for the forbidden fruit that hangs just below the malevolent serpent. Joe’s brother Rufus is one of the pallbearers, but he looks disheveled and dazed, every bit the drug addict that Joe said he had become. The snake, I see, has bitten him, too.
None of the mourners who orate at the service, or who later gossip at “the feed” downstairs after the “churchifying,” mentions Josephus’s relationship to art. But I hear, over and over, their rejection of Coroner McKee’s finding that Joe died accidentally. “A skull fracture and a six-inch gash on his forehead?” one skeptic stands and says. She is a loud, angry woman in an elaborate hat who looks like she tips the scales between two fifty and three hundred pounds, and as she speaks I realize that she is the same woman who played the part of Aunt Jemima at the pancake breakfast. “A six-foot man just ups and falls headfirst into a well that’s seven foot deep and twenty inches across? If that was an accident, then I’ll eat this hat I’m wearing, feathers and all,” she declares. “That’s why we got to keep fighting the good fight in the name of Jesus Christ Almighty! To get Brother Josephus some justice and right what’s wrong in this sorry world and this sorry town!” From various places around the room, people call out in agreement. “Mm-hmm, that’s right!”
“You tell ’em, Bertha!”
“Amen, sister!”
From the other side of the room, I hear a man’s tortured sobs. It breaks my heart when I see that it is Joe’s afflicted brother, Rufus …
“How sad,” Miss Arnofsky says, and her comment returns me from the past to the present, from the basement of the Negro church back to my studio.
“Yes. Yes, it was. Poor Rufus died not long after that, in the flood.”
“The flood?”
I nod. “A dam gave way in the northern part of town, and the water it had been holding back took the path of least resistance, rushing toward the center of town and destroying a lot of the property in its path. Several people were killed, Rufus Jones included. The paper said he had been living in an abandoned car down by the river.”
“When was that?”
“Nineteen sixty-two? Sixty-three, maybe?”
“And so sad, too, that Josephus never knew what a success he would eventually become. But at least in his lifetime, he had your advocacy.”
“Yes, I was able to give him that much at least. But it went both ways. Joe gave me something, too.”
“What do you mean?”
I pause before answering her, thinking about how to put it. “Well, Miss Arnofsky, many years have passed since the morning I hung that blue ribbon next to Joe’s Adam and Eve. I’ve judged many juried shows, large and small, always asking myself just what is the function of art? What is its value? Is it about form and composition? Uniqueness of vision? The relationship between the painter and the painting? The painting and the viewer? Sometimes I’ll award the top prize to a formalist, sometimes to an expressionist or an abstract artist. Less often but occasionally I will select an artist whose work is representational. But whenever and wherever possible, I celebrate art that shakes complacency by the shoulders and shouts, ‘Wake up!’ Not always, certainly, but often enough, this has been the work of outsiders rather than those who have been academically trained—artists who, unlike myself, are unschooled as to the subtleties of technique but who create startling work nonetheless.” My guest nods in agreement, and I laugh. “And now, if you’ll excuse me,” I tell her, “I have to climb down from my soapbox and go downstairs and use the toilet.”
“Of course,” she says. I rise from my chair and stand, my ninety-four-year-old knees protesting as I do. Miss Arnofsky asks if she might have a look around at my work while she’s waiting, and I tell her to be my guest.
When I return a few minutes later, she is standing in front of the shelf by the window, looking at a shadow box collage a young artist gave me years ago. “It’s called The Dancing Scissors,” I tell her. “The artist is someone I awarded a ‘best in show’ prize to years ago, and she gave it to me as a gift. She’s become quite celebrated since then.”
“I recognize the style,” she says. “It’s an Annie Oh, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right. You know her work?”
She nods. “I did a profile piece on her for our magazine when she was just starting out. It was called ‘Annie Oh’s Angry Art.’ She was very shy, almost apologetic about her work. But what struck me was the discrepancy between her demeanor and the undercurrent of rage in her art.”
“Yes, I suppose that was what drew me to it as well: the silent scream of a woman tethered to the conventional roles of mother and wife and longing to break free. I predicted great things for Annie back then, and I’m delighted that that has come to pass. We’ve stayed in touch, she and I. As a matter of fact, she’s being remarried next month, and I’m going to her wedding.”
“Oh, how nice. If you think of it, please tell her I said hello, and that I wish her and her new husband all the best.”
“Of course, of course. But I shall have to extend your greeting to Annie and her wife. She’s marrying the owner of the gallery that represents her work.”
“Aha,” Miss Arnofsky says. “Now tell me about the other paintings here in your studio. These are your works?” I nod.
She wanders the studio, looking through the stacks of my paintings leaning against the walls, both the ones that have returned from various shows and those that have yet to leave my work space. Standing before my easel, she smiles at my half-finished rope-skipping girl. “I so admire that you’re still at it every day,” she says. “I see this is a recurring subject for you.”
“Yes, that’s right. Little Fanny and her jump rope. I’ve painted her hundreds of times.” I explain to my guest that it was my good fortune to have received a scholarship to the school at the Art Institute of Chicago when I was sixteen years old, and how my training there helped to shape my artistic vision. “At first I merely imitated the styles of the painters I most admired. The impressionists and expressionists, the pointillists. But little by little, I began developing a style of my own, which one of my teachers described in his evaluation as ‘boldly modern with a freshness of vision.’ I don’t mean to boast, but I began to be recognized as one of the three most promising students at the school, the others being my friends Antonio Orsini, who came from the Bronx and loved the New York Yankees more that life itself, and Norma Kaszuba, an affable Texan who wore cowgirl boots, smoked cigars, and swore like a man.”
“A woman before her time,” Miss Arnofsky notes. “But tell me about your jump-roping girl.”
“Well, I spotted her one afternoon when Norma, Antonio, and I were eating our lunch in Grant Park. She was just a nameless little Negro girl in a shapeless gray dress, skipping rope and singing happily to herself. Her wiry hair was in plaits. Her face was turned up toward the sun in joyful innocence. As I recall, my friends and I had been arguing about whether Roosevelt, the president-elect, would prove to be a savior or a scoundrel. And as the others’ voices faded away, I pulled a pencil from my pocket and, on the oily paper in which my sopressata sandwich had been wrapped, began sketching the child. Back at the school that afternoon, I drew the girl over and over, and in the days that followed I began painting her in gouache and oils, in primary colors and pastels and monochromatic shades of green and gray. It was as if that guileless child had bewitched me! I gave her a name, Fanny, and came to think of her as my muse.
