Library Sketches, Part 2

A friend of mine was in Alabama last week, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, ending in a walk with 80,000 others across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I’d been thinking about her a lot while she made her pilgrimage south, so it seemed appropriate then to be at the Central Public library last week to hear Eric Foner on his new book, Gateway to Freedom: the Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, a mix of black and white faces in the crowd:

Randall Kennedy, Harvard Law Professor and a former student of Foner's, began the program by asking the question, "Why hidden?"

 






















Foner called his book a hidden history because so many of the people who formed the loose network of conductors and footmen that made up the Underground Railroad were unknown to American history. During Foner's research, he came across names he'd never heard before, accounts hidden away in library stacks, unread.

"What interests me about these underground conductors is that it was actually an interracial organization, or set of organizations. It’s an example not that common in American history, of black and white people working together for a common cause. There was tension, there were problems, but they managed to communicate with each other, [to send] people to each other and that’s what strikes me."

Kennedy brings up Louis Napoleon as one of his favorite unknowns.

Napoleon, an illiterate, free black man, worked as a porter for abolitionist and editor, Sidney Howard Gay; Napoleon did the footwork for much of Gay's abolitionist activities in and around New York City, finding fleeing slaves at the docks and train stations. Despite signing his name with an X, Napoleon managed to go to court and get writs of habeus corpus in support of fugitive slaves. In one famous case, a lawyer for a slave owner asked sarcastically, "Who is this Louis Napoleon, the Emperor of France?" and John Jay II, the lawyer representing the slave, said, "No, he’s a much better man." 

***

After the program I ran into Peggy Powell, Nancy Gilmore and Samuel Foster, docents at LA museums— Powell and Foster at the CA African American Museum, Gilmore at the Science Center and a volunteer archivist at the Mayme Clayton Library and Museum, which houses a large collection of African American memorabilia. 

They were eager to talk; Gilmore wished the program were twice as long. Foster found it informative. All wanted to see a continuation of the conversation.

Peggy Powell revealed a hidden family history of her own when she talked about her great, great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson Lightfoot, and his journey along the Underground Railroad, from Kentucky to Ontario, led by a conductor named Henson, a story she had just discovered.

 

Which proves a point about the system we call the Underground Railroad. It was a fluid moving river, a many branched tributary, for people to help fugitive slaves along the way to freedom. I would be overly optimistic to think anything might change in the narrative that's told in our history books, due to Foner's Gateway to Freedom, but in the meanwhile, let's continue the conversation.



A podcast of this talk (and all ALOUD programs) can be found at: http://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud

Library sketches 1

The other night I plopped myself into a seat at the Central Library to hear, "Who We Be: Race and Image at the Twilight of the Obama Era," with Justin Simien, director of Dear White People, and Jeff Chang, author of Who We Be: The Colorization of America, moderated by journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan. Before everyone took the stage I sat there with my sketch book open and began to draw. But once the program began, forget it! I tried sketching, while writing everything down, which didn't work I later found out. I couldn't focus on the conversation because I was trying to get the scene down and I couldn't get the scene down because I was writing down the conversation. Next time, I'll try one thing at a time.

Waiting for the program to begin

   Erin Aubry Kaplan                                                                  

        

                                                                                                                       Jeff Chang

Justin Simien

In all honestly, Justin's the one I came to see. I loved his cuttingly funny and satirical film about an American college with all the race, gender and cultural appropriation problems inherent to campuses these days. I'm not going to write a review, you can google it, better yet, see it, but Justin's approach to talking about race spoke to me the most:

"I've often been a black face in a white [crowd] most of my life and navigated btw mostly white dominated spaces, whether that’s a college or an office space. And one thing that I felt uniquely oppressed by, and almost had a paranoia about feeling that way, was color blindness: this idea we are color blind. We don’t see race. In a way it made me feel as if that's just another way of saying, you're blind to the fact that as a person of color I’m having a different experience than you, and I’m not allowed to bring up the things that I see and the things I’m feeling because you are colorblind. And because you are personally beyond racism. That means you're completely blind to the ways in which you may have made me feel when the minute I got in your car you switched it to 50 Cent." 

"This idea of micro aggressions, which wasn’t really a word when i first started writing the film, but i quickly appropriated once I saw people giving it a word, a phrase, is a way to describe the fact it may not be lynch-mob style racism, but I feel in some way I'm being kept from a part of the culture. It's underneath these layers of, well, it's a post racial society and I’m personally not racist, so therefore your feelings aren't valid. I wanted the world of the film to take place in that version of America. Really this school is a microcosm of the American experience, you know, there’s plenty of black people on the brochure of the school, but you can’t find them when you get there, and they’re not allowed to live in the same dorm if they want to."

An audience member who asked the first question after the talk, also spoke of colorblindness:

 

"I work and study race and the law, and the Supreme Court, as you know, has been one of the main propagators of colorblindness; in fact has disciplined state and federal governments who are trying to use race to dislodge these entrenched patterns. Just today the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on a case which may eviscerate the Fair Housing Act. One of the few times the Supreme Court has upheld use of race, like affirmative action, was when it benefited universities and corporations. I think there’s this really interesting corporatizing of diversity and this very milquetoast version of diversity when it benefits American capitalism, and this fascinating way in which colorblindness is being dispersed around legal and cultural spaces."

Amen, lady!

~~~~~~

Dear Readers; I would like to know what you think of this page. Do these sketches help your understand better, even in a minimal way, the nature of the event? would you like to see more? less? or more realistic? (knowing that I can't really do verisimilitude), or what works best do you think? Your feedback would be much appreciated. Thank you Readers!

A podcast of this talk (and all ALOUD programs) can be found at: http://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud

Playing with Puck

Last week at the library, I was glad to hear Maureen Moore, associate director of ALOUD, mention playful in a list of her boss's most beguiling attributes, because 1) it is such a rare trait to have in a boss, and 2) I have known her boss, Louise Steinman, mainly in that way for over three decades, and it would be such a pity if she couldn't carry that puckish prankster part of her to her job.

I was also happy that Jack Miles who interviewed Louise for ALOUD about her new book, himself took up the playful mantle—jumping out of his seat at one point to focus attention on the twinkle in the eyes of rescuers Janka and her 9-yr-old son, Marian, projected overhead. Imagining the thought process of mother and son in deciding whether to house a 17-yr-old Jewish boy, Miles turned to the audience, shrugged his shoulders and said: "Save a Jew? Why not!" It was a funny Woody Allen moment and a testament to the book that Miles could segue from seriousness to playfulness and not be considered a heretic, given the gravity of the subject.
 
Louise's book, The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation, is a revelatory read, seamlessly weaving a complicated history with the personal, and although not done in the name of play, certainly it was Louise's skills in the art of play that helped her through the ten years that it took to write the book.

As for knowing her mainly as a playful puckish prankster.... that might not be entirely true, but for the purposes of this post, I will say it is, and present to you, forthwith, some playful moments shared together over the years. 

Dog's Head Route, Portland, OR, 1980

(photo credit: Chris Rauschenberg) 

 

At the harmonium... 

(photo credit: Chris Rauschenberg) 

 In rehearsal...

Ojai, mid-80s
(Where are those dresses?)

 New York City subway, 2013

 

Playing around in Studio A (still!)

Winter Sky, library and some drawings

Day after election, caught on the wind, these words:  
"All I want from Obama in the next four years," said jogging guy to buddy, "is something small, humble and achievable."  Small, humble and achievable. That stray bit of conversation became my mantra for the rest of the day: smallhumbleandachievable; smallhumbleandachievable. I kept repeating those words like a prayer.

White sky tonight coming home from the Central Library, where Jonathan Letham and Daniel Mendlesohn (The Lost) were in discussion about the "essay." Their conversation flowed back and forth about writing, about structure, about length and form; about fiction v. faction, (i.e., what is made up, possibly based on fact, or not, versus what is fact, based on one's own perceptions, which may be, or not, true, got that?). Nothing was said about politics, though we were all floating on the historic moment.  

For someone who's been working nights, it was nice to be back in the library hearing a weighty discussion about ideas. Something I'm realizing from taking courses at Art Center: artists don't necessarily tell you why they do the things they do. They don't sit around discussing the who, why, where, when and what fors like writers do, like these writers did so openly tonight. They handle "what's behind the curtain" (Jonathan L's reference to why he began writing essays) in a different way. 

Whenever it snowed in Louisville, where I grew up, the sky would turn white, like it did tonight. I can see that winter sky, with bare cold branches silhouetted against it, the clouds low and heavy, with a light snow coming down, making the road slippery. Let's say I'm heading out of the East End in my VW, through the park towards downtown, taking the curves with a slide.

For most of my childhood I didn't even know real artists existed, and definitely not in Louisville, but one day I saw an ad in the newspaper announcing an art show in the West End, so my friend H and I went, and we discovered that the West End, or, as it was called back then, the black section of town, wasn't so far away, certainly not as far as we'd been told. Also discovered were real artists, living real artists' lives, and from that point on, we went back as often as we could, or at least til the end of senior year. During that winter, the sky was the same in the West End as it was in the East End, with those dark bare branches silhouetted, and I was amazed it had taken this long to find out.

 

Bringing art back into my life is like revisiting the West End, meeting artists who approach life in mysterious ways, taking bits of reality, mixing it with how they see the world and producing something more beautiful than beautiful, truer than true, realer than real, or the converse, taking something and destroying it, the same as writers do, framing, structuring, making shit up, exploiting circumstance, forming words into what isn't necessarily real, but true.

 

Some drawings/paintings from my contemporary illustration class with the Clayton Brothers, Christian and Rob. Check out their incredible work at: www.claytonbrothers.com/

ALOUD Program at LAPL: www.lfla.org/aloud 

Click on pics to see as slideshow.