The Muse: Josephine Baker (1906-1975)

If I were a painter, I would spend my lifetime stroking your fluid rhythms onto my canvas. Dawn and dusk, noon and midnight, I would be occupied by your bronze breasts, your seductive slither, by the river of mirth that pours from your wide smile while my brush furiously chases you.

Life Picasso before me, I would dissect your magnificent body and put you back together with colour and light.

……

All of Paris wants Josephine Baker. It is the 1920s, the post-war age of jazz and sensual gluttony, the age of smoky cabarets and fur-lined, short-shorn women.

A million suitors, male and female, in the Parisian theatres where she performs La Revue Negre, watch Josephine. She amazes and outrages, able to contort herself like a circus freak, able to leap and bend like an acrobat, brown and thick and smooth and naked but for a few coloured ostrich feathers or a skirt of bananas.

Hemingway wanted her. He said, “Tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles.”

Picasso wanted her. She posed for him. She turned around with her insolent wit and said, “What was his name? I posed for him. Ah, yes, Picasso. It was just a couple of stupid streaks. Awful!”

…..

The audience loves Josephine. The surface of her masks is sufficient muse. The hunger and brass of her dancing is the only hint of her life before Paris. St. Louis, Missouri, was a different planet. There, eight- year -old Josephine slept in her employer’s basement in their dog’s bed. There, she stole coal from the train yards to heat her mother’s house. France is a million galaxies away from her married life, from the man who gave her the name Baker at the age of thirteen. Many lovers have tasted her flesh since then, and already another husband. She is nineteen.

At a party in Paris, Ernest Hemingway meets the diva in person. He recalls what a hot and sultry night it was, but in the heat, Josephine wore a beautiful fur. She never removed it when the club got hot and humid. When they left together, Josephine told him she had nothing on underneath.

…..

Who was Josephine Baker? Was she the small black girl born into the St. Louis slums and ragtime bars? Or was she the matriarch who adopted twelve children from around the world, long before the era of Angelina Jolie’s reign? Was she the saint who sold her jewels to buy gifts for the poor? Or the eccentric who insisted on having chickens, rabbits, goats and a cheetah in her dressing room?

…..

Anyone who was not alive during the fifty years that Josephine Baker prevailed knows her only from a number of famous nude photographs celebrating her unbelievable body. The images of her nakedness are splendid glorifications of the skin and form of an unusual beauty, bronze and solid and linear.

We know only how she was unashamed and perhaps would describe her in politically incorrect terms like savage or primal, as France did, fascinated by the stereotype sensuality of blacks. She preferred to dance naked and entertain voyeurs in Europe than to be excluded from hotels, restaurants, and public transport in racism-torn America. She took pleasure in lovers and in love itself.

Many biographers have apologized for Josephine’s repertoire of lovers, softly excusing her promiscuity as the times, or as show business, or even as mere legend without fact.

But Josephine never apologized for her passions and her lack of shame. She had nothing to hide: her body was for pleasure, her own and those lucky enough to watch her or touch her. she was never tasteless or vulgar, except in a witty, ironic way. She considered her body, naked or clothed, a part of her art. Josephine loved love. She loved her many husbands intensely. Her decade long relationship with an Italian stonemason was the highlight of her life. Pepito became her manager, and when they announced their betrothal, she told the papers she was marrying a Sicilian count. Countess Josephine kept his photo on her desk after his death and through two more husbands. “He made me,” she explained to the curious.

Josephine lived surrounded by princes, politicians, artists, writers, geniuses, business moguls, brassy lesbian intellectuals, jazz stars, and actors. Among her social contemporaries were Einstein, Bessie Smith, Juan Peron, e.e. cummings, Alex Calder, Hemingway, Mussolini.

…..

Josie had many lives and her role as entertainer wove around and sometimes camouflaged her other selves. Her legacy as an exotic dancer still makes our imagination dizzy- the memory of her sinewy, muscular grace nearly obliterates her complex accomplishments.

Like Jolie, her heir in beauty, eccentricity, and philanthropy, she was a pilot. She was also a rider and a civil servant. She was a lover and a saint. Josephine tried anything and she did so with the same energy that she took to the stage or the bedroom.

She spoke against racism and drew attention to the injustice against blacks in America. She spoke at a massive civil rights gathering, bringing the masses to their knees. The closing speech that day was the famous I Have a Dream speech by none other than Martin Luther King Junior.

She learned how to speak German and Italian and took work as a spy against Adolf Hitler in the Second World War. She was ideal for the unlikely role with the French Resistance, gaining entry into any country on her fame and beauty. She gained access to important parties and soirees, where she would eavesdrop on high society and party leaders. The results she scrawled in invisible ink on her sheet music.

She loved money, though, and lived excessively, living rich and then going broke, over and over. Her many states of bankruptcy were caused as much by her love of fine jewelry as by her penchant for giving money to the poor. Often she would go down to the coal office and ask to settle the accounts of families who couldn’t pay their bills. She sold her cheetah’s diamond collar for twenty grand and gave the money to the sick and poor. She worked in soup kitchens. She sent gifts to thousands of soldiers during the war. Among those gifts were autographed photos of herself.

…..

After the death of the most powerful female political figure in the world, Eva Peron, Josie was on tour in Argentina. Juan Peron saw the traits of his late wife Evita in Josephine, a strong and glamourous woman with a penchant for fine dresses and ideals in her heart for love and justice. Josephine helped him by giving speeches to the crowds, fulfilling the need Evita’s death left inside of them for a warm female icon.

But Josephine soon realized the powerful Peron regiment was not a democracy at all. She saw the poor sleeping in yards, eating filth. She saw the hospitals that were short staffed and unsanitary. Sickened, she left Argentina and returned to France. She retained her feeling of kinship with the late Evita, however. Evita was, after all, a saint in her own way.

…..

It is possible that Josie may have settled into a long-term love affair had God gifted her with a child. But during her first marriage at thirteen, she suffered a miscarriage. Up until that time, she had spent her days knitting booties and preparing for early motherhood.

She miscarried later on again, and later still, she gave birth to a stillborn child. Eventually, she had a hysterectomy, which removed all hope of motherhood.

She would say that God just did not intend her to have her own babies. To fill her deep longing for children, she considered adoption. Josie adopted twelve kids from Columbia to the Ivory Coast. She believed the Rainbow Tribe would demonstrate to the world that all races and creeds could live together in peace. Her kids grew up on a farm she built on her estate in the Dordogne Valley of France.

This act of love broke her financially once and for all. The children went to live with her husband, who had left her because he did not feel they could afford so many children. Among the most forgettable pictures of Josephine, there is one of her evicted from her mansion, sitting on the stoop amidst tins and bottles.

This was almost the end for Josie. She had already suffered a number of strokes, and now she was penniless. But she vowed to get the estate back and live out her last days with her children. In her late sixties, she began a tour nonetheless, this time doing a theatre piece about her own life in America. She performed quite literally until the day she died in 1975.

…..

The woman who owned a diamond necklace for her cheetah is the same one who was baptized in the Mississippi river. She was the one who kick-started her fame dancing naked with a bunch of bananas. She could never sing, but her European audiences did not notice the tinny squealing of her voice when in the spell of her sensual powers. She harnessed this erotic energy and captivated nations and empires.

She was a woman of one skin and many selves. Her physical strength and beauty was the focus of her audience and her biographers because the rest of Josephine was elusive, transitory, erratic or hidden. What was bare and given freely was what her audience had to receive. The rest was slippery, unpredictable, intangible, and impossible to pin down.

…..

If I were an artist, I would spend my life on one subject, smoothing coffee and ochre against copper paint. This silhouette or that pose- the art of your form would be my teacher and my inspiration. I would plunge my hands into clay and sculpt your essence the way many did, never tiring of my subject. But I am not a sculptor, like Picasso, who can call you Nefertiti and preserve your spell. I am merely a poet, and words fail to cage you within slippery bars. My words fail to hold you still for examination and scrutiny.

I cannot doubt my own talents, however, to portray you- even you had no idea how many selves like silk scarves you wore upon your skin.

Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at thegirlcanwrite.net. Writer, artist, editor- her various art creations are everywhere. Visit her site for biography, client testimonials, links, or to hire her for your next writing project. Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

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Am I That Easy to Forget? remembering Little Esther Phillips, 1935-1984

Three things defined Little Esther’s life: the blues, her singing career, and heroin.

My husband advised me never to try the shit. He knew me better than anyone ever has, and he knew how many paralyzing anxieties I lived with. He said heroin felt like those anxieties were erased into oblivion. He’d been well acquainted with the stuff in his youth, in Eastern Europe’s war-fragmented world. In that endearing and guttural accent of his, he said, shaking his head, “Girl, it is a paradise.”

Like most of you- (but not like most writers) I already had a No Way Policy toward the Big H. Despite that ringing endorsement of a world without worry, I knew that my jumble of neuroses and anxieties had led me down enough rollercoaster roads. Untangling everything while half crocked on gin and trying to write a novel, three books, and my daily bread was proving to be an amusing and ambitious challenge. I did not need something to make a big ol’ mess of the small strides I’ve made toward quotidian order.

But then I don’t have the kind of pressures that child stars have. A phenomenon that’s relatively new historically, it’s becoming clear that every child star is totally fucked. Drew Barrymore, McCauley Culkin, Michael Jackson, “troubled pop star” Britney Spears- spin spin sugar. Shirley Temple may be the only one who escaped the insanity of fate unscathed- or maybe she was just the best actor.

Seven years after Shirley T. first opened her eyes, a live wire was born in Galveston, Texas. She was average in every way- not the richest by a long shot, but not the poorest little black girl in Texas. Not a beauty queen, but not homely, either. Esther Mae Jones grew up in the church so becoming a world famous blues diva hadn’t even entered her head. It all happened by accident, really. Esther was reluctant to hit a blues bar at age 14 but she did so anyways, because her sister really wanted to go. Her sister and a friend wanted to get drinks, but they had no money. There was a ten-dollar prize for the winner of a singing contest. Esther could sing, so she entered. And she won.

The nightclub she sang in was owned by bluesman Johnny Otis, and he was blown away. Soon she had a few massive hits: including Mistrustin’ Blues, which spent nine weeks at number one. She was living on a bus, dressing up, and touring with strange men. She was on heroin very soon into her unexpected career. There’s no way a poor little Christian black girl from Galveston knew what hit her. But there is no question of her fate, however it played out. It can’t possibly help her now, but some say Little Esther Phillips was the greatest blues woman of them all.

Esther Phillips’ career was a tempestuous struggle, with endless work and relatively splotchy successes. But her first year- scarcely a teenager, no less- had a string of hit records seldom, if ever, paralleled by a female musician of any genre or era. There were seven chart toppers on Billboard for her debut year, 1950, and three of them were number ones.

Esther’s voice has been called an acquired taste. Her distinctive vocals have a clear diction reminiscent of her idol Dinah Washington, with a gravelly, nasal quality that grated the skin just before she’d hook it underneath the open wound in a melting flow of stunning melancholy, a voice of beautiful agony, a drowsy epiphany in a smoky saloon. Her blues were right there stark naked in front of you, madness, darkness. Piercing at times, almost shrill, then shifting into lower registers that creep under your spinal cord with a seductive chill. Tears flow out against your will. Esther has a rare talent: she can run blazing hot and frosty cold at the same time.

These qualities transport you, with Esther seemingly right under your skin, through blues, rhythm and blues, country, jazz, pop and disco. It’s too bad this versatility made her a challenge to market. Her career was rocky and she got the short end of the stick more often than not. Regardless, it is one of the highlights of existence to hear her totally unique voice at its barest and most profound: songs like Alone Again (Naturally), I Can Stand a Little Rain, and Use Me are out of this world. Then there’s the unforgettable Am I That Easy to Forget? And How Blue Can You Get is in a realm of its own: few blues have dug this deep.

Esther produced a dedicated, extensive body of varied work, all stellar, shining most in deep blues and her smoldering, caustic interpretations of standards. Her success was erratic, starting off with a cannon with a number one record making her the hottest star of 1950, and the youngest star with an R&B number one hit.

Before today’s child star train wrecks hit the glossies, Little Esther was 13, dressed 25, to win first prize in a singing contest. The rest is history. She hurtled into the arms of heroin, naïve as any young girl would be in that era, suddenly on the road as a superstar virtuoso. School? Esther couldn’t study on the tour bus, where she spent all her time with older men. She spent her life on stage, and in and out of rehab for a lifelong heroin addiction and alcoholism. She sang her heart out, even when she was most sick. But only intermittently did she replicate the success of her first efforts.

Adding a bit of blackness, of blue velvet into country, was in vogue as the integration of black and white evolved. By a stroke of luck, Esther Phillips met, of all people, Kenny Rogers in the early ‘60s. He had a bright idea, and soon she was recording a country album for his brother, Leland. Her interpretation of Release Me is far and away the most magnificent one ever recorded. It was a hit, but the next few bombed miserably. A few years later, she was signed to Atlantic by Ahmet Ertegun, who said she had one of the best voices he’d ever heard. It was the era of the British Invasion and she recorded a ladies’ version of the Beatles’ And I Love Her.

Her stellar fire and ice vocal style that gave new life to old favourites and showcased a young woman’s old soul also coloured her reputation. Esther was known for being tough to deal with. Lord help you if you owed her money, whether you were a person or a company. Because Esther would come and get it. She did not like being ripped off and she loathed the way she was always used. She saw clearly how much she made for companies who gave her a pittance of proceeds. “You didn’t hear me,” she would roar to secretaries who gave her the rote “he’s not available” speech when she came for her pay. In one famous incident, according to blues writer David Nathan, she pulled a baseball bat from under her mink coat and hollered, “I’m not leavin’ ‘til I get a goddamn check!” But she was also famous for being funny, sly, and warm, and completely dedicated to her work. She could be extremely generous, known to cook southern fried chicken for entire crews by herself.

Now Esther’s career of highs and lows, never being able to quite get back the first blast of stardust, was perfect punctuation for a heroin habit. You spend your whole life chasing the first high, so they say, and never quite get it back. Esther was in and out of the hospital with her heroin and alcohol addiction. She even lived with her father during convalescence, enough to get sober, right before chance’s encounter with Kenny Rogers. But it always comes back. Her tumultuous battle with substances is metaphorical of her career’s rollercoaster successes and failures.

Esther’s dedication to her work never wavered, nor did the quality of her output and the measure of its soul. It was the market that fluctuated wildly, because today her lowest ebbs are the favourites of her fans and collectors. She recorded hundreds of songs, and some that never made hits are absolutely spellbinding. There was no pattern at all to ‘what worked’ in Esther’s career. It careened up and down of its own volition, though she worked tirelessly through sickness and health. After a series of bottom feeders and mild comebacks, 1972’s From a Whisper to a Scream became a classic album of her career. Featuring, among other gems, Home is Where the Hatred Is, a song about heroin, the record was nominated for several Grammy awards.

Esther Phillips took her only Grammy- but not because she won. Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, gave her own victory trophy to Esther, saying that it really belonged to her.

In the disco era, Esther, who was a good friend of Andy Warhol during this time, recorded a lively rendition of her idol Dinah Washington’s What a Difference a Day Makes. It was the best selling album of her career, and her disco diva sound gave her a new niche market that would last through the ‘80s and the gay ‘90s past the new millennium- the gay queens who loved the queens. But regardless of the constant work she did, the endless recordings, the feisty personality, and the many hits, outside of a few jazz or disco collectors who are rabid for her unmatchable voice’s beauty and sorrow, Esther is largely forgotten.

In personal matters, Esther was notoriously private, letting her volatile ups and downs conceal her true deepest feelings. These she revealed only in the heartbreaking soul of her songs. But sometime near the end of everything, she married C.B. Atkins, who’d previously been married to Sarah Vaughan. Etta James said Esther was in love with R&B singer Latimore, but married Atkins to fulfill a lifelong hope of stability, and bought a house around that time as well. It didn’t go well: it is said that Atkins spent most of Esther’s life savings, and then took off.

Of course, nothing could stop Esther Phillips, and despite terrible sales of her latest album, Good Black is Hard to Crack, she continued to tour throughout Europe and jazz clubs where she was loved. She recorded A Way to Say Goodbye, ironically, as her last call. It was released after her death.

In 1984, Esther was hospitalized with severe liver and kidney failure from the years of hard drinking and drug abuse. She was 48 years old when she died. Johnny Otis, who had discovered her at the singing contest at his Barrelhouse club, led the funeral ceremony.

Esther Phillips was a massive star with a massive drug problem by the time she was a teenager. She spent every moment from age 14 through to the evening of her life working, recording hundreds of songs and touring ceaselessly. She cut people open with her ragged, jagged vocals and weathered triumphs and failures by simply carrying on. She stormed through the studios in her furs, or conversely, her rags, stunning everyone who encountered her. Her singing could stop you in your tracks. It’s a fateful irony that a little girl who never wished to be a superstar was one of the world’s biggest. It’s another irony that she was truly one of the brightest, truest stars, but is now largely forgotten. Even many fans of blues and jazz have barely know her name. And the price was high- she never did live any of her own genuine dreams.

Doris Tray, another R&B diva, told writer David Nathan, “The thing about Esther was that she wanted to be just an everyday person, settle down with a man, have some kids.”

Lorette C. Luzajic is the girl at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Writer, artist, editor- her various art creations are everywhere. You may also enjoy her feature food stories and spice column at Gremolata.com. Visit her site for biography, client testimonials, links, or to hire her for your next writing project. Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

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Meet Virginia: 1882-1941

As far as suicide notes go, it was pretty cheerful. “You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier,” Virginia Woolf scrawled comfortingly to her husband.

Yes, yes, I read Virginia Woolf as a young feminist intellectual. I found Woolf dry and unfocused. And frankly, given the slums I lived in with a bunch of homos who never stopped drinking and snorting Special K while I studied, in the heart of Toronto’s Crackville, I didn’t pay as much attention to Room of One’s Own as I should have. Still, I knew the gist- you need space and peace of mind to write- and I wasn’t buying it. After all, I was writing like mad with barely a pot to piss in, was filling notebooks and lit mags with my brilliant ramblings.

I’m not the only one who found the snooty modernist world of the British middle class feminist intelligentsia to be absolute dullsville. But what did I know of the world or of myself? Just because I’d scrawled some racy anarchist poetry didn’t really give me position to contest one of the greatest modernist thinkers, a woman who paved the way for many female writers, myself included.

Of course, as one ages ungracefully, they begin to see how their path was made easier by their teachers, the pioneering risk takers who paved the way. Perhaps arrogance and know-it-all attitudes are inborn to youth to save them from the unimaginable horrors of impossibilities. Maybe I thought I was such a bohemian, hanging out at fetish bars and reading Lynn Crosbie and Kathy Acker. But there had been other writers before me, many much better writers with much wilder, crazier lives than mine. For all that I found her work dry and dusty, Virginia was much beloved by many literary camps- the modernists, the feminists, the lesbians, the lesbian feminists, and yes, the arty bohemian crowd.

Woolf was an intriguing figure and a diligent worker. Part of an unconventional collective, the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf discussed art and literature with other members, hobnobbed with homosexual intellectuals, including one who was briefly her fiancé, suffered from intense episodes of mental illness, and enjoyed scandalous affairs. Determined to do it herself when the world wouldn’t do it for her, Woolf started up the Hogarth Press with her husband. She self-published her own titles- The Waves, To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway- but she also published some influential writers like E.M. Forrester, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and a 24-volume Freud translation. (She rejected James Joyce’s Ulysses. Oops.)

Woolf was productive, popular, and deeply loved by her husband. But in 1941, she filled her pocket with heavy stones and walked into the lake. She may have already tried this- ten days prior to her disappearance, she returned from a walk soaking wet and said she’d fallen into the lake. Reminiscent of Puritan punishment- not suffering a witch to live- Virginia Woolf hovered over the face of the deep until death became her. How elegant, how dramatic, how regrettably fatal. Her body was found on April 18- my birthday.

Woolf was just shy of 60, and she had battled lifelong depression. She understood depression as an illness that took something from her, referring to it as a “terrible disease” in her suicide note. Most likely severely bipolar, she swung from happy, incessant chatterbox to dark melancholy. Her first nervous breakdown was at the tender age of thirteen.

Woolf was also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She wrote about her stepbrother in Sketches of the Past: “I remember how I hoped that he would stop…but he did not stop.” Woolf was often candid about sensitive topics, especially as she had a supportive husband and community. And while she acknowledged the sexual abuse and her skewed sense of self, it is believed that her intermittent madness and the abuse were separate sorrows.

I cannot put feelings into a dead woman’s heart, but my sense is that Virginia had a life of great happiness, with momentary lapses of reason that were unbearable. While her suicide cut short a fascinating life and doubtless more amazing writing, Woolf had been highly productive, and quite content in between her bouts of sorrow, when she felt a burden to her loved ones and to the world.

Much is made of Virginia’s lesbian swinging, and her mannish appearance, giving her a devoted following of women. The Bloomsbury Group encouraged open experimentations and friendships of every ilk, and yes, some swinging. Indeed, Virginia was briefly engaged to a homosexual member of the circle, but instead she married Leonard Woolf. They were more or less equals: while contemporary feminists trying to pin her mental breakdowns on him, it is likely he helped keep her alive. He watched carefully for evidence of breakdowns, supported her creatively, encouraged her work, and nurtured her when she was flagging. She was not miserably stuck in a mismatched straight marriage, though she did write in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth: “It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination.”

Indeed, she had a twenty-year relationship with Vita Sackville-West. Leonard never tried to keep her from this friendship, which did take occasional physical turns. The friends, frequently apart, wrote intimate letters that let us glimpse into their souls. While it may make things more interesting to picture constant Sapphic acrobatics, a sordid romance played out in various literary salons, the truth is likely not so juicy. “I love Virginia – as who wouldn’t? but really, my sweet, one’s love for Virginia is a very different thing; a spiritual thing, if you like, an intellectual thing,” Sackville-West wrote to her husband. “Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way; there is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea.” She did admit they’d “gone to bed” but the solid friendship was the mainstay of their intimacy, and the details are unlikely to make it into either Penthouse or On Our Backs. In any event, though Woolf was not the lipstick and bonnet type: she described herself as incredibly ‘dowdy’ and felt that no woman cared less for personal appearance than she did.

Virginia Woolf, 1998, by Joel Isaacson

Her predilections for gender equality, however they played out in her personal life, were part of her contribution to literature at large. Certainly, she has had many critics, who, like my former youthful self, found her tawdry, dry, and whiny. There are others who complain of the tinges of anti-Semitism that showed occasionally despite her marriage to a Jew. Overall, Virginia’s stream-of-consciousness style and frank examinations of gender, relationships, and creativity have inspired everyone from African American author Toni Morrison to pagan-persuasionist Camille Paglia to the postmodernist smorgasbord The Simpsons cartoon! There’s a band – and a song- named Shakespeare’s Sister, alluding to Woolf’s insistence that a woman equally as talented as Shakespeare would have missed the boat due to the silencing of female creativity (in A Room of One’s Own.) Of course, the movie The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s critically acclaimed novel, rightfully revived interest in Woolf’s work and suicide. Countless plays, novels, short stories, movies, and other creative and critical works have been born out of Woolf’s vision.

Where should the new Woolf initiate commence his or her study? I suggest finding a room of one’s own, a big pot of tea, and a few cats. Woolf’s books aren’t long, but their mucky wordiness and lack of contemporary cinematic effects require a few hours without distraction and an unhurried cigar would be suitable. The plots are secondary to the psychological reflections and descriptions, so read slowly for full reward. Once you get used to the winding flow, the rewarding insights about the impermanence of relationships is stunning. Mrs. Dalloway is probably the place to begin- for here Woolf writes about a mannish cigar-smoking woman, the lesbian kiss that character Clarissa recounts as the happiest of her life, a mentally unstable fellow with desperate hallucinations who commits suicide, a possibly homosexual husband, and all the other delicious elements that make for good scandalous reading.

Meet writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Her book The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos is available through Indigo or Amazon. Her work appears all over the Internet. She loves interesting people, but she also really enjoys writing about food and health.

Please order her amazing poetry collection, The Astronaut’s Wife.

Available at:

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Astronauts-Wife-Poems-Eros-Thanatos-Lorette-C-Luzajic/9781847287335-item.html

www.thegirlcanwrite.net/buybook.html

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Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man: Outsider Bill Traylor

When listening to the discourse surrounding the work of outsider artists, I often feel it is a parody of the already ludicrous talk in the traditional gallery circuit. Indeed, it’s likely that most artists, even rich and famous ones, might be considered ‘outsider’. After all, most artist live unconventional lives, and most are driven to create, regardless of what our impression is of their creation. From Van Gogh to Basquiat, it’s safe to conclude that many artists are peculiar, to say the least, and that’s what makes the work fascinating. When I hear pretentious nattering about ‘masterful use of colour’ or ‘graffiti inspired surrealism’ from swollen urbanites, I think the point of art is sorely missed by nearly everyone who studies it. Whether we are looking at abstract paint drippings, flawless realism, or detailed pointillism, isn’t the real heart of art the story it tells of the artist, and of the artist’s world?

“Outsider Art” is a catchall phrase for various ‘isms’ in the art world. The term implies and assumes that the artist lives in some way outside the norm, that he or she exists in the margins, and that he or she be extra-eccentric, visionary, insane, or imprisoned. Outsider artists are also self-taught, without formal training in art. I truly suspect that most artists flirt with at least one or two of those categories, though most of the ‘masters’ had some training to help them tell their fascinating inner stories. Because classic outsider artists don’t, I feel that ‘criticism’ is kind of moot, and what is most vital is not ‘progression of form’ or ‘experimenting with perspective’ but what the images suggest about a person and the way he or she saw the world. Is art not one of the oldest forms of storytelling, after all?

It is this misstep, in my mind, that disallows much of the public from the enjoyment of art. It’s classic to hear, “My nephew could draw that- it’s hanging on my fridge!” Too many are locked out of their own experience of art because they supposedly lack the tools to interpret imagery. Meanwhile, the hoity-toity wine swillers are robbing the everyman of his totally valid experiences inside and outside of the gallery. Remember George Costanza’s horror at being asked to meet Jerry’s artist girlfriend? He felt like a buffoon inside of his own impression of art, and in trying to come off as knowledgeable and hip, he ends up buying a hideous abstract he can’t afford.

Now, in the early 1940s, Bill Traylor wondered what in the world his cardboard drawings were doing up on a gallery wall. Voices around him discussed his “world of sharply defined silhouetted figures and beasts (1),” and his “ongoing visual narrative (2).” They talked about “the elemental simplicity” and “the composition of beautiful play of straight and curves lines in its suggestion of some ritual dance or just a playful moment. (3)”

In reality, Traylor’s unschooled, childlike pencil and poster paint drawings were memorable because their story is remarkable, not because Traylor preferred primary colours and never mixed paints. These type of actions were not planned effects- this is a man who was born as a slave in Alabama, who began drawing at the age of 85, and made 1500 drawings in a three year period, sitting on a stoop in Montgomery, Alabama. The value is what the pictures reflect of an illiterate man’s life, of his memories growing up in a plantation cabin with no education, and becoming homeless in old age. This is a man who slept on a pile of rags among empty coffins in a funeral home, who manically created images that documented his mixed memories of his African heritage, his farming experiences, his love of dogs and cats, and his observations of the south.

Bill was probably born in 1856, and he wore the name Traylor like his “master,” George Traylor. He lived in a slave cabin in Benton, Alabama, and as an infant, his mother most likely tied him to a tree while she worked the fields, until he was old enough to help out, as was the tradition. The Civil War began when Bill was about five years old; heightening the abject poverty his slave family already lived in. Pork was plentiful, however, as were cabbage and collard greens, but Bill spent most of his life with no possessions at all. Writer Mary Lyons said that the people of small southern towns like Benton, Alabama, where Bill was, lived on “pure gumption.”

Traylor remained on the plantation for most of his life as a laborer after the war freed him to be paid. Little is known of the details of his adolescence and adulthood, but by his thirties, he had a wife and four children. Once, Bill said he had raised 20 children. He may have taken responsibility for kids orphaned by the war or hardship, or he may have had several sets of children if he married more than once. Though technically he was free, the KKK burned schoolhouses and Bill was illiterate. It was safest to stay on the plantation and farm for food. The former slaves made the workday more tolerable by singing rhythmic religious filed songs known as shouts or hollers. These songs later gave way to the blues.

Though cotton farming paid better wages, Bill tried to grow as much food as he could. He remarked once that, “You could have that building over there full of money, but you couldn’t eat it.” Most of Traylor’s long days were spent working the mules, growing food, plowing. Storytelling sustained the nights- legends of Railroad Bill, the ‘black Robin Hood” and voodoo legends gave depth and entertainment to family time. Of course, families like Bill’s looked forward to weekends: moonshine parties were common in Alabama, and everyone drank corn liquor and square danced to fiddlers. Fights were commonplace. “What little sense I did have,” Bill allegedly said, “Whiskey took away.” Of course, the sins of Saturday were taken in to the church on Sunday, and southern black Christianity was another way that Bill and families like his endured hardship.

Bill was almost 80 when “my white folks had died and my children scattered.” He worked briefly in a shoe factory in Montgomery, but his rheumatism was severe, forcing him to ‘retire’ on welfare wages of fifteen bucks a month. It was 1939, and on a stoop not far from the funeral home where he crashed among coffins, he drew his famous 1500 drawings in three years. He sketched on cardboard and found papers, with coloured pencils and sometimes poster paint. He drew mules and people and whiskey drinkers and cats and dogs and preachers and farms and teakettles. Observers saw how content the old man was, calmly smoking a pipe, drawing until late evening every day. He tied string to his drawings and hung them on a fence so people could see them, and when people bought them, usually for less than ten cents, Bill was amused. “Sometimes they buys ‘em when they don’t even need ‘em,” he apparently stated.

It’s a man named Charles Shannon that we must thank for the stories we know about Bill’s life as a freed slave. He was a trained artist who met Traylor on that Monroe Street stoop, and he was enchanted with the life Traylor was depicting. When Bill moved to the floor of a shoe repair store, he was able to work under an overhang, so he could work even if it was raining, and he stored his art behind a chest. Charles brought him art supplies and paints, most of which Bill never used.

Charles looked out for the unusual artist, but he was drafted in 1942. After the war, he found Traylor at his spot behind the pool hall, though Traylor had moved all over to live with various children. The old man was in poor health- he’d had gangrene, and his leg had been removed. The former slave had not felt inspired to draw during the war years, and he didn’t now. About a year later, Charles went to a hospital to visit Bill, and he was so aged and ill he couldn’t even speak.

Charles Shannon said he saw in Traylor “a kind of beautiful simplicity,” and he saved all of the man’s drawings when he passed on, probably around 1948. Shannon had helped organize three exhibitions of Traylor’s work while the artist was living, and he had been shy about it. For 30 years, Shannon held onto this treasure trove, but when he unearthed them decades later, during the 1970s, interest in his biography was strong. Whether Bill Traylor would have liked it or not, he became a famous artist.

1 and 2.Raw Creation, Outsider Art and Beyond, by John Maizels. Phaidon Press, 1996.
3. Self-Taught Artists of the Twentieth Century, by various curators at the Museum of American Folk Art. Chronicle Books, San Francisco, 1998.

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