“They offered you a full ride, Joan,” she’d said. “You’re going.”
We were all in the kitchen—me, Mama, My, and Auntie August, who was plating the Friday meatless dinner: pan-fried perch with a side of buttered green beans Mya and I had picked from the back garden after school.
“I know Rhodes’s art program like I know myself, Mama. I won’t learn anything there.”
“You’ll learn how to be a goddamn doctor!”
I had never heard my mother curse. She had pounded her fist on the counter as she said it, emphasizing the finality of her argument.
Mya burst out in tears. My, for all her pranks and sass, had a sensitive side. She hated when Mama and I fought, but fight we did. And more and more often, it seemed.
“Y’all stop; look what y’all doing to My,” Auntie August said, and stopped dishing fried fillets onto My’s plate. She sat down beside her at the kitchen booth and wrapped her arms around her.
Mama let out an exasperated sigh. At the counter, she could not look at any of us when she said, slow and tired, enunciating each syllable, “I just don’t want you to be poor, Joanie. You can draw. Lord knows, you can draw. But if a man up and leaves you…or you up and leave him, how will you survive? Selling sketches in the streets? Name me one successful artist with a dark face. With breasts. Name one Black woman famous artist. Go on. I’ll wait. Be a doctor, Joan. For Christ’s sake. Be a doctor.” She’d paused for a few seconds, then she said in a whisper, “However nice they are, don’t matter a lick. No daughter of mine going to press food stamps into white hands.”
I didn’t want that, either—poverty and the shame it brings—but I was willing to risk being chronically poor the rest of my life so that I could draw. Art mattered more to me than anything else. If there was a chance I could make it work, that I might make a living off it, however meager, I had to try.
Professor Mason thrust his cane down hard on the wood floor to get my attention, startling me back to the studio. We’d been painting nude models. He went over to the stool the model had been using and took a seat. The room was empty now. It smelled like pencil shavings and paper. Other than Mama’s cobbler baking or Auntie August’s chicken and dumplings cooking, I knew of no better smell.
“Go to London,” he said.
“What?”
“Go to London,” he repeated. “You’re bigger than Memphis. Rhodes, I hate to say it, can’t teach you any more than I already have. The College is still accepting applications. And I know someone there. I won’t hear any objections,” he said as I began to protest. “I’ve already put in a good word. Yes, yes, don’t scold me. I’m an old gay man in Memphis. I do what the fuck I want, love. You should, too.”
The College. I knew exactly which one he meant. It was laughable. I shook my head. Perhaps Mama was right. I couldn’t be a doctor, not with my science skills. Mya did most of my Biology homework. But I could be a lawyer, easy. Writing and history and argument had always come natural to me. Maybe art was something I could do on the side of my life. Become a part-time art teacher. Or teach art in the summers. Maybe even abroad. See the world that way. Hold down a decent job. Make Mama proud. The first attorney in the family…
“My family—”
“Will understand,” he said, striking his cane hard on the floor again. “For the love of God, don’t be stupid, girl. If you stay, at best, you will end up an old art teacher like me shaking his cane at young folk and calling them stupid. Rightfully so. But if you go. If you go…” He trailed off.
* * *
—
Auntie August was waiting for me in the red Caddy outside.
“Joanie!” she shouted out the window. “You know I have to set Miss Dawn’s hair tonight. Get yourself in this car!”
I sprinted to the car and placed my large knapsack filled with oils and brushes and inks in the trunk. Closed the trunk and opened the passenger seat with a hurried, “I’m sorry, Auntie.”
My mind was racing. Professor Mason’s words had ignited a fire in me. For better or worse, I was born this way. I was born to be an artist. Placing pencil to page felt like worship each and every time. Of course, I did it. Of course, I was obsessed. Art is air.
How can Mama not see that? I wondered silently. How can she not see that I may just be great at it? That just maybe a dark-skinned skinny girl from North Memphis can draw something that will silence this world?
After a few minutes of driving from Rhodes on North Parkway, after a few minutes of listening to Anita Baker on the radio, I couldn’t help myself. I had to tell her, someone, my plan.
“Auntie?”
“Child, you better be telling me how sorry you are for making me wait and that’s it.”
I loved her. I knew where Mya had gotten her sass. It was genetic, apparently. Passed down through the generations.
“Auntie, I don’t want to be a doctor.”
She kept her eyes on the road, the streetlights flickering on in the darkening November evening, but she also reached out a hand to turn down Anita’s voice on the car radio.
I took that as my cue. “Listen, I’ve been talking to Professor Mason. And he says, he says there’s still enough time for me to apply. I’ve got ’til Christmas; that’s when the application is due. And Professor Mason says there’s a fellowship—just one—that they dole out once a year to an outstanding American application. A fellowship! That means a full ride, Auntie. Same as Rhodes. But this way, this way, I get to be an artist. They need a portfolio—that’s a series of paintings in all different mediums—sorry, I’m going on and on, but Auntie, will you sit for me? I have an idea for my portfolio. All the women in the neighborhood. Well, not all. But you, Miss Dawn, My, the beauty shop, Mama. Lord, I don’t know how I’m going to sketch Mama without her knowing.”
“Joan—”
“Maybe I can use old photographs for Mama…”
I couldn’t stop now that I had started. I could see my plan laid out before me like cobblestones I simply had to tread.
“Joan!” Auntie August shouted.
“Yes, ma’am?” I had forgotten myself, my place. My elder was Auntie August. I knew I was not honoring her by not listening. I held my peace, though it hurt to do so.
“Where?”
“Ma’am?” I asked, deferential in tone.
“Where, child? What school is this? What on earth are you talking about? I’m listening, I am. But I just have no idea what you’re saying, niece. Explain yourself.”
I did. The entirety of that car ride home.
By the time I finished, we had pulled up to our driveway and Auntie August had turned off the ignition of the Cadillac and reached into the car’s console for her pack of Kools. She took her time rolling down the old Caddy’s window, took her time lighting one. I knew from the way she exhaled her cigarette smoke that she was serious, deep in her thoughts.
“I can sing,” she said, exhaling a plume of cigarette smoke, then taking another puff. “You’ve heard me before. Don’t do it that often. Folk pass out. Honest. Once, years back, at your mama’s wedding, man fainted in a back pew. Had to be carried out. Hadn’t even noticed. Just went on singing Aretha in a way I do doubt Aretha could do it. But I never did anything with it. My voice. Not sure I wanted to, how folk went on and on whenever I let out a note. And well, I knew Who gave me this voice. But I did love piano. Wanted to play jazz. Loved Gershwin.”