Picture Palace (11 page)

Frank said, “Is this all there is to it?” I said yes, and he said, “It's just the way I imagined it.”

“Sure it is.”

“But I wish I'd seen Provincetown before it got commercialized.”

“Bull-sugar,” I said. “It was always commercialized. It's been like this for sixty years—vulgar, plastic, phony antiques, windows full of saltwater taffy, queers everywhere, and pennants saying ‘Provincetown.' It was declared a national monument by President Taft, and he weighed three hundred and fifty pounds. It's been on the map ever since they started to sell egg-timers with Pilgrims painted on them and ashtrays made out of quahog shells. Don't knock it—that's its heritage.”

We were on the street, walking to the Town Wharf for lunch. Frank said, “Really strange people, too. They're all on drugs.”

“Nonsense.”

“I blame their parents.”

“Bull. They're carsick. Listen, it's a long drive.”

Provincetown before my time had been an appalling fishing village of dull clapboard houses, narrow streets, creaking porches, one severe church, and sand blowing down from the dunes eroding the Puritan geometry. It had always had its Sunday painters: water-colorists change nothing. It was the poets, the queer antique dealers, the escapees, the actors and loonies and curio sellers who gave it life. The summer people in their roadsters carried frenzy here and saved the place from being just another sand dune.

Until I did it, Provincetown was portrayed as quaint and dead. The painters painted the dunes, the photographers took pictures of the wooden houses, the sculptors collected driftwood and made these warped sticks into lamps and horror-objects. The writers ignored it; they rented shacks and wrote about their terrible childhoods. But I had been born on the Cape; these houses and boats meant nothing to me, and I had seen enough fishnets and lobster pots to last me a lifetime. It was the rest that excited me—the funny little boathouse that had once been a theater, the fairies walking along Commercial Street with their pinky fingers linked, the visitors who stuck out a mile. Throughout the Twenties and into the Thirties I took pictures there. I saw a man with a perfect head and photographed him, and later I found out he was the poet Cummings—a wonderful memory because I thought he was a genius before I saw a single line he'd written: I liked his head and the way his jokester's thick lips curled when he laughed. He was much funnier than the other one, who looked ruined and squinting, the sunlight removing half his face, O'Neill. Pugmire and his vast collection of medicine bottles, Bunny Wilson and his cronies, the tragic Bruno Bassinet who was found floating face down in his underwear in Hatches Harbor, the get-togethers O'Neill arranged above Peaked Hill Bar: this was my Provincetown.

And there was a direct link between Provincetown and New York City. In the space of ten years I did two sets of Robeson pictures, the first before the notorious hand-kissing scene in
All God's Chillun
, the next in 1932 during the New York revival of
Show Boat
. Robeson sang (always “Lindy”) as I did him and he had more moods than anyone I had known.

“They want me to play Othello,” he said at our first session.

“That's only natural.”

“I really want to play Hamlet.”

But in the event he played Emperor Jones.

He was my first boogie-man. Even as a celebrity, Robeson was considered a savage by most people, like the Ubangis my uncle Tod brought over from Africa, who were paraded out as freaks on the stage of the Old Howard in Scollay Square. “They were so sad,” he said. He guessed they were homesick, and to cheer them up Uncle Tod let them sit near the furnace in the basement boiler room where they sweated until one—the man—died; the woman was shipped back to Africa. This story infuriated Robeson, who had the idea—mistaken, I think—that the Ubangi man was an African chief in boiler-room bondage. “But it's not your fault, honey.”

Next to Orlando, Robeson was the most complete man I had ever met. He was success-conscious, impressionable, and had no political savvy, and he had a fatal gift for rhetoric; yet he had a law degree, a corrosive intelligence, an athlete's sinew, and a gentleman's charm. He was fearless, dignified, and polite, the sort of superman envious weaklings gang up to destroy. He was bowled over by my photographs. He had dressed up in fantastic costumes, like an African prince, a statesman, a revolutionary, a convict, a pirate; he got the duds out of the wardrobe of the New York theater and made the right faces for them. He told me not to tell a soul, and he bought the more outlandish pictures from me so that I couldn't exhibit them. I thought at the time that they were parts he wanted to play, because he gave little speeches for each one—jabbering like an African, orating like a president; but later it occurred to me that they were people he wanted to be, and it didn't surprise me when he went to Russia, because one of the pictures (fur hat, overcoat, and growling
minski-chinski
) foretold that.

It was Robeson who introduced me to the other blacks in New York, the
Show Boat
cast, the hangers-on, girlfriends, spivs, and bookies. “My people,” he called them, “my brothers and sisters”—it was my introduction to those words used in their larger senses. Some of them were religious types, Holy Rollers and preachers and evangelists, with names like Father and Daddy; or sly fast-talking sharks with sharp teeth and an odd black puppety walk and names like Pigga and Doolum; others pretended they were real Africans, and one told me he was God. A few tried to interfere with me, but I said I would not stand for it and if they didn't cut it out they could get their picture taken elsewhere. But how they dressed! Top hats and tails, earrings, blankets and war bonnets, leopard skins, bandanas, and one in his shorts, just a pair of boxer's trunks. Strange as the others seemed, dressed up as Uncas and General Othello and Crispus Attucks and Shriners in red fezzes, it was the boxer who caused the sensation: no one had ever seen a confident muscle-bound black man before. He was a bizarre Negro who looked like a bullfrog and claimed he was an Indian and called himself Tashmoo.

“Maude's cannibals,” people called them. Robeson had supplied me with New York subjects, Frenise helped me on the Cape. Many blacks lived then, as they continued to do, on Martha's Vineyard, They were servants, houseboys, cooks, sometimes gardeners, but never chauffeurs (the Irish did that, though Papa disapproved: “I would never hire a man who believed in an afterlife to do a dangerous job”). For years I traveled around the Cape and out to the Vineyard doing blacks, and when I had my first exhibition in that wharf gallery in Provincetown people were astonished—not by the blind portraits, or the perfect one of Cummings or
Clam diggers
or the nasty one I had set up called
Eel in a Toilet
, but by the blacks, because they had never seen them before, so many of them, like human beings.

For one thing, they were not black. Instead of printing them the usual way I fuddled around a stage further and made negative prints. A few years later, even amateurs knew how to do this, reversing the order, backassward, printing a positive to get inkblot whites and illuminated shadows. But then it was considered wildly imaginative, and to use black subjects in negative prints a stroke of pure genius. They appeared lighted from within, an internal glow that livened the skin and blackened the eyes and picked out the teeth like obsidian choppers. They were incandescent golliwogs in two dimension, but it was especially creepy because my pictures showed the familiar in reverse, solarized people with white hair and white noseholes and gray fingernails and black teeth, and I must admit that the first few I did nearly scared the pants off me with their superhuman looks, right out of a rocket, as if there were a million more somewhere in the sky in the Mothership who were about to land and take over the world. And although some of the blacks were printed as usual (I didn't take any liberties with Robeson) none looked as black as those whitened negative prints or caused people to study them so closely. Thereafter, whenever I took a picture that I thought people would not look twice at—some ordinary scene I felt deserved attention—I printed it this way and never failed to drown the viewer in it. My white Negroes made the show; they were arrestingly familiar and yet had the definition of sojourners from the spirit world. Now people noticed the lip-shape, the long crown, the huge noseholes, the forehead ridge, the small beautiful ears.

It was news, and everyone said what brilliant pictures they were and what a great future I had: This gal is going places, mark my word. I had to laugh. I knew that the pictures were easy and only the subjects amazing, like shots of bad weather or big game, hailstones and tigers, or our old friend “Snake Swallowing a Pig.” The subject was the thing, and so my skill was praised, but I knew that there would always be someone to say I was a photographer of accomplishment if I exhibited a picture of a person with two heads, giant or dwarf, or blood-splashed murder victim. Even the Cummings one—it was his head that counted, not his name.

With Teets it was his mouth. All the blacks talked while I had done them, but Teets, whom I had met on the Vineyard, had kept up a nibbling monologue that lent a sour scavenging expression to his buffoon's mouth and gave glimpses of the roots of his teeth and the way they molded his gums, like carved wax inside the scratched tissues of his lips.

He had the liverish just-dug-up color of an earthworm, he wore a sock on his head, and he hid his intelligence in clowning. He was a reader; not a self-improving type, but a man of restless solitude who searched in books for his counterpart. He read everything and, like many of us, he failed to find in any book a clue to his own world, a familiar smell or gesture, a quality of light—that little kick in fiction that tells the truth and makes the rest plausible. “It's just a story,” he would say, tossing a book aside: he did not believe.

In him I saw, as I often had with Frenise, a fellow sufferer, passion sandwiched between innocence and duty, yearning to soar. And he even looked the part, like a crow on a branch complaining with his beak, “Dummies. I can't read this book. It's about dummies.” Or his more solemn conclusion, “I'd rather read your pictures, Maude. They's like stories.”

Teets's photograph, in stiff robes, a pharaonic profile, was praised for its weirdness—wild eyes and a gobbling mouth full of teeth. But there was a voice, like the “shet” and “bidge” that didn't go with Frenise's church clothes, that insisted there was more to Teets than his pose.

That day in the dunes above Edgartown, dressed as an Egyptian and sitting cross-legged in the sand, he said to the camera, “There's only one book which is the truth, and it's the Bible.”

Troof, Bahble
. I thought: So it comes out at last—he's a religious nut, a roller or a jumper.

He explained to the camera, holding his hands forward, as if he expected birds to light on his wrists, “Not the Holy Bible, but the other one, the plain old Bible they hit you with when you're little.”

“Do tell.” I was winding and snapping, winding and snapping.

“It's the truth about what people do. They cuss. They kill their childrens. They do wrongness. They suffer for years and years and they look around and suffer some more. And sometimes nothing happens for two-three hundred years but begetting.”

I said, “But lots of books are about that.”

“Cussing, yes, and dying, yes, but not begetting with their own daughters and brothers and sisters. But that's the truth.”

“Brothers and sisters?”

“Doing it hard,” he said. “It ain't in books—it's in the Bible.”

I said I wasn't happy with the pose. I told him to relax and get on his elbows and keep talking and don't mind me.

He said, “Sure it's the truth. I know someone that done it, and,” he smiled, “that someone is me, baby.”

“Cussed?”

“Jammed.”

“With your daughter?”

“With my sister. Hard.” He sucked his teeth. “Got no daughter.”

I said, “I don't think you ought to be telling me this, Mister Teets.”

“It's the truth, so don't get vex. The truth is the truth.” He did his crow-squint, lowering his head and saying into the camera, “Know how it come about?”

I didn't know what to say. His head shook in the viewfinder and swerved at me.

“Sit still.”

“I am setting still, but your camera is vex, jumping up and down, and the reason is you just heard the truth.”

Troof
again. “I didn't hear anything.”

“Here she come then, Harry and me—Harry is my little sister, living in Oak Bluffs, where my father was stewie for the Phippses. That's where it all come about. It was maybe October, blowy, sand in the streets, all the summer people gone and only us there and a few Phippses. There were town people there, the ones you say hello and thank you to, but you couldn't do nothing with them and you couldn't touch the Phippses. We was alone, Daddy, Harry, and me, and Daddy was doing all day, which leaves Harry and me.” He had inched forward. I was on my knees—I took all my best pictures on my knees. His broad black face was not a foot from the camera. I saw a nose and two eyes, like a face pushing through a door I was trying to close.

“Think about it—no one else on the island. We're the only ones, her and me. Like in the Bible.”

I noticed he was avoiding the words white and black, but I got the picture, the pair of them and their belief, a simpler version of my own family.

“Pretty soon I realize I'm a boy and Harry she's a girl, and one day in the soft barn loft I lifts up her dress and I say, ‘What you got down under there?' and I reaches.”

Teets licked the cracks from his lips and looked tenderly at the camera, perhaps using the lens as a mirror. I probed his perspiration.