We Are Water (2 page)

The house is a small cottage at the back of the Skloots’ property. Following Joe’s instructions, I drive down the Skloots’ driveway, then inch my car over a rutted path out back until I get to a brook. I park and get out, then cross the brook by way of two bowed two-by-six planks that have been placed over it. A thin white woman—Joe’s brother’s Dutch wife, I figure—is outside, hanging clothes in just her slip. When I ask her if Josephus is home, she sticks out her thumb and points it toward the door. Before I can knock, it swings open and Jones invites me in.

The place is filthy. It reeks of stale cooking odors and cat urine, and there is clutter everywhere. A fat calico cat is asleep on the kitchen table amidst dirty dishes, old magazines, and an ash tray brimming with stubbed-out cigarettes. The floor beneath my shoes feels gritty. Josephus’s paintings are everywhere: stacked against walls and windowsills, atop a refrigerator whose door is kept shut with electrical tape. There are more paintings scattered across the mattress on the floor and on the dropped-down Murphy bed. “What’s this one called?” I ask Joe, pointing to a female figure in a two-piece bathing suit standing in a field of morning glories, parakeets alighting on her head and outstretched arms.

“That one there? Thass
Parakeet Girl
.” When I pick it up for a closer look, the roaches hiding beneath it scuttle for cover.

But housekeeping is beside the point. I look closely at every work he shows me, overwhelmed by both his output and his raw talent. I’m there for hours. Some of his paintings are more successful than others, of course, but even the lesser efforts display an exotic, unschooled charm and that bold use of color. Before I leave, I offer him a show at the Statler. He accepts. When I get home, I tell my wife that I may have just discovered a major new talent.

But “Josephus Jones: An American Original” is a flop. The local paper, which is usually supportive of our museum shows, declines to publish either a feature story or a review. At the opening, instead of the usual two hundred or so, fewer than twenty people attend. Not even Angus and Ethel Skloot have come; they are on holiday in Florida. It’s painful to watch the Jones brothers scuff the toes of their shined shoes against the gallery’s hardwood floor and eye the entranceway with fading hope. Both have purchased sharp double-breasted suits for this special occasion, and Rufus’s Dutch-born wife has apparently bought new clothes, too: a sparkly, low-cut cocktail frock more suitable for an evening at a New York supper club than a Sunday afternoon art opening in staid Three Rivers, Connecticut. Worse yet, she has neglected to remove the tag from her dress, and I have to instruct my secretary, Miss Sheflott, to go upstairs to her desk, retrieve her scissors, and discreetly escort young Mrs. Jones out into the foyer for the purpose of clipping her tag. Later, Miss Sheflott tells me she tucked the tag inside the dress rather than removing it. Mrs. Jones has confided that she can’t afford it and is planning to return it to the LaFrance Shop on Monday.

In the days that follow, there are complaints about the show’s prevalence of female nudity. Three members of the Friends cancel their memberships in protest. In the six weeks the show is up, the number of visitors is dismally low—our worst attendance ever. I’ve penned personal letters to several influential New York art dealers and critics, inviting them to discover Jones. “He is a painter of events commonplace and exotic that are shot through with an underlying sense of anxiety,” I have written. “His compositions are rich with surprises, some joyful, some sinister. In my opinion, he stands shoulder to shoulder with other American primitive painters, from Grandma Moses to his Negro brethren, Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin, and the breakthrough artists of the Harlem Renaissance.” But none of those busy New Yorkers to whom I’ve written has had the courtesy even to reply, let alone trek the three hours to our little museum to see Josephus’s work for themselves.

The show ends. We keep in touch from time to time, Joe and I. I encourage him, critique the new work he sometimes brings by. I’m sad to learn from Joe that his brother Rufus’s wife has left him, and that Rufus has taken it badly—has fallen in with a bad crowd and begun using heroin. “Mr. Skloot let him go after he found out he be messin’ wiff the devil’s drug,” Joe says. “Booted him out of the house out back, too. I been saving up some to send Rufe to one of them sanctoriums to get hisself clean, but they cost more money than I gots. If I could sell some paintings here and there, I could do it, but ain’t no one like them enough to buy any.” I try several more times to interest my New York connections in Joe’s work—alas, to no avail. Eventually, he stops coming around to the museum and we fall out of touch.

But in the summer of 1959, during Three Rivers’s celebration of its three hundredth anniversary, I am asked to judge the art show on the final day of festivities. It’s a big show; more than three hundred artists, accomplished and amateurish, have submitted work for consideration. Most have chosen “pretty” subject matter: quaint covered bridges, romanticized portraits of rosy-cheeked children, and the inevitable still lifes of flowers and fruit. As I wander the grounds, looking for
some
thing to which I can affix a “best in show” ribbon and still sleep that night, I come upon Josephus’s work at the south end of the festival grounds. Delighted and relieved, I scan what I have previously admired:
Parakeet Girl
,
Jesse James and His Wife
, his pictures of pinup girls and fishermen midstream, ukulele players and circus curiosities. One theme seems to prevail in Jones’s work: predators—lions and tigers, lynxes and leopards—attacking or about to attack their prey. Then, among these familiar paintings, I see a spectacular new one—twice as large and twice as ambitious as the others. At the center of the composition stands the Tree of Life, lush and fecund. Beneath it are a pale, naked Adam and Eve. The latter figure is reminiscent of the prepubescent Eves of Van Leyden, the sixteenth-century Dutch master. Adam, though his skin is gray rather than brown or black, bears the face of Josephus Jones himself. The benign members of the animal kingdom who surround the two human figures seem almost to smile. But trouble lurks, in the form of the treacherous serpent hanging from the tree. Joe has depicted a moment in time. Adam reaches for the forbidden fruit which Eve is about to pluck. It will be the fateful act of self-will that will banish them both from the garden. Innocence is about to be lost, and we humans, forever after, will be stained with our forebears’ original sin. In
Adam and Eve
, Jones is once again exploring the theme of the predator and the prey, but he has done so in a more subtle and masterly way.
Adam and Eve
is a leap forward—a stellar achievement, and I am elated to hang the “best in show” blue ribbon next to it. The festival gates swing open to the public at 9:00
A.M.
As I exit, they push past me, eager not so much to view the art, I suspect, as to fill their bellies with the pancakes that are being cooked and served inside the tent by a large black woman gotten up to look like Aunt Jemima. I admire the organizers’ cunning. If you want people to flock to art, lure them with pancakes.

Later, I’m informed that the festival committee was unhappy with my selection, and I read in the newspaper the following day that an irate art show attendee rushed Jones’s
Adam and Eve
, intent on destroying it, and that this would-be art critic had scuffled with its creator. This news delights me! Isn’t that art’s purpose, after all? To engage and, if necessary, disturb the beholder? To upset the apple cart and challenge the status quo? Was that not what the great Michelangelo did as he lay on his back, painting political satire onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Haven’t artists, from that great sixteenth-century genius to Manet and Rivera, outraged the public and forced them to
think
? Now that his art has been attacked, Josephus has joined the ranks of an illustrious fellowship.

Several weeks later, I am in my office at the museum, working on the budget for the coming year and half-listening to the radio. A novelty song is playing—one that mocks “the troubles” between the Irish and the Brits.

You’d never think they go together, but they certainly do

The combination of English muffins and Irish stew

I chuckle at the words, thinking, well, if paintings can make political statements, then why can’t silly popular songs? But I stop cold when the music ends and the news comes on. The announcer says that thirty-nine-year-old Josephus Jones, a local construction worker, has died accidentally—that he has tripped and fallen into a well behind his residence and drowned. I sit there, stunned and sickened. A promising artist has been cut down by fate just as he was hitting his stride. Unable to work, I put on my coat, walk out of my office, and drive home.

I go to his funeral service at the colored church. The Negro community has come out in impressive numbers to sing and wail and shout out their grief about Joe Jones’s premature demise, but I am only one of four Caucasians who have come to mourn him; the other two are Angus and Ethel Skloot and a distraught young woman who looks familiar but whom I cannot, at first, place. But halfway through the service, it dawns on me who she is: the Eve of Josephus’s painting, reaching 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.”