~

           
Oh, to be able to take four lines and  make them
the very picture of dejection.   Turn them low-
down, way-down, down-baby-down-baby
blue with stark but subdued yellow, purple,
brown, red, and black.  Lots of black
segregated into blocks forced to juxtapose
or overlap that are much too much
like the cells of a prison, cells of a jail..
In the practiced hands of artist Jacob Lawrence,
cubism found itself a set of drums and a sax
and climbed onto a makeshift stage with Jelly
Roll Morton tearing up piano and Pee Wee Russell
clarineting a too-short, set-long wail.  Jazz
liquored up and poured on canvas.  Smoke
reddens its eyes.   Blood is everywhere, fresh
and long dried.  Tears held to the point
they act as glue.  Bessie Smith is riffing
her way through another Georgia, another
night.   Lots  of flats; sharps, not so
many.  So much you want
your notes to tell.   Shout, groan, squeal
with delight at the moments you steal.  Want'm
to feel every whisper, every sigh, every whimper
from every child denied the right to the right
food.  Not having to live squeezed in a firetrap,
so cold your nose won't stop dripping
and your teeth won't stop chattering.   Sliiiiiiiiiiide
home, baby.   Show how a body don't have to
see Africa to feel her beat in each and every vein.
Her fired-up sand and cool eyes of a predator
poised to pounce.   Color swathed and splashed
and interwoven with bone, shell, fabric, and hair.
Her jewels, her wildlife in their camouflage
spots and stripes don't keep hunters from raping.
Home home, dig?  Time to show what it was like
growing up in Atlanta,  then Harlem, back when
black was Colored at best, and White counted
itself twice, then twice again..  Show men, show
women, show children struggle to unstick paint
when lucky enough to have a window
or hug a fire escape as hot as fish grease
or try to sleep in a public park to beat the heat.
Air!   Air!    Lawrence often said Suggest.  Suggest
the blisters, the calluses. Walk your instrument
barefoot over hookworms for miles for water.  
To the back of a bus so you can keep someone
else's children and scrub someone else's clothes
on wood and metal.  Don' take a lot of notes
to rain, hail, and thunder.  Zigzag the sky
with lightning to remind that God owns
the power.  You are God's child.   No more
hunkering to wait for the storm to pass.  Time
to take a note from a revolution's guerilla,
first be the wall then leap out.  Work your way
up through the splintering floor.  Mass
color to remind, subtly or not, what it was
to stand naked in chains for jokers.  To be sold.
To be torn from love's arms.   Sold.
   
Most cubists played triangles and plucked away
before mirrors crazed by being made to reflect
and reflect themselves.  Circles squaring, squares
circling.  Warping and changing connections,
if any.  Humans no longer recognizing
themselves ended up stuck in paint.  Jacob
Lawrence freed by putting human first.
Did not attempt to disguise pain or the ecstatic
in the way Picasso came to.   In  jazz,
you bend and re-bend, smoke and re-smoke.
Tuck notes inside notes and give them wings.
They moan, they croon, they curl, they fly.  
 
 
Jacob Lawrence,  Genius,  1917-2000
               Shhh, he is painting. . .

 

(c) Phyllis Jean Green,  April, 2006
    All Rights Reserved