Devil House(73)

It’s a charming house, one that’s been standing on this land since 1931, when its original owner, Marlee Stuart, who traced her family line clear back to Mary, Queen of Scots, built it atop a plot of land she’d inherited from her father. It belongs now to Angela West, who’s taught graphic design at Virginia Commonwealth University, a brisk drive up the road and into town from the Stuart house, since 2014.

“Out where I grew up, houses don’t usually have their own pedigrees,” she remarks as we stroll past a grape arbor on the property—one of several; it’s weathered but sturdy, and came with the house. “It’s an adjustment, to a native Californian, to feel like you’re part of a longer conversation with the ground underneath you.”

Silence governs for a moment as we walk toward the house, or near-silence: I hear the movement of squirrels in the trees, birds in the bushes.

“Maybe less of an adjustment for me, I guess, or else you wouldn’t be here in the first place, right?”



* * *



INSIDE, IN A SHADED PARLOR ROOM, the faint but sweet smell of old tobacco seems to govern the pace of our conversation. In languid, long reflections, she answers all my questions directly, volunteering long tangents rich with such details as can only be found in a primary source. Sometimes she stops, and doesn’t pick up the thread again for several minutes; in those minutes, we might sit quietly, or she might get up to make tea; or she might remark again, as she does several times during the course of our afternoon together, how far from Richmond Milpitas is, in many important ways.

“I was a kid, and it was a huge deal at the time, of course,” she says. “But there’s a gulf between the girl I was then and the person I grew up to be; when people want to talk to me about it, I feel like I’m telling them a story from somebody else’s life.”

I ask her to start at the beginning, and she does.



* * *



ANGELA WEST ENTERED her senior year at Milpitas High School with a feeling of hope: she’d worked hard for three years, and could see a path opening that led to her future. Her grades in high school wouldn’t win her admission to the Ivy League, but she’d talked to a counselor who believed in her; that counselor, Beverly Benton, had seen a lot of students pass through her office, and knew how rare second appointments were. “When a kid wants to see you again to make sure they understand their options, it kind of makes your day,” she told me by phone the week before I headed out to Virginia. “Angela hadn’t set the world on fire academically, but she felt like she’d be able to shine if the stakes were a little higher.”

Together, they developed a plan: Angela would apply to state colleges and even look at community colleges, with a view toward transferring as a junior. She kept a perfect attendance record for September and October, hoping that a good first senior semester would stand out on her applications. She reckons these times as the dawn of her adult life; the habits she developed in the foregoing years, she says, were prelude, but these were the days in which the person she’d become first felt like an entity with real flesh on its bones. A hard worker, a self-starter, a team player who knew how and when to bring her own visions into the big picture: these roles, and several others that inform her pedagogy today, saw their first rough passes that fall. She did paste-up for the yearbook, and saw how page design was more than a formality—or how formalities, when carefully tended, quietly congregate to make form, without which all one’s good ideas go wanting for a roof above their heads. The idle sketches with which she’d decorated her notebooks since junior high now followed a practiced aesthetic: a small line design like an insignia at the upper center, a slogan or a lyric from a popular song running corner to corner like a banner, its block lettering rounded, effervescent. “Of course, I didn’t have the vocabulary yet to talk about it like this,” she says. “But from here, I can see what was going on, how my interests were becoming coherent.”

And then it was Halloween; and people in Milpitas may not remember where they were on October 31, 1986, but most of them remember where they were on the morning of November 2, when the news broke.



* * *



EVEN IF YOU DON’T KNOW Angela West, there’s a good chance you know her work, if you attended any but the most cloistered of American high schools in the early 2000s. Those splashy notebooks whose iridescent colors displaced the Pee-Chees and Trapper Keepers of generations past? Angela was first on the scene with the style; fresh out of college, she took a job with a design firm in Boston, and her first assignment was for Mead in Pennsylvania. “Cross-branding was really big—licensed designs—but they wanted their own line of splashy covers so they wouldn’t have to pay the Hollywood studios or the Lisa Franks,” she tells me with a laugh. “At the same time, everybody’s afraid of getting sued, so they wouldn’t tell me, you know, Do something Rainbow Brite. We’d sit in meetings and they’d dance around the point until I gave them a nod and told them I thought I had it, and then I’d scare up a knockoff Rainbow Brite with enough wrong to make for plausible deniability.”

Mead sold a huge amount of notebooks with her charming if generic fantasy horse outline gracing the cover; it was her idea to print the design as a gold or silver silhouette, and it was her proposal that they be printed on neon covers instead of the simpler tones that were Mead’s bread and butter. She insists that they’re nothing special—all in a day’s work—but their success helped her up the ladder in her trade. By the mid-nineties, she’d started her own company; she had a keen eye for good new talent.