The Prophets(59)

And so they cluttered his room: canvases triple stacked against the base of three walls; every unused surface—whether desk or floor—a resting place for scene after scene of slave merriment or contemplation, even though his father assured him that the latter was impossible. And, of course, his most successful works were the most suffocating: the ones that captured the sorrow. He didn’t know that grief could have such a multitude of expressions—be resurrected similarly, yet uniquely, in so many different faces—until the first time he made a Negro sit for him. His hand quivered and he had nearly missed it. But there it was: wet in the eyes, trapped on the tongue, broken in the palms.

He handpicked Isaiah from a gaggle of Negroes he gathered by the edge of the river. He called them out in the middle of their bathing and told them to stand in a line. The overseers cut their eyes at the interruption. No matter. This land belonged to his father as did their jobs, so the Negroes did as instructed and yes, the overseers spit out their tobacco, but they were otherwise silent.

The Negroes’ feet squished in the mud. Some of them used their hands or leaves to cover their exposed parts. Others looked away. They all glistened in the sun. Timothy scoured the crowd looking for a color that would best match the fruit of the blackberry trees he planned to include in the landscape. He noticed Isaiah’s halo first, surrounding his head in all its shadowed glory.

“Finish washing,” he said to Isaiah. And afterward, instructed him to get dressed and come to the space where the grounds met the cotton field.

Timothy had brought a chair, but not for himself. Upright and solid, the back of the chair rose to just below a seated Isaiah’s shoulders. Timothy positioned the chair so that it faced east and the sun shined on his back and on Isaiah’s face. He made Isaiah sit there for hours, demanded that he not move a muscle, not even to wipe the sweat from his brow.

“Don’t even blink,” Timothy joked, and had to reassure Isaiah that he was kidding.

Some of the other Negroes watched from behind trees or from the entrances of their shacks, straining their vision with wide eyes. But they kept their distance. Timothy saw them. They stayed behind, as if fearful that they would get sucked into the painting and, perhaps, have to contend with two places from which they couldn’t escape.

Isaiah’s face was drenched. Finally, Timothy moved from behind the easel he had placed just off to the left of where Isaiah was sitting so that he would have the proper perspective and capture almost all that he wanted of Isaiah’s nature.

“You are an excellent model for my work,” he then said to Isaiah with a joyful flourish.

Isaiah’s silence followed by his head bowing made Timothy think Isaiah didn’t understand a compliment when one was being given. He shook his head and asked the Negro behind the closest tree to come forth and assist him in carrying his equipment back to the house. At the porch stairs, Timothy stopped. He turned to see Isaiah still seated in the chair.

“You can go back now,” he yelled, not unkindly.

It dawned on him briefly that he had never seen a Negro in the South seated in a chair. On the ground, yes. On haystacks. In driver’s seats. But never in a chair. Maybe that was why the Negro continued to sit: to have a small idea of what it meant to be fully human, to rest a spell on a comfortable surface and to have support for your back. But he got up and Timothy watched him move slowly back to the river and collapse to his knees at the edge of it before bending forward to splash his face.



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THE TRIP TO BOSTON was more difficult than the trip coming home. Traveling north felt unnatural. And the things he had seen along the way: it had rained continually, which meant the wagon was perpetually stuck and the rain brought with it a mist so thick that he couldn’t tell where he began and it ended. They had to travel through patches of Indian Territory, he and the others heading north for college because they, too, had to gain the skills necessary to help their fathers manage the tracts of land that they conquered, and the North, despite its festering treachery, was home to the best institutions for business thought. His time at the school that his father said he must attend to be best prepared for his inheritance was interesting for the wrong reasons. Midnight art and powerful sleep would be of no use to Paul. He had been told by jealous men, the men charged with ferrying past the imaginary line that separated the northern and southern parts of an infant country, that the fog wouldn’t protect them. Indians didn’t need eyes to see them, they said, or, rather, could see them through the eyes of woodland creatures—a snake at their feet or a bird circling their heads. They would kill them while they were asleep and eat their flesh raw as tribute to even more savage gods. He couldn’t erase from his mind the image of bloody teeth tearing at him. And the envious men looked at him, specifically, when they told their scare stories, as if they could see the timidity at the beating center of his heart. He had perhaps not been careful enough: stared too long at a passing gentleman; said a male name during his slumber, maybe; or it could have been the gentle way in which his hand would occasionally drape at the end of his wrist. You could never know for sure what it was that inspired their malice, so every part of your inside self had to remain inside.

He had found that Northerners, unlike Southerners, had no idea that they were the descendants of cannibals. They had been sufficiently protected, by a myriad of myths involving hard work and superior intellectual, moral, and physical character, from such unpeaceful knowledge. But there was a chance that some of them knew it. There were some of them who had kept themselves in a perpetual state of dreaming, imbibing morphine mixed with water. Some ate the powder straight out of the package. Others inhaled it. Its effect on them intrigued Timothy. He would ask them many questions. In their sometimes incoherent responses, he felt he had been let in on secrets that might have otherwise gone unheard. Some of them talked of feeling something, anything, for the very first time; a tingle, they said, in the chest. A feeling that made them want to lie on their backs in the soil and greet the sky and everything else with gratitude. Even niggers, they said. And they would only call them by that name when they were feeling this grateful. Otherwise, “Negroes.”