The House Girl Read online

  Lina nodded. This was a strategy she understood: wasn’t this what Dresser was doing with the reparations claim? Pushing the question. What were their names? Isn’t it time we made the effort to remember?

  Lina continued farther into the gallery, through a wide archway to an open middle space where a large drawing was displayed alone. Children No. 2 read the title on the wall. It was in charcoal, done on rough, perhaps homemade paper. Several heads of babies and children floated disembodied in the background, a row of them, all similar in appearance but none of them quite the same. A larger head of an older child dominated the foreground. Lina guessed the child to be three or four years old; his (her?) face was expressive, full of an expectant joy, but the eyes were closed. It was an odd juxtaposition—the face conveyed a strong emotion, it made Lina’s throat catch, but the closed eyes cut the viewer off from sharing the joy or understanding it.

  Suddenly Oscar was there, standing beside her. “Just look at that,” he said. “She must have been warming up, experimenting with the smaller ones. Studies, looks like. But that face, holy shit, she nailed the bigger face. Look at that kid, Carolina. Just look at him.”

  Lina looked. The closed eyes, the smooth full cheeks, the lips turned in the barest suggestion of a smile, and the picture hit Lina with a force she wasn’t expecting, in a way her father’s paintings never had. Her reaction here was emotional, not intellectual, and for once she wanted to leave it at that, without searching for clues to analyze, references to dissect. She couldn’t explain why this boy’s enigmatic face captivated her, nor did she want to explain it. Looking was enough.

  Just then a phone buzzed from across the room. Marie answered in clipped urgent syllables, then hung up and clicked across the gallery expanse toward Lina and Oscar with her arms held wide.

  “Darlings, I’m afraid I must be off.” She raised herself up on tiptoe and kissed Oscar on each cheek, then stood for a moment holding his face with both hands. He looked down at her and smiled, it seemed to Lina, with a rueful, half-there apology, but also with delight, and an energy, a look passed between them. Lina felt as though she were watching the scene through a peephole, something she should not see, and yet fascination held her gaze steady: this unknown sliver of her father.

  Oscar dated, of course he did, but Lina never met them, never saw them. These women existed for Lina only as a stray blond hair across the back of his jacket, a feminine voice on their answering machine, and, once, a photograph of Oscar and a leggy brunette in one of those free, glossy Manhattan magazines. But Marie—Lina remembered her from Oscar’s parties, the ones he used to throw regularly with a pauper’s abandon throughout Lina’s childhood; she’d heard Marie’s name spoken over the years, a gallery move, a marriage, a divorce. Lina felt now as if she’d missed something vital, a clue to Marie’s significance. And what else had she missed?

  The night Oscar had shown Lina the Grace pictures, he’d said, I’m okay, Carolina, the words flying naturally from his mouth as though he had said them a thousand times before. After all these years, and Lina’s constant, lurking worry. I’m okay.

  I wasn’t a perfect husband, Oscar had told her.

  That small word etched at Grace’s throat: Enough.

  Marie released Oscar’s face and turned then to Lina. “Carolina, my dear. You are a lucky girl, you look nothing like your father here.” She gave a sideways wink to Oscar. “You have grown into a beauty, just like your mother. I am so very glad to see you again after all these years. Good luck with your case.” She pulled Lina close and made a quick pass to the right and to the left, planting a dry kiss on each cheek.

  Marie turned, fishing through her bag for her keys, and then she disappeared out the front door, Oscar behind her. Lina paused for a moment in the empty space and focused again on the drawing of the children. The child with closed eyes seemed older than the others, sketched with more skill and more detail. It was only this one that truly demanded the viewer’s attention. What was that child thinking? What did he not wish to see?

  With reluctance Lina turned away from the drawing and followed her father outside. She emerged from the gallery, squinting with the sudden rush of sun, and stood silently beside Oscar as Marie locked the door with a hard twist.

  “Lina, I hate to admit it, but I hope you do not find any of Josephine’s relations,” Marie said. “It would make life much more complicated for me. Bye now!” And Marie Calhoun ducked into a waiting car, a suited driver closing the door behind her.

  OSCAR AND LINA CAUGHT A cab back to Brooklyn. There was no air-conditioning and all four windows were opened wide, the rush of the wind flinging Lina’s hair around her face. She wanted to ask her father about Marie, not because she really wanted to know but because the alternative—wondering, imagining—gave her a hollow ache in the back of her throat.

  “Dad, what is up with you and Marie?” Lina asked, shouting to be heard above the wind. She tried to make the question into a joke, hoping that he would reply with a laugh, some funny story.

  But his reply was serious and guarded. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, it just seemed like you guys had some kind of connection.”

  “We’re old friends.” Oscar turned away from her, toward the window, and the breeze pushed his hair away from his face and flattened his beard, leaving the bones of his cheeks, his forehead, his skull exposed.

  “Just friends?”

  A hesitation. A beat. “Just friends. Yes,” he answered.

  “And she knew Mom?”

  “Yes, they were good friends.”

  The cab stopped at a red light and the air around them quieted. Lina became aware of the tinny beats of an Indian pop song trickling from the driver’s cracked radio, the smell of roasting peanuts from a vendor on the corner. Oscar gazed out the window, his face visible to her only in profile, the long slender fingers of his right hand resting lightly on his jeaned thigh, one blue eye that gazed away from Lina, toward the peanut vendor and the endless stream of strangers on the sidewalk. She saw the tension in his shoulders, a sharp blink, the way his lips pulled down at the corner.

  “But listen, Carolina—you heard Marie,” Oscar said, and he turned to her, his cheeks pink, his eyes alight now with enthusiasm. “She didn’t look that hard for any relatives. It’s better for the gallery if there’s no contested ownership. Nothing to slow up sales from the show. Start looking, Carolina. The picture of that kid, it just—I don’t know. I think you’ll find something.”

  The light flipped to green, the cab roared ahead, and Lina’s heart quickened, her hair flurried at her cheeks, and the sudden wind in her eyes made them tear. Any impulse to push her father on the Marie question disappeared into the noise and distraction of the car and Lina felt a shaky kind of calm, as if she had only just dodged something unbearable. She let herself be taken from her moment of suspicion. Show us the nature of the harm, Dan had said.

  How might she find Josephine’s descendants? It would be difficult, perhaps impossible. Nothing was known about Josephine Bell following her mistress’s death in 1852. There might be no descendants; she might have died without leaving anyone behind. Dan might hate the idea, Dresser might hate it. But a rising certainty took hold of Lina, as the cab hurtled down Broadway, past the federal courthouse, past Ground Zero, catching all the green lights as the long avenue unfurled evenly beneath them. She had twelve days to find a plaintiff. She would find Josephine.

  PART TWO

  Lina

  Josephine

  Dorothea

  Lina

  LOTTIE*

  By Porter Scales

  Do her eyes accuse you? Do they question? Do they blame? What, in the end, does she want? It is impossible to gaze upon Lu Anne Bell’s masterful Lottie without posing these questions. We know that Lottie was a slave owned by Robert Bell, Lu Anne’s husband. We know that Lu Anne Bell painted Lottie in 1849, some thirteen years before the Civil War began. We estimate Lottie’s age at perhaps fifty? Sixty? I
t appears from her homespun dress, her thick cracked fingers, that Lottie was a field hand and would have worked the tobacco, wheat, and corn fields of the Bell Creek plantation. In her hands she holds flowers—some bluebells, a branch of magnolia, lilies, all types native to Bell’s Virginia—and the paint here is heavy, the canvas saturated with hue.

  The viewer’s eyes are drawn inevitably, irresistibly, to Lottie’s face; it is an extraordinary face. The cheeks are full, the lips thick and slightly parted, a sliver of inner pink visible, as though Lottie were about to speak, as though she had something to tell us. A horizontal crease marks her forehead and the eyes are a deep brown, the lids heavy but the gaze expressive. She looks directly at the viewer and there is something uncomfortable in this gaze. For a moment we turn away from her eyes, to the weathered wood of the cabin before which Lottie stands, and to the fields beyond, which seem restless and awhirl, as though the tobacco plants danced in a strong wind. We examine the details of Lottie’s immediate surroundings: the spider on the cabin wall, the suggestion of a low-hanging sun, the thin, shadowless clouds in the far sky.

  Only then do we return to Lottie’s gaze. We look and we find her without pity, without judgment. She is not a worker, she is not sexualized, she is not a benignity with the presence of a child. She is a woman, flesh and blood, with hopes and fears there on her face, in her eyes, in her hands that hold the flowers. In painting her subject, a slave, in such a way, with tenderness and hope, Lu Anne Bell has given us a portrait of humanity itself.

  As with any great portrait, we are left wanting to know more about the subject and about the circumstances of the work’s creation. Robert Bell owned dozens of slaves over the course of his marriage to Lu Anne. There is no way for us to know now, some 150 years after Lu Anne Bell’s death, why she chose Lottie for such a luminous examination. Was Lottie dear to Lu Anne? What were the precise parameters of their relationship? Likewise we can only guess at the mechanics of the creation itself. Did Lu Anne compose the painting from memory? Did she pose Lottie before the slave shack, place the flowers into her hands, prop an easel there in the mud?

  In the end, our ignorance as to method and reason is, I would argue, wholly inconsequential. What we are left with is the artistic experience at its most innate, its most sublime. There is no cleverness or theory or striving for us, the viewers of art, to contend with. There is nothing to be got through. There is nothing to feign. There is only Lottie, this powerful visitor from a time and place so removed from our own, so wholly foreign to our experience, that we will never understand her. And yet we try. We meet her gaze and the modern world falls away. We are standing with her in Lynnhurst, Virginia, in the year 1849, on a sunny day, a day like any other. Lottie invokes a calm, a pure and unparalleled call for empathy that should not be ignored or forgotten. Her gaze holds us. We cannot look away.

  * This essay first appeared in Artforum, March 25, 2000.

  LU ANNE BELL’S CHILDREN NO. 2*

  By Porter Scales

  The children themselves are, in many ways, unremarkable. There are six, the largest positioned in the foreground and five smaller in the back; none looks straight at the viewer; each appears in profile or semiprofile; the eyes of the largest are closed. They have been sketched in seemingly quick and confident strokes of charcoal. The paper is rough, homemade; the edges, if one could see them beneath the wood of the frame, would surely be frayed and irregular. The children’s heads are disembodied, floating as if through space and time, but in all other immediate respects they tend to the regular, to the typical; they might appear in, say, a particularly well-illustrated child’s storybook or the portfolio of a talented commercial portraitist. But then one looks closer, at the shadows beneath the eyes of the largest child, at the complex beauty of the whorled ear on the third, at the fine line of the arched neck on the smallest. The details call to the viewer softly, in whispers of simplicity and effortless technique. Here is the work of a master hand; here is something to behold.

  But what, exactly, do we see? This is where context becomes so critical. These children: are they black or are they white? It is impossible to tell. This question of race—which must pervade the work of Lu Anne Bell, which cannot be ignored given where and when and how she lived—is utterly absent. On the faces of the children, on the surface of the drawing, there is the black of the charcoal, the white of the paper, but the racial identities of these children remain opaque. Of course, critics and historians have tried to affix labels. Hawkins and Jeffers claim the child in the foreground is African American, the others, Caucasian. A more recent study by a French historian, Martine Cloussoud, contends that they are all Caucasian, depictions of the many children lost to Lu Anne Bell in the period 1840–1850.

  Another interpretation, I would argue, presents itself: this is an examination by Lu Anne Bell of the children so often born to black women, fathered by their white masters. By law, the status of such children followed that of their mothers: they too became slaves. And the child produced from a further master-slave union again remained enslaved. And so on, and so on, and so on. Over the years, generation after generation, the physical markers of racial identity became virtually meaningless. Who is slave? Who is free? In this context, the picture becomes illustrative of a larger phenomenon, one that occurred throughout the antebellum years and beyond, that of passing. There exist many historical examples of former slaves passing into the white world, leaving their African American identities—whether such an identity was imposed or deeply felt—behind. How common was this occurrence? How many today find themselves with gaps in a family tree, missing ancestors, unknown histories?

  Lu Anne Bell’s interest in this issue may have been motivated by the circumstances of her own marriage. We know that Robert Bell, Lu Anne’s husband, went on after her death to remarry and to father children both by his second wife, Melly Clayton Bell, and by at least two women he owned as slaves in Louisiana. We do not know if he conducted himself likewise while at Bell Creek and it is possible, of course, that he did not, or that Lu Anne Bell herself was never aware of her husband’s behavior. Yet it seems equally possible—and, I would argue, likely—that such hard truths informed her rendering of these floating, isolated children.

  It is Bell’s triumph, then, that the work transcends so fully the personal to stand as a powerful artistic achievement and social commentary. With clarity and compassion, Children No. 2 remarks upon the nature of the race line during a time when that divide carried such determinative weight. To be identified as white or black was quite literally a question of life or death. Lu Anne Bell portrays for us the arbitrary nature of that divide and, I would argue, raises questions about the wider implications for the enslaving whites. Who is slave and who is free?

  The enslaving whites deprived their slaves of the opportunity for basic self-identification, self-realization. The exercise of this determinative power created for the enslavers a different sort of prison, a prison of their own devising but a fatally confining one no less—economic, social, spiritual, moral.

  Did Lu Anne Bell see this? Did she understand the essential unsustainability of her way of life? Did she sense the ruin to come?

  I suspect that she did.

  * This essay first appeared in the New Yorker, November 15, 1997.

  MONDAY

  Lina had arrived early at Clifton to conduct further research on Josephine Bell before the phones started ringing, before the secretaries trooped in. Sometimes, without people, the office seemed almost restful, a blank neutral expanse, like an airplane hangar or a meadow. Lina was clicking through Porter Scales’s slick but serious website: the same headshot she had seen at the Calhoun Gallery and, beside it, a catalogue of essays and reviews previously printed in Artforum, Art in America, the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair; also some lectures he had given at Columbia, where he held an endowed chair, at Yale, at Cambridge, to audiences at MoMA and the Guggenheim. Porter Scales’s field of expertise was nineteenth-century
American art, it seemed, although his writings addressed twentieth-century work as well. A one-stop shop for American high culture of the past two hundred years.

  As her digital clock shifted to 9:00, Lina closed down Porter’s site. Sounds of arriving secretaries now bounced along the hall and into her office, elevator pings, swishing slacks, the smell of coffee and sweet doughy things. She heard Sherri arrive and immediately begin a phone conversation that involved long breathy silences and sudden jarring hoots of laughter. Lina rose from her desk and quietly closed her office door.

  Over the weekend, Lina had compiled a list of companies and professional genealogists that specialized in tracking African American ancestry. She started with AfriFind, the largest and seemingly most professional of the fee-charging services; its website promised to “reunite African American families, discover historical roots, acquaint you with the ancestors you never knew.”

  The woman who answered Lina’s call was a full-time genealogist, she said, and happy to speak with Lina about her search.

  “I have some recently discovered information about a … family member,” Lina improvised, “who was a slave on a tobacco farm in southern Virginia, but no one knows what happened to her after the year 1852. I’m trying to confirm the family connection, track from here to there. But I’m working under a tight time frame.”

  Any results would take six to eight weeks, perhaps longer, the woman said. The only faster option was for Lina to conduct the research herself. Lina could check the private papers of the farm where her ancestor was enslaved. Slave owners often kept detailed records of their holdings, which might indicate if the woman died, was sold, or ran away. If she had survived the Civil War, she might turn up in national census records, although African Americans were not listed by name until the 1870 census, and even that was problematic because freed slaves often took on new surnames.