January 15, 2016

While I was thus polluting the blank pads of paper intended for Art, the art teacher in grade school continued to have hopes for me, in the dogged belief that, being my mother's child, I just couldn't be that bad. Once a week, on Wednesdays, she came to the Fourteenth Street School, and we had a whirl at Art. While the other children were drawing houses with doors and chimneys and neat spirals of smoke coming out, the most I could manage was a lean-to. No smoke, no symmetry. I was equally wobbly on Halloween pumpkins, spring flowers tastefully arranged in a vase (which the teacher called a vawhse) and Christmas trees with a star on top. Stars, with all those points, drove me crazy. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, I was the only child in class who became an artist's model.

The exotic role came to me at the age of eleven, when the Saturday morning art class ran out of subjects. The class had been organized by Mr. Ward, a small, gray-haired man who looked as though he'd break if you bent him in the middle. He had lived abroad for many years, but now he'd come back to Franklin, to squeeze out his last years, like dried up paint from a nearly empty tube, in doing portraits of citizens whose forbears had struck oil. On the side, he'd started the art class for twelve ladies, including Mother and Mrs. Ramspeck, all of whom paid two dollars a week for the privilege of studying under Mr. Ward.

They must have been terribly hard up for models, to choose me, and I must admit they tried my pretty sister first, but she squirmed too much. I had always had a talent for sitting static as a corpse, but it had been considered a rather unfortunate, negative talent until the art class got ahold of me.

-- from We Shook the Family Tree (1941)


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