Girl with Brush and Canvas

by Carolyn Meyer

  “‘She’?” Lucille asked timidly. “Georgia, did you refer to God as ‘She’?”

  “Well, yes, I did. I mean, God is obviously a woman, don’t you agree?”

  I had come to that conclusion some time before, and when I was about thirteen, I’d had a fierce argument with Francis on the subject. I had expected Mama to agree with me, and I was surprised when she didn’t. And if Mama didn’t think God was a woman, I was sure none of these Southern belles would either. I was being provocative, and it worked. The girls were stunned.

  “Oh, Georgia, you are most certainly wrong about that!” Lucille exclaimed.

  “Not only completely wrong but probably blasphemous too,” Earnestine said. “My daddy is a minister, and he would be shocked almost to death at what you’re saying.”

  Susan hurried to be the peacemaker. “Aren’t these just the fluffiest dumplings you’ve evuh tasted in your liiife?”

  In spite of my habit of stirring up controversy, I got along with almost all the girls, except for one: Alice Peretta. Alice was not pretty in the way the other girls were, but she carried herself like a queen. For some reason Alice had taken a dislike to me and treated me with utter disdain, mocking me, even calling me “Farmer O.”

  Susan tried to explain Alice’s behavior. “It’s just that she’s stuck-up, and—well, I don’t like to tell you this, but she says you walk like a farmer and you talk like a farmer and you dress like a farmer, but you think you’re better than anyone else because you have your own table in the studio, and you say you’re an ‘artist’ and get to do whatever you want.” Susan imitated Alice, pronouncing artist with a curled lip, as though it had a bad taste. “The best thing is just to pay her no attention.”

  I had a different scheme in mind. I would change Alice’s opinion and win her over, not because I liked her but to prove that I could. “I’ll wager I can make her like me so much that she’ll want to be my best friend,” I declared boldly.

  Susan shook her head. “No, you can’t. Not Alice. She’s a terrible snob. Her father owns a huge ranch in Texas and a bank and thoroughbred racehorses and I don’t know what else.”

  “Just watch me!”

  Most afternoons Alice practiced on the spinet piano in the dining hall. She played “Für Elise” over and over, but no one had the nerve to tell her how badly she played. One day I went down to the dining hall while she was practicing. I’d often done quick sketches of Auntie and my sisters, and I was good at it. I stood near the piano and sketched Alice’s profile. Alice ignored me and kept on playing—worse than ever, repeating the same mistakes—but I knew that she knew I was there.

  When I’d finished the drawing, I signed it With admiration, Georgia O’Keeffe, propped it on the music stand, and left without a single word.

  After supper Alice showed up in the art studio. I was at my easel, working on a painting of a pewter pitcher with a curved handle. The reflection of light on the dark metal wasn’t quite right, and I was trying to find some way to improve it.

  Alice watched silently for a while. “Thank you for the drawing,” she said stiffly.

  “You’re welcome.” I kept working on the reflection and didn’t even glance at her.

  She tried again. “I don’t understand why you gave me the drawing. Or why you bothered to draw it in the first place.”

  “It’s merely a souvenir from an admirer,” I said. I stepped back and studied the pewter pitcher. Maybe if I added a tiny daub of paint to the handle, that would do the trick.

  “Well, it was very kind of you,” Alice said. Her Southern manners required her to say something polite even if it wasn’t sincere. Then her tone softened. “And it’s a good likeness, too, Georgia.”

  Within a week or two, Alice had changed her tune and decided to be my friend. It was hard to say why—maybe she got over some of her snobbishness about Midwestern farm girls. I’d won my wager with Susan, and it turned out that once I got to know Alice, I really liked her—maybe because she had her own way of thinking, just as I did.

  8

  Chatham, Virginia—Fall 1903

  SCHOLARS’ FROLIC: HOW DID THEY EVER COME UP with that name! Miss Drummond, the housemother, decided that for my first appearance at the monthly dance I would wear the regulation school uniform and be one of the “boys.” The tailored navy blue skirt and jacket with red piping suited me much better than a party frock. I didn’t even own a party frock! I would have had to borrow one.

  The tables and benches in the dining hall had been shoved aside. Miss Cornwall took her place at the piano. “Gentlemen!” she called. “Choose your partners!”

  Picking up my cue from the other “gentlemen,” I stepped up to Lucille, who was decked out in a flouncy dress with a satin sash tied in a bow. I bowed stiffly from the waist. “May I have the honor of this dance, Miss Trumbull?” I could hardly choke out the words without laughing.

  Miss Cornwall launched into a waltz. I stood perfectly still, at attention, arms at my sides. “You’re supposed to lead, Georgia,” Lucille whispered.

  “I don’t know how,” I whispered back.

  “You’ve nevah danced befoah?” she asked.

  “Not like this,” I confessed. Papa had not taught us to waltz.

  Miss Cornwall observed that there was a problem. Without missing a single note of “The Blue Danube,” the music teacher directed “Miss Trumbull” to take “Mister O’Keeffe” aside and practice with me until I got the hang of it.

  “Put your right hand on my waist,” Lucille instructed. “Now I’ll put my right hand in your left. Lead off on your left foot. One—two—three, and here we go.”

  I caught on fast, and soon we were waltzing. And when we moved on to the Virginia reel, forming two facing lines—“boys” on one side, girls on the other—I knew what I was supposed to do.

  After an hour we paused for refreshments, in order to practice the art of balancing a cup of fruit punch and a plate of fancy little cakes and “finger sandwiches” that were literally no bigger than my finger, while carrying on a conversation between polite sips and nibbles.

  A month later, knowing I’d have to borrow someone’s “party frock” for the Autumn Celebration, I suddenly found myself indisposed, with a headache, tiredness, and stomach pains brought on by “the curse”—which had never bothered me before—and spent the evening in bed, listening to the THUMP-thump-thump of Miss Cornwall’s attack on the Blue Danube.

  But I could not use the same excuse to escape the Harvest Ball in November. It coincided with my sixteenth birthday, and Alice Peretta’s, too, a week later. Elsie had decorated tiny little cakes with fancy icing as a special treat for us to practice eating daintily. Alice’s rich family in Texas had sent her three new frocks, all of them ordered from Paris, and she offered to let me borrow one, because we were close to the same size and she had lots more.

  I accepted and chose the plainest dress in her collection—pale blue with a minimum of ruffles. Lucille helped with the buttons. Earnestine insisted that I unbraid my hair, but when I protested, the girls agreed that I could tie it in back with a bow. “No black ribbon!” they insisted, and found a blue one that satisfied them. I had never felt more unlike myself.

  After the Harvest Ball finally ended and we’d retired to our dormitory rooms and changed out of dresses and uniforms and into our nightclothes, I made a proposal: “Let’s go down to the dining room, and if the tables haven’t been put back, I’ll teach you some dances that are much more fun, and you don’t need a partner.”

  The girls stared at me as though I’d suggested robbing a bank. “In our nightclothes?” Susan asked.

  “Of course! Why not? Who would know the difference?”

  “But what if we’re caught?” asked Earnestine. Being a minister’s daughter—a lot of the girls at Chatham were—she was timid about breaking rules and worried about being found out.

  “Is it a crime to go downstairs?” I asked.

  “It’s against the rules—leaving o
ur room after lights-out.”

  But Susan stepped up boldly. “Oh, come on, girls! Georgie’s had a splendid idea.” I’d asked her and my other friends to call me Georgie, like my family did. “And besides, it’s her birthday! We have to do something special to celebrate.”

  We tiptoed down the creaking wooden staircase, suppressing giggles. A lamp had been left burning in the empty kitchen, and it provided just enough light to the dining hall that we could see without running into anything. We were in luck: the tables and benches hadn’t been pushed back in place. I demonstrated a few simple Irish jig steps and provided the accompaniment by whistling. Francis had taught me how.

  Alice declared that because her birthday was the following week and this was partly her celebration too, she would raid the pantry and see if there were any of those little cakes left over. There were, and we made short work of them.

  Our dancing lesson/birthday party was in full swing when a bright light suddenly flared in the dining hall. Billy, making his rounds with a lantern, gaped at us, a dozen girls in nightgowns dancing a jig.

  “It’s a class, Billy,” I called out. “We’re rehearsing.”

  Billy held up the lantern and squinted in my direction. “You have permission, do you, Miss O’Keeffe?”

  “Of course!”

  “Uh-huh,” Billy said and went away, shaking his head.

  The girls stood in shocked silence. “That’s an untruth, Georgie,” Earnestine said quietly.

  “No, it’s not, Earnestine. I haven’t seen any rule against dancing in the dining hall in a nightgown. And I’m the one who gave permission.”

  The girls laughed nervously, but that was the end of the dancing, and we trooped back upstairs.

  It wasn’t the end of the adventure, though. Someone—maybe it was Billy, maybe it was one of the girls who hadn’t joined in the dancing, Bea Morrison or Annabelle Jeffries—reported me to Miss Drummond for “being out of bed after the lights-out bell had sounded.”

  “I am disappointed in you, Miss O’Keeffe,” the housemother said. “Such behavior is unbecoming to a Chatham girl. I must assign you the usual punishment of writing five hundred times, ‘I shall obey all the rules of the Chatham Episcopal Institute.’”

  The other girls, including Alice, had to write it only a hundred times. “Why are you getting off easy and I’m not?” I demanded.

  “Because you’re the ringleader, Georgie! You always are! Everybody knows that!”

  My punishment consumed an entire Sunday afternoon while the rest of the girls went out for a walk. It was a waste of time that failed to cure me of my determination to do things my own way. But I also thought it was funny that my classmates recognized me as the ringleader. I was not rebellious, exactly, but the rules felt like a dog collar attached to a leash, and I looked for ways to wriggle out of it.

  Early in December the young ladies of the Institute gave a holiday recital. The townspeople of Chatham filled the benches in the dining hall, plus the chairs Billy brought in. I played “Anitra’s Dance” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, a piece I’d been working on since the beginning of the term, with Miss Cornwall’s encouragement. I couldn’t afford to take lessons from her, but she lent me exercise books and sheet music, and sometimes when I was practicing she stopped by and gave me advice.

  Everyone said I gave a fine performance, and for a while I wondered if I might not be a better pianist than artist. “You do have talent, Georgia,” Miss Cornwall said. “But discipline is the key. You must put in long hours of practice every day if you truly wish to become a fine musician.”

  But that was not how I worked; I had to be inspired. I either painted for hours at a time, or I didn’t paint at all, sometimes for days. It was the same with music. There was something else: when I finished playing “Anitra’s Dance,” it was done, and nothing remained of my performance. But when I finished a painting, it continued to exist—unless I decided to burn it. I realized that I was temperamentally better suited to being an artist than a musician.

  At Christmas, almost all the Chatham girls went home to be with their families. I did not. It was a day’s journey, and it cost too much. I didn’t mind. If I stayed at Chatham, I would have plenty of time to paint and not be bothered by anyone until the other girls came back in January.

  Mrs. Willis and a few of the teachers also stayed at the school over the Christmas and New Year holidays, and they did their best to make it less lonely for those of us who remained—along with me, two first-year girls whose parents were missionaries in China and my friend Alice Peretta. Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border, was too far even for Alice, who could afford to travel wherever she wanted. We went together to the midnight service on Christmas Eve at Emmanuel Church, with lots of flickering candles and anthems by the choir and carol-singing by the congregation. I did like that part.

  Mrs. Willis invited us to her home for Christmas dinner. Her pretty little house had once been the caretaker’s cottage, and the walls were hung with interesting paintings, mostly landscapes. Some were signed “E. Claridge” and others “E. C. Willis.” I asked who E. Claridge was, and Mrs. Willis explained that she was Elizabeth Claridge before she’d become Mrs. Harold Willis. I knew right then that I would sign my name and only my name on my artwork. Even if I someday decided to have a husband, I would not use his name. I would always be Georgia O’Keeffe.

  We feasted on baked ham and candied yams, served by Mrs. Willis’s maid, Cora. Cora was dressed in a black uniform with a starched white apron and cuffs and a collar, an outfit that—except for the ruffles on the apron—I thought was every bit as handsome as the robes worn by the nuns at Sacred Heart. After we’d had our Christmas pudding, Alice volunteered to play the piano so we could all gather around and sing carols. Her playing had not improved much, but I liked to sing and the wrong notes didn’t matter.

  On New Year’s Day the four of us who’d stayed over the holidays ate dinner in the school dining room. Elsie fixed rice with black-eyed peas and some ham left over from Mrs. Willis’s Christmas dinner, to eat for luck in the New Year, she said. She’d warned us that chicken would not be served.

  “Why is that, Elsie?” I asked.

  “’Cause a chicken scratches backward and a pig roots forward,” Elsie explained. “Don’t you folks up North know that?”

  When I was a student at Sacred Heart, I’d paid attention to my regular classes, and I’d done enough to get decent grades in Madison. But during that first term at Chatham, I did as little as possible. I thought most of the subjects were a waste of time. I refused to practice my French lesson three times a day, as was required. I was a loathsome speller—I didn’t even know how to spell “loathsome”—and I hated the drills.

  The only class I truly enjoyed was Mrs. Willis’s art class, but around the beginning of the second term I stopped painting. Nothing I’d been working on interested me. Restless and bored, I distracted myself by annoying the other students. They complained to Mrs. Willis. “Georgie pulled my hair,” grumbled Annabelle Jeffries, the smartest girl in all the other classes but without even a shred of artistic talent. “She hides our brushes,” whined Bea Morrison, who whined about everything.

  “Leave her be,” Mrs. Willis advised them. “When Georgia is inspired, she does more in a few hours than all the rest of you combined can accomplish in a week.” I loved her for saying that—not only for telling the girls to quit complaining, but for understanding that I had my own way of working or not working.

  By the time wildflowers like bleeding heart and bloodroot and lungwort were bursting into a frenzy of color in that part of Virginia, and the air was so heavy with their scent that I was almost drunk with it, inspiration had returned. Inspiration wasn’t something I could turn on and off like a faucet. It was more like an underground spring that disappeared for a time and then came bubbling up to the surface again. I started painting more intensely than ever.

  The girls in my classes sometimes resented me for my special privileges, an
d it was plain that even my good friends—Susan and Lucille and Earnestine and Alice—thought I was a bit odd. Their conversation was usually about clothes and parties and often turned to boys they knew, or hoped they’d meet someday, subjects that didn’t interest me. When The Mortarboard, the yearbook, came out at the end of the term, this rhyme appeared with my photograph:

  A girl who would be different, in habit, style and dress,

  A girl who doesn’t give a cent for men—and boys still less.

  But my classmates also marveled at the quick sketches I seemed to toss off so effortlessly. Even Annabelle, who was used to being the best at everything, agreed that I was talented, and Bea admitted grudgingly that my work was superior.

  “You’re going to be a famous artist someday,” Susan said. “I believe that with all my heart.”

  I believed it, too. But how was I going to become a famous artist? And a great one?

  9

  Williamsburg, Virginia—Summer 1904

  AFTER NINE MONTHS AT CHATHAM, I MADE THE trip back to Williamsburg and my family. For the first few days we stayed up talking until late. Francis had completed a year at the College of William and Mary and seemed little changed, just as quiet and reserved as he’d been when we stayed with Aunt Lola in Madison. Alexius at twelve was still a good-humored boy with a bright smile and a sunny disposition. Fifteen-year-old Ida and Nita, two years younger, lamented that the private day school they attended was a humdrum place with lots of snobbish girls. “They let us know that we’re not quite up to their standards,” Ida said, sighing.

  Catherine and Claudie were being tutored at home. “I like it,” Catherine told me, and Claudie, now five, agreed. “I get to do whatever I want,” she said.

  I envied those two their freedom, and I looked forward to three months of doing whatever I wanted, too.

  To escape the suffocating heat of the town, Papa rented a ramshackle house on the York River a few miles from Wheatlands. We piled our featherbeds and some cooking pots and utensils into the O’Keeffe & Sons Feed & Grain wagon, assembled a table out of planks and sawhorses, turned empty crates into stools, and set up housekeeping in the rented house. Papa showed us how to pry oysters open and suck them, raw and briny, from their shells. Francis and Alexius found an old rowboat, rigged up a sail, and figured out how to maneuver it. For long, solitary hours I waded barefoot along the water’s edge, and as the sun dropped lower I scrambled up the riverbank and filled pages of my sketchbook with pencil drawings—the river, the old rowboat among the reeds, a single oyster shell.