Girl with Brush and Canvas

by Carolyn Meyer

At the end of the class that day I was ready to enroll. It was a six-week course, and I had already missed the first few sessions, but Mr. Bement allowed me to join his Drawing IV class, the most advanced. One of Mr. Bement’s early assignments was to start with a blank page and draw a line, dividing the space into rectangles. “By doing so, you have made an artistic choice.”

  Mr. Bement’s ideas were exciting. He did not insist that I look at the world in a particular way or do something a certain way. He left me to find for myself the ways of looking and doing. With no effort and no struggle, my imagination came alive again.

  I began a series of watercolor paintings of the beautiful university campus designed by Thomas Jefferson. I left out the fussy details that William Merritt Chase favored, concentrating instead on the geometric shapes and simplifying classical elements of the handsome Rotunda and the Law Building. I painted trees and shrubs as outlines; then I returned to the same tree or shrub and painted it from a different perspective. These paintings were not like anything I had ever done.

  When the course ended, Mr. Bement called me to his office. “I’m giving you the highest grade in the class,” he said. “Ninety-five. And I should like very much to have you as one of my teaching assistants next summer.”

  I accepted immediately. “But I need to work in the meantime,” I told him bluntly. “I can’t bear to go back to Chicago and take some meaningless job drawing embroidery and lace, but if that’s what I have to do, or something like it, then I suppose I must.”

  “Oh, my dear, dear girl!” Mr. Bement said in his fluttery little voice. “I shall do my best to find you a regular teaching position for the winter. But you will need to have more experience to be hired.”

  How do you get teaching experience when you have no teaching experience to begin with? I saw no way around the problem until a telegram arrived from Alice Peretta. The wealthy girl from Laredo, Texas, whom I had made my friend when we were students at Chatham, was teaching in Amarillo. We’d kept in touch in the seven years since we graduated. We didn’t correspond for weeks and then we’d pick up again exactly where we’d left off. Alice knew I needed to find work, and she wired this message:

  DRAWING SUPERVISOR POSITION AVAILABLE HERE STOP WIRE IF INTERESTED

  I reread the telegram with growing excitement. A teaching job in Texas! What an adventure! I loved the idea of the Wild West that I’d read about as a child, and this was just the kind of thing I knew I’d like to do.

  I rushed to show the letter to Mr. Bement and to ask his advice.

  “Glorious news!” he trilled. “I shall write you an utterly irresistible letter of recommendation.”

  “But I don’t have certification,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, dear, dear, dear!” Mr. Bement dithered. “Well, you need have no concern. None whatsoever! Banish all worry! We shall see what can be done!”

  I wired back to Alice immediately:

  VERY INTERESTED STOP LETTER FOLLOWS

  The next day Mr. Bement called me to his office and showed me the letter he had written on university stationery. He described my work and my qualifications, noting that I had studied in New York and Chicago “with such masters as Luis Mora and William Merritt Chase.” He also stated that I had trained at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where I had achieved the highest degree known to my profession.

  “But I’ve never attended Pratt Institute!”

  “Really? No matter. No one cares. I have no doubts—none whatsoever—about your qualifications. You have the makings of a splendid teacher.” He started to wave me out of his office and then changed his mind. “Let me have the letter, Miss O’Keeffe, and I’ll make sure that it is mailed.”

  I hesitated. The line about Pratt was an outright lie, and I was reluctant to have it included. But if Mr. Bement saw no harm in making the false statement, then I decided to let it pass. I left the letter for him to mail.

  Through most of July I existed in a kind of limbo, not knowing if I would be hired or not. At last the letter arrived offering me the position. I had been accepted! The pay was adequate, a little better than I’d earned in Chicago, and I’d be doing something I’d enjoy, maybe even love.

  School would begin in Amarillo at the beginning of October, but I was instructed to be there for a meeting with the teachers and administrators on the last day of August.

  Papa declared that he was proud, and Mama said she was pleased, although I could see that she was weak and needed help. Selfishly, I could hardly wait to escape the gloom that hung over the house where my studio had been reduced to a dingy space in the basement. In Amarillo I would teach, I would paint, I would have the different kind of life I’d yearned for. Yet I felt torn. I was needed at home.

  Nita saw my hesitancy. “You must go, Georgie. It’s a glorious opportunity for you, and you mustn’t worry about Mama. I’m here, and Ida and Auntie too, so Mama will be well cared for. You know this is what she has always wanted for you. I love to paint and draw, and I believe Ida and I have some artistic ability, but you’re the artist, not us. I’m thinking of studying to become a nurse, and Ida has talked about it, too.”

  I hoped Nita was right about Mama, and I made her promise she’d let me know if the situation became dire.

  Letters flew back and forth from Amarillo. Alice was enthusiastically planning how we would share the cabin she was renting. It’s a plain little place, barely above a hovel, but you won’t be spied upon by the other teachers, and I guarantee that you won’t be lonely at all, she wrote in the last letter I received before I left. There’s even a piano in the parlor—I call it a parlor, just to be funny—and we can entertain our beaux with musical evenings.

  I remembered her incessant playing of “Für Elise,” and laughed. Maybe she had improved, but it wasn’t likely.

  She also reminded me to bring warm clothes, because Amarillo was in the middle of the Texas Panhandle, and the winters could be much colder than I imagined, and very windy. More like Chicago, I’m afraid, she said.

  I finished packing and saying my goodbyes. I was almost twenty-five, and finally my life as a teacher and an artist was about to begin.

  17

  Amarillo, Texas—1912

  AFTER SEVERAL BLISTERING-HOT DAYS CROSSING the endless flatness of the Midwest, the train pulled into the depot in Amarillo. I looked for Alice, who had promised to meet me. When there was no sign of her, I hired a carriage to take me to the address she’d given me in her last letter, a rustic cabin on a ranch at the edge of town. A woman in a shapeless calico dress, her face lined by harsh sun and worry, came out of the main house.

  “You must be Miss O’Keeffe,” she said, and I said I was. “I’m Mrs. Randall, and I am mighty sorry to have to tell you that Miss Peretta came down with a fever about a week ago, and the good Lord took her just three days past.”

  I gaped at the woman. “She’s dead?” I asked. “Alice is dead?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the woman said. “Doc Gibson tried everything he could, but nothing seemed to help, poor thing. Her folks come by yesterday and took her away to their home in Laredo to bury her. They was pretty broke up about it.”

  I stood there, dazed, unable to take in what I’d just been told. Alice, dead? How could that be? My knees were weak as water, and I had to lean against the dusty carriage to keep from falling down. I was too shocked for tears. I couldn’t think clearly, and I had no idea what to do next.

  “I can rent the cabin to you at a fair price,” Mrs. Randall said. “It’s close to town—just a good walk to the high school.”

  Mrs. Randall opened the door, and I stepped into the cabin I’d expected to share with Alice. It was as bare as a cell. Her parents must have taken everything of Alice’s with them. Even the piano she’d talked about.

  “Such a nice girl. She spoke highly of you. Had a picture she said you painted, hanging on the wall, right there. Guess her folks took it.” She hesitated, and we both tried to collect ourselves. “Miss Peretta surely liked living out her
e. I think you would too.”

  “No. No, thank you, Mrs. Randall.” I shook my head. I didn’t have the money even if I’d wanted it.

  The driver was waiting to be paid. I’d forgotten about him. “You want your suitcases, ma’am?” he asked.

  “No, please just take me to a hotel in town,” I said. “Any place will do.”

  I thanked Mrs. Randall and climbed numbly back into the carriage. I tried to pay attention as the driver drove back toward town, going on and on about the wonders of Amarillo—the new Grand Opera House that seated two thousand music lovers, the trolley that ran up and down Polk Street, the new high school that wasn’t quite finished. I had noticed a handsome new hotel, Harvey House, at the depot when I got off the train, but I feared a room there would be more than I could afford.

  After some discussion he deposited me at the Magnolia Hotel, a rundown-looking place with two lilac bushes drooping by the front porch. “Not the fanciest place in town,” he said, “but as good as any to start off.”

  The manager showed me to a room on the third floor—small, with a narrow bed, a straight-backed chair, a washstand, and a couple of hooks for my clothes. I paid him for two weeks in advance, and after he’d gone I unpacked a few things, washed my face, and went downstairs to the combination saloon and dining room. Although I wasn’t in the least hungry, I ordered the nightly special: beefsteak, beans, cornbread, and coffee. A card game was under way at a nearby table, and a few rough-looking men leaned on the bar, knocking back shots of liquor and chatting up a couple of rough-looking women. I left half my meal uneaten, climbed upstairs, and crawled into bed. Outside my window the wind whistled and groaned. I had never felt so lonely in my life.

  The next day I walked up Polk, down Taylor, up Fillmore, and so on. All the streets running north and south in that part of town were named for U.S. presidents, and the cross streets were numbered. It would be easy to find my way around the dusty town. But there was none of the genteel charm of Williamsburg, none of the elegant Jeffersonian architecture of Charlottesville or the well-tended cottages I’d admired at Lake George—just banged-together lumber, whatever was practical to create shelter without much regard for style. For some reason that attitude appealed to me.

  I thought of Alice. Her friendship had meant a great deal. I was grateful that she’d brought me here, because somehow I felt immediately that I had made the right choice to come. But I missed her sorely, and I struggled to come to terms with her absence.

  The people who’d hired me must have realized from the first meeting that I had no experience teaching in high school, and I could not think how I was going to put to use anything I had learned in my classes at the university. I was the youngest of the teachers. The other teachers had years of experience—I was out of my depth, and they knew it. I still dressed in tailored skirts and jackets and shirtwaists I’d made. And because I loved to walk wherever I pleased, I wore flat-heeled men’s shoes that were much more practical than the dainty footgear most women teetered around in. I’d gotten used to my hair, still too short to braid. It was obvious from the start that I stood out in Texas just as much as I’d stood out in Virginia.

  The female teachers lived with families, two or three to a household. I wanted to be on my own, independent. They didn’t come right out and say so, but they did let me know that the Magnolia was not a respectable place for a young lady and would tarnish my reputation. I ignored their hints that I should look for “more suitable” lodgings.

  For a few more weeks, until the high school was completed, I would not have a room for my classes. In the meantime I was to use a one-room cabin that must have been a schoolhouse at one time. It reminded me of Town Hall School in Sun Prairie. The location was inconvenient, but it was not a bad thing to be away from the other teachers for a while.

  The teachers brought their noon meals from home and ate together in one of their classrooms, and I was expected to join them. I asked Max, the bartender-cook at the Magnolia, to boil a couple of eggs for me to take for my dinner. Max was a tough-talking man with a soft side, and he not only boiled the eggs but sent along a square of cornbread or a slice of pie and whatever else he had on hand. Not much grew in this dry, sun-bleached, wind-parched prairie, but Max was friendly with a cook over at Harvey House. Fresh fruit and vegetables were brought in by the Harvey’s arrangement with the Santa Fe Railroad, and Max made sure I got a dose of lettuce or green beans whenever a shipment of such luxuries arrived.

  “Cowpokes don’t give a dang about any kinda beans except pintos,” he said.

  I’d been in Amarillo for about two weeks, eating supper alone in the Magnolia among a crowd of local ranchers and cowboys in town for a rip-roaring Saturday night, when we heard gunshots outside. Everybody rushed to the door, and I followed them. A body lay sprawled in the middle of the street, and a bearded man with a smoking six-shooter stood over it.

  “What’s going on?” Max called.

  “Not a dang thing,” snarled the gun-toter. “Thought he could steal my cattle and my wife, and I just showed him otherwise.” He got on his horse and rode off, and we all went back inside.

  I wondered aloud if the sheriff wouldn’t soon arrest the killer. One of the patrons at the bar explained that it wasn’t the shooter’s first time. “Beal Sneed’s already shot his father-in-law dead for insulting him. But he’ll get off, you’ll see.”

  And he did. The trial lasted half a day, the jury acquitted Mr. Sneed after ten minutes of deliberation, and his defense attorney celebrated by buying a round of drinks for everybody at the Magnolia.

  There I was, a naïve schoolteacher who’d grown up in the Midwest and been an outsider in the South, now living in the Wild West. I could look out my window and see herds of cattle miles away, a thousand or more head at a time, making their slow, steady way across the prairie in a cloud of dust that never entirely disappeared. Moving no more than fifteen miles a day—the cattle would lose too much weight if they did any more—they took as long as two months to make the journey from ranch to railhead, where they’d be loaded onto cattle cars and taken to slaughter. At night the cowboys’ campfires flickered in the inky blackness beneath a starry sky.

  I found that I was crazy about all that wonderful emptiness. I walked for miles under the hot sun and through wind that sandpapered my skin, soaking up the vastness of the sky and the plains as blank as a newly primed canvas. I wasn’t painting, not even sketching much, but I was content. I was absorbing my new world.

  My students were mostly fifteen and sixteen, some a little younger, some older, children of ranch hands and nearly all of them poor. We liked each other immediately. I had no trouble with discipline: I listened to them, and they listened to me. Two of my pupils, Horace and Cornelia, were enthusiastic about everything I tried to teach them. They accompanied me on long walks on the prairie beyond the city limits, and we sat on the grass with sketchpads and pencils and drew. I drew and they drew, and we talked about the ways an object could be drawn. Sometimes they brought along little brothers and sisters, and we all had a grand time, talking and drawing and seeing.

  That first year in Texas I turned twenty-five, and it was not my students but the older people and those closer to my own age who were judgmental, who thought I didn’t fit in the way I was expected to. I wondered how Alice had stood it, but she was a Texan, so perhaps it had been easier for her.

  I tried to impress upon the boys and girls in my classes that art was not just a picture hanging in a museum. Most of them had never been to a museum and had no notion of what I was talking about. I showed them pictures—chromos were still around—but that was not the same. “Art is the way you see things, the choices you make in your everyday life, in the way you live,” I told them. Filling a space in a beautiful way, as Mr. Bement had quoted our much-admired Arthur Wesley Dow saying.

  At first I had none of the supplies I believed were necessary to teach students about art. But after we’d been given drawing paper and pencils, I taught t
hem how to divide space. “Draw a square on your sheet of paper,” I instructed. A variety of rectangular shapes appeared, some neatly squared at the corners, others freer, looser. “Now put a door in it,” I said.

  They looked up from their papers and stared at me. “A door, Miss O’Keeffe?” Cornelia asked, frowning at her perfectly drawn square. She was the type who liked things well formed. “Where should it go?”

  “Wherever you want it to go,” I said.

  Horace, predictably, set his door off to one side and then decided to add a window. He didn’t ask my permission; he just did it.

  But it did not take long for me to get into a struggle with the principal of Amarillo High School. The woman I replaced had required her students to copy from a Prang drawing book, the very same chromos that Mrs. Sarah Mann had used to inspire me back in Sun Prairie. I strongly opposed this method. I thought the book didn’t do a thing to encourage free expression. Many of my students couldn’t afford the Prang books, and so I didn’t order them.

  “You don’t need a book to learn to draw,” I told my class. “You take whatever you have at hand and look at it.”

  What we had at hand was the dappled pony named Barney that Horace often rode to school. I suggested that Horace bring Barney into our classroom, and we’d use him as a subject. With much laughter, Horace and his friends coaxed the placid little pony onto a platform. We had a lively discussion of how to draw him and then tried out our theories. When the bell signaled the end of class, no one wanted to leave.

  Word about the pony got back to the school board. I received a stern letter from the superintendent, informing me that this was against school policy. What was the school policy, I wondered—no horses in the classroom? I ignored the letter, and for a while I heard nothing more. That winter the Texas legislature met and debated the issue, and they backed the superintendent’s requirement that teachers must use textbooks approved by the board of education. I could have told them that the board of education knew nothing about art or how to teach it—but I didn’t. I just kept on ignoring them and doing things the way I thought they should be done. My students brought in whatever they wanted to draw—a china teacup, a battered straw hat, a one-eyed doll—and we drew them. No more ponies, though.