“Yes, what sort? Is she a nice lady? A good lady?”
“Miss Wheeler is an interesting lady, let me put it to you that way. We get along handsomely and always have, since day one. Also, I think she’s very funny. She likes to keep you laughing.”
“What about Mr. Wheeler?”
“Mr. Wheeler passed away from a stroke or a heart attack, something like that.”
“Does Mrs. Wheeler come to the school every day?”
“Yes, she does. Every day up until the bell rings. That is not counting Wednesdays, when people come by after classes to get their hair cut and Miss Wheeler stays late to supervise. She likes to be here in case something happens. We get people getting upset and screaming sometimes, seeing the job the students do, but what you want for three dollars? I mean, come on.” His laughter sounded like an animal running across a tin roof. “You know what I’m saying?”
“I sure do,” said Rhys, adding a laugh of her own. “Mr. Cherry, do you remember the last time this room was painted?”
“The last time it was painted?”
“Yes sir.”
“Only once since I been here.”
“And when was that?”
“Maybe a year after I started. No, it was more like six months. The color before was kind of dark, a kind of blue, and the Wheelers wanted to brighten things up.”
Rondell Cherry seemed to like Rhys and to trust her implicitly, but for some reason he felt differently about me. He looked at me again the way he had earlier in the lobby. “You one hundred percent positively certain you’re not a government man?”
I took out my wallet and flashed a press credential, the ID card the paper had issued me years ago when I was first hired. It was the wrong thing to show him. “You not intending to write a story about us, are you?”
“I’m not with the paper anymore. I quit a while back.”
“Miss Wheeler like to die she knew I let the T-P in here.”
“When you scraped the paint off that piece of cloth from the wall,” Rhys said, “what did you see? What was underneath?”
He looked up at the spot on the wall and pointed. “Came from that vent there. I can’t say it was anything you could make out. It was just some colors that weren’t the blue before it. It was some reds, some greens and some whites.”
“And Mrs. Wheeler will be here Wednesday when people come and volunteer to have their hair cut?”
“Three dollars and they’ll do yours, too. Not that I recommend it.”
Rhys kept staring at the wall and the feeling that had made her weep came over her again and I could see her fighting it, trying to keep it away. A beautiful old post office was now a run-down beauty school. A monumental work of art was painted over, then further desecrated to accommodate air-conditioning vents. The vents were too small, so they’d been replaced with larger ones. The larger ones had leaked. The government was investigating the woman who ran the school. The government would seize the beauty school and once again possess the painting that it had ordered destroyed.
“You’re a very nice man,” Rhys said to Rondell Cherry. “Thank you for accommodating us today.”
She walked out of the room without another word, leaving Rondell Cherry and me to follow. As we were heading down the hallway he stopped and grabbed me by a sleeve. “Listen,” he said with a tug, “you sure you’re not a government man?”
FOUR
Rhys was quiet on the drive back to the French Quarter. I noticed her hands shaking as she held the wheel. She would look at me and start to speak, then stop herself. At an intersection she braked to a complete stop even though the light was green. From behind us came car horns and shouted curses. I sat rumbling with laughter. Rhys was oblivious.
“What do we do now?” she muttered, glancing at her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Come on, honey, what do you do?”
“You snap out of it and go,” I replied, then pointed to the signal and slipped lower in the seat.
Rather than return to the parking lot where I’d left my car, she did an illegal U-turn on Poydras Street and headed back Uptown. I said nothing in protest, figuring we were returning to Wheeler for another look. But she passed the school without slowing or saying anything and drove another mile or so before stopping across from a building that looked like a well-tended warehouse. Painted high on an exterior wall were the words NEAL AUCTION COMPANY. “Hope you didn’t have plans for the evening,” she said.
“Me? Never.”
“I just remembered it’s Thursday night. Do you know what that means?”
“Maybe I did in a previous life but the significance escapes me at the moment.”
“Thursday night is when auction houses in New Orleans traditionally stay open late and host preview parties.”
“You’re taking me to a party, are you? My God, we’re on a date.”
She cut me a nasty look and pushed open her squeaky door. She paused before stepping outside. “No, Jack, this is not a date. This is a preview party, with the emphasis on preview. In New Orleans auctions are held on weekends, and Thursday night is the only time a lot of buyers get a chance to see what’s coming up for sale. Unlike you, Jack, they have real-life commitments like nine-to-five jobs and families and they can’t come here during the day. Neal is the oldest auction business in town, and it specializes in all things southern. It’s where I’m going to recommend Patrick consign Dorothy.”
As we were crossing the street my body reacted noisily to the smell of fried chicken issuing from the Popeyes on the corner. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and the aroma stopped me in my tracks. “I’m starving,” I called out. “Come on, Rhys. My treat.”
She shook her head and waved me on.
“Rhys? Rhys?” When she looked back at me I said, “I truly believe I’d sell my soul for a biscuit. That’s how bad it is.”
“How can you think about food when there are paintings so close by?”
Double glass doors, tinted gray and stenciled with the Neal logo, opened into a space that seemed entirely removed from the present. Old rugs layered the gallery’s wood floors, and mirrors and paintings papered the walls. From the ceiling were suspended crystal chandeliers and vintage light fixtures, some of them ablaze and radiating heat. Antique furniture crowded the large open rooms. The smell of fried chicken now was replaced with those of furniture wax and peppermint oil. People of what seemed a genteel class circulated among the pretty things: men in suits and jackets without ties, women in pearls and neatly pressed outfits. I followed Rhys to an office area in front where jewelry and pottery were displayed in big glass cases. She retrieved a catalog with a label on the cover that said “House Copy.”
“Take this,” she said, and slapped the book against my chest. She then took one for herself.
The cover illustration, wrapping from front to back, showed a painting of a working cotton plantation, its fields crowded with African-American laborers. “Well, I’ll be,” Rhys said. “Check this out, Jack. They’ve got a giant Walker for sale.”
As in the case of A. J. Drysdale, a collection of southern art wasn’t complete without a Walker. “Even my dad the junk-shop picker owned one of these,” I said.
“Get out of here. Your dad had a Walker?”
“He really did. It was small, though, not much bigger than a postcard. It was a portrait of a laborer standing on the edge of a cotton field. A black man.”
“Of course the subject was black. What else would it be? Walker made his name exploiting the image of the poor black.”
“It was just a little picture, Rhys.”
“You’re very naïve,” she said. “Now come. I want to show you something.”
I followed her into the main room of the gallery, where it was so crowded with people and furniture that it was hard to get around. An enormous dining table, not an inch short of fifteen feet long, stood in the center and held magnum bottles of wine and supermarket party trays loaded with vegetable sticks, cold cuts and cheeses. I pause
d to spear a slice of ham, but in the instant before eating it Rhys yanked me forward. The ham landed on the table with a splat. “God, Jack. Are you still thinking about food? The Louisiana Room is right over there.”
“The Louisiana Room?”
“Leave the ham alone and let me introduce you.”
It turned out to be a small exhibition room decorated from floor to ceiling with oil paintings, most of them by southern landscape and portrait artists of the nineteenth century. Few of the paintings looked to be less than fifty years old and none was contemporary. The most impressive of the offerings, the Walker plantation scene, was hanging at the center of the wall facing the open double doors. That made it the first thing you encountered upon entering. At the moment Rhys and I were alone in the room, so she was free to talk. “I don’t like it,” she said. “No, I actually feel more strongly about it than that. I hate it. I abhor it.”
“I like it a lot.”
“Yes, well, in this case my opinion represents the minority, I assure you. I suppose I’m way too sensitive to Walker’s use of demeaning racial stereotypes. The mostly white collectors of southern art covet his sentimental renderings of enslaved or indentured African Americans at their toil. ‘Country blacks,’ I hear collectors call them. These cotton kingdom images evoke feelings of nostalgia, though not the sort anyone but a real shitbird would admit to.”
“A what kind of bird?”
“A shitbird, Jack. A shitbird.”
“It’s a nice painting. Come on, Rhys. What’s so hard to accept about it?” When she didn’t answer, I said, “Why does it always have to be so personal with you?”
“Why? Because all art is personal,” she said matter-of-factly. “Otherwise it isn’t art—it’s decoration. Now move out of the way, Jack. You’re blocking my light.”
She stepped up to better inspect the painting, and I stood a few feet behind her. Men, women and children populated the scene, along with mules pulling covered wagons and dogs snoozing in deep puddles of sun. Everybody seemed to be working hard; the burlap sacks hanging from the men’s shoulders were stuffed, as were the tall cane baskets balanced on the heads of some of the women. In the background there stood a gin house with stacks belching smoke, as well as the big house and assorted outbuildings, one of them a rustic cabin complete with animal pelts tacked to the wall. The blue expanse of sky suggested good times.
These people might’ve been serving their white master, but they appeared more than happy to do so. The catalog listing dated the painting as circa 1885, two decades after the Civil War and the emancipation of the American Negro.
Rhys was still studying the image when she said, “One of the unspoken truths about Walker collectors is that they’re buying pictures of people they would never allow in their own homes, except on those occasions when their houses need to be cleaned.”
“So you’re calling anyone who owns one of these things a racist?” I laughed but not with any feeling. “Aren’t you being a little unfair?”
“It’s fine to hang pictures of African Americans on the wall,” she continued, “but don’t let a real one walk through the front door.”
“What a load of crap. I don’t believe that at all, Rhys.”
“You’re wrong not to,” she said. “As a rule the more poor black people there are in a Walker, the more valuable the painting. And a painting depicting poor blacks is always more desirable than one showing poor whites. If it weren’t so insidious, Jack, I might be as amused as you are.”
“Amused? No, Rhys, I’m not amused. You just called my late father a racist because he owned a painting by this artist. I’ll have you know he was nothing of the kind. We had black people visit our home quite often when I was growing up, always on social calls. Not one of them did the housekeeping.”
“I was trying to make a point. I didn’t mean to impugn your father’s integrity.”
“But you did, Rhys. You did that exactly. And all because he owned a little picture by an artist you don’t happen to like.”
She stepped back from the painting and looked around the room. She might’ve been wrong—and dead wrong, at that—but there would be no apology. “Have you noticed by chance anything curious about the paintings in this room today?”
“No.”
“Not one of them shows blacks and whites together. Not one, Jack. See that painting there of the French Quarter, circa 1932? Every figure in it is black. The nun is black, the child is black, the washerwomen are black, the man pushing the cart is black. But in this painting—it’s by the Impressionist Clarence Millet—the people are all white. Every one is white. Why is that, Jack? Were all the artists back then racists who believed in segregating the human race by skin color?” I didn’t answer and she said, “Of course they weren’t all racists. Until the sixties artists in many areas of the Deep South were forbidden to paint images showing blacks and whites together unless the blacks were depicted in attitudes of subservience to the whites. Oh, you had plenty of pictures showing black maids waiting on their white employers and nursing their white children, and white foremen lording over crews of black laborers. And you might’ve had some showing famous black entertainers entertaining white crowds. But you never saw a picture where the races were integrated and treated as equals. Granted, segregation was a fact of life. But to look at the paintings in this room today,” she said, “you would think that in the old days blacks and whites occupied polar universes.”
She pointed to a painting of a popular French Quarter location called Pirate’s Alley. It showed the area crowded with white people. She then pointed out another painting of the same location. The second painting, which looked to have been painted at the same time as the first, counted half a dozen African Americans but no whites. “Did whites have their hours when they could walk down the alley?” she said. “And did blacks have theirs? Didn’t they ever walk down the alley together at the same time? If indeed they did happen to walk down the alley at the same time, why wasn’t there ever an artist there to capture the moment? Think about it, Jack. Most of these paintings were done for tourists, and many thousands were painted. How could it be that artists failed to find an occasion when both black and white people were strolling down that alley together?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t either. Want to hear a story? There once was an artist from a small town in Mississippi who entered a painting in an art-club contest. This was some time in the late fifties, and the painting showed a large public swimming pool crowded with both black and white people, all of them mixed together and enjoying the water on a hot summer day. The painting was beautifully done, and it won the contest, beating out a portrait of a long-dead Confederate general painted by the wife of the local sheriff. The woman complained about the content of the winning picture to her husband, and that night he and his deputies showed up at the artist’s doorstep and told him he had a choice to make. He could paint the figures black or he could paint them white but he couldn’t show blacks and whites swimming in the same pool together. The blacks had their pool on one side of town and the whites had theirs on the other side. He said the painting was subversive and anti-American.”
“What did the artist do?”
“He refused to alter the painting and the deputies dragged him outside and beat him until he listened to reason.”
“Did the artist fix the painting?”
“He made all of the figures white, if that’s what you mean by fixing it.”
She was upset and I knew better than to push it any further. I opened the catalog and turned to the description of the Walker painting, spread out with color photographs over two pages. The high side of the painting’s estimate was $200,000. According to the description, the size of the painting—twenty-eight by forty-two inches—was monumental for an artist best known for painting on a small scale, and its provenance was impeccable. It had belonged to the same New Orleans family since the date of its creation, when the original owner bought it personally
from the artist.
I could feel Rhys looking over my shoulder at the catalog, and I closed it and wheeled around and faced her. “Look at your own copy, won’t you?”
“I don’t mean to take it out on you, Jack. But sometimes I could just scream. Am I the only person who sees it? If others see it, why don’t they say anything about it?” She stood in front of the Walker again and held her hands behind her back. “Now let me broach another sensitive subject,” she said, “off the subject of race this time.”
“Thank you, Rhys.”
“Why would the consignor of the Walker choose to betray his legacy, break his family’s long history of ownership and place the painting up for sale?”
“How many guesses do I get?”
“As many as you need.”
“Money,” I answered, then recalled my own experience with my father’s collection and offered another possibility. “Or maybe it belonged to somebody who died. And maybe the people who survived him couldn’t look at it without seeing him and missing him and wishing they were dead themselves.”
“Your second guess is less likely than your first, although by the tone of your voice you could be sharing a personal experience. While I don’t discount it, I’ve noticed an alarming trend lately, and I have a theory that conforms to your first answer.”
“Are we in school, Rhys? You sound like a damn professor. Dr. Goudeau.”
She ignored me. “Ever since the Louisiana legislature legalized gambling in the state there have been more rare and fine items appearing at auction. It’s my guess that the city’s aristocrats enjoy playing craps and poker at Harrah’s and the riverboat casinos as much as the city’s white trash do. It’s also my guess that their luck at the games is no better. In the Deep South, in times of a depressed economy, the first things sold off usually are Grandpa’s favorite Colt pistol, his prized Confederate saber or his cotton kingdom painting by William Aiken Walker.”
“Will that be a question on the final exam, Dr. Goudeau?”
“Shut up, Jack.”
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