My shot of the weary Negroes with dazed expressions captured the bitter irony of that slogan. It was featured in the lead story in the next issue of Life.
When I returned from Louisville, all was forgiven, and Erskine and I went back to work on the book we had started the summer before. By the time we made a second trip south later that spring to finish the job, we had hit on a way to work together: I took pictures without his interference, Erskine wrote text without mine, and we wrote the captions for the pictures together. We’d lay eight photographs on the floor and study them, we’d each write a caption and later we’d compare the two. Sometimes we combined the results, or used my idea and Erskine’s words, or the other way around. We made a good team.
We had not talked about a title until the day we delivered the manuscript and photographs to the editor. While we waited to see him, Erskine said, “The title is You Have Seen Their Faces. What do you think, Kit? Do you like it?”
I thought it captured exactly what we’d been working so hard to say. I took his face in my two hands and kissed him on the mouth, not giving a fig what the steely-faced receptionist might think. “It’s perfect,” I said, and kissed him again.
I also believed it was the most important work I’d ever done, and I was ready for the challenge of another book. I was also ready for the next exciting assignment from Life. It came in July, when I was dispatched to cover several stories in the Arctic. I was thrilled. What an adventure! Erskine, of course, was not pleased at all.
“How long will you be gone this time, Kit?” he asked peevishly.
“As long as it takes, darling,” I promised, “and not a day longer.”
Overleaf: Margaret’s photograph captures the irony of flood survivors waiting beneath a cheerful billboard.
25
The Arctic—1937
LORD TWEEDSMUIR, A NATIVE SCOT RECENTLY appointed governor general of Canada, had set himself the goal of touring the width and breadth of the huge and diverse country for which he was now responsible. His Excellency was believed to be traveling aboard an old steamer somewhere in the vast Canadian tundra, heading north. My editors at Life decided this had the makings of “a cracking good story”—if I could find him.
I spent a day or two in Edmonton, the capital of the province of Alberta, making the rounds of bars and cafes and asking questions until I found a bush pilot who’d heard of the governor general’s tour. I hired him, and he loaded me and my equipment, which included a suitcase with the chrysalises of a dozen butterflies, into a small pontoon plane. I was still working on what had become a long-term project of photographing the metamorphoses of various insects, and I’d brought them with me.
We took off in search of His Excellency’s boat, the Distributor. “It’s probably on the Athabasca River headed toward the Northwest Territories, loaded with supplies for trappers. That’s my guess,” the pilot shouted above the noisy engine.
For nearly three hours we followed the course of the river, skimming above the tundra, around jutting mountain ranges, and over shimmering lakes, until we sighted the steamer. The pilot swooped in low and dropped down beside it. My cameras and I were hoisted aboard, the pilot flew off, and the Distributor continued to churn steadily upstream, hour after hour, with stops at tiny villages and hamlets along the way. At each stop Lord Tweedsmuir stepped off the boat briefly and delivered his greetings, exactly the same each time, in a nearly impenetrable Scottish brogue that left his subjects glassy-eyed.
I took photographs of the scenery as the Distributor wended its way through the tundra, but at this point there wasn’t much to do. The days passed pleasantly, but I felt uneasy. I’d heard nothing from Erskine since I left New York, no replies to the cables I sent almost daily. I was worried.
The Distributor left Alberta, entering the Northwest Territories, and docked at Fort Smith. Lord Tweedsmuir prepared to deliver his usual speech to a group of Eskimos. A radio operator came aboard and greeted me. “I’ll bet you’re the young lady I’ve been looking for,” he said and handed me a telegram addressed to HONEYCHILE, ARCTIC CIRCLE, CANADA. “We thought this sounded like you,” he added, grinning.
The message was brief: COME HOME AND MARRY ME. SIGNED SKINNY.
Almost any girl might have been thrilled to receive such a message from a lover, but I had not changed my mind on the subject of marriage. Erskine was moving out of his hotel room and into an apartment next to mine. In New York we went everywhere together. Everyone expected us to marry. Now here I was, thousands of miles away, feeling an intense rush of longing for my darling Skinny, but still not wanting to say yes.
The steamer left the Athabasca River and followed the Mackenzie, dropping off goods and a dwindling number of passengers at each stop. After several days we arrived at Fort Norman. Two more cables were waiting for me—one from Life, the other from Erskine.
I opened Life’s cable first: REQUEST YOU CHARTER PLANE AND SHOOT ARCTIC OCEAN IN SUMMER. There was no question that I would accept the assignment.
The cable from Erskine begged me to take the next plane home and marry him. I understood that he would not be satisfied until I was completely his. My feelings were mixed, constantly changing. Erskine and his pleas felt far away, part of another life. I put the cable with the others. I had work to do, the Arctic Ocean to explore.
The Distributor left the Mackenzie and turned east, up Great Bear River. I kept my eye on the butterfly chrysalises that I’d nurtured from eggs to caterpillars. The cooler temperatures had slowed down the metamorphosis, but I knew that any day, at any hour, my beauties would be ready to emerge. If I missed that event, I’d have to start all over the following year.
Anticipating this, I found the captain, and with my most persuasive smile, I said, “Captain, I have an enormous favor to ask of you.”
“What is it?” he asked gruffly.
“I’m in the midst of an important scientific project involving the life cycle of mourning cloak butterflies, and I wonder if you could possibly stop the engines when my butterflies begin to emerge, so that I can photograph them without the vibrations spoiling the focus.” I offered another smile.
The captain gazed at me in astonishment. “Miss Bourke-White, I’ve been working these rivers for thirty years, I’ve never stopped a boat even if a man fell overboard, and now you want me to stop it for a damned butterfly?”
“Yes, please, captain.”
He nodded briefly and walked away. I hoped that meant he’d agreed.
I taped the ten chrysalises to the rail of the deck, set up my equipment, and settled down to wait. The sun skimmed above the horizon and glowed dimly for a few minutes before soaring overhead again.
For the next few days I dozed in my deckchair, never actually sleeping. Passengers brought me food from the dining room. Lord Tweedsmuir passed by periodically, greeting me warmly and addressing me as Maggie, and loaned me books to help pass the time.
On a bright Sunday morning at the edge of the Arctic Circle, I detected the first wiggle and sent a message to the captain. The engines went still. The chrysalises began to split. His Excellency came to watch and to offer help. While I took picture after picture, ten butterflies had emerged, grandly unfolding their purple-black wings with broad yellow borders. The captain grumbled, the engines started up again, and I had a magnificent set of photographs.
Before the steamer’s final destination lay a thousand miles and a dozen more trading posts. The sight of a handful of decrepit wooden buildings and the sound of howling sled dogs greeted us at each stop. There was also at least one cable addressed to “Honeychile,” delivered by a smirking radio operator who had probably shared the contents with everyone in the village.
We arrived at Port Brabant, a tiny hamlet spread out on a flat spit of land surrounded by the waters of Mackenzie Bay. His tour complete, Lord Tweedsmuir flew off to Ontario. I released the four surviving butterflies, and searched for a pilot willing to take me out over the Arctic Ocean. The only planes flying this far north
belonged to the Royal Canadian Mail and accepted private passengers only when it didn’t interfere with delivering the mail to these isolated outposts.
By good luck I met two other adventurous travelers: Archibald Lang Fleming, a bishop of the Church of England, and Dr. Thomas Wood, an English composer and travel writer. Known as Archibald the Arctic, the bishop was making his semiannual tour of the remotest churches in his diocese, and “Doc” was working on a book about Canada. The three of us negotiated with a handsome bush pilot, Art Rankin, to take us where we wanted to go in an ancient flying machine he’d named Nyla. Art rounded up a bewhiskered copilot named Billy, and the deal was done.
While the pilots made their preparations, I went sightseeing around Port Brabant. In the Hudson’s Bay store I met a lonely trapper who told me sadly that I reminded him of his ex-wife. He had ordered a fur parka as a wedding gift for his bride, but she had taken one look at this godforsaken village and didn’t stay long enough to claim it before she fled back to Minnesota. The Eskimo woman who had made the parka lived in the village of Coppermine, and if by chance I happened to visit Coppermine, the trapper said, the parka would be mine. He scrawled a note to present at the trading post, authorizing me to claim it.
An hour later the bishop, the composer, the pilot, the copilot, and I were on our way—first stop, Coppermine. On the ground again, Art and I made for the trading post that doubled as the post office. Art handed over the sack of mail, and I produced the trapper’s letter.
Sewn from caribou fur, trimmed with white reindeer fur, and fringed with wolverine, the parka was one of the most elegant garments I’d ever owned. Archibald the Arctic used my camera to take my photograph.
We left Coppermine. Art had removed one of the doors of e plane and tied a rope around my waist so I wouldn’t fall as I leaned out to take pictures. The scene below was perfect: dark water and floating ice bathed in a warm golden light. Then the picture suddenly vanished, and we were enveloped in featureless white.
Margaret loved clothes and considered this handmade fur parka the most elegant item in her wardrobe.
Fog.
It was like being suspended inside a cloud. Every landmark disappeared, and it was impossible to tell up from down. The pilot had to descend quickly. He swooped low and climbed high, searching for a break in the blankness. No one spoke.
A small hole appeared in the white nothingness. Through it I glimpsed open sea, a narrow inlet, and a slender crescent of rock.
“That’s it!” shouted Art above the roar of the motor. “We’re going in!”
The old plane settled gently onto the water, and Art scrambled onto the rocky shore to tie it up. The rest of us followed gingerly, leaping from the pontoons to the shore without falling into the frigid waters.
“Now,” announced Archibald the Arctic, “we shall have tea.”
The bishop unpacked a tin pot from his valise and set off over the rocks to gather sticks, practically nonexistent in the Arctic, until he found enough to make a small fire. We had tea.
Art tried to radio for help. He knew where we were: one of the Lewes Islands, some three hundred miles from any sort of human habitation. Every hour on the hour, the radio operator back in Coppermine tried to reach us: “Art Rankin on Nyla, please respond. Visibility remains zero. Art Rankin, please respond.”
We could hear him, but he could not hear us. Nyla’s signal was not strong enough to reach Coppermine.
“How long do these fogs hang around?” I asked.
“Sometimes for weeks,” Art said matter-of-factly, and I was sorry I’d asked.
We took stock of our resources: enough rations to sustain life for one man for twenty days. There were five of us.
Then Billy, the copilot, found a fresh-water spring. “A blessing,” said the bishop.
It had felt strange to pack a ski suit when I was leaving New York in July. Now I was glad I had it, and my new fur parka, too. Archibald the Arctic proved to be an entertaining storyteller. Doc made up songs and taught them to us, and we sang. We built cairns and pelted them with pebbles. Art was a deadeye shot. I took pictures in the odd, disorienting light. Then we slept a little and tried not to think about the fog.
The radio operator in Coppermine reported continuing zero visibility, and on one broadcast added that he had a cable for somebody named Honeychile: WHEN ARE YOU COMING HOME? SIGNED SKINNY.
“Tell him to come up here,” muttered Billy, who by then knew my story. “We’ve got a bishop to marry you and two witnesses besides.”
Suddenly the fog thinned and lifted slightly. Art hustled us into the plane. We were scarcely airborne when the fog vanished and gave way to lashing rain. For two hours Nyla fought her way through the storm. It was like being underwater. We were all quiet, for we knew the gas gauge must be falling, and night was falling, and if a miracle didn’t occur soon, we too would be falling, falling …
But a miracle did occur. Art sighted a few dots on the tundra that might be a settlement. He circled, dropped, and landed on a river. We piled out onto another rocky shore, grateful beyond words—except Archibald the Arctic, who had a number of words appropriate for the occasion, to which we all added “Amen!”
The settlement was deserted, except for a sole Eskimo who explained in his language that everyone had gone to fish camp and would be back in a few weeks with enough fish to feed the village through the winter. Billy translated for us: We were guests of the village, and we were to help ourselves to whatever we needed.
Ravenous, we dined on a cache of canned meat and beans. We discovered a dusty old Victrola and a few records, only slightly warped, and we cranked it up and danced. I had four willing partners. Far more important, though, was a supply of gasoline left behind by whalers. It was enough to get the intrepid Nyla into the air again.
We flew to Aklavik, not far from Port Brabant, where we’d begun our adventure. I caught a flight to Yellowknife, cabled Erskine that I was on my way home, and got a good night’s sleep, my first in a real bed in a month.
The next morning in the Chicago airport I was looking for my flight to New York. A cacophony of urgent messages and muffled announcements blared over the loudspeaker, and I ignored them until one in particular, repeated for the third time, finally registered: “Paging Child Bride, please stop at the ticket counter for a message.”
Child Bride? I could guess who that might be. I identified myself—“I’m Child Bride,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous—and opened the telegram:
WELCOME, WELCOME, WELCOME, WELCOME.
26
Promises—1938
ERSKINE WAS GLAD TO HAVE ME BACK HOME, I was glad to be there, and for a while everything went smoothly, as long as I didn’t travel on assignment. Then, early in the new year, Erskine received notice that his wife, Helen, had finally filed for divorce, and he began again to pressure me to marry him. The more tightly he tried to hold on to me, the more I struggled to hold on to my freedom. And when I did struggle, he fell into a dark depression or exploded with rage. I tried to leave him, but he would not give up. He couldn’t bear to be without me! He wouldn’t let me go!
And so I stayed. For now, I told myself. I’ll stay for now.
The editors at Life had been so pleased by the pictures I’d brought from my month in the Arctic that they ran two stories in the same issue—eight pages about Lord Tweedsmuir and his tour through the Northwest Territories, and another three pages on Archibald the Arctic. It was the first time Life had printed two stories by the same photographer in one issue.
I was ready for my next big assignment, and I got it. Newspaper headlines in the winter of 1938 showed that Europe was on the brink of war. German troops had entered Austria, and Hitler was threatening to invade Czechoslovakia and wipe it off the map. In Spain, Francisco Franco’s fascists were taking control of Spain.
Life’s editors wanted me to travel to Europe to cover these stories, and I was eager to go.
The timing was right. Erskine and I had already begu
n to talk about doing another book together. He had a title for it: North of the Danube. I organized my trip around the project and made all the plans. We sailed for Europe at the end of March.
We made our way through cities and villages and farmland, meeting with people and listening to their stories as we had in the American South, taking photographs and sending them back to Life. I was recording history as it was happening.
But at every step I had to keep one eye on Erskine. Without warning and for no reason I could see, he would sink into a black mood that seemed to drag everyone else down. His erratic behavior put off even the generous people who helped us, and that hindered my own work. I had counted on the easy way I’d had with my subjects as we’d traveled through the South for our first book. Now Erskine’s unpredictable mood changes distracted me. I could not give my complete attention to the people I was photographing, and it showed in their faces.
After nearly five months in Europe we sailed for home. When the Aquitania docked in New York harbor at the end of August, reporters and photographers swarmed the decks. We were a celebrity couple, Erskine for his writing and I for my photographs, and we were peppered with questions—not sensible questions about what we had witnessed in Europe, but pointless ones. “Miss Bourke-White! When are you going to marry Mr. Caldwell?”
“I’m not going to get married, no matter how much it might please the press corps,” I snapped. “I like being single.”
My sarcastic response to the reporters didn’t faze Erskine. His divorce from Helen had become final while we were away. He continued his campaign with gifts and flowers and singing telegrams, still begging me to marry him, still trying to wear me down.
And I kept saying no.
Girl with a Camera Page 17