by D. Anne Love
“A boyfriend?”
“No! Some dumb boy asked me to a baseball game, and then got mad at me when he struck out. He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Thank goodness,” Daddy teased. “I’m not up to planning a wedding this year.”
He took another bite of roast beef and told us he’d gone by our house on his way to Oklahoma, and everything was just the way we left it. “We may want to paint, change things up. When we get around to it.”
“Sure, Dad,” Opal said. “I’m ready for a change.”
We stayed at the table a long time that day, catching Daddy up on everything that had happened in our lives since last summer. I told him about Powla, about my paintings, and that I hoped to be a real artist someday.
“Maybe you can get a job painting posters for the Mirabeau carnival this summer.” Daddy helped himself to a slab of coconut cake.
“Can we go this year, Dad?” Opal asked.
“I’m counting on it,” Daddy said. “I love the carnival.”
I did too. I loved the clatter of the roller coaster, the sounds of people screaming as it whooshed down, and the rough-voiced men begging you to waste your money to win a cheap prize. I loved filling up on hot dogs and caramel apples, and the sticky feel of cotton candy melting on my tongue.
Aunt Julia got up from the table and brought Daddy the newspaper story about the Spoon River Anthology. Opal told him about her chance to join the summer theater company next year and recited her Constance Hately speech all over again, a private performance just for him.
Daddy took it all in until his good eye began to droop and he stretched out on the sofa in the living room for a nap. After Opal and I helped Aunt Julia clean up the kitchen, Opal went upstairs to read, and I went out to the garden. Aunt Julia’s whirligigs turned in the breeze, a blur of color against the new green. The air was full of the smell of summer. Everywhere I looked, something was blooming—hollyhocks, marigolds, and rosebushes heavy with buds just waiting to unfurl.
Mozart came out and crawled into my lap. I stroked his back and thought about the year that had been both terrible and wonderful, a year in which I’d realized that other people’s dreams have to matter too, even when it means letting go of some of your own. Living with Aunt Julia had taught me that the people who stay are just as important as the ones who go, and that the best home of all is the one you make inside yourself.
A white convertible sped past the mailbox, raising a cloud of dust that hung in the air like powdered gold. “Hey!” Nathan yelled as the car hurtled past. “Hey, Garnet!”
Nathan raised his arm and waved. I waved back.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As a young girl coming of age in the 1960s, I experienced firsthand many of the societal changes I write about in this novel, including the beginnings of the civil rights movement; the birth of space exploration; and the fear of Communism that deepened in the wake of Russia’s launch of its Sputnik satellites, the Communist convention held in New York, and the downing of an American spy plane over Russia.
Like adolescence itself, the 1960s held both great promise and great uncertainty. Across the South, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading sit-ins and protest marches, calling attention to the injustices affecting black Americans, encouraging profound change in the social order of the country. While black athletes were winning medals at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, ten people, eight of them black, were shot in a race riot on a beach in Biloxi, Mississippi. Senator John F. Kennedy was elected America’s first Catholic president and challenged America to put a man on the moon within ten years, a challenge that sparked renewed interest in science and opened outer space as a new frontier for exploration. It was a time of confusion and fear mixed with excitement and hope.
As these events unfolded, I formed opinions about the differences between what I was learning in school and what was happening in the real world, opinions I expressed through writing stories and poems, much as Garnet expresses her thoughts through her American Dreams painting.
The Mexican muralists David Siqueiros and Diego Rivera, whom Garnet studies and copies in her own work, are considered by many art scholars to be the most influential muralists of their time. Both used their work to express their political beliefs, beliefs that landed them in trouble with their patrons and with the authorities.
David Siqueiros was a devoted Communist who was imprisoned more than once for his political views. In 1941 he was denied entry into the United States because of a new law that prevented Communists from entering the country. The story of his mural American Tropical (Tropical America) is a story of politics, art, and censorship. In the 1930s he came to Los Angeles, California, and was commissioned to paint a mural at the Plaza Art Center, in a part of town heavily populated by poor Mexican immigrants who often lived in deplorable conditions. Moved by the plight of the immigrants, Siqueiros used his art to attack American imperialism.
Using shocking symbols, such as a Mexican Indian on a cross and a worker armed with a gun, as the centerpiece of his mural, Siqueiros hoped to call attention to the injustices suffered by poor workers everywhere. Years later he wrote that “the Mexican hero is rooted in history as a symbol of the oppressed peoples of the world.”
His patrons, who had envisioned a mural depicting placid scenes of Mexicans going about their daily lives, were outraged. The work was so controversial that portions of it were painted over within a year of its completion. Within ten years, American Tropical was completely erased.
During the 1960s, as the struggle for civil rights continued and the Vietnam War polarized the country, Siqueiros’s lost work served as the prototype for murals of protest that appeared in city neighborhoods across the country. In 1988 the Getty Conservation Institute formed a partnership with the City of Los Angeles to conserve American Tropical. Since then, conservators have conducted analyses of the paint Siqueiros used, installed an environmental monitoring station, and made digital photographs of the mural’s surface. Perhaps someday this important work will be on view once more.
Like Siqueiros, Diego Rivera encouraged revolution both in political life and in art. In 1931 the American philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, who had long admired Rivera’s work, commissioned the artist to paint a mural at Rockefeller Center to be called Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future. Rockefeller hoped the mural would “persuade people to stop and think, above all to stimulate a spiritual awakening.” However, once Rivera began work on the mural, he veered from his original plan and included a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, the Russian revolutionary who founded Bolshevism, led the Russian Revolution, and later became head of government. When word got out that Mr. Rockefeller had commissioned a mural containing communist demonstrations, he wrote to Diego Rivera, asking him to “substitute the face of some unknown man where Lenin’s face now appears.”
In his reply to Rockefeller, Rivera refused, stating he would rather see the entire mural destroyed than change it. Rockefeller then ordered Rivera to stop work on the mural. It was covered over with a canvas, and later the nearly finished mural was chipped off the wall. Upon his return to Mexico, Rivera recreated the mural in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.
As Garnet explains to Principal Conley, the muralists believed that the purpose of art is to educate people and thus inspire them to fight for liberty, justice, and identity.
For further reading about the muralists and their work, I recommend Desmond Rochfort’s Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera by Patrick Marnham.
Here’s a look at D. Anne Love’s next novel,
Picture Perfect—available now!
Now it was June. School was out for the summer and Mama was still gone, still running around all over the country teaching other women how easy it was to Bee Beautiful.
There wasn’t much to do in the summer in Eden, Texas. Zane and I planned to spend our vacation driving around in the
ten-year-old Ford my daddy the judge had given Zane for his sixteenth birthday, swimming at the lake, and just hanging out while we waited to grow up so our real lives could begin.
Daddy spent most of his time downtown in his courtroom, where he had developed a reputation for sorting out all kinds of disagreements. People said that no matter how complicated and messy a case became, Sumner Trask could think on it and figure out what should be done to make things right. But when his wife went AWOL, leaving him to deal with two teenagers all by himself, he was at a total loss. I guess it’s always easier to fix other people’s problems than your own.
It was a hot Saturday and I was home alone. Daddy was playing golf with a couple of lawyers, and Zane was down at Threadgill’s Garage, supposedly repairing the dents in the Ford, but I suspected it was mostly to hang out with Mr. Threadgill’s daughter, Ginger. She was in Zane’s class at school and had been our neighbor until last year, when her daddy moved them to a house out on the Dallas highway to be closer to the garage. Ginger was a strawberry blonde, not fat, but not thin, either. I guess you’d say she was solid. Zane said she could fix a flat tire without even breaking a sweat and was the only girl he knew who could explain rack and pinion steering, or tell the difference between a socket wrench and a screwdriver.
I made myself a glass of iced tea and took it out to the porch. The full weight of summer in Eden was settling in; cicadas whirred in the trees, the air was heavy and still. Normally I loved summer, but this year, with Mama Lord-knew-where, Shyla consumed with her prelaw summer school classes, and Lauren Braithwaite, who had been my best friend since third grade, living in Atlanta because her dad had taken a new job there, I was left to face the entire summer without anyone who understood what it was like to be a fourteen-year-old girl.
A black car pulled into the driveway of the vacant house next door, where our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Archer, had lived until she broke her hip and had to go stay with her daughter in Houston. Now there was a FOR SALE sign in the weedy yard, and I’d made a habit of checking out the potential buyers. I watched as a real estate saleslady ushered her client up the front steps and unlocked the door. I was ready for something exciting to happen. I hoped that whoever moved into Mrs. Archer’s house would shake things up and change my life.
Be careful what you wish for.
Growing up
with McElderry Books