Hold Still

by Sally Mann

  Except… except… he expressed hope for someone born in the next generation who could make art that married the concept of mortality with the redemptive force of beauty. He wrote these words the month I was conceived, August 1950:

  We are perennially reminded that art is prophetic… and that some of our best modern works of art are those in which world- or self-dissolution is represented.

  So perhaps it is not too much out of line to indulge in the prophesy and hope that there may arise a truly vital germ of creative art which will generate, in the midst of the constant threat of death, a will to endure, and which will: 1) lend strength and vitality to a more meaningful kind of life, and 2) emphasize and strengthen the life-conserving processes of civilization.

  Am I suggesting here that I was born to redeem my father’s lost artistic vision, the child destined to make the art that he was unable to make, to peer behind some of those ten thousand doors?

  Maybe I am, and maybe I was. God knows I have tried.

  21

  The Cradle and the Grave

  Even though I wanted to please my father more than anything, rebellion came naturally to me, beginning as a child. As reported earlier, my mother’s journals from the 1950s are peppered with despairing accounts of frayed tempers and the hairbrush spankings she administered over my refusal to wear clothes, or, when she managed to get them on me, my refusal to change them until they were ragged. I remember those times, too: the powerlessness, the frustration and the furious agitation roiling within me, the strong desire to be left alone, Mowgli-wild, naked and dreadlocked. Especially I remember wanting to have things always my way.

  Those difficult personality tendencies were exacerbated by the defiant temper of the 1960s, which coincided with the full noxious bloom of my adolescence and my banishment to Putney. But it was hard to rebel against my father, now distant geographically as well as emotionally; although I tried mightily, on some level I knew it was impossible. Even then, writing this doggerel prose poem in a 1969 journal, I admitted defeat. I wanted to be just like him and I wanted him to be proud of me.

  It’s obvious that he heavily influenced my nascent artistic aesthetic, but it was not through any direct means. He seldom discussed with me the deep artistic passions so evident in his youthful journals, and he was relatively close-mouthed about his lifelong, obsessive artistic endeavors, which ran the gamut from stained glass windows to Calder-like mobiles and hill-sprawling earth sculpture. If anything, for better or worse, what I learned directly from this distant, abstracted, art-making father was that whatever project he was working on at the time was more important to him than almost anything else, including, perhaps, even his family. My mother writes painfully about this indifference and neglect in her journal from 1956:

  I get the feeling that really I register only in a small part of Bob’s life—that the creative world of his is the core of his being and I’m there to admire and comment and see that he has everything he needs. I get worked up over, say, the fact that he piddled around on his creations all day yesterday and yet couldn’t do the Victrola fixing—or, even worse, didn’t think of it, or, thinking of it, didn’t do it—when I’ve begged for it so often.

  He simply didn’t have time to let us into his life; his passions were all that mattered. So, here it is again—my genetic roadways crowded with my Welsh grandfather’s sentimentality genes, pushing earnestly along, and right behind them my father’s pedal-to-the-metal, obsessive, death-inflected art-passion genes downshifting into passing gear.

  As I worked my way to the bottom of the Daddy boxes in the attic, I found these pictures he had taken with the Leica outside New Orleans in 1939, some sixty years before my own Deep South work.

  I could have taken any of these pictures. In fact, I have taken these pictures, almost every one of them, without the benefit of ever having seen them before. Recognizing them as my own pictures gave me a moment of woo-woo, hair-raising frisson followed by a vexatious pinch of resentment and resignation.

  I began to see my artistic life—starting from my earliest pictures taken at age seventeen with that same Leica, right through to my own 2003 artistic exploration of death, published as What Remains—as the inevitable result of my silent father’s clamorous influence.

  The Leica had a Hektor lens with a wobbly focus knob and bad optical coating that caused a bit of flare that I rather liked (and still do). Handing it over to me, distractedly and with a hurried and insufficient explanation of how to load the film and focus, my father, like my high school English teacher Jeff Campbell portentously assigning me Faulkner, unknowingly performed his own decisive act of predestination.

  It was the winter of my senior year at Putney School, the year of Faulkner, the year of Awakening. What I was awakening from was a fathomless sleep of ignorance, and by this I mean not just the ignorance of race relations I wrote about earlier. It was worse than that; I was a shallow, uninteresting, uninterested, and uninformed kid. My parents’ lackadaisical style of parenting certainly made me independent, but it provided no structure or nurture for my creativity and intellect. I never had the art, dance, music, riding, tennis, and French lessons or the travel abroad that my own children, for instance, enjoyed: I languished in the limited Appalachian backwater of my own thoughts. And, for a girl living out in the country with not a lot to do or see, with not even a television, for Chrissake, those thoughts were anything but profound.

  Except there were books, two in particular: You Have Seen Their Faces and The Family of Man, which I have still in their worn-out first editions (one cost a dollar, the other seventy-five cents). I know that the latter is controversial for its oversimplification, vulgar worldwide success, and naïve ideological posture, but I am not embarrassed to say that I am still moved by it. As a child, it captivated and enthralled me; I studied every picture, from the opening Wynn Bullock image of the naked child in the ferny forest, to W. Eugene Smith’s “Walk to Paradise Garden” (a print of which I now own). It taught me the rudiments of sexual love, family and community life, of personal and social interactions, strife, and, perhaps most important, of empathic compassion for suffering.

  In that last respect, You Have Seen Their Faces took over where The Family of Man left off. Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs from the Depression are still among the most haunting in my photographic reservoir. Though back then I would need help with the captions, once read to me, the words spoken by the people in the pictures only compounded the crippling confusion and guilt that arose when I looked at the book. A rural Alabama resident said to the book’s editor, Erskine Caldwell, “Of course I wouldn’t let them plaster signs all over my house,” adding, “but it’s different with those shacks the niggers live in.” Running her thick-nailed fingers under the lines, Gee-Gee read those words to me with not a particle of pissed-off in her voice, but something else: wretchedness and grief.

  Until I could read on my own, I had to tease out whatever time Gee-Gee had in her work schedule to read to me. With calculation, I would watch as she ran water into a Coke bottle so well used that its green glass had grown milky. Once she had corked it with the funky tin sprinkler and wet the laundry, I knew there was at least one child’s book’s worth of reading before the uninterruptible ironing session. I could get my mother to read to me, too, if I caught her before she stretched out with the Georg Jensen ashtray on her stomach, a Kent cigarette in one hand, the Atlantic in the other, for her afternoon rest.

  Best of all was when my father read to me. He would take me onto his lap before supper, his one deep golden cocktail beside him on the marble table, sometimes with a cherry at the bottom for me. We would open up the Washington Post to the funnies at the back and he’d read every single strip to me, even the ones, like Brenda Starr, that he thought were stupid. His favorites were Pogo, Peanuts, Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, and Barney Google with the goo-goo-googly eyes, a line Daddy delighted in putting to music and singing at the top of his lungs as he rode on the sulky behind the Gravely mowe
r. Our mutual favorite was Prince Valiant, which ran only on Sundays and was in color. Several times I wrote its author, Hal Foster, once asking if Prince Valiant had to wear underpants.

  My childhood books, many with my name penciled laboriously on the front covers, are on the bookshelf in the attic: the A. A. Milne and Dr. Seuss books, Charlotte’s Web, Richard Chase’s Jack Tales and Grandfather Tales, Walter Farley’s horse stories, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Moonstone, and a complete set of the Oz books in their 1908 first editions gloriously illustrated by John R. Neill.

  Perhaps prematurely in my reading life, but premonitory as to my creative one, my father had given me a book called Art Is Everywhere, which has a chapter entitled “Are You a Camera?” It concludes by saying, “If you want to imitate a scene exactly as you see it, then use a camera!”

  I should have taken that advice, but instead for many years I chose to imitate the scenes of my life by poorly reinterpreting them in my daily journal. The journals that remain after the annual from-the-bottom-up culling (and which I will most assuredly toss into the wood furnace before I take my own thirty Seconals) reveal that what I thought about was, chronologically: horses, then boys, followed closely by personal appearance and weight issues, popularity or lack thereof, and whether I was a slut. Cringing my way through the banality, cheesiness, and sheer peacockery of those early years, I almost welcome the high-flown ruminations of the post-Awakening, wannabe artistic soul, such as, for example, this windy contemplation of the importance of insecurity to the creative process (something to which I suppose I still subscribe):

  Can the artist produce under any motivation other than insecurity?… And is the end product, the tangible creation, made less valuable, less beautiful by the fact that it derives from a basic insecurity?

  … Sometimes I do wonder at my capabilities; at exactly what is innate and ready to be drawn upon within me.… How, for instance, did Picasso come about? Was it that he merely picked up a paintbrush before a saxophone?… Could he as easily have been a jazz player had he begun as such, or, despite the presence of his saxophone, would he have searched out his paintbrushes?

  So, is there any true path for me?

  … All I ask is, yes, to be happy—a simple, free and complete happiness and then the path will be decided in a wave.

  That last sentence reminds me of the line that Oscar Wilde tossed out in response to a friend’s anxious dinner invitation that had concluded with something like, “I don’t know what I can possibly give you [to eat]!”

  To which Wilde had breezily replied, “Oh, anything. Anything, no matter what. I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.”

  “Complete happiness” was all I asked; seems reasonable enough. Clearly I was not an artist who wanted to suffer.

  But… all the same, I did. We all do. My particular suffering was often tied up with trying to please my distracted father, or, at the least, to get his attention. Remaining on nodding terms with the eighteen-year-old who wrote those journal pages is excruciating, but despite wincing at the rawness of my fear, my need, my ambition, and doubt, I also grudgingly recognize many of those things, still, in the person I am now.

  Early in December 2000, when an armed convict came across the fields toward our house, I had already begun to think about the concept of death in relation to the land, as well as to photography and art. As that harrowing day played out, I confess to thinking that the timing of it had a perverse felicity, as if it were an apposite and propitious cosmic sign.

  The morning he came, I was alone on the farm, our six greyhounds hanging out by the woodstoves while I spotted prints. I was listening to an audio book of Moby-Dick read by the late Frank Muller, which was drowned out, annoyingly, by the sound of a helicopter repeatedly passing over the farm. When the phone rang, I put down the spotting brush and my eyes readapted to distance; I could see the copter hovering close by, over the river.

  Picking up the phone, I found Larry on the line from his office in town. He sounded odd. He asked me if anyone was with me, and said to answer carefully. Carefully? I said no, and he asked again if I was able to speak freely, and I said, with some impatience, “Sure, of course I am. What’s up with you?”

  He let out a sigh, and in a more normal voice told me that the sheriff had just called him and asked if I was home alone. Receiving the affirmative, he’d told Larry about an escapee headed toward the house and said I needed to lock the doors. This was a laughable concept in a house with nine (then unlockable) French doors. Sited on a raised plateau with long views and bounded on three sides by water, our house is protected almost entirely by geography, a classic stronghold. But Larry’s imagination had gone to the worst case: the desperate man was already in and had a gun to my head.

  My own imagination also went into horror-movie overdrive: terrified, I told Larry I was certain I was hearing movement in the living room. I quietly put down the phone and with exaggerated tiptoeing, managed a sightline.

  Pie-Pie, the youngest greyhound, was stretching and changing sides by the stove.

  Chagrined, I went back to the phone, and Larry explained the situation. A deputy had been sent to a residence on the other side of the county at four in the morning to arrest David Sensabaugh, who already had some minor sex offenses on his record, on four new felony charges. A few hysterical women were at the scene, one apparently rooting around in a shed for a gun, so the deputy cuffed Sensabaugh’s hands behind his back and used the seat belt to strap him in the front seat of his idling cruiser.

  While the deputy was distracted by the women screaming at him that he was a fat motherfucker and was going to pay, Sensabaugh pretzeled his handcuffed wrists down and under his feet. He undid the seat belt, scooted over to the driver’s seat, and locked the doors. Gunning the car, he tore off into a field, plowed a few unnecessarily exuberant doughnuts into the frozen dirt, took out a fence, and, cutting through a neighbor’s side yard, disappeared down the paved road. He went straight to a friend who hacksawed the handcuffs, then drove out our road, Route 39, ditched the car by the river, and set out on foot with the deputy’s shotgun and two pistols.

  The sheriff’s department, joined by state police with dogs, was in howling pursuit of him by midmorning, but the fugitive knew the territory and mountain-goated down the cliffs above the Maury River. He crossed the icy river close to our cabin and spent some time there, drying himself before heading through the woods toward our house. His pursuers, stymied by the cliffs and the river, doubled back to their cars and took the road to the nearest bridge. They were at least fifteen minutes by car from our farm. As they set out, the circling helicopter pilot got a fix on Sensabaugh running toward the house and radioed Sheriff Day, who called Larry. Who called me.

  After I hung up, I rushed to the windows and, seeing no one, was convinced, like Larry, that Sensabaugh had already gotten into the house. Slinking along the walls, going from room to room in an absurd pantomime of an imperiled (and unarmed) cop in a house search, I cursed those damn greyhounds and their complete lack of guard-dog protectiveness.

  Finding no one, I roused the dogs and chased them outside. I made it to the garage, heart pounding, certain I’d find a suet-faced, overweight, weenie-wagging, knuckle-tattooed convict pointing a pistol at me from the driver’s seat, but it was empty. I fired up the car and roared off the farm to the main road, where I nearly collided with the old Volvo station wagon wallowing around the last corner, Larry’s frantic face pressed almost to the windshield.

  Somewhat irrationally, I was obsessed with the dogs, certain that they would be shot when Sensabaugh approached the house and they ran, curious and friendly, in a pack toward him. I insisted on going back. When we got to the garage, Larry grabbed a shotgun and was about to make a tour of the house when we saw a scarecrow-like figure running awkwardly toward us along a fencerow, a pistol in his downward-pointing hand. We froze in indecision and fear.

  At that cinematically perfect moment the helicopter reemerged fro
m making a run along the river and banked down so close that we could see the anxious face of the pilot. With exaggerated arm motions we semaphored him toward the approaching figure. Right on cue, in a heroic Hollywood hurrah, a phalanx of speeding cop cars crested the hill, nearly going airborne, their wheels appearing elliptical with speed. They headed straight toward the copse of trees into which the fugitive had disappeared.

  I had enough time after the deputies arrived to grab a little digital camera, and we stood on the porch, watching the men getting out of their cars and walking, with stunning nonchalance, toward the woods. They amiably hollered to Sensabaugh, who was then hiding behind a tree, to give up and come on back. He was having none of it, and the next thing we knew, the men were scrambling back to their opened car doors for cover as Sensabaugh opened fire. Dumbly we stood there watching as the firefight continued, until we realized that this was the real thing. Incoming!

  We ducked behind the porch columns. After more rounds came a moment of silence. Then we heard the tinnily distinguishable pop of a lone pistol shot from within the trees. It was a shot to the head.

  David Sensabaugh fell among the stumps and bracken of that untended copse, this man who had been the terrifying bogeyman in the closet, the Jack the Ripper, Hannibal Lecter, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock of my excitable imagination, bleeding out in the milky winter light.