As I began to study the Vicksburg Monument project and its creative possibilities, I was also completing an essay outlining a premise for an Andrew Wyeth exhibition of that portion of his sixty year career dealing with these figures I have mentioned. The collection of those artworks became a reality with the Wyeth’s blessings and help and the exhibition ANDREW WYETH –Close Friends opened in February, 2002, at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Although it was during the development of that retrospective that I finally began to realize the subtleness of his genius and the impact his Close Friends had on me as an artist, it was also during that experience that I first attempted to express my emotions in words, to attempt to understand or explain my own interest in the subject.
Reflecting on my first exposure to those works of art I realized my response had been more visceral, that feeling deep in one’s gut so difficult to explain to another human being. Like some high school jock secretly pulled by the desire to design clothing or listen to Bette Midler albums, I kept going back to Wyeth’s portrayals of those black men and women and children, quietly allowing that creative seed to germinate and grow and mature in my own secret garden for years.
I was soon discovering works by other American artists who were brave enough to see black people as worthy of painting or preserving in drawings, paintings, and photographs. In the 1930’s, the Pulitzer Prize winning Mississippi writer, Eudora Welty, while traveling for the Works Progress Administration, captured the dignity and struggles and tragedies of poor struggling Mississippi peoples. Among them were black families with scarcely enough provisions to acknowledge their citizenship. In those quiet, rural days of absorbing these artistic masterpieces, I began to reflect on my own life experience and the sights I had seen on a neighbor uncle’s cotton farm. It was the 1960’s and much of that and other farms would suggest little change from Miss Welty’s photos from four decades earlier.
Why was I so personally affected? I wondered how our lots in life are determined and why it had not been me living in a shack with no window coverings or running water. It never occurred to me that others might actually be looking at me and asking why they had not been left with both parents dead and living with grandparents on a gravel road in rural Scott County.
So I watched and soaked it all in. Though the black kids of my youth seemed less than bitter, mostly taking life day by day and enjoying the simple pleasures of an uncluttered existence, I could not really know their minds. The faces and expressions and features seem burned into my creative conscious as I revisited those emotions years later. And then there was the less complicated and psychological aspects of the sheer unexplainable interest I had in the structure of the African American faces and the skin and the natural way those qualities would translate in graphite particles onto my Bristol board paper. To my surprise, I was soon able to make those tones speak, occasionally sing, and on rare occasions slap the viewer in the face prompting a closer second look, the best works leading them to their own journey into self retrospection.
With no premeditation, my work in pencil and paint began to reflect those experiences and memories and there before me I was not only developing a style and artistic sensibility, I was somehow revealing an African American people, many of whom had experienced life in the rural south in a way I could not have. I certainly am aware that my works only represent a portion of the black experience in this country, but the artist who reaches too broadly in an effort to express human emotion non-specifically risks diluting any emotional impact at all. At the time I was simply expressing what moved me. I still am.
* * *
I sat there reading my paper that morning, reflecting on the time and space and living of life that had separated me from Uncle Benny’s farm, and realizing I was not really so far away after all. I had become aware that I would carry those childhood years around with me like the color of my eyes, not always noticeable but always there.
Over the ensuing weeks, I began to study the Civil War with great energy. Not so much focused on the technical aspects of war or the individual order and details of each battle, I found myself discovering the history and personal stories that reflect much of the pain and anguish experienced by a great nation divided and in turmoil. I read accounts and comments by military leaders, civilians, politicians, historians and the transcribed words of “colored” men who had also laid their lives on the line in less than welcomed circumstances.
At that point, the exact focus of the monument was unclear to me. The challenge for me as an artist was to conceive and construct a figurative statue and monument that would honor the sacrifices of all those of African descent who participated. I longed for something that would not be a divisive symbol, rather one that stimulated all mankind to reflect on our common humanity. For me, that would be the strongest element of such a tribute and one that could reach the diverse population drawn to stop along Grant Avenue and ponder its meaning and significance in their own lives. Is that not, after all, what the best art does?
* * *
Volumes have been written about the war . . . the battles, the strategies, the causes, the leaders, and the human stories. It was the event in our history that led the historian Shelby Foote to note, “Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defines us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things.”
Mr. Foote’s assessment is a hard but honest one and it seems to apply as well to this project, one that should be seen, in my humble opinion, in light of what it is - enormously worthy and honorable but also complicated, charging all of us to search for historical integrity.
I became aware of what I had missed in my education. The study of history is personal and not always easy, not so much about memorizing dates or places or people, but investigating the who, where, when, and why of people. To paraphrase the great Mississippi writer, William Faulkner, history is not “was”, but “is”. My research into this part of our American history kept forcing me to look at our country today, to examine my own heart, and to wonder about the motivations of public figures, black and white, who say they want to move beyond race, yet, themselves feel compelled to focus on race in a society that still struggles to be colorblind.
The research was tedious and potentially discouraging when I realized individual opinions could be strong and potentially divisive. The comment was once made that we should be judged not by the color of our skin, but by the character of our hearts. I shutter to wonder if that is not really what divides us; is it our character and not our color?
Yet there I found myself struggling with a project and design that by its very nature dealt with race. It was unavoidable and essential in light of what the monument would memorialize. As an artist, and an uninvited one at that point, I had to find a way to some starting place. I did, and my initial focus was to design a figurative sculpture that honors the contribution of Mississippians of African descent while prompting all Americans to reflect on our painful past and to strive for a steadily improving harmony in the future. Should this monument do that, would it not do the greatest honor to those transplanted people who would become known as African Americans and who also selflessly gave of themselves for a greater cause?
Shelby Foote’s assessment of the Civil War arose from the origins, the battles, and the resolution of that great American conflict, but it is also most surely expanded upon daily in our country. Though the war concerned state’s rights, the passion of the argument was undoubtedly fueled by the issue of slavery and the fundamental concept of human rights. The obvious conflict involved the economic machine that ran the south. With Eli Whitney’s gin, big cotton made abolishing slave labor more than a philosophical debate over racial supremacy. By freeing the slave, the mere reduction of manpower in the fields could shut down the machine and the southern economy. One of the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, likened the dilemma to holding a wolf by the ears; you didn’t want to hold on, but you didn’t dare let it go, either.
Through my research, I found that the uniqueness of the participation of people of African descent in this colossal crossroads was a complicated issue, disconcerting to all. However, as the war trudged on, in the end, the personal sacrifice of every soldier, white and black, helped weave together the fabric of a war that finally led us back to the original pursuit of one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Within the boundaries of the Vicksburg National Military Park one can drive by over 1000 monuments and markers honoring the participation of citizens of these now United States of America. In none of them will the visitor see a black man. This monument would singularly change that for all time.
For those African Americans today who are consciously aware of Augustus St. Gaudens’ Shaw Memorial to the 54th Massachusetts and the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum in Washington, DC, they are most likely also aware of the lack of any National Military Park Monument honoring their forefathers. For them and for those unaware of such a void, this memorial should become personal, a feather in the cap of dignity and respect so long struggled for. The black Union soldier, Christian Fleetwood, expressed the intimate nature of the honor to fight when he said, “This year has brought about many changes that at the beginning would have been thought impossible. The close of the year finds me a soldier for the cause of my race. May God bless the cause and enable me in the coming year to forward it on.”
In association with the Vicksburg Campaign, fierce fighting occurred at Milliken’s Bend, where the courage and valor of a race of men long oppressed was made clear to men of both armies through the actions of the colored troops in combat. A Union officer expressed it best in his report of the skirmish.
“After it was over, many men were found dead with bayonet stabs. And others with their skulls broken open by butts of muskets . . . the bravery of the blacks at Milliken’s Bend completely revolutionized the sentiment of the army with regard to the employment of Negro troops.”