You could tell he was getting back to work when the drinking stopped and the partying stopped. Sitting in anxious silence—he hated being alone, but spiritually he was always alone—he would place a pad of lined yellow paper in his notebook and, with his strong, decent hand, begin to write down the world that honored his imagination and his dead.
The Dead Were Always With Owen – Owen Dodson, poet, theater maker and former Howard University professor who pioneered James Baldwin's first play, The Amen Corner, in 1955. (Howard's theater department was reluctant to do this because Baldwin's characters spoke “Black English” at a time when the target was the Mid-Atlantic, but Dodson did it anyway.)
This was long before I met Dodson, in the early seventies, when I was fourteen. We were introduced by a woman he had known since elementary school in Brooklyn—now a schoolteacher who worked with my mother and who, like my mother, believed that I had a future as a writer. Soon after this, Dodson invited me to his home to pick up some books he wanted to give; Over time, our relationship changed, and my casual benefactor became my complex mentor. I spent a lot of time after school in his beautifully furnished apartment on West Fifty-first Street and learned a lot there. I saw things that I had previously only seen in books or in my imagination: beautiful Cocteau drawings, Victorian sofas, free-standing candelabra straight out of a nineteenth-century play. Dodson also had an extensive collection of art and photography books, including a first edition of Henri Cartier-Bresson'sDecisive moment” and a book about a photographer I'd never heard of before, a man with a Dutch name: James Van Der Zee.
“Van Der Zee's People, Lenox, Massachusetts,» 1908.
called “The World of James Van Derzee“, a book that was published in 1969 and included a significant number of Van der Zee's photographs of early twentieth-century black Americans, had a cover that captivated me as much as the image of Matisse's collage on the cover of the Cartier-Bresson volume. Van der Zee's cover showed four smartly dressed black men in derby sports. Three of them were wearing bow ties, and the fourth was an older gentleman with impressive gray hair. moustache, tie and waistcoat, pocket watch tucked in. I didn't get the feeling that these men were dressing up for the camera; rather, they were showing the beauty of casual formality. The photograph was sepia-toned, but even through this grid I could see the ease that the men felt when they were together – a lightness that I had never felt.
I wanted to know everything about these people. (Only later did I discover that it was a portrait of Van der Zee, his brothers and their father.) With regard to painting and drawing, one first wants to know something about the artist; in photography, the subject is the decoy. The best photographers frame their images with a kind of amazed humility: Look at this! What Van der Zee wanted us to see in this photograph, as in all the photographs I saw of him at the time, was how the spectacular and the mundane could exist in the same frame, and how interested he was in all of this, even the dead.
