We Are Water. Wally Lamb
what was before you?” Miss Arnofsky asks. “Can you describe what you saw?”
“Well, he had no understanding of perspective; that was immediately apparent. Many of the figures that populated his paintings were out of proportion. He knew nothing about the technique of chiaroscuro; there was no play between shadow and light in any of his samples. Nevertheless, he had an intuitive sense of design and a wonderful feeling for vivid color. His subject matter—cowboys and Indians, jugglers and jungle animals, tumbling waterfalls, women naked or barely clothed—possessed all the characteristics of the modern primitive. Yet each gave evidence of a unique vision. And Josephus Jones was indeed a narrative painter; his pictures suggested stories that celebrated the rustic life but warned of sinister forces that lurked in the bushes and behind the trees.
“I called Angus Skloot, who told me where Joe was working that day. And so I carried his box of paintings out to my car and drove to the building site. Joe introduced me to his brother, Rufus; the two were building a massive stone fireplace inside the unfinished house. I suggested we talk outside so that I could deliver the good news about his artistic talent.
“He must have been thrilled to receive it,” my guest says.
“No, quite the contrary. He was unsurprised, unsmiling; it was as if he already knew what I had to tell him. I asked him how long he’d been painting. About three years, he said. Told me he’d begun the day he awoke from a dream about a beautiful naked woman riding on the back of a lion. He had grabbed a carpenter’s pencil and a piece of wood, he said, so that he could draw his dream before it faded away like fog. He wanted to remember it, but he wasn’t sure why. All that day, he said, he thought about the woman astride the lion. And so, at the end of his workday, he got permission from Mr. Skloot to take some of the almost-empty cans from the paint shed. Then he’d gone home and painted what he had first dreamt and then sketched out. He said he had been painting ever since. I handed him back his box of paintings and he placed it on the ground between us. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ I said. He looked suspicious, I remember. Asked me what it was I wanted to know. ‘Whatever you want to tell me,’ I said.”
“And what did he want to tell you?” Miss Arnofsky asks. “I realize that this was years ago, but it would be helpful to me if you can recall it as accurately as possible.”
It’s strange what happens next. When a painting I’m working on becomes my singular focus—when I am “in the zone,” as I’ve heard people put it—a trancelike state will sometimes overtake me. And now it’s happening not with my art but with my memory. Seated across from me, Miss Arnofsky fades away and the past becomes more alive than the present …
Joe scuffs his work boot against the ground and takes his time thinking about it. “Well, my granddaddy on my daddy’s side was a slave on a Virginia tobacco farm and my grams was a free woman.” After the emancipation, they moved up to Chicago and his grandfather got work in the stockyards. His mother’s people were third-generation Chicagoans, he says. “Mama washed rich ladies’ hair during the week at a fancy hotel beauty parlor downtown, and on weekends she preached in the colored church. My daddy worked in the stockyards at first, like his daddy did. But sledgehammerin’ cows between the eyes to get them ready for slaughter give him the heebie-jeebies, so he quit. Got work at a brickyard and become a mason—a damn good one, too. When me and Rufus was thirteen and fourteen, Daddy started bringing us along on jobs, and that was how we learnt to work with stone and mortar ourselfs.” His father was a better mason than he is, Joe says, but Rufus is better than both of them. “He a artist uses a trowel and ce-ment instead of a paintbrush is what Mr. Skloot told him,” Joe says, smiling broadly. “And thass about right, too.”
I ask him how long he’s lived in Three Rivers. Since 1953, he says, and when I tell him that was the year my family and I moved here, too, his eyes widen, then slowly lock onto mine. He nods knowingly, as if our having arrived in Three Rivers at the same time is more about fate than coincidence.
Both of his parents had passed by then, he tells me, and Rufus had just gotten out of the navy. He urged Joe to come east because he had a plan. They would get good jobs at the shipyard in Groton, helping to build America’s first nuclear submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus. But the shipbuilders had shied away from hiring coloreds, fearing repercussions and race baiting from their white workers. “So we took whatever jobs we could find. Worked tobacco up in Hartford, worked at a sawmill, dug graves. We took masonry jobs when we could find them, which was just this side of never. The luckiest day of our life was the day Mr. Skloot come to visit his sister’s stone at the cemetery up in Willimantic,” he says. “Rufus and me was digging a grave two plots down, and he come over and the three of us got to talking. Mr. Skloot’s face lit up when we told him we was gravediggers for right now but masons, mostly. He said he’d just fired his mason for being drunk on the job. Well, sir, by the time he got back in that big ole black Oldsmobile of his and drove away, we had us jobs with Skloot Builders. We was spoze to be on trial for a month so Mr. Skloot could see what kind of work we done, and if we was hard workers and dependable, and didn’t get liquored up. But we got hired permanent after just the first week because Mr. Skloot liked what he seed us do—well, Rufus’s work more than mines, but mines, too.”
Mr. Skloot is the best boss he’s ever had, Joe says. When I ask him why, he says, “Because he pay good and he kind. Lets us live out back on his property, and he don’t even care that Rufus got hisself a white wife. Rufe married his gal when he was stationed over in Europe and brung her over here after we was working steady. She Dutch.” Joe touches his work boot to the box at his feet. “I got other paintings at the house, you know. Lots of ’em. If you like these ones, maybe you want to see those ones, too.” I tell him I do and arrange to meet him at his home at six o’clock that same evening.
The house is a small cottage at the back of the Skloots’ property. Following Joe’s instructions, I drive down the Skloots’ driveway, then inch my car over a rutted path out back until I get to a brook. I park and get out, then cross the brook by way of two bowed two-by-six planks that have been placed over it. A thin white woman—Joe’s brother’s Dutch wife, I figure—is outside, hanging clothes in just her slip. When I ask her if Josephus is home, she sticks out her thumb and points it toward the door. Before I can knock, it swings open and Jones invites me in.
The place is filthy. It reeks of stale cooking odors and cat urine, and there is clutter everywhere. A fat calico cat is asleep on the kitchen table amidst dirty dishes, old magazines, and an ash tray brimming with stubbed-out cigarettes. The floor beneath my shoes feels gritty. Josephus’s paintings are everywhere: stacked against walls and windowsills, atop a refrigerator whose door is kept shut with electrical tape. There are more paintings scattered across the mattress on the floor and on the dropped-down Murphy bed. “What’s this one called?” I ask Joe, pointing to a female figure in a two-piece bathing suit standing in a field of morning glories, parakeets alighting on her head and outstretched arms.
“That one there? Thass Parakeet Girl.” When I pick it up for a closer look, the roaches hiding beneath it scuttle for cover.
But housekeeping is beside the point. I look closely at every work he shows me, overwhelmed by both his output and his raw talent. I’m there for hours. Some of his paintings are more successful than others, of course, but even the lesser efforts display an exotic, unschooled charm and that bold use of color. Before I leave, I offer him a show at the Statler. He accepts. When I get home, I tell my wife that I may have just discovered a major new talent.
But “Josephus Jones: An American Original” is a flop. The local paper, which is usually supportive of our museum shows, declines to publish either a feature story or a review. At the opening, instead of the usual two hundred or so, fewer than twenty people attend. Not even Angus and Ethel Skloot have come; they are on holiday in Florida. It’s painful to watch the Jones brothers scuff the toes of their shined shoes against the gallery’s hardwood floor and eye the entranceway with fading hope. Both have purchased sharp double-breasted suits for this special occasion, and Rufus’s Dutch-born wife has apparently bought new clothes, too: a sparkly, low-cut cocktail frock more suitable for an evening at a New York supper club than a Sunday afternoon art opening in staid Three Rivers, Connecticut.