Elizabeth Catlett at the Bronx Museum

Jenn and I had never been to the Bronx Museum before, but last night we journeyed there on the surprisingly speedy D train for a chance to see Elizabeth Catlett, the sculptor and printmaker who turned 96 this month.

We were disappointed to find a sign at the front desk to say that Catlett couldn’t be there, but we were well compensated by a panel discussion including three of the 21 artists whose work is featured alongside Catlett’s—Sanford Biggers, Renee Cox, and Xaviera Simmons—and by the opportunity to wander through the galleries. Among the most striking pieces for me were Catlett’s terra-cotta head Elvira, and a wild collage called Lizard Love by the Kenyan artist Wangechi Mutu (whose work is discussed at Divia’s Blog).

Strangely, the Bronx Museum’s website doesn’t feature any images from the show (not that I can find), but a generous assortment of photos, and a thoughtful discussion of the exhibit, are available at Sherry Howard’s site Auction Finds.

The Power Broker

After more than a thousand pages, I am nearing the end of The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, a book I have been meaning to read for more than 30 years.

I had thought that I would learn a lot about Robert Moses and the modern history of New York State and New York City, and I have. I also expected that the book would be a bit of a slog—and in that I was wrong. It is a mark of the energy of this book that I will be a little sorry to come to the end. In its clarity, its erudition, its character drawing, and its flashes of emotion, it reminds me of The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes.

The Power Broker would have been a great reading experience years ago, but now that I have spent more than a decade in New York City, it becomes much richer. I have been to Inwood Hill Park, and was startled to see that a highway built by Robert Moses cuts through what is still billed as the only unspoiled indigenous forest in Manhattan. I’ve spent time looking out from Battery Park, and shudder to think that Robert Moses nearly succeeded in demolishing historic Castle Clinton and covering the park with a highway overpass. I’ve been to the site of the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, one of Moses’ last great projects, and seen the Unisphere standing in the rather bleak surroundings of what was meant to be one of his greatest parks.

I knew that Robert Moses had reshaped Long Island and much of New York City for the benefit of drivers, so when I decided one day that I would like to walk across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, I was not too surprised to find that the bridge had been built by Moses without pedestrian access. But I didn’t know until reading this book that Moses himself never learned to drive.

Though Moses was unquestionably a ruthless, arrogant bastard, he Got Things Done, as Caro puts it. The Power Broker dramatically conveys the almost impossible technical challenges of, for instance, threading the Cross-Bronx Expressway through a densely populated borough and across or under existing highways, water mains, and railroad lines.

But, especially in the chapter “One Mile,” Caro underlines the human cost of his subject’s success. Time and again—as when he sacrificed the neighborhood of East Tremont rather than reroute the expressway by two blocks—Moses added to that cost through stubbornness and vindictiveness.

Asked why he demolished the valuable clubhouse of the Columbia yacht club after taking it over for the city, he replied, “Because they were rude to me.”

Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou

There are certain books that I’ve had on the shelves for years and still haven’t gotten around to reading. In some cases (The Hour of Our Death, The Graves Are Not Yet Full, Escape from Sobibor) it’s because the subject matter is a little ... heavy.

In other cases, as with my hardcover copy of A Suitable Boy, the book itself is too heavy. When I’m reading a book, I like to carry it around with me until it’s done. In fact, much of my reading is done while clinging to a pole on the C train. With certain books, like A Suitable Boy, this is awkward to do, and with others, like The Satanic Verses, it seems inadvisable.

I did finally accept the challenge of hauling around A Suitable Boy until I had finished reading it, and was glad I did. But I thought it would be a long time, maybe forever, before I read Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, the massive and beautifully produced volume created to accompany an ambitious museum exhibit mounted by UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 1995.

It turns out that the Christmas break is the perfect time to read this book. I have blocks of time to devote to it, and especially since a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow on the city, no reason to go anywhere. Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou looks like a coffee-table book, and in fact it would be well worth having just to go through the photos and their captions. There are numerous images of vodou flags, sequined bottles, paintings, sculptures, and complete vodou altars from Brooklyn to West Africa to Haiti itself. But there are also in-depth essays by many authorities on Haitian vodou, including Karen McCarthy Brown, Laënnec Hurbon, and Donald Cosentino, the editor of the book.

I have a long-standing interest in Haiti, and in 1996 I traveled there on a vodou-oriented tour organized by Global Exchange. Halfway through this book I was regretting that I never got to see the exhibit it’s based on. Then I realized that I did see it. This was the same show that appeared at the American Museum of Natural History from October 1998 to January 1999, and that I made a special trip from Cambridge to see (about a year and half before Jenn and I moved to New York.)

The museum still has pages on its website devoted to the show, and for anyone who wants to plunge into the book and isn’t already familiar with the difference between the rada and petwo rites and the various manifestations of Ezili and Ogou, they make a useful introduction. 

The Whipping Man

We now interrupt Pepys Week to let you know about The Whipping Man, a play by Matthew Lopez that premieres next month at the Manhattan Theatre Club.

Tonight, thanks to an invitation from our friend Marcia Pendelton at Walk Tall Girl Productions, Jenn and I were invited to a preview of the play, including a read-through of a scene from the first act and a Q&A with the playwright, director, and cast, which includes Andre Braugher, Andre Holland, and Jay Wilkison.

Jenn and I are long-time fans of Andre Braugher, having enjoyed his work in Glory, Homicide, and House (and even The Mist). Jenn couldn’t come last night, but I enjoyed the opportunity to see Braugher and the others in person and to get an early glimpse of what looks like an intriguing play.

The Whipping Man is set at the end of the Civil War. A Confederate soldier (Wilkison), the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant family, has returned to the family home in Richmond, a city that lies in ruins. He is severely wounded, his religious faith shaken. There he meets two of the family’s house slaves (Braugher and Holland), who take care of him. Each of them has been raised as a Jew. It is Passover, and Abraham Lincoln has not yet been assassinated.

What follows is apparently an exploration of the meaning of freedom. Lest this seem too philosophical, director Doug Hughes promised tension and drama, including (he repeated as if were a particular selling point) an onstage amputation. As the Times wrote, reviewing an earlier production in New Jersey, “Anyone who tends to faint at the sight of blood may want to arrive late for performances at Luna Stage for the next several weeks.”

I had thought that the title of The Whipping Man referred to a scapegoat—a whipping boy who is grown up but still taking punishment. Hughes explained that in fact it refers to the man that urban slaveholders would rely on (in the absence of a plantation overseer) to outsource the job of whipping their slaves. This man is apparently significant to the play, but thankfully (unlike the amputation) remains offstage.

Swords & Roses

Now and then while reading about American literature of the 1920s, I’ve run across references to Joseph Hergesheimer, often mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway and Fitzgerald. And in used bookstores I’ve sometimes seen old copies of his novel Java Head.

My curiosity finally overcame my inertia enough to look into who this man was. According to Wikipedia, “Hergesheimer’s reputation fluctuated wildly in his own lifetime, from a peak of acclaim and popularity in the 1920s to almost total obscurity by the time of his death.... Tastes changed decisively in the 1930s ... with both critics and writers favoring a more terse, tough-guy style.”

But remarkably, “When asked in 1962 what was his favourite American novel, Samuel Beckett replied ‘one of the best I ever read was Hergesheimer’s Java Head‘.” (For a thoughtful piece on Hergesheimer and the difference between flowery writing and writing that is simply bad, see The Simpleton.)

The New York and Brooklyn libraries don’t have any copies of Java Head that can be checked out, but Brooklyn was able to find me a copy of Swords & Roses, published by Knopf in 1929. I had thought this was a collection of short stories about the Civil War, but instead it’s a work of nonfiction: a kind of love letter to the Confederacy, featuring mini-biographies of figures like Generals Johnston, Beauregard, and Jeb Stuart, as well as Confederate naval hero John Newland Maffitt.

The first essay, “The Deep South,” gives a hint of why Hergesheimer was admired for his descriptive writing, and why Clifton Fadiman said he was “deficient in mere brain-power.” Hergesheimer is describing the great plantation houses of the antebellum South.

There were excessively fine houses, houses with the woodwork, the stair rails, of rosewood; with marble columns and classic ballrooms, elaborate marble mantels and Florentine mosaics; with all the door knobs and window catches and light brackets run from pure silver.... The wells were so deep that the water, drawn in a cedar bucket, was cold as ice water. Perishable food was lowered into them. The wells were haunted, they were the subject of negro legend; but the legends were all beneficent; when the slaves slowly drew up the water they commonly sang. Their songs and the sound of the winding chains were a part of the early spring morning. There were dippers at the wells—gourds for the negroes, beautifully wrought silver for white people. The negroes, it is conceivable, were not more unhappy than the whites; they were negroes, remember, on plantations, in the country; in a country that was seldom cold. They worked in the fields, or in the house, and slept in small cabins. They were, within the rigid fact of their slavery, free—they had no responsibility, they had no debts, and when they were old they were safe: they cleaned the ornamental brasses, they tended the making of tallow candles, polished and filled the lamps, and with soft cloths rubbed brilliant the cut prisms, the teardrop prisms and the pendentive prisms of the girandoles and crystal chandeliers.

Not bad, right? Who wouldn’t want to be a slave when you could drink ice-cold well water from a gourd, and polish the pendentive prisms of the girandoles with a soft cloth?