They made Clementine Hunter use the back door to see her own paintings. White folks walked in the front of that Louisiana gallery in 1955 to admire her work on the walls, while she got led around the back like hired help.
She had painted every single one of those pictures with her own hands. Good enough for the wall, not the door.
A window shade has one job. It covers a window so the people outside cannot see in.
In Louisiana, around 1939, a woman in her early fifties pulled one of those shades flat and painted the first picture of her life across it.
Her name was Clementine Hunter. She could not read or write, she had picked cotton for nearly half a century, and her paintings now hang in the Smithsonian.
She was born on Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, somewhere around Christmas of 1886. Nobody wrote down the date, because nobody with the power to record it thought a Black child on a cotton plantation was worth the ink.
Her grandparents had been enslaved on land just like it. Her parents worked those same rows from first light until they could no longer see the bolls.
There was a schoolhouse, and she went to it for about ten days.
Then the fields took her, and they did not give her back.
She would remain unable to read a single word for all 101 years of her life.
For roughly fifty years she picked cotton under that sun, bent double, the long sack dragging behind her and growing heavier with every handful.
She said it plainly, late in her life, into a historian's tape recorder. Three hundred and fifty pounds a day, dragging her sack from eight in the morning to five in the evening, for fifty cents a hundred pounds.
She raised her children right there between the rows. "I take my babies to the field, put them under a tree and put the water there and put their food there," she said, "and I be working."
"Some people make out like now they got to have babysitters," she said. "I ain't."
"I got mine in the field."
By the 1930s she had come to Melrose Plantation, cooking in the big house for a woman named Cammie Henry.
Melrose itself had been built generations earlier by Marie Thérèse Coincoin, an African woman born enslaved who won her freedom and raised an estate along the Cane River. By the time Clementine stood in its kitchen, it had passed into white hands and become a retreat where white writers and painters came to make art while Black hands cooked and cleaned.
One of those visitors was a New Orleans painter named Alberta Kinsey. When Kinsey packed up to leave, she left her used tubes of paint behind, the way a person leaves anything they are finished with.
She had never held a brush, never taken a lesson, never set foot inside a museum.
One evening she carried those leftover tubes to François Mignon, the man who looked after the plantation's library and its art collection. She told him she believed she could make a picture of her own, if she set her mind to it.
He did not laugh at her. He went and found an old window shade, the kind made to keep the world from looking in, and put it in her hands.
She spread it flat and painted a baptism in the Cane River. People in white standing in the brown water, a preacher's hand resting on a bowed head, the congregation gathered on the bank to witness it.
The earliest ones like it sold for twenty-five cents apiece.
She could not afford canvas, so she painted on whatever the plantation threw out. Cardboard boxes, paper bags, scraps of lumber, snuff bottles, jar lids, soap cartons flattened open, and more window shades.
She painted at night, after the cooking and cleaning were finished and her husband was seen to. She said the pictures came to her in her sleep, and she would rise in the dark and mark them out with a pencil before they slipped away.
Her husband thought she had lost her mind. "My husband told me, you gotta be crazy, getting up at night fooling with a picture," she remembered.
She had her answer ready. "What God gave you, you ain't gonna go crazy," she told him.
She painted what she had lived and what she had watched her whole life.
Wash day under the trees, the big black pot, the cold-water soap her mother boiled down from lye and grease.
Cotton going into the sack, pecans gathered off the ground one at a time. Saturday nights at the honky-tonk, weddings, baptisms in the river, a funeral carried to church in a wagon, zinnias burning in the front yards.
"I paint the history of my people," she said. "The things that happened to me and to the ones I know."
When the art world first came to look, it brought its labels along. Primitive, they called it.
Naive. Folk art, said the people who decide such things, as if a woman painting her own world from memory were a child who had wandered into the wrong room.
She painted her angels with their hair streaming sideways, and when somebody asked why, she said it was simple. The angels were flying, so their hair was flying too.
By 1955 the world had begun to notice in spite of itself. That year the museum in New Orleans gave her a solo show, the first it had ever granted a Black artist in that city.
That same year, Northwestern State College, right there in Natchitoches, hung her paintings in its gallery. Her work was on the walls, framed and lit, and white visitors came filing in to look at it.
Clementine Hunter was not allowed to walk in the front with them. She was Black, the gallery was for white patrons, and so someone took her around the building and let her in through the back.
She stood in a room hung with her own pictures. Pictures she had made at night, on cardboard and window shades, after fifty years in the cotton.
And she had been slipped in the back door of the building to see them.
The paintings were welcome through the front. The woman whose hands had made them was not.
She did not get to choose which part of her the gallery wanted. It took the work and sent the worker around the back.
She did not stop. That same summer, while she was being walked through back doors, Mignon asked her for something far larger than a window shade.
He wanted her to cover the inside of the African House, a squat brick building on the plantation with a steep roof, with murals of the life she knew. Sheets of plywood began arriving at her cabin, some of them eight feet across.
She was sixty-eight years old.
She painted them through the thick heat of that summer, mostly at night, after the cooking and the cleaning were done.
When she finished, nine big panels carried her entire world across four walls. One of them was a map of the whole Cane River country, copied from a commemorative plate Mignon had given her, with cotton and pecans and churches set down as the three things that ran that valley.
There was cotton picking and wash day, a wedding, a funeral, the Saturday-night juke joint with its colors snapping like guitar strings. In one corner she painted a small figure of a woman holding a brush, herself, at work, in a world that would not yet call her an artist.
Those panels are still up there today. People climb the narrow stairs into the cool brick quiet of the African House and stand in front of them, the way you stand in any room that matters.
Thirty-one years after it walked her in the back door, that same school called her back.
In 1986, near a hundred years old, Clementine Hunter sat while Northwestern State, by then a university, placed an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts in her hands. She could not read one word of it, not the Latin, not her own name printed across the top.
She put on the robes anyway. She took the honor with the same plain steadiness she had carried through fifty years of cotton and forty of paint, and she did not pretend to be anyone other than who she was.
The same institution that had once decided she could not use its front door now rose to its feet and called her doctor.
She kept painting nearly to the end, in a small house and then a trailer, the board on her lap, no easel, the way she had always done it. She died on the first day of 1988, having lived 101 years.
She left behind thousands of paintings, by most counts well past five thousand, and perhaps closer to ten.
The first ones had gone for a quarter.
Today they hang in the New Orleans Museum of Art and in the Smithsonian, which holds more of her work in its African American history museum than that of any other single artist. The quarter-paintings now change hands for tens of thousands of dollars, and the same kind of institutions that once called her primitive line up to own her.
She saw almost none of it. She lived her whole life within about a hundred miles of the spot where she was born, and she never read a line of what the scholars wrote about her.
A window shade is built to keep people from seeing in. She took one, painted a baptism across it, and now strangers drive hundreds of miles, climb a set of attic stairs, and stand in a small brick room just to see what she saw.
turnnoffyourmind
dededos
theartofmadeline
titsay
2087
