some dreams hang in the air
like smoke. some dreams
get all in your clothes and
be wearing them more than you do and
you be half the time trying to
hold them and half the time
trying to wave them away.
their smell be all over you and
they get to your eyes and
you cry. the fire be gone
and the wood but some dreams
hang in the air like smoke
touching everything
—Lucille Clifton, “Untitled”
In 1989, Beverly was gathering. Discarded wooden materials made up the bones of her shack portraits, the stories surrounding them like flesh. A burnt triptych titled Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars) comes alive through her written word:
Like burnt clothing, remains carry the smell of danger past and present. Covering or patching (houses or garments) does not remove the memory. These structures, after being painted, were set on fire, left to burn and to be extinguished by friends.
These shacks are a metaphor for what, then as now, was a tactic for enforced despair . . . despair from without. Those of us up in Greensboro in 1961–62 faced a different force. Instead of fire and blood, there was wood and bats-with-nails-sunk-into-flesh.
There was blood-and-flesh and wood. These are a tribute to the still strong spirit and to memories of that spirit in spite of blood and flesh and wood and fire.
This excerpt accompanying Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars) references the artist’s undergraduate years at Bennett College as a student organizer, specifically pointing to the racial violence Beverly and her peers experienced while participating in civil rights protests.
Various tensions gather at the fire—the sculptures as a memorial with scars, the physiognomy of racial violence in their charred wood. But also, the structural representation of survival. Trauma’s stubborn odor, its saturation, unmovable, at odds with the suffused flow of student movement and political organization. Smell’s felt memory, the way an odor can bring a moment back to life. And still, the fleshiness of brutal force, the fleshiness of sculpture—how did it feel to hold the hammer in her hand, to hit the nail on its head, to build a house out of tools that had once been used to attack her and her friends? How did it feel to burn the house, to hold, at once, ruin and ritual in her palms—to come to the realization that, whether deliberate terrorist attack or unintended fire, the remains still smelled the same?1
Three Families could also be three incidents, three incidents could also be three generations. The piece creates ritual from “the speculative knowledge of freedom”—shifting the frame from “despair from without” to hope from beyond, to echo Saidiya Hartman.2 The smell of danger past and present, the embodied nature of that fear, becomes much like the stayed, ever-abiding imagination that’s persisted throughout and beyond the material conditions of slavery. Beverly doesn’t lay waste to material substance, but she does refuse its glory. There is a deeper knowing present here, a recognition that relics carry past lives, that the wreckage beneath and before is often insurmountable. She has come to learn through lived experience, that what is here today, could be gone tomorrow.
Abstracting the embodied memory of the wooden shacks and her written text, less than a year after the burnings on Pine Forest Drive, where the artist lived, and worked, and staged these art-making processes, Beverly created a portrait of three red shacks, using oil pastel on paper. Titled Three Families, the work reads like a two-dimensional presentation of multiple, coexisting temporalities collapsed across space. Moving from left to right, the shacks seem to grow progressively more burned. The red exterior paint appears brightest in the leftmost dwelling, charred black streaks alluding to the shape of a window or a front door consumed by flames. Beverly envelops the shack next to it with dark striations, the red undercoat producing a spectral, emberish glow. She smudges the third house with a bluish-gray film, simulating smoke’s evanescence. Oil pastel melts the structure’s edges, transfusing thick coats of pigment across thin outlines. Here, the red paint is a darker hue, resembling deoxygenated blood. Across the three shacks, the compositional fabric comes undone, the lines less resolute. Beverly reproduces the burnings in pastel, a performance in three acts.
In all iterations, the spirit resides. Beverly uses soot and ash as metaphors for the inextricable nature of this spirit—it cannot be removed, even once the object is gone, the scent lingers. The terror cannot take it away. To remove a burning, you must burn it again. Water extinguishes—it does not erase.
Encountering Beverly Buchanan’s archive, an immersive impulse characterizes my looking. I submerse myself in her photographs and drawings, her handwriting and typescript. There is a luminous self-awareness to Beverly’s writings: her self-proclaimed legends and less formal field notes are reflective and clarifying. She writes her own captions as if to lay claim to her intellectual property. Ever conscious that a document could outlive her, Beverly imprints the object with her own contextualizing signification. The narration allows her voice to become the loudest in our heads. These legends, field notes, stories, jottings, lists, and other forms exist in vibrant dialogues with each other and other writers. Multiple articulations of an idea or process produce a robust aliveness that increases in volume with every attempt. It is hard to unhear her.
I want to go as far as to say that Beverly was conscious of the inevitable before even beginning. The inevitable being the end. Living with multiple chronic conditions; having undergone frequent hospitalizations; earning her master’s degrees in parasitology and public health; working as a public health educator in East Orange, New Jersey, before moving to Georgia—she was no stranger to mortality or the social determinants of health. And what is it to become an expert in your own illnesses, to be equipped with the training to self-diagnose, to experience the health system as student, as scientist, as sick?
I watch a two-hour, unedited video recording by fellow Athenian artist Judith McWillie, shared by curators Mo Costello and Katz Tepper. Beverly Buchanan, Athens, Ga., July 8, 1995 features Beverly at her Athens residence on Boulevard, often seated in conversation with Judith, as they discuss an array of topics spanning their shared interest in Southern vernacular art forms. In response or in passing, Beverly often brings Judith’s attention to the possibility of loss.
Because it’s like, you know, last week I had bronchitis and you know, it’s like, you can be here today and not here tomorrow. Or it could be bulldozed with all the stuff for the Olympics happening with all the roads and land being sold so fast. It could not be there next week.
The passage elucidates Beverly’s tenderness with time as the precarity of her own aging body becomes enmeshed with the precarity of a rapidly developing Georgian landscape. Threats of loss make one precious, brood their own unique sensibilities. My interpretation of the above quote sees Beverly condensing anatomical and terrestrial forms, evincing kinship between respiratory inflammation and land degradation with an embodied urgency. She locates the poetic substance of breath as her words become absorbed into the process’s variant frequencies: the shifting materiality of air as it enters the pulmonary organs’ swelled interstices, like a forest mowed down, its oxygenic byproduct depleted. Each survival depends on the other. In this way, the earth’s damaged lungs are representative of a body whose decline has grown, ever so slowly, out of control.
What I mean by disappearing, she warns: if we see it one day, it might not be there next week.
Judith follows her lead, telling a story: It was mud all the way up above our knees, it was like quicksand and so we couldn’t get all the way out there, and then within, I guess, six weeks it was gone . . .
Beverly: Gone
. . . flat.
Judith is describing her last trip to Vesta, to the woods that held a brush arbor dwelling built by Ms. Mary Lou Furcron, an elder whom Beverly first met in the late eighties en route to Washington, Georgia. Ms. Furcron had built her home by hand without using any nails. But after the architect suffered a stroke, she was brought to live in a nursing home in 1989. Judith learned that the area that had once held Ms. Furcron’s beloved brush had been bulldozed, likely in 1994—the dwelling returned to the mud that bore it.
Beverly often created miniature versions of the vernacular homes she came across on her long rides through Georgia’s backcountry. She made a structure titled Tribute to Mary Lou Furcron on the same day that she met Furcron—the elder woman’s architecture inciting Beverly’s own making. To echo Rhea Anastas, Beverly’s art and writing indicate that she aimed to do more than merely reference the material histories of rural Southern life.3 Her work features loving reflections on the people who embodied these landscapes to her.
At the end of the anecdotal text narrating her sculpture for Ms. Furcron, Beverly types, “I miss her more than she knows.”
_____
The world of the encountered often flickers into the world of the imagined, similar to how posthumous encounters incite the speculative. As a researcher, Beverly was in tune with the afterlives of a place and its people. An object was never just what it was, but a measure of the forces at work around and through it—nothing ever existed in a vacuum.
In an undated notebook entry Beverly writes, “Remembering the look and feel of structures has been a strong focus in my drawings and sculptures. My vision and interest shifted to the reality of current places and their surrounding landscape. . . . Capturing the essence and something of the look and feel of now versus then is not easy. I want to continue to develop this idea now of memory versus reality. I hope that you can help me try.” I am thinking about her usage of direct address, the diaristic form as self-referential but also divining. So much of my time spent with Beverly’s archive has been about parsing through its mediation of her work, how the memory or print of an image is a vision of an object, not its exact reproduction. And here, it is as if the artist speaks to me from the afterlife, distilling the collaborative nature of this labor, revealing how the work I am trying to do is aligned with her own mission.
I used to come to the archive in search of a hidden truth or for demonstrable evidence of another’s lived reality, some proven fact to hold onto. I reified the space for its authenticated documents, fueled by a lust for signatures, often forgetting that these findings were conjectural. There it is: conjecture, from Latin roots, meaning “to throw together,” also from Late Middle English, “to divine.” There is a divination inherent to archive. It can be a place that conceives miracles, that allows me, for a moment, to speak to the dead. One of the first questions that the archive asks is “Do you believe in angels?” Some may call them ghosts. “But,” Toni Morrison chides, “memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of imagination can help me.”4
Reading about wonder, Katherine McKittrick speaks into this slippage: “Because some scholarly work demands that results be expressed in colonial time and space, the unidentifiable is cast aside. The unidentifiable is the imagination. It’s also embodiment, not bodies, embodiment. It’s also affect, experience, relation, and more.”5 The poetics of Black being, this Black aliveness, encapsulates the inability to rely on material substance in the wake of Black death, because there will always be some essence just out of reach.6 That essence materializes through imagination, from myriad associations that glint and wink with time. Scholars working in the realm of Morrison’s “unspeakable things unspoken” do not refuse the unidentifiable—we embrace it.7
_____
On a small cluster of notepaper, I scan Beverly’s compiled list titled “literary influences.” I imagine the gusts of insight as she jotted the writers down, recalling the first time she learned an author’s name or read one of their works. On the second sheet, she scribbled “Langston Hughes,” along with a parenthetical note that she met him while studying at Bennett. And there I am, imagining still, the space between her paper and the first page of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton, “5/23/67 R.I.P”—
The house that is on fire
pieces all across the sky
make the moon look like
a yellow man in a veil
watching the troubled people running and crying
Oh who gone remember now like
it was,
Langston gone.
In her foreword to the book, Aracelis Girmay elucidates how Clifton’s writing channels a “constellatory thinking where everything is kin.” My mention of Clifton and Hughes in conversation with Beverly’s work follows this speculative instinct, fulfilling a desire to situate two women inspired by smoke in con-versation, to envision a home ablaze amidst a great cloud of witnesses, licked flames “mak[ing] the moon look like a yellow man in a veil.” Girmay offers:
The poem is an attempt to remember a community’s loss while simultaneously marking the impossibility of that record ever being precise enough. The decision to begin the Selected here carried a few hopes. I wanted to mark Clifton’s documentary sensibility and a strange, triple-eyed imagery where the moon, for example, looks like a yellow man in a veil, a mourner among mourners, but also watching, like, maybe a poet. A poet like Langston, a poet like Ms. Lucille.
A poet like Beverly.
“The house that is on fire,” as an opening line joins in chorus with Beverly’s Three Families (A Memorial Piece with Scars), and her 1991 performance of the work Out of Control, staged in the backyard of her home on Pine Forest Drive and documented initially as a postcard. Lucille’s question, “who gone remember now like it was,” resounds with the artist’s cautionary notes on disappearing, as illuminated earlier in the 1995 conversation with Judith McWillie. To write materializes as another means to preserve, to capture the essence and “remember now like it was.” But like Beverly, Lucille recognized the profound sense of care required in order to render what once was, a precision sharp as a poet.
The “documentary sensibility” Girmay notices is ever-present in the thorough representation of Beverly’s burning. Incorporating the images into a twelve-month calendar titled Out of Control at the turn of the century, the artist narrates the visuals with effectively brief captioning. I find small miracles in her script:
January—Robert Mathis yellow root house in the background.
September—Two are burning up—Slow down!—
Hand me the hose—somebody!
December—Just enough—Just in time,
helpers watched. That’s what helpers—do—.
Ok. 3 burned shacks. (Almost 3 burned down shacks)
——THE END—
In their brevity, Beverly’s notes recount the affect surrounding Out of Control, painting the artist’s thoughts with kind humor and genius. She kept her voice, which is to also say she maintained her imagination. I recall Barbara Christian saying, “I can only speak for myself. But what I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life.”8 I believe a similar impetus, that is, to survive, is why Beverly wrote, annotated, storied, recorded, captioned. I’ll never know if she felt like her body or her diagnoses were progressing out of her control, if she saw herself in the house aflame, if life for her was slowly becoming unrecognizable. I imagine, though, that her urge to document, to carry the present into the future, and “develop this idea now of memory versus reality” emanated from the inside out. That, in leaving us these objects to understand life as she lived it, she found a way to save herself. Even from the archive, I encounter Beverly’s voice as one that speaks in retrospect, rendering reality as if it were past for the future. She gently brings our attention to the substances, sentiments, and situations that we might (and still may) otherwise deem unidentifiable or irrelevant. We would not know, without her.
To interact with the residue of Beverly’s making is to also remember that archives exist in ongoing processes of ruination—they exist in relation and, like us, they become undone by it, too, retold or flattened by anecdote or a changed street name. Something else existed before the thing you thought you found: its predecessors. Archives possess lineages. There is more than we will ever know, there are losses we didn’t even know could be grieved. Whatever remains propels us to imagine, as if our lives depend on it.
How do you swim in an elder’s memory? isn’t a question driven by the contested possibility of the act. It pertains to method and movement. It is, rather, a prompt swelling with inspiration, but also weighted with the reality of human impulse. Rarely, to the limits of my own knowledge, do writers ask ourselves what we owe the people who produce the archives we seek after. I’m thinking of that quote from Beloved, Paul D speaking of Sethe: “She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” This is my prayer, that I will do right by the women whose embodied wisdom raised me. To be, if nothing else, a friend of their minds. Imagining the possibility of our communion someday, I offer this meditation as one attempt at gathering.
_____
1. In 1979, Beverly Buchanan created a site-specific commission for the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Macon, Georgia. She called the public sculpture Ruins and Rituals, situating the work across three different areas on the land surrounding the museum.
2. Saidiya Hartman, “The Hold of Slavery,” New York Review of Books, 24 October 2022, nybooks.com/online/2022/10/24/the-hold-of-slavery-hartman.
3. See Rhea Anastas, “Beverly Buchanan,” Artforum 55:5, January 2017, artforum.com/events/beverly-buchanan-3-226835/.
4. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 238.
5. Katherine McKittrick, “Curiosities, Wonder, and Black Methodologies,” Dean’s Forum Inclusion + Equity Lecture, University of Virginia School of Architecture, 14 September 2020, youtube.com/watch?v=68gIZJPt7rY.
6. Evoking the scholarship of Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being (2021), and Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016) here.
7. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” Turner Lecture on Human Values, University of Michigan, 7 October 1988.
8. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique, 6 (Spring 1987): 61, https://doi.org/10.2307/1354255.
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