Middle Passage: The Artistic Life of Lawrence Baker

By Louis B Burroughs, Jr

Lawrence Baker's Middle Passage is written in the tradition of western prose, in which a person reflects on influences and experiences in his life. Baker's world involved cultural, intellectual and social expectations pressing hard against negative racial stereotypes and reality. He came of age in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1960s, torn between relationships, school, the negative magnetism of the streets, and the impenetrable reticence of his mother, intent upon survival in her own unique manner. As a result, Baker left the south, seeking neither fame nor fortune, but a long absent father and educational opportunities. It was in Cleveland, Ohio, during the late 1960s that some degree of stability entered his life. There, with the aid of his father, he was able to pursue an education and become what he terms first "a man," and eventually an artist. His odyssey involves encountering and overcoming various obstacles, none more daunting than the inertia of race, family and an inadequate early education. This book not only asks plain questions about the connections between Baker's complex inner life and art, but also probes the relationship between African-American social and cultural development and the purpose and role of art. Therefore, Baker's life is the scaffolding, but the book does not stop with his thoughts and his experiences. It endeavors to show, through Baker, some of the underlying tensions between seeing and being seen, between what is and perhaps what should be and the myth and magic of art making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Louis B Burroughs, Jr
• Release date: Nov 30, 2013
• ISBN: 9780989185523

Louis B Burroughs, Jr

With family roots in Greensboro, Alabama, Louis B. Burroughs resides in Orange Village, Ohio, with wife Marlene Stoiber Burroughs. He was born in Cleveland and grew up in the Glenville neighborhood on the city’s east side. From his earliest years, he found himself sketching and drawing. A master’s degree in Urban Studies from Cleveland State University helped him hone research, analytic and writing skills. From a studio in the Art District of Cleveland, he has produced a body of paintings and sculptures. Middle Passage: The Artistic Life of Lawrence Baker is his first book. In summer, he spends time writing and painting at “Isla Calebra” (Snake Island) on Lake Nipissing in Lavigne, Ontario, Canada.

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Middle Passage: The Artistic Life of Lawrence Baker

By Louis B. Burroughs, Jr.

Published by Louis B. Burroughs Jr. at Smashwords

Copyright ©2013 (text only) Louis B. Burroughs Jr.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

With the exception of the main character, the artist Lawrence Baker, names, characters, places, and incidents in this book either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Artwork, graphics and photographs in this book are the property of Lawrence Baker. All rights reserved. Any resemblance to an actual person, living or dead, or events and locales is entirely coincidental and not by design. Images may not be reproduced in any format without the permission of the artist.

This book is available in print at www.louisburroughs.com

This book is dedicated to

Anita White Baker

A note, on how the book came into being:

Lawrence Baker gave the author the task of bringing a fresh perspective to the topic of art and to the details of his life, so that these would cohere. The book began as a ghostwritten autobiography, but several things happened. The book could not be completed under the original budget and time-frame. As autobiography it could not be written in the third person, and yet a distance was required when veering from actual facts and when artistic license was taken with characters, ideas, and events. Nevertheless, the book remained appropriately in the first person as if Baker were speaking directly to the reader. It was at this intersection, where fiction became life and life became fiction, that the original contract between the writer and the artist was changed. The ghostwriter became the author and the character's voice remained in the first person.

Artistic license allowed exaggeration and intensification in areas of the book where memory was lost, suppressed or repressed, for example, Lawrence Baker’s recollections of airplane flights to Cleveland, Ohio, as an infant with his father, the birth of his sisters and brother, and major civil rights events. This can be partially explained as the nature of childhood; but one must also remember that suppression of untoward memory and events was and still is an important survival mechanism for oppressed humans.

Any resemblance of the characters or events in the book to known individuals, other than the main character, the artist Lawrence Baker, or places he imagines is by accident and not by design. However, the original goal remains: to enhance the understanding of how artist Lawrence Baker communicates and connects with the world through art and thus how human experiences are communicated collectively to the world through visual images.

Table of Contents

Foreward

Acknowledgements by Artist, Lawrence Baker

Acknowledgements by Author, Louis B. Burroughs, Jr.

Part One

Chapter One - In the World of the Lie and the Turtle

Chapter Two - Geechee

Chapter Three - Nexus

Chapter Four- Sacrament and Souls

Chapter Five - A Boy in Jacksonville, Florida

Chapter Six - Caldonia, Caldonia, Why?

Chapter Seven - School Shoes and Sambo

Chapter Eight - Learning the Hard Way

Chapter Nine - Feel Black

Chapter Ten - Predator or Prey

Chapter Eleven - Manchild in Cinderella Land

Chapter Twelve - Jacksonville’s Ice Cubes in Hell

Chapter Thirteen - The Emerging Artist

Part Two

Chapter Fourteen - Cleveland Nothing to Lose

Chapter Fifteen - Second Son of Dogman Baker

Chapter Sixteen - The Massacre and the Matchmaker

Chapter Seventeen - From Melanie to Marriage Manifesto

Chapter Eighteen - Lost and Found Sibling and Funerals

Chapter Nineteen - From Medea to Canaries in the Mine

Chapter Twenty - Lawrence Baker, For Art’s Sake

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-One - Show, Tell and Teach

Chapter Twenty-Two - Must I Draw a Picture?

Epilogue

Conclusion

Artist’s Statement by Lawrence Baker

About Lawrence Baker

References

Photographs and Paintings by Lawrence Baker

Foreward

Lawrence Baker's Middle Passage is written in the tradition of western prose, in which a person reflects on influences and experiences in his life. Baker's world involved cultural, intellectual and social expectations pressing hard against negative racial stereotypes and reality. He came of age in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1960s, torn between relationships, school, the negative magnetism of the streets, and the impenetrable reticence of his mother, intent upon survival in her own unique manner. As a result, Baker left the south, seeking neither fame nor fortune, but a long absent father and educational opportunities. It was in Cleveland, Ohio, during the late 1960s that some degree of stability entered his life; there, with the aid of his long absent father, he was able to pursue an education and become what he terms first a man, and eventually an artist.

His odyssey involves encountering and overcoming various obstacles, none more daunting than the inertia of race, family and an inadequate early education. We find Baker not only overcoming these obstacles by setting goals and organizing resources, but also by making art and then fighting for recognition in the art world. Putting his heart into this book is his way of giving voice to the lives of many other talented individuals of his generation and background who lost the belief in their own ability. In doing so, Baker becomes a kind of hero who willingly shares both strengths and inner frailties. Wrong turns and bad decisions are laid bare. Questions are raised that are unanswerable -- because there were many dead ends, U turns, backsliding and questions with no answers.

Baker does not assume that the new generation of black American artists must endure his trials. He is only hopeful that the number of black persons making art continues to increase, and that more and better art is produced. Historically, obtaining freedom and becoming free was an unruly affair, and fashioning a post-racial America is, like the making of art, an inexact process. If freedom means ownership not just of oneself, but of one's images as well, then there are still problems to resolve and work to be done by all factions of the African Diaspora.

A long repressed memory that lends coherence to Baker's artistic experience in particular is the sixteenth century trauma that unites Africans of the Black Atlantic, Latin America and the Caribbean: the Middle Passage. Reunifications of torn apart family, kin and kinship, and whether it is possible to reunite long broken traditions that were torn and ripped by the passage are underlying currents of Baker’s book.

Although many students had talent, in the Jacksonville schools of the 1950s, black art was not passed on as educationally beneficial. Either it was repressed for political reasons or its existence was usurped by the southern interest of racial dominance and gradualism. Whether it was for Jim Crow protectionism or fear that it would inspire Negroes to demand freedom, black art would be censored up to the 1970s. At the same time, the magic and power of art was being taught in the north and celebrated in cities such as New York City and Los Angeles. By the 1980s, Jacksonville and the state of Florida would be the home to many black artists, including the Highwaymen.

Baker, even with his academic training and subsequent knowledge of black heritage, did not attempt to invoke an African past. He did not feel that he had to express the overt 'Niggertudeness' of the AfriCobra artists or to be a super Negro. His larger than life, early figurative paintings are of family members exuding calmness, and not exactly AfriCobra styled defiance. They have been compared to renowned American artist, Chuck Close. The book traces Baker’s path from the beginning roots to his mature works.

But why do the eyes of Baker’s figures stare, show no fear or submissiveness? Because Baker has created paintings with figures that speak, saying, When whites look at you, look them back, right in their eyes; and they will know that you have to be reckoned with -- that you will not be the docile one, nor play the fool. It is with these works that Baker chose to break into the mainstream of American art and would make multiple requests to be admitted to art shows, only to be rejected which caused him only to redouble his efforts rather than give up. Baker would then mount a relentless attack on galleries and curators who still seemed to maintain vestiges of a ‘whites only’ policy. His efforts would bring him success, but not without extracting payment.

Still less did Baker consider that his art should be pleasing in the eyes of whites, who make up the majority of those who control and support the art market. In the past, making such art was the difference between being noticed and being ignored. To paint romantic notions of slavery and subservient Negroes, for example, meant not painting what one really thought and felt, but what the dominant white collectors wanted.

We know that the freedom granted to blacks after the end of the Civil War in 1865 was untidy, that integration was fragmented, and that assimilation into America’s ruling Christian European cultural paradigm was a back-and-forth process. For one hundred years after the Civil War, social progress was slow as blacks engaged in an often brutal fight for legal, economic and civil rights. But still, during this post-Civil War period, great strides were made reestablishing a black culture. With freedom, blacks formed new religious organizations, educational institutions and schools, and excelled in sports, dance, literature, art and music. These would be the foundation of the new non-slave black culture from which African-Americans would launch the civil rights era of the 1960s and modern art.

It would be a glaring omission to mention racial progress in this book without introducing the negatives of unemployment, black on black crime, the ravages of street drugs, family disarray and mental anguish, all of which Baker, in some fashion, would encounter. Also, not to mention the depression and fatigue brought on by confronting both the real and perceived racial barriers of today would also be an oversight. It is a fatigue that at times is unreasonable, but nevertheless acts as a self-imposed intellectual and creative constraint. The reality is that overstepping boundaries can yet result in a loss of freedom or financial independence, which is the America that even educated men of color, must negotiate.

Lawrence Baker is one among many African-American artists who, after migrating north from the south, received classical training in art a scant sixty years after The Banjo Lesson, a period when the nation was still coping with racial pathologies and urban riots. It was a time when many educated African-American artists were experimenting with art concepts and schools of thought that ranged from primitivism, impressionism, realism and abstract expressionism to post-modernist radicalism.

Like others, Baker’s reality is one of history, heritage and fantasy, for the most part held in a state of dynamic tension, but occasionally spinning out of control. This book not only asks plain questions about the connections between Lawrence Baker’s complex inner life and art, but also probes the relationship between African-American social and cultural development and the purpose and role of art. Therefore, Baker's life is the scaffolding, but the book does not stop with his thoughts and his experiences. It endeavors to show, through Baker, some of the underlying tensions between seeing and being seen, between what is and perhaps what should be.

The terms culture, history and heritage, are themselves imprecise; the term African-American serves as a broad brush to depict various people of color or of African descent, and as such it is the descriptor most often used in this book. African-American is replete with political correctness, errors, omissions and blind spots. American culture has used Boy, Buck, Coon, Negro, Nigger, Negrier, Negra, Retro-Nigger, Black, Afro-American, colored and more colorfully, boot, Ziggerboo, Jiggerboo, Crow, and Buzzard to identify the characteristics of the same racial group.

These are negative descriptive terms for blacks, but are certainly less confusing than the one hundred thirty-four or more phenotypes, i.e., identified shades of blackness indicating social and economic status migrating to America from Latin America. Baker inquires about how a person of color perceives and renders likenesses of nigger, coon or buzzard.

One wonders what America would look like if African visual art-making traditions had been encouraged and sustained, rather than suppressed during 350 years of slavery? What would American art be today if Negro slaves could have made art continuously in their own best interest, made images according to their own heritage or created an account of their lives and other heroes in the New World? Perhaps these are inelegant questions and topics for another book; but one must wonder how America might have been a different place, given an infusion of Negro art. And one must ponder what art was lost, assimilated or redirected while moving forward into the future.

Acknowledgements by Artist, Lawrence Baker

I would like to acknowledge the historical and contemporary cultural influences of America that shaped my life. These are the forces that have culminated in what I am today and the art I make. I hope that in some way, my life, my art and this book prove to be of value to a new generation of African-American artists and others. Through this book, I hope to show above all else that creativity, resiliency and perseverance can break down barriers and overcome obstacles. I hope my art expresses something of what it means to have the ability to make something, to make something that others feel is useful and of value, and to amplify the importance of both living life and making art.

I would like to thank my mother Chilonia Royal Newman, now deceased, for being a mother in the south under circumstances that would have caused a lesser person to give up. Instead she chose to give life, to struggle and nurture me and my brothers and sisters. I want to thank her for the quilts that brought art into my life at an early age. She easily could have chosen another fate and my life would have been quite different. I thank my father John Baker, also deceased, for allowing a man of nineteen to turn back the clock to become his son. And I thank my ten or more brothers and sisters, some of whom are half-siblings, but whom we agreed to refer to as brothers and sisters, for our own sanity. It would be an oversight not to mention the role of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, where I have found refuge and a family of like-minded black men, and to whom I have entrusted a scholarship fund for nascent artists. Omega Psi Phi is a Greek letter fraternity that began at Howard University at the turn of the twentieth century to assist black men in obtaining quality educations.

It would be a monumental omission not to mention the contribution of the person to whom this book is dedicated, Anita Baker, my wife, who shared her personal insights about my life that is the glue that binds the pages of this book. Anita, my daughter Aja and son Lawrence Jr. must all be acknowledged in ways that cannot be described, but especially for putting up with my extreme sensibilities, fears, moodiness, self-indulgence and general mood swings. I was to experience my first heart attack in early 2011 during the writing of this book. Recently, I feared the dog of death was at my door and that I was powerless to resist its fangs; but for some unknown reason, I was spared. I am thankful for the honorary doctorate from Wilberforce University that I received in 2012 for my contribution to the arts. I am even more grateful for the ways in which my family helped me during my illness and recovery, especially my wife Anita.

I am grateful to my fellow artists in Cleveland, Ohio, who met from time to time to critique my work. Those in particular are: artist/photographer, Charles Pinkney; retired (and recently deceased) Kent State University art professor, Joseph O'Sickey, whose generosity and introduction to my wife Anita in 1969 contributed greatly to the person I am today; retired art professor, Edward Parker, who deserves special attention for being the hub of the black art community in Cleveland, Ohio, with his art school, open studio, gallery and lodging (he has provided numerous artists with a place to live, work, display and sell their art); and finally, the art teachers of the Cleveland Municipal School District for displaying my work in their Annual Art Teacher’s Show. Even though my art has won numerous regional and national awards, the curators of the Teacher’s Show never missed an opportunity to ensure that my work was not hidden from view.

I would like to thank fellow artist and writer Louis B. Burroughs, Jr. for framing my thoughts and ideas in this book that I can say is my own. From musings on the meaning of life, sexuality, religion and what it means to be an African-American artist, Burroughs provided a structure from which the book took form. Given hand-scratched notes, pen and pencil drawings, photographs, paintings and audio tapes, Burroughs massaged these raw materials into a sculpture which can now be read as a coherent, creative whole. I think he succeeded in ways that I did not think possible when we started. The book aimed high, imagined the unimaginable, alluded to and honored that horrific Middle Passage which connects and shapes the psyche of all people of color in the western hemisphere of the Black Atlantic.

It is also hoped that somewhere and somehow this book adds to an understanding of hip-hop, rap, techno music, flash mobs, million dollar athletes, a Haagen-Dazs black walnut flavored political candidate, a part-time governor denizen of Niggerhead Ranch in Texas, black people who have excelled in inventiveness and intellect in every profession and those who have not, a black president of the United States, and the insatiable need for humans to see, communicate, deny, imitate, invent, and then reinvent themselves to create a future worth living. It is hoped that this book, which cobbles together events, theories and ideas somehow validates and leads to the understanding of an unscripted artistic life.

Acknowledgements by Author, Louis B. Burroughs, Jr.

Thank you to Lawrence Baker for inviting me into his world so that I could attempt to understand and reflect upon his life and art. I also would like to acknowledge the contributions of Constantine Costa Petridis of the Cleveland Museum of Art for the historical perspective of this book, as seen through his discussions and research on African art, and the question of whether a truly black art exists. I am grateful to Cleveland artist Hilton Murray who critiqued the book’s content on numerous occasions. Mr. Murray is a nationally recognized marketing and advertising expert who helped clarify the connection between the African-American national character and the art produced by African-Americans, as well as art produced by white Americans with African-American subjects. He was particularly helpful in explaining how that national character was created and falsely perpetuated through art and advertising. I would like to acknowledge art professor emeritus Alfred Bright of Youngstown State University who has spent much time and effort in his career elucidating the links between African rituals and animism, and between African-American spirituality and art in his classroom and public lectures. Members of the Artists Archives of the Western Reserve provided readings of the book during its development and I am grateful for their comments and encouragement. I acknowledge the Wikipedia and Google Internet searches that aided in connecting the theoretical dots, thus saving countless hours of library searches. Special thanks are given to Bonnie Jacobson for line edits and Dr. Marlene Stoiber Burroughs for structural editing.

To contact Louis Burroughs:

[e-mail]

www.louisburroughs.com

Part One

Chapter One - In the World of the Lie and the Turtle

I was told that the second son of upper middle-class John Edward Baker and Chilonia Newman Royal showed a precocious talent for making art at an early age, and was encouraged to develop this talent with an eye toward money and future fame. I would like to believe this is so.

More accurately, I am a tenth generation descendant of slaves who worked on plantations in Georgia and Alabama. My mother's parents were sharecroppers who migrated from rural Georgia to Jacksonville, Florida, in the early 1930s during the Great Depression. My father's family was probably not much better situated during those years, somewhere in Alabama. Another reality of my life is that, although I had an interest in making art at an early age, my art-making did not start in earnest until about age 21, a few years after being admitted to a four-year college art program in Ohio.

I had to make many of the same mental calculations as did my ancestors, any one of which could have been disastrous. Dreams were dangerous and notions of high self-esteem could be deadly. To think of rising above the expectations of southerners who longed for the return of the days of white supremacy and privilege through ownership of human beings could be a very serious mistake. To rise above the white women who returned the gaze of black men with contemptuous glares or worse, the yelling of rape, was a grievous error leading to a beating, if not death. Then there was the black community's notion that unbridled ambition is a narcissistic pipe dream liable to attract undue attention. Rising above that idea also could be a mistake.

Indeed, to dream of more could destine a Jumped-up Thinking Negro to physical, financial, and psychological ruin; look at all the other delusional Negroes who tried to better themselves and failed. Drained of their dignity, pride and ambition, they were left with only the shell of what it meant to be a human. They had stories to tell, but they walked the streets of Jacksonville homeless and idle, talking to no one in particular, like zombies. In their heads, they lorded over mansions, preached truth to the multitudes, but were unable to write stories or paint pictures.

To be safe, the message was clear: it is better not seek to go beyond one's station in life. It is better to get a safe Negro job with the city's sanitation department for instance, or through a labor pool or in a restaurant washing dishes or cooking. Obviously the idea that one could be an artist was especially crazy. So my life became a series of calculations; any miscalculation could have led to an artless life, a loss of wits, and surely to my undoing. But somehow I had to rise above my station in life.

The Lie

It announces itself one night and you dream in the morning of waking up whole again. Gradually you make your peace, so to speak, with this malady. You start to know about it by the time you start to gain knowledge of yourself, know how it matters to you and know how it should not be important, but is important to others; and it becomes all you know and all they know. You never recover from it. It follows a predictable course. Like a virus, it never dies on its own accord. It can lie dormant; but in the end it always comes back. The only way to cure it is never to catch it. It is found in both the unwilling and willing, sinners and saints, and has no zodiac. It has a different strain for every season, occurrence and occasion. It is so versatile that it can live in the soil and in the air, as well as in the human brain. Once planted and embedded in the mind, it is the fever through which all human life is lived and all things judged. It is the Cyclops eye, a man-made mirage, infecting the religions, politics and occupations of the nation's character. Racism, that pesky mosquito that lies on the brain, is a powerful protagonist, and I do not wish my life of sixty-three years to be overshadowed, defined or circumscribed by it, or give it credence as a worthy antagonist. If there is to be a villain, let it be any evil idea that attempts to subvert, distort or separate dark- skinned peoples from their art.

Its stringencies cannot be entirely overlooked. In 1985, James Baldwin declared, white is a state of mind. America is not all white, never has been all white, and never will be all white. He went on to explain that in all of mankind's history, racial supremacy of white skin color is an egocentric, transplanted tree, rooted in the economic, philosophical and religious soils of Europe, brought to its apex in America. Its fruit benefited the planters, industrialists and mercantile capitalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But whiteness was to begin a decline by the early eighteenth century, diluted and assaulted each succeeding generation by the people of color it chooses to oppress. I am a person of color and the first of my generation to attend and graduate from college. I am the object of The Lie and an artist.

Color theory says that black, the absence of all colors, matters; and that white, the presence of all colors, matters. The making of art and what is considered art matters, and is important to all cultures. Art has taught me, Lawrence Baker, that one would not be or exist if not for the other. Therefore, any government system attached to color that does not contain space for all colors is an unnecessary burden and a distraction. Race reigned supreme in the south of my youth. It ran perniciously like a foul odor through the windows and doors of houses, places of work and worship, whole neighborhoods and institutions. It is the world I grew up in and a world that I would not find comfortable, even to this day.

Jacksonville Florida

Jacksonville is a city dissected by two rivers and located on Florida's northeast Atlantic coast. Like much of northern Florida, the Jacksonville area was originally scrubland, made up of a mix of forest and more lightly wooded fields dotted with small pines, saw palmetto, blackjack and water oak. The forests have since been developed by builders to provide housing, both for wealthy sun-seekers migrating from the north and poor white southerners from nearby states. Swamps were drained and paved over for roads; bridges were built to accommodate the transportation needs of the newcomers. The tall palm trees shown on travel guides promoting the city as a tourist destination are non-native, and were planted by city planners eager for growth and tourism. The advertised palms are the new South's rendition of what a tropical tourist destination should offer, and are most often growing in ostentatious display in public parks and along highways leading into the city. And of course, like these non-native palms, racial supremacy was not a part of the natural ecological system of Florida. A racial hierarchy, based on color, was planted by European settlers during the colonial era to exploit slave labor.

Before the movie industry moved west to Hollywood, California, Jacksonville was the home of the silent movies. The city of the two rivers also was the birthplace of early monster movies. The Jacksonville area’s eco-system of animals, languid waters, swamps and Spanish Moss-draped trees, backlit by a misty blue sky, was an ideal background to inspire ambient unease. It was by its very nature secretive, melodramatic and scary.

I was seven years old when I saw my first scary movie. In the Creature from the Black Lagoon, a fossil hunting expedition drifts down a dark tributary of the Amazon River (actually the St. John River) seeking to discover the rumored gill man who had been scaring the natives.