So already, about four years ago, I began working on a short story: it had been roughly fifty years since I'd written one. Since 2017, I've tried to finish it several times--and recently, I actually did. So I present "Sight Lines" to you in hopes that you'll want to read it and be glad you did. For planning purposes, please know it's about ten pages long, double-spaced as a Word document. And while it might be especially interesting to students and educators--teachers in particular--I hope it will interest non-educators, too.
So here's the plan: first,
I'll share with you, as I've already begun doing, photos of three art
works that appear in this story, which takes place in a museum. Then I'll share the story. And finally, I'll talk about the genesis of the story.I. The Photos
• "Duck, Duck, Noose" by Gary Simmons*
• "Sleep" by Kehinde Wiley**
• "Long Jump by Carl Lewis" by Henry Taylor*
Sight Lines
Nine wooden stools, each topped by a white Klan hood and mask, all arranged in a circle. At the center of the circle, a noose hanging from the ceiling. The eyeholes of the masks looked blankly toward the noose. Beside one of the stools, a rope lay coiled, ready.
The installation was the first thing people saw when they entered the exhibit. It definitely set the tone, Dena thought. She had come to the art museum on that January morning with her husband and father-in-law. But as soon as the two of them had seen the high school students gathered near the stools, they’d hightailed it into the next room.
Dena had stayed because of the teenagers. Sixteen-year-olds, she thought. She’d taught high school for more than thirty years, so she could guess at the excitement and anxiety surrounding this field trip. No doubt the teacher was hoping every kid would see something that they just had to tell a parent or friend about. No doubt every kid was glad to be out of the school building, but was also wishing that some friend in another class had been able to be on the trip, too.
The kids were looking at the installation silently; Dena suspected that they’d been directed to. There must have been twenty of them. They stood in a jagged line generally two people deep, all of them clutching cellphones. Most of them were White. Six of them looked to be Asian. And two of them were dark-skinned. Dena was pretty sure the two dark-skinned kids were African-American. The boy stood in the front row in the middle of the line; the girl stood on the far edge of the group in the back row, directly behind a White girl, a redhead with amazing hair.
Dena stared for a minute, trying to figure out that hair. A thick purple and bronze band, or maybe a braid, circled the girl’s head; was it her own hair, synthetic hair, textured metallic cloth—or some combination of these? Whatever it was, it would have been perfect for that Swedish festival in December when girls wear wreaths with candles on their heads.
There was bronze in the African-American girl’s hair, too—touches of it, the result of small, rounded beads braided into her hair close to her scalp. They framed her face subtly, glowing in ceiling light aimed slant at the installation. Maybe she and the red-haired girl were friends—Sisterhood of the Braided Hair.
Both girls were silent, like the rest of their classmates. The red-haired girl stood rigidly, staring almost straight ahead. The African-American girl divided her time between looking and writing, or maybe drawing, in a little black notebook that rested on her phone. Dena wondered if she’d chosen her spot in order to have an unobstructed view of the installation. Or whether she usually stood on the edge of things so her very stuffed backpack wouldn’t hurt someone if she turned around fast. That backpack surprised Dena; most museums wouldn’t have allowed it in a gallery.
There were two adults with the students, both middle-aged White women. Dena tried to figure out which was the teacher and which was the museum educator. Docents had become museum educators when they began spending more time asking people about the art they were seeing than telling them about it. That’s why it didn’t surprise Dena that the students were being asked to look long before saying anything. Not that she’d heard anyone ask them to do that. The installation was so emotionally blunt and sharp; would the students would be able to push their reactions aside and just describe what they were seeing?
With that thought in mind, Dena pushed herself just to observe, as the kids were doing. The hooded stools, she noted, outnumbered the noose nine-to-one. That was the ratio of light-skinned to dark-skinned kids in the field trip group, too.
Oh, already she was straying from observing, she realized. She decided to estimate how far from the floor the noose was—was it at the height of a human neck? But now it was the bright red in the big painting on the wall beyond the installation that drew her attention. The athlete at its center was wearing a bright red uniform. His brown skin was so dark it was almost black, and there was a lot of bronze in the painting, too.
Realizing she wasn’t going to stay focused, Dena gave up and thought about the field trip. The teacher must have anticipated that some art in the show might be about racial violence, given that it was all by African-American artists. And hopefully, since it was halfway through the school year, the kids had some experience with discussing topics that brought up strong emotions.
Just then, the two adults nodded to each other and began moving to the front of the group. Silent looking time was over, and Dena knew she wanted to listen to what got said next, even though she’d be eavesdropping.
“Okay, everyone, let’s everyone cluster together just a bit more. We’re about to begin sharing."
Dena positioned herself in front of a painting not too far from the group, pretending to be absorbed in it. It was likely, Dena thought, that the two Black kids would be affected differently than their classmates by the installation; it was also likely that some of the other kids would speculate about what the Black kids might be feeling. Dena realized she was making assumptions about the kids, and assumptions were almost always trouble. But these were difficult situations for teachers. On the one hand, you had to be ready for students’ emotional reactions, especially since some content was more personal for certain kids. And on the other hand, people are different--you couldn’t know how individual students would feel just because they happened to belong to some group or other. All of this went better if you knew your students and they knew each other. Which didn’t mean it always went easily or well.
“Now that you’ve had a while to take this piece in, can anyone tell me what you’re thinking and feeling, and why? It would be great to hear from a few of you.”
Dena hadn’t expected the discussion to begin this way—so personally. What had all that silent looking been about? Had the kids already done the physical description step before she’d entered the gallery? Maybe the whole activity had gotten off to a late start, so the museum educator had decided to combine a few steps. That way, this group would be ”done” with the installation before the next group arrived.
Whatever was the case, the kids seemed uneasy—or maybe it was disengaged. Silence. Then more silence, or maybe it was more a shuffling as kids shifted their weight, reached into their pockets, looked up rather than around since even accidental eye contact with the teacher might have gotten them called on. The African-American girl stepped away from the group and snapped a photograph.
The teacher and the museum educator scanned the group, both of them looking long at the Black boy in the front row as they searched for volunteers. He was looking down. Dena wondered if he’d looked down as soon as he’d heard the question because he’d known they would look at him. She smirked to herself for a moment: wouldn’t it be great if he or some other kid spoke up right now and said, “This piece of art really makes me feel good”? What would they do then?
Looking up, she noticed the girl with the backpack was looking at her. The girl had a flat, serious look. Maybe she was reprimanding Dena for her obvious nosiness, telling her to mind her own business. Maybe she was wondering why Dena was smiling. Or maybe she was tired of clueless, earnest adults who always asked questions that were too direct. As if kids always knew right away exactly how they felt and wanted to tell everyone about it.
Dena didn’t look away, though she wanted to. When the girl finally turned back toward her little notebook, Dena didn’t know what to think. Did the girl think of her as just one more of those White people who always looked at the nearest Black person when anything about race came up? Dena knew that she’d done that too many times as a teacher, even when she’d tried not to. It was ironic since when she was in high school, she’d hated how most of the eyes in the room turned toward her, the Jewish girl, when the Holocaust was mentioned to see if she would quiver or even shatter.
One of the White boys spoke up finally. The installation made him angry, he said. He’d learned a lot about Jim Crow recently and understood why African-Americans didn’t feel safe to this day. “A lot of the Klan supported Trump; they’re still very active,” he reminded the class.
“I wonder if the artist is talking about lynching metaphorically as well as literally,” said the Asian girl who spoke next. “Also, I wish I knew if the number of stools is significant.” Dena waited for the museum educator to acknowledge the girl’s implicit questions, even if it wasn’t the time to answer them. Then she looked to see if the teacher was writing them down for later. But the teacher wasn’t. Hopefully, she had a good memory.
A White girl spoke next. “My mother grew up in the South,” she explained, “And she heard lots of racist comments while she was growing up. She even thinks some of the people in her family took part in lynchings, though no one ever said so. So looking at this makes me feel kind of uncomfortable, like . . ..” She hesitated. “No, I’m done.”
More silence, some shuffling of feet and repositioning of things in bags and pockets. The teacher and the museum educator scanned the group again, while the girl with the backpack stepped back again and took another photograph.
“I’ll go next,” said the Black boy in the front row. “I really don’t like this piece very much. It’s not that this artist isn’t talented or that this isn’t a good idea. But it kind of steals the show. Why are we looking so hard at this and not at something else?”
“Thank you, everyone,” said the museum educator. “Let’s move on.” Another question not acknowledged, a good one for anyone in the business of helping students visit art exhibits with lots to choose from in them. Dena fixed her empty gaze on the painting she’d been pretending to look at and hoped the kids would have the chance to discuss the installation later in the day, or maybe tomorrow. But was the discussion over for now because an African-American student had finally spoken?
Slowly the class moved toward the door in the corner behind them. The girl with the backpack was the last to leave the gallery, hanging back to take a few more photos now that she could stand directly in front of the installation with no one in front of her. She paused one last time to look at it without the camera before her eye, and then walked toward the other room without looking anywhere near Dena.
Dena walked to the last spot where the girl had stood. It really wasn't the front of the installation, but it was the place where a card with the names of the work and the artist was mounted on a small pedestal. “Duck, Duck, Noose,” Dena read. She wished the kids had had a chance to talk about that title.
Dena looked again at the installation, thinking of the children’s game: if you don’t get a seat, you’re out. That’s when she noticed. From that spot, the noose superimposed itself on the neck of the athlete in the red uniform in the painting behind the installation that she’d noticed while she’d been trying to look only at the installation.
Damn!
She moved a few steps to the left, and it got worse. From that new angle, the athlete—his red uniform said USA—looked like he was jumping into the noose to hang himself. Was this what the girl had stayed behind to get a picture of?
Dena was now thinking of the painting, not the girl. Was the athlete an actual member of a Team America? She approached the painting and read the card adjacent to it. Yes. This was a painting of Carl Lewis. Track and field Carl Lewis. He was mid-air because he was doing the long jump. This was a painting to commemorate his Olympic achievement.
This made it even worse. The curators had to have known about this. In fact, they must have done it on purpose, thinking it would make the exhibit “better.” Camus had said something in The Plague about good intentions that did harm. But when Dena tried to remember it, all she came up with was mangled Robert Burns: The good intentions of mice and men gang aft agley.
Suddenly, the gallery began to fill up with teenagers again: the next school group was beginning to gather at “Duck, Duck, Noose.” Dena wanted to grab their teacher and urge him to have them look at something else. But how could she quickly explain why to him without seeming unhinged?
At this point, Dena’s only consolation was knowing the exhibit would be closing in two days, putting an end to the lynching of Carl Lewis. Still, someone needed to write a letter about this. Dena was wrestling with the question of where the letter should go—to the museum or the newspaper, or maybe even the artist—when she realized she was paying more attention to the letter than the exhibit. She resented that: when else would she get to see the exhibit? And then she felt ashamed: there were worse problems a person could have than being distracted while looking at an art exhibit.
Finally, wondering how her husband and father-in-law were doing, she stepped into the next gallery. That's when she saw directly across from her the Sisters of the Braided Hair. They were having a hushed, serious conversation about something they were looking at on the African-American girl’s cellphone.
Dena had been right—they were friends. Instinctively she moved away from them, and for several minutes, drifted unseeing through the second gallery wondering what they were discussing and knowing she’d never know.
And then, suddenly, she snapped back to attention: at the gallery’s far end was the first field trip group, almost all of them. Just the kids. They were standing in clusters along the length of a painting nearly as wide as the wall on which it was hanging. Stretched almost diagonally across the vast width of it, a semi-naked, shining, bronze-toned Black man lay peacefully on a white veil that wrapped around him to cover his genitals the way Jesus’ often were on crucifixes. Both he and the veil seemed to be borne slightly aloft by the painting’s profusion of green and beige leaves flecked with small red blooms. The vegetation was too prominent and alive to be mere backdrop. The kids were looking silently—reverently, Dena thought. They’d remember this painting. |
| Scott at 30 Americans**** |
Your foray into short story writing sparked a lively discussion in our poetry group. We had so many thoughts and reactions to this provocative piece and that,for me, is the mark of a good story! Bravo!
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