Eat Joy by Natalie Eve Garrett

Author:Natalie Eve Garrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936787746
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2019-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

WHEN MY FATHER MET HER IN the mid-nineties, Julia was running an art-clinic in East Harlem for the mentally ill, some of whom lived occasionally on the street. She didn’t call them mentally ill, or homeless, but “clients.” The clinic, Souls-in-Motion, was a vast basement space attached to a daytime psychiatric rehabilitation center. She’d transformed the underground realm with swaths of fabric, reclaimed furniture, rescued animals, found objects, potted plants, and art supplies into a fantabulous art studio and gallery. There were separate workstations for writing, sewing, basket-weaving, stretching, painting, making, and communing. The enterprise was so well-lit, dynamic, and artfully decorated that you forgot not only that it was a basement but that it was a room with walls. In the adjacent lot grew a community garden that Julia also maintained, equally abundant and wild.

The art on display was uninhibited and terrifically strange—the projections of blazing minds. There were intentionally ugly rag-dolls, abstract quilts, life-size portraits done entirely with Crayola markers, zany totems of stained scrap wood: part dinosaur, part piano. Souls-in-Motion reminded me in spirit of Pee-wee’s Playhouse. I probably made that association because back when she was productive as an artist in her own right Julia had designed, of all things, the jeweled box containing the head of Jambi the Genie. Souls-in-Motion was as playful as that TV show. The community’s ragtag crew included a giant African leopard tortoise, a one-eyed stray cat, and a rabbit called Jack. There were hammocks for the artists to sleep off their meds when they weren’t actively making; desks and drafting tables made of discarded doors for them to work at, beneath which the animals freely wandered.

My father and Julia held their wedding reception at Souls-in-Motion. It was something like the Mad Hatter’s tea party. I remember getting knocked down by an elder wearing a ripped pink satin dress as she maniacally chased after the rabbit with a broom, her wig askew, her face smeared with frosting from the homemade wedding cake. That lady was Doris, one of the clients who became a regular guest at the house my father and Julia now shared.

Watching Julia’s gracious interactions with Doris and the other clients over time, I came to appreciate my stepmother’s gift for kindness. She didn’t distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior; high and low art; them and us. She was unafraid to sit next to trauma, even when it sometimes smelled. Also, there was a spiritual dimension to her socialism. Once, I heard an angry man with a single matted dreadlock that reached all the way down his back rant at her for what felt like hours. With great paranoia, hostility, and pain he decried the system that enabled her to enjoy shelter and money while keeping him endangered and oppressed. He made perfect sense while talking crazy. Julia listened receptively, calmly, to his looping monologue where most white people I know would have felt cornered, threatened, frustrated, or blamed; then she said that she was sorry, offered him a hug, fed him soup, and asked him what he wished to draw.

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