Pride by Lorene Cary

Author:Lorene Cary [Cary, Lorene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77849-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

13

In half an hour, I composed myself enough to call Bill on the telephone and postpone our date. We waited a week, during which I worked and treated myself to museum day trips. At the Afro-American Museum I took in an exhibit of black sculptors that included a 1937 bronze by Meta Warrick Fuller depicting a nude boy kneeling over a skull in the ground. At first glance, I dismissed it as derivative: alas, poor LeRoy. But it wouldn’t be ignored. Alive and mysterious, “Talking Skull” managed, as the best bronzes do, to combine size and weight with perfect detail. The boy’s toes looked as if at any moment he might wiggle them. The skull, half sunk in the mud, must surely rise up, I thought, when the museum closes and talk to the busts.

The smoothness and depth and richness of bronze suited our cultural vision—and our skins. But it was so expensive and took so many people to accomplish. I imagined Meta Fuller, in the 1930s, sculpting her plaster model, then making a negative mold of it, coating the inside mold with wax and filling the center with sand or ash. Then I thought of the foundry where the metal workers would melt down the copper and tin and pour it in the mold, a stream of metal so hot it glows, so hot it drains the air of red and orange and yellow and takes it down with it, melting the wax and coating the mold with every appearance of life.

It made me want to see the cold-work bronzes of the ancient people of Benin. So on Friday, a week after the Roz incident, I treated myself to a day trip to the Met in New York. I ate lunch with a former colleague, who told me all the gossip, including the quiet reinstatement of the student I’d nailed for plagiarism.

“I’ve been to see the Benin bronzes,” I said.

She said she wished she, too, could go look at them again, but she’d promised to write an introduction to a book we both agreed we’d wished had been written by someone with a sharper mind.

“But it does the job,” she sighed.

I took my tuned-up Karmann Ghia out of its fifty-dollar-a-day garage berth and drove back to Philadelphia to make my date with Bill Williams. The Benin bronze alloy doesn’t cast as well as its Greco-Roman counterpart. It’s softer. But once out of the mold, it works better cold. The Africans carved all over their bronzes: jewelry, scarification, pubic hair. It let them layer the image; the initial work, when it came out of the mold, was still up for revision. The whole process was more forgiving. That, no doubt, was what I’d gone there to remember.

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