ICP "Getting Close" assignment. Scary and motivating both. After the experience with Natan Dvir in the spring.
Also, a photo culture of the tree :
google images collection.
First visit to the North West corner of Washington Square Park: the area seems to have a strong localized culture, men sat at outdoors tables playing chess, or cards, dominos - Scrabble?. They have been here in the colder months also. They appear to be their own group, their own society. I am unsure about their cultural or national situations, are they maybe Islanders and African Americans together? Are they spending so much time there because they are outside of the work structure, or have work that takes up time other than the 9 to 5 frame?
I walk up, am spoken to rather than myself starting to address anyone. I stay, am left to stay, the conversation comes. On a basis that has to do with the mood of leisure and chilling out and having time to spare and enjoying bantering, and with a very ritualised form of flirting, which is one mode of interracial possibility. I soon learn that the place is experienced as having an aura: several of the guys mention the Hanging tree (the 330 yeard old elm, dating back to Dutch times therefore?), and the old location of the police station opposite. And the old burying ground. It is implied, unquestioned, that this is part of slave history. The land here also has a long history for Af Ams : given over to slaves by the Dutch, for cultivation, and to function as buffer zone between them & the Native Ams (who had been driven out of this their land, naturally). Named then "The Land of the Blacks". Was farmland. Told that they were no longer slaves, but their children would be born as slaves.
End of 18th century, bought by the city to make a potter's field, burying ground - for unknown or indigent people. Common grave. Later used during the epidemic of yellow fever. 20 000 bodies.
The Dutch in America and slavery:
see.
Oh, I'm reading this now :
A legend in many tourist guides says that the large elm at the northwest corner of the park, Hangman's Elm, was the old hanging tree.
Unfortunately for the legend, the tree was on the wrong side of the
former Minetta Creek, where it stood in the back garden of a private
house.
Records of only one public hanging at the potter's field exist. Two
eyewitness to the recorded hanging differed on the location of the
gallows. One said it had been put up at a spot where the fountain is
now, the other placed it closer to where the Arch is now.
Also :
Archeological study of the Park, 2005.
After 1820s purchased and made into a military parade ground, made available for volunteer militia companies. By 1830s, city's most desirable residential area.
Potter's field / "to be a burying place
for strangers" (Bible, Matthew 27/3-8).
Sitting down at one table, engaged as spectator of card trick, then a time of being talk to, or at rather, both invited to listen and kept at an impression distance. Spiritual talk, magic,the world, the state of the world, now, power, what I can do, using power for good but not harm (can be used for harm: nuclear now, weapons of mass destruction).
I go where the openings come. I stay two hours.
The conversation shifts, slows down, focuses. Names and identities are gradually offered - having been withheld actively to begin with, Dee, father from Cuba, come to US at 7, Florida, a silence about his own children. He talks a lot, in multiple directions and meanders, listens little and keeps the space of my input reduced to expressions of I'm-listening, to start with. We exchange first names, it's his question. I tell about Haiti. I suppose I have an accent which frees me from a particular sociological fixed spot in American landscape, undertermined somewhat, possibly.
Dee begins to show me a couple of wood-cut objets, on the table with him - he sits with a chess board, a pack of cards, a pack of cigarettes which other members of the group at nearby tables buy from him for a dollar each. Tale about how he has made the eyes, melt from plastic? Gradually he shows me pictures (he has over 2000) on a phone, of his work: many woodcut figures, animal or human forms (he shows me the first one he made, which he wears around his neck, a small bobbin-sized human figures, head and mass-body, dark wood), with teeth, eyes, wearing things that remind one of ritual accessories (necklaces, nails possibly, large red tongues out of teeth-inscruted canine mouths).
His face changes. Or do I look at it differently. His teeth are fairly bad and I read the face initially as type, and then probably we start to look at each other as persons, features of dignity and strong personhood appear, transformed from something which I feel like pontificating (bullshitting, in part, fobbing me off) and authoritizing into something which I feel as
une lenteur evocative of knowledge, experience (hard, instructive
à la dure - "They let me down hard" is inscribed on his chess board, he says something about that being his name), and intelligence. At several moments I find his face very beautiful. I really want to photograph this.
He tells me of his father, come from Cuba as a child, narrowly escaped from something very nasty (falling overboard - of ? -, being picked up), he expresses admiration and love for him. He tells of a bottle of seeds that his father sent back to his village, snatched pinch by pinch from some employment (cut pockets, trouser legs), tomato seeds celery lettuce tomato celery.
Other fabulous stories, I only get scraps, between the scrap-like telling and my scrap-making, shredding ear for unfamiliar English dictions.
That he has traveled a lot. Been to Haiti in 1970s, Papa Doc, foreigners are safe. Has researched his family history - he mentions Cuba, African, American?, French, Spain. Are these strands of his tree? Not quite sure.
He wants "to publish" his work. When I leave and he asks me what I do (teach English), he says "I knew it", "intelligence", and says that he is trying to publish, trying to write, trouble with English. I think I caught that he works as a paralegal. We plan to meet again this afternoon, I want to show him the Baron Samedi shot from Haiti, and tell him about Atis Rezistans.
There's one photograph that I so wish I had been able to take: his hand, holding the ducklike head he has made out of a small bit of branch (he has collected one of the roots of the Hanging elm, on occasion of a recent maintenance, made it into a sculpture, "powerful"). The instant so beautiful, the hand, the birdwood, the holding (grip, intertwine, makes a block, the duck head nested in the fist; he's doing something with this gesture) the telling.
I take about four shots of the tree. They are "photos of", completely lacking in interest except as expressive of where I am: underphotographed, seeing nothing like an image, ultra-shy in bringing the camera into the situation, determined to bring back
something from day 1. Anything but the.
My job today is to do that. Introduce the camera. I'm thinking possibly I could offer to take some shots of his work if he would like to have some. Although he has this regular practice himself.
The (amusing, laughable) anxiety about going out, day 1. Had set an alarm, to make sure to catch myself. Actually took a pill before hand, fretting for an hour. Set on, though.
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