CARLETTA CARRINGTON WILSON: POEM OF STONE & BONE: MAKE HER OF MYSTERY
On February 26, 2022, this statue of Mr. James Washington Jr by Barry Johnson was unveiled at Midtown Square on the corner of 24th and Union. The statue faces Washington’s Fountain of Triumph. Notice the rock in the bottom right of the frame and Juan Alonso Rodriguez’s Hollyhocks above it. Not exactly a triangle but these three objects infuse the corner with Washington’s presence in Seattle’s Central District. They are just blocks away from the Washington house and studio. Photo by Carletta Carrington Wilson.
African-American/Black History Month is a designated time to remember people and events in the history of the African diaspora. Last year Raven Chronicles Press published POEM OF STONE & BONE, The Iconography of James W. Washington Jr. in Fourteen Stanzas and Thirty-One Days, by Carletta Carrington Wilson. This book honors the art-filled legacy and life of Mississippi-born and Seattle-based Artist, James W. Washington Jr (1909-2000). Below is a chapter from the book.
I have to know the animal or individual before I can sculpt them. Not just know his features but feel them. I have to be him. Not until I get to the point where I am the animal can I release the spiritual force into the inanimate material and animate it. When this happens, I feel like I’m working with flesh rather than just stone. —James W. Washington Jr.
POEM OF STONE & BONE: MAKE HER OF MYSTERY
BY CARLETTA CARRINGTON WILSON
The titles of the installations and artworks that comprise the work Poem of Stone and Bone were gleaned from book titles found in the personal library of James W. Washington Jr. Washington’s palette of far-ranging reading interests include not only expected books on Christianity and the Masonic tradition, but also other religious beliefs, histories of Africa, Europe, Asia, the occult, travel, gardening, health, sciences, slavery, biography, music, fiction and poetry, art and artists. Ntozake, Maya, Countee Cullen, Gumbo Ya-Ya, the sacred and the secular share shelf space with icons of the Civil Rights Movement, philosophers, thinkers, and self-help gurus. I was surprised, am still impressed, with the breadth and depth of [his] intellectual pursuits spanning from the 16th to the 20th century.
Born in the small sawmill town of Gloster, Mississippi, twenty-five miles from the Louisiana border, almost a straight shot to Baton Rouge; Blues Highway 61 nowhere near, but surely hues of blues did found the town. For Gloster was one of many lumber, perhaps turpentine, camps to be found in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. A young Washington witnessed men dark-skinned as him, long-lost Africans, tied to tools, bound by unrelenting rules cast in color, break free in the glee of music’s jubilee. Surely, he heard “rocks” rumbling, tumbling/rolling across the keys of a piano being played in a manner that would come to be known as “boogie woogie” wrung out, in rough ragged romps his reverend father would, surely, refer to as the “devil’s music.”
The devil is in details fulsome with beats and knockings, of percussive abrasions, degrees of subtraction, pit marks and blows. A world breaking, is broken apart by fingers bent in fury, of fist-and-claw striking a pupil with unforgettable scenes of seen-and-saw. Wouldn’t he have heard that thudding fall reverberate from timberland to timberland? What sound of a day born in the ear of the southwest corner of a state could not be wrested away, even by the lush landscape of the northwest corner of a more distant state?
How did the boy Washington was distance himself from days long-dried by the sawdust of sorrow? What monument of memory stood in stark relief as the face of a father was worn away by time? Like so many children of the South a father is shrouded beneath a cape of escape, is hidden from history, an all-too-familiar character in an all-too-familiar tale. Clearly, Washington’s father left his son with more than a photograph and unanswered questions. His inheritance: an indelible image of what is sacred and what is profane. For a future must be forged, not only in a tender soul, but also in the narrow of the marrow encased in his bones. Verily, a boy must fashion himself into a man who can stand to face himself, if no one else. Isn’t this what that school of hard knocks taught with its whiff of bayou on your shoe, a stiff-stalked chalk-white cotton’s scratchy lettering drawing blood marks across a son flowering beneath days of endless rays? How many a man must have come to understand that it is not what you are. It is what you are not.
I believe it was her, the original sculptor, with chisel and strike, who raised a worthy life out of the work of her womb. Make her of mystery, the mother, a matrix of the monumental moments of a merman whose hands swam through rock. . . . “My mother was very sensitive about my talent. She observed me, what I was . . . doing.” Who was she, this woman, who nurtured her son’s fragile future who “concerned with the creative aspect of religion” set him, foot-forward, on his path? Here is the first indication of an affiliation with coagulum and clot of rock, for Washington follows his mother to Little Rock, Arkansas. There he meets Janie, the second woman, steadfast and loyal in supporting him and his visions.
Maker, make Her of mystery, the quarry which has been quarried. Out of womb-shaped stones and rectangular block, smooth as a mirroring page, infant animals, sperm, fish, egg/ovum, the triangle and the cross, cross. “In the Greek sacred alphabet, the delta or triangle stood for the Holy Door.” For people formerly identified as Gypsies and Egyptians, the triangle was a representation of woman. This symbol of female trinity signified to the Gnostics, “creative intellect.” Upon these stones Washington wrought lines with the certain nervosity of water and electricity. For who is guaranteed, in the undertaking of breadth from that world into this or from this world into any other, to remain unmarked, unmarred, unmoved as one moves from the unnamed into the named?
Among the symbols of Freemasonry, one finds the cornerstone, the nobility of labor, the stone of foundation, the builder, the gavel, the hand, the lamb, the triangle, radiated triangle, and the trilateral name.
The cross, crosses, crossings, crosshatching populate Washington’s work. Like so many children did he, too, cross his heart to promise that words upon his lips were not untrue? What had the child made of a father, suddenly, crossed out of his life? Lines of descent creep across a great geographical divide. The multivalent cross raised and lowered in baptism, just beyond and before triangular sails sail across oceans, part and participle of a triangular trade where dulled skulls and cross-bones harkened the piracy of an individual’s potential to be. To quote Maya Deren, in Haiti, “The sign of the cross appears everywhere, whenever communication or traffic between the worlds is to be indicated. The vertical dimension comprehends both the abyss below and the heavens above the earth, the dimension of infinity; the horizontal comprehends all men, space and matter. All ceremonies begin with the salute to the guardian of the crossroads, the Loa principle of crossing, of communication with the divine world.” Did Robert Johnson, in the mythic realms of Mississippi, stand at the crossroads reaching for an unfound sound, for true? Or did he reach into his own deep cavernous abyss of a mind until he found a sound that grew out of indescribable blacks into blues.
An artist must cross into unknown reaches and return, not only changed but also, bearing witness. Washington says, “What the cross actually means in this is that every individual that it takes to peoplize [sic] this world must bear a cross and that is to have their struggle in life before they reach their peak.” Though we see the cross as a primary symbol of Christianity, it doesn’t appear in Christian art until six centuries after Christ. This pagan symbol protected crops, was seen as a cipher for the phallus, the Tree of Life. In conjunction with the circle/oval/egg it represented a sacred marriage. Isn’t this the work of the artist, to marry disparate elements, one to the other in order to produce/reproduce, create and recreate newborn forms? A traveler might find, in strange terrain, embryonic energy, messages bearing new meanings. One must approach, with an amphibious attitude, the rock-faced future. Must cross, reach across border and borderland of hand to grasp, glean, guide and be guided by the unseen.
Thus Washington, after absorbing ideas from Athens and Egypt, decides to take himself further, further south. En route, he petitions the “Absolute” for a more complete knowledge of art. At last he stands before the ancient ruins of Mexico’s Teotihuacán.
There he stood taking in form, color, texture, and dimension of immense triangles of stone. Bathed in hot, humid light, he takes unprecedented steps towards his future, “So I went back by myself, and went up the Pyramid of the Sun, and then when I was up there I made a view . . . I had my sketchpad with me. So then I asked somebody how you get to the Pyramid of the Moon, and so they told me to go up the Avenue of the Dead. . . So when I got up the Avenue of the Dead about a hundred feet or something, then I saw a stone, I was going to pick up the stone, but I didn’t. I went on, and about another hundred feet. I had an urge to pick up the stone, and went back and picked up this stone. And I put it in my bag.”
A single rock incubates then reshapes Washington’s fate. Is it an accident that the image the rock reveals is of a boy? A young boy of Athens. Centuries ago, a young boy was working in Athens, but he was not working for wages. His face is preserved on a terracotta vase. The boy has the distinct likeness of an African who survived the crossing of a desert. He and other boys share pages of a book, share a fate that is lost in the gloss of history. Lost to history, the great ancestral chain of women and men linking the dead to the land of the living. Like that lost boy, who had also lost his father, Washington, just a generation or two away from wage-less working, went on living, his hands in constant motion. He too, at risk to lose all sense of himself in relentless labor, “But then I found a way to escape.”
I digress. We must return to Athens and its importance to the development of this work. Athene, mother-goddess of Athens. Her sign, a triangle poised on top of a cross. Note: that Athene came from North Africa. “Egyptians sometimes called Isis Athene, which means, “I have come from myself.” What comes from oneself, but one’s own mysteries: Washington says, “Everything in life was created in three.” Mother, father, child, is a holy trinity and an artist must be, at once, all three. The three-sided triangle points to three geographies: Mississippi, Mexico, and the Madison Valley; midwives in the birth of a sculptor.
In order to produce one must conceive, must receive and accept what comes from oneself. This is a recurrent theme in the writing and ideas James W. Washington Jr. has espoused. To mine one’s mind, to dig, excavate the ore, wrest and wrestle with the stuff of one’s life is, to me, his essential lesson. He is a mother/man, a man deeply connected to his feminine capacity, his anima. Perhaps, it is this quality that so entranced me about work centered upon mysteries of birth, conception, and its attendant markings.
Mason. Ma/son. Masonic. Ma/sonic. Mallet. Glyph-in-guise. Rise. Angle. Arch. Strike. Chip. Cut. Cut away. Drill down into granite, limestone, to see below the surface until rock reveals what form is being born.
“The more you make them come alive the better you feel. Because you become a part of that life, because it come through you. And you feel that life emerging from you. And you become energized, you become rejuvenated, as a result of this life flowing through you, and you inject it into the subject matter.”
Washington draws upon the unseen possibilities of a mineral material that, in our society, has lost its mystical function. Rocks are walked upon . . . used to build wall and edifice, are thrown at one’s enemies, dug up, ground down, and cast out. He uses metamorphic rock, composed of feldspar, quartz, and garnet as canvas and pulpit. Testament and testimony in stone is imbued with the mystery of history and is in keeping with shamanic traditions.
Walking Thunder, a Diné shaman, says, “The heart of rock teaching is found in the designs of the rocks. If you look carefully at a rock and focus on it, it may tell you the life story of the world. This is because rocks hold the stories of the world. That’s how they hold Earth’s wisdom.”
The wisdom in the way this sculptor has sculpted his life is evident, not only in his choice of materials, but in the gift of the giving of something larger than himself. For James and Janie Washington created a foundation that provides a foundation for artists to try their hand, test their visions, place themselves in and on a path of unseen possibility. I have been fortunate to spend days upon the grounds of the Washington House and Studio to take hold of a new knowing. A necessary knowing, needed to venture forth in and out of oneself and, through the act of creation, make visible something from an unseen, unknown world.
This deeply spiritual pair built their house upon a rock. A rock of ages. To quote the Sermon on the Mount, “I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock. And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.”
This is honey in the rock, this capacity for creation from creatures such as ourselves, who did dwell in the well of the womb, every one of us possessing untapped and unexplored possibilities. Dare you reach or do you refrain? As mother/father of our moments, I believe, as did Mr. Washington, that it is the work of the artist to bring forth, to vivify what lies hidden in the voids of the ovoid.
Carletta Carrington Wilson: In Poem of Stone and Bone Carrington Wilson utilizes objects, land and literature to create another, more nuanced perspective on the life and work of James W. Washington Jr. With a focus resting on the mid-to-late 19th and early 20th century, give or take a few decades, Wilson attempts “to see through history.” An avid reader of history and historical documents, Wilson’s literary and visual responses answer questions she never knew to ask. She states that: “Language is a visual medium, one by which form, shape and color inform an eye and shape a mind. Through the lens of history, I visit and revisit the role language has played in the creation of a past and the scripting of its future.”
Her work can be found in collections of the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, University of Washington Allen Library’s Book Art Collection, University of Puget Sound Collin’s Memorial Library Book Art Collection, Swarthmore College McCabe Library, and UCLA’s Judith A. Hoffberg Collection of Artist Books.