Every morning and every night I open and close my eyes to Ficre’s painting Visitation. It allegorizes our first meeting in the State Street studio, when I walked through the “Foster Kindness” door into my future. In the painting, a man and a woman meet with offerings. From the woman, scarlet red tomatoes, her own fecundity held in cupped hands at her womb. She is wearing all white: the white of the Yoruba goddess Yemaya (with her blue nearby in the background), and the white of Obatala, the creator of all human bodies. The solemn brown man humbly offers an eye on a plate. That is what Ficre gave to all of us, his eyes on the world. We stand inside of him and have the privilege of seeing out as he did. The eye is also an icon, a protective evil eye that a caretaker offers his coming family. As in so many of his paintings, he has created a spirit house.
Though the pair is meeting for the first time, they are surrounded by the images of the children they will soon have, and their sons are painted as angels, for in Ficre’s work, there are angels everywhere in landscapes where ancestors are conjured and present.
A curtain of flowers rains down over the woman’s space, illuminating her. Visitation has Ficre’s characteristic sense of what Amy called in his work “tutto” naming a kinship with the Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti “Maps of the World.” They shared an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain.
Eight
And so the story ends, or pauses, for as we know it is all one long story.
My sons and I have moved to New York City. Today we look out our window at the Hudson River and wait for another hurricane as the sky turns lavender and orange, Ficre colors. When the rain is most dramatic, we feel him close. The boys grow taller than everyone around them and become young men. Their grandfather turns eighty and with my mother they circle the wagons and leave their home of forty-two years in Washington, DC, where I grew up, and return to New York—their ancestral metropolis—to be extended family with us, as Ficre always wanted it.
New York is the place that called Ficre as well, place with mythos, and a place where everyone belongs. Now I live in a neighborhood of stage doors and students walking down the street with huge instrument cases. The dancers pirouette on Lincoln Center Plaza and clatter down the street in high fabulosity. They are the children, making art. Ficre was one of the children, at the Art Students League, but he was never a child and always a child. That rare combination, true to his position on the zodiac. Ancient and brand-new, as anyone who knew him would say.
I am in New York City, where I was born, where I have spent decades trying to return. “Welcome home,” I am told many times, even by people who do not know I was born in Harlem, USA, at 135 and Fifth, in the Riverton apartments, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where my father was also born. Ficre and I never made it here together—that was planned for when the children graduated from high school.
Death sits in the comfortable chair in the corner of my new bedroom, smoking a cigarette. It is a he, sinuous and sleek, wearing a felt brimmed hat. He is there when I wake in the middle of the night, sitting quietly, his smoke a visible curl in the New York lights that come in between the venetian blind slats.
At first I am startled to see him. He sits so near, is so at home. But he doesn’t move towards me, he simply co-habits. And so, eventually, I return to sleep. He isn’t going anywhere, but he isn’t going to take me, either. In the morning, the chair is empty.
Which is stronger, death sitting in the corner, or life in New York City? Death, or my teenage sons, sleeping profoundly in the next room, growing overnight? “I love plans!” my new friend Esther exults, and so do I, for nowadays I feel like plans are all that stands between me and the end of my life. I’m not going to die overnight because next Wednesday I am going with Esther to see an auction of nineteenth-century American documents at Swann Galleries. I’m not going to die tonight because I already took the chicken out of the freezer and Simon loves roast chicken and rice for dinner, and I promised him I would make it. I’m not going to die tonight because on Saturday Farah and I are bundling up and going for a walk against the blustery winds along the river, to continue the conversation we began almost thirty years ago when we were both in graduate school, before I even knew my beloved Ficre.
At the fish market, I see the very first sets of roe and flats of shad. Each year I make a ritual spring meal of shad and its roe, as my mother always did. I fry bacon crispy, pour out the grease but leave the pan slick, dredge the fragile, bloody roe in flour, salt, and pepper, and fry it in the bacon pan with onions while the shad broils. I serve it with buttered, parslied boiled new potatoes and steamed asparagus.