From The Paris Review:
My great aunt Cora Mae can’t hear well. She is ninety-eight years old. When the global pandemic reached Michigan, the rehabilitation center where she was staying stopped accepting visitors. There were attempts at FaceTime, but her silence made it clear that for her, we had dwindled into pixelated ghosts. She contracted COVID-19 and has been moved again and again. When my mother calls to check on her every day, she makes sure to explain to hospital staff that my great aunt is almost deaf, that they have to shout in her left ear if they want to be heard.
Cora Mae has a bawdy sense of humor. Most of the time when she speaks, it’s to crack a joke that would make most people blush. She wears leopard print and prefers for her hair to be dyed bright red. I have tried to imagine her in the hospital, attempting to make sense of the suited, masked figures gesticulating at her. She doesn’t know about the pandemic. She doesn’t know why we’ve stopped visiting. All she knows is that she has been kidnapped by what must appear to be astronauts.
The film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, begins with a little black girl gazing up into the face of a white man wearing a hazmat suit. A street preacher standing on a small box asks: “Why do they have on these suits and we don’t?” He refers to the hazmat men as “George Jetson rejects.” It feels wild to watch the film right now, as governors begin to take their states out of lockdown knowing that black and brown residents will continue to die at unprecedented rates, taking a calculated risk that will look, from the vantage point of history, a lot like genocide. The film’s street preacher sounds obscenely prophetic. “You can’t Google what’s going on right now,” he shouts. “They got plans for us.”
. . . .
Under quarantine in Detroit, my father, a photographer, has been sifting through boxes of slides in his sprawling archive. Each image unleashes a story for him. Last week, he told me about arriving in Sarajevo while covering the Olympics. He stayed with a family of friendly strangers eight years before the war. “I wonder if they survived,” he mutters to an empty room.
When my cousin was a police lieutenant, she told us about getting a call for someone who had died. At first glance, they thought the man had been hoarding newspapers or magazines, but then his daughter explained that he was a composer. The papers in those leaning stacks were original compositions.
When we hear on the news that Detroit is struggling, that people are dying, do we imagine composers? Do we imagine a man who sifts through photographs of Bosnia before the war?
. . . .
Last year, the Detroit Institute of Arts mounted an exhibition called “Detroit Collects,” featuring mostly black collectors of African American art in the city. One room was lined with giant photographs of well-dressed collectors. Immediately I recognized the wry smile of a woman named Dr. Cledie Collins Taylor.
My parents have been telling me about Dr. Taylor for years. “You’re going to love her.” “Her house is a museum.” “She used to live in Italy.” “She loves pasta.” When a friend came to town, we thought we would go to the Detroit Institute of Arts, but my father took us to Dr. Taylor’s house instead. The sun was spilling across the horizon, raspberry sherbet bleeding into orange, and the temperature was in the low teens. A handful of houses along the street had big paintings integrated into the architecture of a porch or a window. We knocked on a security gate and a woman in her nineties welcomed us inside.
“Every February, someone discovers me,” Dr. Taylor joked, nodding at the coincidence of receiving extra attention during black history month. I felt a twinge of embarrassment. Here I was, encountering one of Detroit’s most important artistic matriarchs for the very first time.
. . . .
At Dr. Taylor’s house, we sat in the living room and talked for a while. The impeachment hearings were playing loudly on a television in her bedroom. “A lot of my collection is upstairs, why don’t you go take a look.” We crept carefully through a room that seemed to be fitted with exactly as many books as it could tastefully hold, toward a narrow stairway. Upstairs, canvases leaned against the walls. A figurine stood, stark, in a room off to the left. There was a photo-realistic painting of a black woman with short hair, in profile, wearing a pink turtleneck and sitting on a white couch. A black-and-white print of a man with hair like Little Richard peeked out from behind a stack of frames. In a round canvas, a man with an afro slouched behind a shiny wooden table, seated in front of geometric panes of blue, including a massive window framing a cloudy blue sky—as if Questlove were relaxing to “Kind of Blue” inside a Diebenkorn painting. Ordinary scenes of black life, exquisitely rendered, were scattered across the room, a collection relaxing into itself with a kind of easeful, dusty abundance. We were called back downstairs.
Dr. Taylor walked us through the house, and took us on a tour of the basement. African masks, sculptures, shields, and figurines were pinned to pegboard the way other basements showcase drills and rakes. I placed my hand on the baby bump of a pregnant wooden figure. “Somewhere along the line, the collecting idea just catches you,” Dr. Taylor said, humbly.
“You could tell where the problems were because you’d get a lot of things from that place,” she said of collecting work from Africa. “I realized that people were responding to what they needed; certain things in their family shrines they could part with, just to eat.” She told us about her friend, a playwright who convinced a general not to kill her family during the Biafran War. Dr. Taylor tried to hold items and then give them back when wars had ended, once she realized why they’d become so available, but she struggled to get past corrupt middlemen.
Link to the rest at The Paris Review