Spring Court – Perkins Housing Project

In 1955 my mother left South Carolina with her five young children and came to live in the Perkins Housing Project in Baltimore. This was our kitchen as it appeared in about 1957 when I was 12. My mother loved her sewing machine so it is fitting that this portrait of her includes a replica of her Singer, foot-powered machine. On it she taught me to sew.

She returned to Baltimore to escape my father and the poor, hard-scrabble life of a small mill town. One day he found us and it was through that 2nd floor kitchen window that my brother and I jumped to go to the police station to get help.

A Little Explanation

My family’s life through my early childhood was marked by continual upheaval as we moved from one house to another, from one situation to another. I counted that we lived in 16 different houses before I was 10 years old. It was also characterized by the contradiction between rural life in a small southern town with all the wonderful things that go along with that and the constant disruption and fear stemming from a home life that my mother worked so hard to stabilize in the face of a father who was an abusive alcoholic. He lived with us from time to time but only long enough to make our lives confusing. My mother finally brought us back to Baltimore in 1955 to escape him but it would take another five years, a jail sentence, and his slow demise to free us from life with him.

Most of the images in this series are three-dimensional re-creations of houses, environments, and scenes from my childhood. Buildings, furniture, landscapes, foliage and all other items are 3D creations which have been rendered into 2D images. In many places I have used old photographs as the inspiration for the scene and I have rebuilt the environment from the photograph or created wholly new environments using a number of software applications. Then in some I have inserted the images of my family into the renderings using Photoshop. My goal has been to create images that tell stories and give the viewer a stronger sense of place or the event or of the characters involved. I have aimed for the rough edges and the layers of dark and light. I have tried to move beyond the photographs to something not better, but just more illustrative of how things seem from the perspective of today.

This work was made through most of 2013 and the beginning of 2014. The images are not presented in any special order. To see the images more closely you can click into them and then click again to get even closer.  For those who care, I used Eon Vue, Sketchup, 3D Max and Photoshop as my primary software.

My Father’s House

I have only one picture of my father and me. It was the starting point of this image. I think the picture was taken in Druid Hill Park near the entrance to the Zoo in about 1947 at a time when my mother left South Carolina to try to come back home to her family. That didn’t work out so we all moved back down there after only a few months in Baltimore.

I tried to locate the building in the photo but the closest I could find was the old stable and workshop maybe around 1900. So I used that building partially as the model for the building in my image.

My father hardly lived with us and when he did the world became an unpredictable and dangerous place. Mostly he lived on the road ending up homeless and ravaged by alcoholism, dead before 50. I imagined this to be his home…not the steepled building on the hill with the shiny car but the shack along the river with water rising ceaselessly

202 Walter Street

This is a much more ominous take on the fire that burned next to our house than the one later in these posts of the image of my brother and me in our back yard. But throughout these works I have been thinking on the contradiction between the rural and idyllic life we seemed to have and the hardships that were constant from our poverty, an absent father, and a mother whose family had seen her as lost.

My Older Brother

My brother John and I were constant companions when we lived in the South. During that time we were very close and we measured our lives around what we did together.

I started this image with this old photo. I was struck by what a crazy collection of buildings and furniture and other stuff made up our surroundings. So not knowing exactly which of the many houses that we lived in those first 9 years this one represented, I decided to invent my own world of what might have been beyond the edges of the photo.

Wind House

In 1954 Hurricane Hazel blew through the South. For our family, for me, it was the biggest storm I had ever seen. It blew down trees, tore off roofs and made the town look disheveled and dangerous, the aftermath of a fight with the weather. In our garden most of the seven or eight apple tress that we had were blown over and big pecan trees ended up sideways in the streets.

Although our house survived without any real damage I came to see back then how fragile our surroundings were and how little it took to disturb an already tenuous life.

Fire and Flood

In our backyard on Walter Street we had a big Chinaberry tree that we played in all the time. Both my brother and I had our pictures taken in that tree proudly standing in the crotch like we owned the world. As I was making this image I was focused on the theme of fire and flood and was thinking about how little we knew of the future and the world that would be presented to us. My brother and I were so different. All of us, my mother, brothers, and sister were facing a new world once we left the south. Yet we were still in reach of the disasters that our father could bring.

Church On Fire

For a while we lived in the back of a church in McColl. Living there were my three brothers, my grandma, my mother, and me. At this time my mother was working in the cotton mill about four blocks away as a bobbin winder. Bobbin winding is a process in the stages of making thread and ultimately cloth. My brother John and I were old enough to walk to school by ourselves but my two younger brothers were at home with my grandma. At some point one afternoon, the back of the church caught fire from an electrical short. My grandma had gone off to visit a neighbor close by, seeing that the two boys were napping. So when the fire broke out the only one left on the scene was our collie dog Rocky. He took it upon himself to bark and bark until he roused a neighbor who came and carried the boys out of the church to safety. Almost everything we had was destroyed but that evening Mrs Walters let us move into her empty house to stay with the few belongings we were able to salvage from the fire.

I remember walking home from school that day and seeing/hearing the fire engine racing down Main Street and having some prescient sense that somehow that fire engine was for us.

The Country Life

Not all was disaster. This is my mother pregnant with my sister in about 1953. This was the first image I did that used an old photograph as the basis of the image. I had previously made a 3D model of this house around 2002 using a 3D printer and mounted it in a wooden box so I used that 3D file I had made as the beginning of the environment that I built. I wanted to expand on the little black and white photo of my mother. The original black and white photo had only half of my brother so I had to remove him from the scene. Sorry, John.

McColl Tornado

We lived in old Mrs Walter’s house on Walters Street for our last few years in South Carolina. It is the house I always associate with the best times of my childhood. We had a big field in the back where we grew all sorts of vegetables. We had apple trees and a big fig tree and a Chinaberry tree where my brother and I built a ramshackle tree house. It was in that house where my sister Elaine was born. When we left in 1955, my grandma stayed and lived there until she died a few years later.

I went back to visit in 1973 and then again in early March of 1984. Both times the house had changed, once for the better, once for the worse. But the third time I visited, some years later, there was nothing but an empty field where the house had been. I asked someone where the house was and they told me it had been bulldozed under. Only recently did I find out that at 7:30 PM on March 28th, 1984, only a couple of weeks after my visit, a series of freak tornadoes hit McColl and many surrounding towns killing 7 and injuring 394 in McColl alone. That old house was in the path of the McColl tornado.

Grandma’s House

Our grandma was Liza Jane Hyatt. She was our father’s mother. I made this house for her. I don’t think she ever had a house of her own. She lived with us off and on in South Carolina helping my mother raise her five children. She was an old-time lady who knew how to make soap from pig fat and lye in a black cauldron in the yard, always had a wad of Tube Rose snuff in her lower lip which she spit into an old coffee can. She told us tales, around our coal stove, of ghostly encounters(which she swore were real). She taught my mother how to put up berries and vegetables for the winter, how to grow food in the field behind our house and how to treat childhood maladies with sulfur and molasses. She helped support our family with her Social Security pension.

We have only three pictures of her. In one she is gathering the four boys together on the steps of our house, a picture that was taken just a while before we left for Baltimore and only a couple of years before she died. I used that picture as the inspiration for this invented scene. I pictured us really going to Grandma’s house, a visit that we might make on a Sunday. But our Grandma’s house would be open to the same vagaries of life as all of our other houses – floods and fires and storms. But in this case, she was there to watch over us.

The Railroad House

We lived for a while in a little narrow house along the railroad tracks that headed toward Main Street and past our school. A few times a day, the train would coming whizzing past. It slowed down as it reached the crossroads nearby. We had a dog named Rocky, mostly Collie, that chased the train each and every time it went by. He would run up to the locomotive with its big spinning wheels behind the cow-catcher and bark and bark with his head perilously close to the rotating bars connecting the wheels. One day we watched him make his ritual chase but he came too close and one of the big spinning bars caught him and knocked him into the dusty road paralleling the tracks. We thought for sure he was dead. But he recovered, never the same dog and half blind from the blow. We left him with our grandma when we left South Carolina a couple of years later.

For me, in my memory, that house and the dog were like a couple. I imagine how endangered he was living so close to something so unpredictable, so beyond his control. I felt that often about our lives there with my mother trying to keep us safe and happy in the face of a family life that was, at times, so tenuous and equally unpredictable.

Little Pee Dee River

I only have one memory of my father taking me anywhere as a kid. Just beyond our house near the cotton mill in South Carolina, there was a railroad trestle over the Pee Dee river. The railroad ties along the trestle were open so that you could look down and see the muddy river running below. At 7 or 8 years old it looked like the Grand Canyon below and so my brother and I were always afraid that we would fall through the ties to a watery death below.

Once my father took us “camping” under the trestle. We had a couple of longs sticks, maybe bamboo, with strings and hooks, which we loaded up with dug-up worms. One of us caught an eel, long and slippery, which my father cooked over a fire. We stayed up all night I remember (or at least it seemed that way) watching the stars and the river, hearing the big black train sometimes rumbling overhead.

I made this image as a little homage to my father for that one good memory I have of him that is simple and pure and untainted by the rest of his troubled life. I used the 19th century Japanese woodblock artist Hiroshige’s wonderful “Evening Rain at Atake on the Great Bridge” as an inspiration for the trestle and the river passing underneath.

The Burning Broomstraw Field

Next to our house on Walter Street was a big field of broom straw that we played in. My brother John says that we set the fire in the field by playing with fire crackers. My memory is that our father, during a drunken binge, set it by carelessly tossing a match or a cigarette. In any case, the field caught fire one day and scorched most of the broom straw down to black nubs. The one fire engine in the town had to come to put the fire out.

The image is made from a 3D environment I made of the house, smokehouse, outhouse and the fields and foliage surrounding the house. I tried to be true to how it really was (although the landscape looks a bit more like Little House on the Prairie than where we lived).

The Flood

For a while my family lived in a little house behind the cotton mill at the end of Railroad avenue. The house was tucked away in the middle of the woods down a path from the end of the road where the mill stopped. Not fifty yards away were the railroad tracks where large black locomotives pulled car after car with goods headed to and from the mill. I visited the place again as an adult and the house was no longer there. It had just disappeared with no sign, no rubble, not even a hole in the woods. I had heard from someone that it had been moved. Much later I learned that the Pee Dee river, running only a little distance away, had flooded and the house had been carried away.

So I have been thinking a lot about that house and other houses where we lived and playing in my mind with how that flood might be a metaphor for the transient and barely rooted life my mother and her five children lived during the first nine years of her marriage. This is not McColl but a place where, in spite of the grandeur of the landscape, there is no real resting place for that house.