inside of the door. It could be the bathroom of a construction worker.
Affixed to the living room walls with blue masking tape were drawings of all the black men she’d been studying, mostly in charcoals. I recognized the African-Americans who’d been coming to the house over the course of the past several months: Cozelle; Markeif; Jershawn; and her present subject, Big Keith.
Each man had a seven-part narrative progression.
Panel One:
Nude slave being purchased shipside by a plantation owner, ankles and neck ringed in medieval-looking iron shackles.
Panel Two:
Semi-clad, barefoot slave engaged in some form of plantation work involving cotton picking, soil tilling, or field clearing.
Panel Three:
Freed slave fighting in Civil War setting, dressed in makeshift Union Army soldier’s garb, aiming a musket at unseen Confederate enemies.
Panel Four:
Educated freed slave sitting in a high-gloss university lecture hall, bespectacled, in collared shirt and tie, slacks, and fine leather shoes.
Panel Five:
BCS college football player striking a Heisman pose in the end zone, white Amazonian cheerleaders going apeshit with oversized pom-poms.
Panel Six:
Wealthy professional football player manning the wheel of the infamous O. J. Simpson white Ford Bronco, a trio of bikini-clad, blond Caucasian women fawning over him from the backseat, one of them fondling him under his uniform pants.
Panel Seven:
Modern-day, twenty-first-century African-American, nude again, confident in expression, staring straight at the viewer, holding a smartphone, a Bluetooth device in his ear, penis dangling midthigh, a noose around his neck, an ancient Southern oak tree in the background, conflating the literal and ultrasymbolic “lynching” theme, bringing the whole thing full circle, back to the Inescapable South.
Each subject has a slight variation to his story. For instance, the thin, sinewy Cozelle, instead of scoring a touchdown, is playing NCAA basketball, knees bent at the free throw line, mid-rhythm-dribble, wearing a North Carolina Tar Heels uniform and classic Air Jordan high-tops.
In his slave work setting, the dark-skinned, abdominally endowed, large-eyed Markeif is picking cotton, bare-backed, with grotesquely raised flogging scars, whereas the light-skinned, GQ -handsome Jershawn is dressed as a white-gloved butler, fully wigged and facially powdered, serving silver platters of food to the plantation owner and his family in their decadent dining room, ghostly portraits of patrician, Hircine-faced forebears looming on the walls above.
The only panel that is exactly the same throughout is the rendering of the white Ford Bronco; the one thing changing being the actual subject, but each receiving a handjob.
“What are you calling these?” I asked.
“ The Seven Stations of O. J. Simpson’s America .”
“Wow,” I said. “Intense title.”
“It’s my senior thesis project.”
“You’ve really nailed Keith’s face.” She had obviously nailed his enormous penis, too; vermiform like his arms.
“Thank you,” Harriet said shyly, wearing the faintest hint of a smile.
“They all pose nude for you?”
“That’s what they agree to.”
“Do they sign a contract?”
“We simply have a conversation over coffee. If it feels right, we agree to meet for one sixty-minute session, for which I pay them twenty bucks. If that goes well, we continue the process, hopefully eventually arriving at the white Ford Bronco.”
I asked her if she ever felt unsafe.
“No,” she replied.
I asked if her subjects ever get excited.
“You mean erect?” she said.
“Yeah, that.”
“One of them had that happen the first few sittings, but the problem resolved itself.”
I tried to imagine what this could possibly mean. I envisioned Harriet handing Markeif a tube of Astroglide and a paper towel and leaving the room.
She asked me if I’ve ever posed nude.
I told her that I hadn’t, that I couldn’t even imagine it.
“It’s
Affixed to the living room walls with blue masking tape were drawings of all the black men she’d been studying, mostly in charcoals. I recognized the African-Americans who’d been coming to the house over the course of the past several months: Cozelle; Markeif; Jershawn; and her present subject, Big Keith.
Each man had a seven-part narrative progression.
Panel One:
Nude slave being purchased shipside by a plantation owner, ankles and neck ringed in medieval-looking iron shackles.
Panel Two:
Semi-clad, barefoot slave engaged in some form of plantation work involving cotton picking, soil tilling, or field clearing.
Panel Three:
Freed slave fighting in Civil War setting, dressed in makeshift Union Army soldier’s garb, aiming a musket at unseen Confederate enemies.
Panel Four:
Educated freed slave sitting in a high-gloss university lecture hall, bespectacled, in collared shirt and tie, slacks, and fine leather shoes.
Panel Five:
BCS college football player striking a Heisman pose in the end zone, white Amazonian cheerleaders going apeshit with oversized pom-poms.
Panel Six:
Wealthy professional football player manning the wheel of the infamous O. J. Simpson white Ford Bronco, a trio of bikini-clad, blond Caucasian women fawning over him from the backseat, one of them fondling him under his uniform pants.
Panel Seven:
Modern-day, twenty-first-century African-American, nude again, confident in expression, staring straight at the viewer, holding a smartphone, a Bluetooth device in his ear, penis dangling midthigh, a noose around his neck, an ancient Southern oak tree in the background, conflating the literal and ultrasymbolic “lynching” theme, bringing the whole thing full circle, back to the Inescapable South.
Each subject has a slight variation to his story. For instance, the thin, sinewy Cozelle, instead of scoring a touchdown, is playing NCAA basketball, knees bent at the free throw line, mid-rhythm-dribble, wearing a North Carolina Tar Heels uniform and classic Air Jordan high-tops.
In his slave work setting, the dark-skinned, abdominally endowed, large-eyed Markeif is picking cotton, bare-backed, with grotesquely raised flogging scars, whereas the light-skinned, GQ -handsome Jershawn is dressed as a white-gloved butler, fully wigged and facially powdered, serving silver platters of food to the plantation owner and his family in their decadent dining room, ghostly portraits of patrician, Hircine-faced forebears looming on the walls above.
The only panel that is exactly the same throughout is the rendering of the white Ford Bronco; the one thing changing being the actual subject, but each receiving a handjob.
“What are you calling these?” I asked.
“ The Seven Stations of O. J. Simpson’s America .”
“Wow,” I said. “Intense title.”
“It’s my senior thesis project.”
“You’ve really nailed Keith’s face.” She had obviously nailed his enormous penis, too; vermiform like his arms.
“Thank you,” Harriet said shyly, wearing the faintest hint of a smile.
“They all pose nude for you?”
“That’s what they agree to.”
“Do they sign a contract?”
“We simply have a conversation over coffee. If it feels right, we agree to meet for one sixty-minute session, for which I pay them twenty bucks. If that goes well, we continue the process, hopefully eventually arriving at the white Ford Bronco.”
I asked her if she ever felt unsafe.
“No,” she replied.
I asked if her subjects ever get excited.
“You mean erect?” she said.
“Yeah, that.”
“One of them had that happen the first few sittings, but the problem resolved itself.”
I tried to imagine what this could possibly mean. I envisioned Harriet handing Markeif a tube of Astroglide and a paper towel and leaving the room.
She asked me if I’ve ever posed nude.
I told her that I hadn’t, that I couldn’t even imagine it.
“It’s
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