810-UMMter Fannins, Satarday, January 17,1987
Former Servant Paints Century
Of Memories From Her Past
NATCHITOCHES, La. - When
Frenchie came home to die,
Clementine cared for him in
sorrow. Then he did die, as he’d
announced he would. After
Clementine came home from the
funeral, she couldn’t sleep. She’d
loved her son with consuming love.
Now he had gone away and would
not come back, and she had to
paint. That was Clementine
Hunter’s way.
She painted an open grave, with
Frenchie soaring out of it, already
fitted with angel’s wings, heading
for a hole in the sky that would take
him to the Promised Land.
The scene of Frenchie’s leave
taking strikes with primal force.
The painting may be the most
emotional of Clementine Hunter’s
5,000 to 7,000 paintings, but it is not
alone in its communion with her
deepest feelings.
Plantation Memories
And Clementine Hunter has had
a lot of time to feel. In December
1986 her admirers celebrate her
100th birthday. The occasion
means little to one whose richest
images erupt from a plantation
past.
On the wall of her trailer is a
plastic relief of the Last Supper
and a proclamation from Gov.
Edwin Edwards of Louisiana,
making her an honorary colonel
and aide-de-camp. President
Carter invited her to the White
House; she wouldn’t go because
they said she’d have to fly. Lots of
people fly, a friend told her. “They
crazy, too,” she said. She’s seen an
airplane, though, and painted it;
the propeller is on the tail.
(hie of America’s most-admired
artists picked cotton well into
young womanhood. Then she
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became a house servant and did
the laundry and ironing at Melrose
Plantation until the owners
recognized her ability as a cook.
She worked on the plantation
until she was about 75, and for
years would work all day, then
walk the dirt road to her shack to
cook for her family before earning
the right, not to sleep, but to paint.
Once she started to paint, it
became her obsession. Yet she
never had held a brush until she
was about 53 years old.
Clementine Hunter has never
been more than 100 miles from the
rural parish where she was bom. It
is doubtful whether she has been
addressed as “Mrs. Hunter” a
dozen times in her life. She signs
her paintings with her initials
superimposed, but, even though
she knows better and used to draw
it the other way, she reverses the
“C.”
She cannot read or write. It
doesn’t seem to matter. She grasps
anything within reach - window
shades, shoe boxes, paper sacks,
snuff bottles with gnarled
fingers and floods it with bright
colors until an exuberant narrative
unfolds.
Compelled To Paint
Today is her last day on earth,
one thinks, seeing her brush jab
the yard-square plywood palette
and stroke a dead white surface
until it comes to brilliant life.
Clementine Hunter paints:
Rough-and-tumble schoolyards,
decorous but perilous courtrooms,
even more dangerous lots outside
honky-tonks, throbbing cotton
gins, lively funerals, river bap
tizings, pecan-tree thrashings,
joyously successful fishing ex-
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s stare impudently at the onlooker as they haul cotton from a field in this 1970
painting by Clementine Hunter, 100-year-old primitive artist. Granddaughter of a slave,
the artist picked cotton in Louisiana well into young womanhood, then became a house
servant at Melrose Plantation. Her paintings, long considered valuable because they
chronicle days gone by, are increasingly hailed for their color, form and vitality.
peditions, and, in characteristic
whimsy, chickens pulling enor
mous loads of cotton.
In her banana-frond-shaded
Nativity scenes, the wise men
present a black Mary with three
gifts; a cake wrapped in
cellophane, a box of candy, and a
big squash known as a cushaw.
She paints entirely from
memory- “Anything that come into
my mind, I paints it,’’ she says.
“Anything.”
She painted evocative abstracts
for a while, but quit, protesting,
“They make my head sweat.”
“Clementine has documented a
way of life on southern plan
tations,” says Thomas N.
Whitehead, a journalism professor
at Northwestern State University
of Louisiana. “Her role as a par
ticipant who can tell us about those
days is unique. She lived it and she
can paint it.”
Whitehead is one of a small
group of Natchitoches academics
who believe the well-being of
Clementine Hunter is their noblest
purpose. Several times a week for
20 years, Whitehead has driven
seven miles through the Cane
River cottonfields to her small
trailer to supply her with brushes,
oil paints, and other needs, such as
fried chicken. She treats such
devotion as her due, upbraiding
him for any lapse.
Mildred Bailey, dean of the same
university, is another of
Clementine Hunter’s benefactors.
On a recent visit to the trailer to
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help her sort out a financial
problem, Dr. Bailey first had to
contend with the tiny, wizened
artist’s pique at a perceived
transgression by Whitehead.
Waiting For Salt Meat
“I got a pretty cabbage over
there,” Mrs. Hunter said, “and it’|
waitin’ for that salt meat Tommj'
supposed to bring me to go witv
it.”
At the end of an hour’s visit, hef
expressed concern as Dr. Bailey
departed was, “Tell Tommy to get
out here with that salt meat he
promised, or my cabbage is gone
rot.”
In the sweltering parlor of her
trailer, Mrs. Hunter sits in an
overstuffed chair with her
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