Circling

It was a plaza of discount stores, where, in second grade, my mother bought sneakers with Velcro closures for me so the other kids would not notice I had not learned to tie my shoes. Location of the gas station bathroom where, as sophomores, Cross Country team members would hide during practice, smoking cigarettes, secrets that made us feel older, and that we bonded over keeping from the adults.

Now it’s the site where the greenway is being expanded and a sculpture will be placed. The sculpture will depict a Cherokee woman offering corn to an enslaved woman who shares the handle of a basket with the daughter of settlers. These are historical figures from my home county in North Carolina. Its title is Sowing the Seeds of the Future.

It is rare that women are monumentalized. But I have learned of some examples from the book Monuments to the Lost Cause edited by Cynthia Mills and Pamela H. Simpson. There is a statue of a Confederate memorial in Raleigh, North Carolina, dedicated in 1914, of a woman and child seated together. The child has his hand on a sword, she is holding a book.  It’s not exclusively a woman who is represented—the boy is there in the space too, to make her a mother figure—but she features large.

It is bullshit, says a detractor of Sowing the Seeds of the Future. Three such women would have never held hands.

In the 1920s, a North Carolina senator had proposed a monument in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South—a woman holding a white baby, with Black toddlers’ hands tugging at her skirt.

Sowing the Seeds of the Future is not meant to suggest that such individuals danced in a literal circle with each other, says the project leader. It is to show that they lived in the same time, same region.

The boy in the Raleigh statue has been interpreted as offering the possibility of either taking the blade from the scabbard or having just returned it, evoking both the past of his forefathers and looking ahead to the future. The Confederate woman is believed to be educating the boy about the Lost Cause and the Southern culture. They both appear to be white.

The hometown sculpture project leader, the detractor, and I are all white.

The Raliegh Confederate woman’s book pages are blank.

Information on the white settler appearing in Sowing the Seeds of the Future, Timoxena, is available because her descendants had a box of her papers, which they passed along to the town newspaper editor, who came up with the sculpture idea. When she, a widow, developed cancer, a friend cared for her. And when the editor died, that caretaker became the leader of the sculpture project.

In Confederate sculptures of females, they usually represent all white Southern women in a general way, as embodiments of both the glory and the tragedy of the South. Historically, most sculptures with feminine figures, regardless of the occasion or country, have not been of a particular individual, but rather, symbols of abstract virtues such as justice or victory.

Of the Cherokee woman in the proposed statue, Rebecca, there are some records. Though she changed her first name from Na-Ka and married a white man, she had not surrendered enough to accept that it was his name that should appear on documents such as the title to her land.

How journalistically objective could she be about the slaveholder?

The mammie statue proposed by the senator had a heavy, coarse shape. She was implicitly supposed to reassure the viewer that no history of exploiting Black bodies for, not just labor, but pleasure, had occurred. Supposed to show Black women as having no sexual appeal to white men. Or to put it another way, she was to enshrine the myth of white women as comparably delicate and desirable.

If there were female figures held up for me by my community when I was young, I suppose they were collectible Barbies still sealed in the boxes with cellophane windows, displayed on shelves in friends’ houses.

In the early 1900s, The United Daughters of the Confederacy declined to approve a female statue proposal because, as one member wrote, the woman portrayed in it didn’t look how some thought their foremothers ought to, but rather, like a willowy, sentimental, frivolous girl. Were they defending realistic standards for the appearance of their gender? Or was this a case of women turning on other women—afraid of the threat of another’s greater beauty—as we can do?

The papers included a photo of Timoxena in wedding attire, from which the sculptor sketched an accurate portrayal, detailing lace textures to etch in metal. The sculpture committee did not approve of the first draft of Timoxena’s figure styled this way. They sent the sculptor back to draw her again in a plain dress and boots, because the editor had left notes indicating she was the workingest lady around.

When I was a child, my mother took me out to the gardens where she worked. Ever resourceful, if a cucumber somehow managed to escape her notice and grew too big to eat, she’d turn it into a toy for me. She’d cut off one end, hollow the seeds out, carve an open-mouthed face, wrap a scrap of fabric around the bottom, and give me a spoon to feed it mud. This was a cucumber doll that dirtied its diaper. I’d change and care for the cucumber, watching my mother till and hoe, admiring her. (A baby doll is not the figure on which girls model themselves, of course; it is what is given to them so they can practice acting like conventional grown women.)

The newspaper editor, the first woman to ever serve in the position in my hometown and a newcomer to the insular rural community where she had no kin, was honored to be entrusted with the legacy of Timoxena. The newspaper editor must have wanted Timoxena to be revered.  How journalistically objective could she be about the slaveholder?

My mother’s efforts, great as they were, could not change our whole culture. She sewed a soft doll with a child’s shape out of pale peach fabric she ordered just for this project for me, named her Iris. When I got home from a friend’s house, I bound Iris’s pliable middle tight with ribbon to give her a waist and try to push up a bust. I said I wanted a store-bought doll, like a normal girl.

What little is known of Salley, the enslaved woman in Sowing the Seeds of the Future, has been deduced from receipts. From the antebellum sale of her to Rebecca’s husband, Salley’s birth date was estimated. From the receipt showing her sale to Timoxena’s husband, we can see the connection between them all. Both the Native and the settler family enslaved Salley.

The Daughters of the Confederacy raised substantial funds for memorials all over the South. In times when women had little power, they exercised this influence over money and public spaces. But, of course, I cannot defend their project of constructing a false narrative, denying that the Civil War was fought for the sake of the institution of slavery.

My family does not have many roots in the county where I grew up. But we have a part in history and I have a part in the story of Sowing the Seeds of the Future too. The person who opposes it for whitewashing was my high school Civics teacher. The leader of the sculpture project is my uncle’s wife—second wife, no blood relation.

These days, I teach at a university in Alabama, so there’s more history that’s mine to reckon with now. Alabama is home to several pieces of public art related to its famously racist heritage including the National Monument for Peace and Justice, monuments to Civil Rights marchers in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, and The Mothers of Gynecology sculpture in Montgomery. The Mothers of Gynecology is dedicated to Black women, in recognition of horrific experimentation they endured without anesthesia or consenting, for the purpose of medical advancements from which others would benefit.  

Where, in what period of history, could women really be represented as dancing together?  Predecessors and outsiders and others hand in hand? The hometown sculpture project organizer, married into my family, who is not my cousin’s mother or mother’s sister—have we even brought her into our circle?

How much does anyone share, have in common or not, with anyone else living in proximity to them? It is an enormous question for some human-sized pieces of metal to raise.

If these monuments do anything better than cause fear and give a false sense of who is a hero and what’s of value, they serve as reminders of parts of the past that it’s tempting, more comfortable, to forget.

Rebecca’s house, located near the present sculpture site, was torched when her husband was away. When she ran from the flames, her acres were seized by men who justified their actions by saying the land was not occupied.

When I moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma for a job and missed the North Carolina mountains, I would walk in the park across from my rental house. There, past the rose gardens, was the Five Moons sculpture, homage to the famous Native ballerinas Yvonne Chouteau, Rosella Hightower, Moscelyne Larkin, Maria Tallchief, and Marjorie Tallchief.

Eventually, Rebecca and her husband moved away from North Carolina to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) because that’s where more than seventy members of their family had been forcibly relocated or fled.

The Cherokee traveled to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, and there is no way I could construe my choice to relocate for my career as similar to the ethnic cleansing by which they were driven from their ancestral lands. But, in Tulsa, far from my family, I was comforted by the familiarity of place names (such as Coweta) derived from the Cherokee, similar to those in my mountains (Coweeta).

Rebecca didn’t leave North Carolina without a fight. Her name appeared in print again before her departure. On a suit she filed that won her $3,000 (though not her property’s return).

“The Mothers of Gynecology” seeks to restore to women whose bodies were sacrificed their personal identities, honoring, specifically, Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey.

I haven’t seen most of my schoolmates since I graduated. When I drive back to North Carolina, before I reach my parents’ dirt road, I pass the greenway and women speedwalking through the space where the statue will eventually stand. If I were a bit closer, going slower, I know I would know some of those faces as former girls’—now wrinkled and worn, under fat or foundation—instantly, still. And I wonder whether, if we met, I would be better or worse than whatever they’d imagined I’d become.

Often, people who encountered the Native ballerina sculpture in the Tulsa park were inspired to pose in jokey, clumsy versions of their pirouettes, arabesques, piques, jetes (or other positions, described by other terms I don’t know enough about to appropriately apply). I was drawn to do the same, but was too shy to reveal my gracelessness beside the statues’ elegantly elongated bodies.

Local women modeled for “Sowing the Seeds of the Future.” The Cherokee model asked that the sketch be revised again because, initially, she was posed crouching, at lower level, lesser stature, than the rest.

Marjorie Tallchief’s likeness was stolen, cut from Five Moons and removed from the park, a few years after I’d moved on from Tulsa for another job. Her absence becoming a monument to bigotry against Native people or women or art or beauty. Not or but and, I should say.

The speed walkers on the greenway create, with their pace, what seems to be an image of advancing forward. But that is rarely the quest of women’s fitness. Many of us want to go back, or at least pause time, to look like we always have—or used to. Those who have changed the least since they were teenagers are both admired for it and hated a little bit.  

To be honest, I’ve never cared for bronze sculptures in cities, never found realistic bronze renderings of commissioned sentiments innovative or complex like the art I’d choose, if I had funds and could make such decisions.

And maybe I associate public sculpture with the marble Confederate men standing in most every Southern town square. If these monuments do anything better than cause fear and give a false sense of who is a hero and what’s of value, they serve as reminders of parts of the past that it’s tempting, more comfortable, to forget.

I took interest in bronze sculpture only when my mother told me about the process for the hometown statue. The bronze sculptor begins by making a maquette, a small model in clay. Next, he makes a mold, impressions in relief. Lastly, a foundry casts the solid piece that will be displayed. Such replication and replication and expansion—

Most of the Marjorie Tallchief statue’s pieces, after having been chopped apart, were recovered from various scraps yards. The sculptor is now recasting the missing bits and soldering her back together.

My knowledge of the adults that childhood friends have turned into is fragmental, gathered from a selfie on social media (that I judge) or an arrest record (to be expected). Or a flyer for a cancer fundraiser or an obituary I can barely believe is real. These send me back, wholly, into memory, where we inhabit our young, light bodies, and, when we fall while playing tag or pursuing some ball, our skinned knees heal quickly.

Among the scraps of information pieced together to suppose a biography for Salley there is this: a receipt for Timoxena paying Salley for a pound of spinning post-Civil War. It is basis for the guess that they relied on each other after Timoxena was widowed—and after Salley was emancipated.  

The Mothers of Gynecology is made of materials gathered from scrap yards. These were the genesis, start, of the artist’s process of creating the towering fifteen-foot figures. Donors contributed discards; the artwork is collective in that sense.

There are many layers to consider in thinking about the receipt for Salley’s spinning.  The receipt is from Timoxena’s papers, she was the one with money to pay for another’s labor. What the story continues to model, replicates post-slavery, is patterns of injustice. Yet, also, it is said that Salley and Timoxena were lifelong friends, that they chose to stay together. And the caring those two humans seem to have shared should be passed on, made much of, too.

The pieces of stories I have collected are not equitable, their weights do not balance each other, they do not add up to a clear end.

But I pull my laces tight through the eyelets and set out to walk laps around the public path too.