Souls I Have Known, A Meditation on Gratitude, by Julia Demaree-Raboteau
Some twenty years ago, I went to Harlem to teach weekly art classes to a group of mentally challenged adults at a day rehabilitation treatment program called Community Support System (CSS). I had taken the job to help support myself as a struggling artist in New York City. I was not as yet Orthodox. Indeed, I reveled in both my individualistic lifestyle and my art style—making paper walking tents that one could put over one’s head like a long umbrella and stroll about the city at will. After six months of teaching art, I was hired full-time as a “mental health worker.”
My new job opened me up to redefining myself as a community person, a change that created significant growing pains to my identity as an independent individual. Also, I expanded my understanding of “creativity” to include the dynamics of human relationships, a much more complex and difficult affair than making art. I set off on my journey blessed with Louise, a fellow artist, hired six months after I was.
Together we created a safe space that became a beacon for those clients who were called to make things and who wanted a quiet place in their lives. Of these some were assigned a permanent workspace where they worked every day. Over time, our studio burgeoned into a multifaceted community of much activity that we called “Souls in Motion.” It was in this room that I learned how to give and receive. In Romans 12, Saint Paul speaks to us about being “living sacrifices” for God and for each other.
The CSS/Souls in Motion community members are mostly people of color, subsidized by government money, who have a psychiatric diagnosis—factors that can make life a challenging affair. Yet I find these people to be bearers of much joy and gratitude, more than I usually experience with people on the outside. Personally, I have always felt that they were the “insiders” and bristle when I hear the phrase “outsider artist.” Stripped of the prosaic “perks” of the culture—money, white skin, and an ability to rationalize away adversity—they sit naked in their glory before God, no matter how off their behavior may get. I love the spirit in our room and love each and every one of them. They have been my teachers for many years. I take great pleasure in sharing some of their stories and lessons with you now.
Let us call up some names. Those still with us: Marguerite, William, Frank, Floyd, Germaine, Rhoda, Ethel, Belton, Doris, Chris, James, Sayeeda, Diane, Juliette, Mary, Alice. And those passed on to the Lord: Candee, Gibbons, Cordelia, Isaac, Pat, Mr. Foo, Spencer, Robert, Hugh, Mariano, Andrew.
Glory be to all these children of God!
Marguerite
Marguerite is a churchgoing lady who expects modern people to have the graciousness she was raised with in the South. She was brought up by her Aunt Hattie, who taught her prayers and manners and who sent her up North at age thirteen to be a live-in maid for wealthy white families in Long Island. Part of her bittersweet litany is to bemoan her lack of formal education and to see whites as better people than blacks. These thoughts keep her at odds with herself and also keep her overly sensitive to insults that occur easily in the callous business of daily living.
Part of her solace comes in catching your ear for long periods of time. It has been in trying to listen to Marguerite that I realized how impatient a person I am. Once I accepted her as my teacher of patience and began to accept her long monologues, her conversational needs changed. Then we could speak about topics that joined us together, about church, children, food. I was in awe of her “motherwit,” telling her that I preferred it to the tedious thinking that can come from those formally educated.
One day she gave me a prayer she learned from Aunt Hattie, a treasure that I recite each morning:
Thank you, Lord, for another day.
A day I never saw before. And
thank you for waking me clothed
in my right mind and for having
all the activities in my limbs.
Amen.
May God bless you with many, many years, Marguerite!
Lorna
From the very first day, Lorna had a full understanding of the potential of the Souls in Motion Studio. She embodied its “sky is the limit” spirit. She was about loving, tolerating, and connecting people together. I was her student in learning about love and connection in community life.
Her first hope from Souls was realized when we published her anthology of poems, Love Always, a title that revealed how she lived her life. She was the galvanizing force behind my husband Albert’s weekly journal-writing class, called the “Soup Seminar,” when writing and sharing were followed by Louise’s delicious homemade soups. Louise and Lorna developed a Souls Pushcart lunch of codfish stew and cornbread to sell to people working for other social services in our building.
She made a cloth self-portrait, a doll that looked just like her. Outside our studio, she fought for patients’ rights in Albany and empowered other clients as a peer counselor. She brought Gospel singing into the room with her talented daughter Rita, and voices we didn’t know we had came to join theirs. Marguerite’s was one of them.
Lorna’s compassion and zest for life were accompanied by a terrific sense of humor. One day she made up a poem to lift another client, William, out of his doldrums. Standing next to his desk, she intoned:
if I bite you
i ain’t gonna let nobody
see me bite you
i’d love to hug you
because you’re for real
you know the deal
i love your laughter
it makes me happy
so if you’re
gonna bite me
make it snappy . . .
Her personal gift to me came before our Orthodox altar, where we would pray together, either to praise God or to help us when life came down hard on us and our community. She taught me how to pray from my heart. She also prayed at the altar for the clients’ children in foster care. At her funeral this year, tributes of love were returned to her tenfold.
Memory eternal, our dear Lorna!
Candee
Candee was a large, handsome woman waysided by a heavy heart. She was from affluence, attended college, and had had options for her life before she came to our program. She bemoaned her state of poverty and instability, and endlessly tried to reconnect with family members who shied away from her. It was difficult for her to accept the advantages of the program because she was so busy blaming others for her plight. Eventually she married another client, found her niche, and gained respect in the community.
Her mind and tongue were as sharp as a razor and her tapered fingers capable of great sewing magic. Louise and I adored her, but sometimes had to avoid her intensity. She infused our creative studio with much excitement. I felt called to her and was challenged by her complex personality and passion for life; I stayed with her through many troubling life choices.
She would test love, respect, and loyalty on a daily basis. She taught me the necessity of creating boundaries for our many-layered relationship. She could be short on gratitude because she thought you owed her. I struggle with that attitude, and so she struck that chord in me as well. She challenged my compassion. In order to help her open her heart, I had to keep mine open even while she was piercing it. Ours was an emotional minefield. In the end, I was overwhelmed by her largesse and had to keep more distance than I wanted to.
Her husband died before she did. He was the love of her life, and she fell down hard without him. She wrote his obituary. It was incisive, caring, and magnanimous, as she was.
Memory eternal, Candee!
Frank
Frank loves to get a charge out of people. All in fun, he says. Sometimes with his brash exterior we forget about the heart of gold underneath. And we know this heart of gold because we see how much he cares about his dog Yogi, who has epilepsy. And we remember how his first dog, Princess, a Chihuahua that he got from his caseworker, used to sleep on his chest to assuage his panic attacks and drive away the night demons that have always plagued him. Then there are the cats. He is always after me to give him one of the philodendron plants we grow in the room. He loves to be in the presence of living things and particularly has loved the animals we have had in the studio all these years.
Frank is also an entrepreneur. He picks up all kinds of goods on the avenue that he tries to con you into buying. He knows what Louise and I like and often finds things we cannot resist. Once we bought into having three enormous stuffed gorillas protecting the Souls premises. He specializes in bikes and rides one himself instead of using the subway.
When he drew an African mask that knocked me out, I encouraged him to draw more, but he said, “Teach, I can’t spend time drawing when I’m worried about my survival.” After that comment I went with him to help fix up his apartment.
Seeing life through his eyes expanded my approach to “making art” in the studio. I ordered red, yellow, and blue duct tape so he could wrap and decorate his bikes. I cut up leather knapsacks, adapting them to saddlebags for his bike. He was elated and sewed them up with carpet thread. We made a winter coat for Princess. These early projects gave rise to many, many others. The main problem was that Frank’s projects were always time-consuming and required hours I often didn’t have. We compromised.
Mainly, I thank Frank for enlarging my field of vision. When people would ask me, well do you teach art at Souls? I would think, if only you knew . . .
To Frank and his menagerie, many, many years!
Gibbons
Enter Gibbons, a soulful guy whose existence defied the premise of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He relished a lightness of being that registered in the angelic realm. His sense of cosmic joy reminded me of the Dalai Lama. He adored every inch of Souls in Motion, and his imagination took fire from the endless possibilities of “matter.”
Gibbons fashioned his art out of wooden sewing spools, toy dinosaurs, dominoes, cotton batting, plastic forks, anything at hand. I can see him coming into the studio with a big plastic bag and a big grin on his face. I could barely keep him in Elmer’s glue, yet most of his creations easily fell apart. I called his broken glass ashtrays “encrustations.” We all owned one. His work would leave the studio as mysteriously as it was created. He filled us with a sense of awe. He applied this same energy to his writing entry for Albert’s 1999 Souls calendar:
Recipe for a Hot Day
A tall glass of cool
breeze with ice cubes
Water sandwich with
two cushions of fresh air.
He loved baking at three in the morning. His sweet potato pies were made from scratch with fresh vegetables and honey. He was enthralled when I told him he could use squashes, and then the warm, orange pies would come to us for breakfast in all kinds of combinations using yam, pumpkin, squash, and sweet potato. He captured the awe before the variety of God’s creation.
Out of the blue, he would whisper to me, “Do you know that we are just one of a zillionth of a speck in the galaxy?” Or, “You know we’re here just a nanosecond of a minute, do you agree, Mrs. Raboteau?” He was keenly aware of the fleeting and precious realities of life poetically expressed in the Psalms. At his funeral we found out that he used to visit every client who was hospitalized. I inherited his small pocket Bible, which was highly dog-eared. He had many favorite passages. They were dark brown with touch. His spirit lives on in our studio and our hearts.
Memory eternal, Monsieur Gibbons!
Cordelia
Cordelia was a chanteuse and a classy dresser. Her outfits matched from head to toe, hat, gloves, dress, and shoes. She let it be known that she had a past and was someone. She came into the program when she could. She was suffering from a huge tumor in her womb that was too big to be safely operable, and she fasted frequently on grapes.
She would come in especially on the days Albert held his writing group. Her romantic predisposition was challenged when he asked the class one day to write a haiku. She worried she couldn’t squeeze her florid style into seventeen syllables, but she rose to the occasion. Gibbons’ capriciousness was anathema to her as well. She tolerated him but just didn’t get him at all. In class, he loved writing bogus letters from corporations containing purely nonsensical requests and recrimination tactics. I never got very far in trying to explain him to her, but I suggested that perhaps “digging Gibbons” was about trying to walk in someone else’s footsteps for awhile.
One day she asked me to photograph her annual singing engagement at an old folks’ home in Harlem. I was honored. I photo-documented a lot of in-house events and took a lot of portraits of the clients over the years. She was resplendent in a royal blue dress that concealed the tumor, which could be very painful, especially when she was on her feet for too long at a time. The feathered brim of her blue hat softened a face that must have been gorgeous in her youth.
She began to sing, and I began snapping pictures. You could tell that she and her pianist had traveled this road many times before, and he knew her kind of song—oldies, heart-tugging oldies that spoke of the love between a man and a woman. After a few songs, she invited everyone out on the dance floor, and the whole place was humming with nostalgia and memories. She made us feel our own longing for love, for someone in our lives to care about us. Cordelia made it clear that this is why we are here.
Memory eternal, Cordelia!
Floyd
One day Floyd asked me if his last name meant royalty in Africa. I told him I was absolutely sure that it did. For Floyd is made from the same fabric as Nelson Mandela—of regal cloth. When faltering, I turn to him for a brush-up lesson in integrity and loyalty.
From his art desk he creates a new mandala for the day with magic markers on bond paper. Each one is unique, and each one has a predetermined destination. Louise and I might get covetous about wanting a certain piece for the room, but all clamoring falls on deaf ears. Floyd marks them for the studio, for the CSS cafeteria or the long hallway between these rooms, for a staff person, or for the girl he is sweet on. There is no bartering and no money accepted. He is in charge of his gifts. I get to enjoy all of them when I photograph them for the notecards I make to sell for him.
Floyd looks like an artist. He loves refashioning his clothes. He sews cuffs on his shirts and jeans made from surprising fabrics and creates his hats out of items from the 99 cent store. At one time, all our friends carried their stuff in Floyd’s tote bags. Out of the non-tearable paper I used for my tents, he creates many 3-D sculptures, such as paper galaxies that hang from the pipes on our ceiling, or banners that announce the presence of Julia and Louise on the premises. Although he is barely literate, I regard Floyd as a genius.
Like Gibbons, he approaches his life with a great sense of adventure. Once he spent $100 out of his $500 monthly check on pussy willows that he passed out to all the females at CSS, clients and staff. More recently, he purchased a harp because he had always wanted one. He stored it behind his art desk, taking it out of its case only to admire it. Finally he sold it to one of the tuners for a fair price. He asked me to research gargoyles on the internet, another item that he had always wanted, but could never make up his mind which kind to buy.
He is fiercely loyal to CSS, and deeply appreciative of its thirty years in existence. He is loyal as well to Souls in Motion but clear about how CSS is the umbrella to the art studio. Now partly blind in one eye, and with graying hair, he continues making beautiful, mind-boggling things. He continues to delight Louise and me with his inventions, especially since we put our art-making days behind us years ago.
May you be blessed with many, many years, Floyd!
Mariano
I was so moved by Mariano’s story that I asked him to write it up as a testimonial. After a long life of every conceivable drug and lifestyle to match it, he gave up one day and jumped off a bridge. But instead of landing in the water to drown, his body lay crushed on a cement mooring. While his many bones were healing, a cadre of very kind nurses touched his heart. He thanked God for his life, and his deep faith was born.
When I met him, he had a court date to determine whether he would return to prison or be released to our program. I agreed to go with him to court and testify on his behalf. It was a freezing winter day, and we arrived way before his court appointment. We were pushing a ten-foot-high revolving door when a bright yellow canary flew down and landed on his right shoe. Without any hesitation, he leaned over and deftly scooped it up, found a brown bag in the trash to put it in, and said to me, “I have just enough time to go back to Souls to put him in the aviary.” We pondered. He could not be late for court. He left and got back just in time. The judge’s decision was dwarfed by his providential golden messenger of freedom.
Mariano went on to be reunited with his daughter and son, who had been in foster care, and his family members. He joined a church and became a lifetime member, cooking huge pots of rice and beans for church events and for the poor in the neighborhood. He never did “art” in our room, but he would waltz in for a hug and always remind us that God was in charge of everything. His faith was so strong. When his health began to wane, he would say he was ready to join his Maker at any time.
Memory eternal, Mariano!
Rhoda
Rhoda loves to come up behind me, put her hands over my eyes, and utter a “guess who.” I always guess who and she is incredulous: “How can you tell it’s me, Julia?” I don’t tell her it’s obvious, because it’s a repetitive act that has been going on for years, always done in the same way. I know she’s asking me, do you know me, do you care about me, can I touch you, can I trust you, and if I tease you will you still love me. It’s the touch version of Lorna’s poem for William. Yes, dear Rhoda, to all of the above. Rhoda comes right out with the things that are important to us all. Am I lovable? Will you love me no matter what? She is our irresistible anchor for love.
Rhoda is also a snail-mail correspondent. She writes letters to our director, to Louise, and to me, and probably to others she loves and cares about. She asks us how we are and then she gives us a lot of advice. You should eat more, you are getting too thin, you are never in program, your husband never comes to see us anymore, and Louise is too thin too. She is describing how it is now. Our creative activities have been sadly diminished by the current era of legalistic paper accountability. She is also addressing an aging community. Many of our folks in her generation have passed on or left the program. The community as we knew it is being redefined. I write back, enclosing some pocket money, and tell her on my next possible day I will be at Souls and hope to see her.
***
After I moved to Princeton ten years ago, I cut back on my hours in Harlem, and Louise has been holding down the fort. Also, my more recent involvement with Emmaus House, an Orthodox ministry that serves the poor, has taken me away from Souls. However, these two ministries are only seven blocks apart, and I have been finding ways to link them. My Orthodox faith has been nourished by this daily challenge of being in communion with others. One comes to realize that we are all made of the same cloth in our intersecting journeys.
Let me end with a prayer that can sustain us in our work:
Kontakion to St. Panteleimon
You imitated the Merciful One and received from
Him the grace of healing, Passion-bearer and healer,
Panteleimon. By your prayers heal our spiritual
diseases and continually drive away the temptations
of the enemy from those who cry out in faith,
“Save us, O Lord.” Amen.
Julia Demaree-Raboteau defines herself as an artist but wears many hats. She strives to be open to whomever and whatever God puts in her path. She believes this discernment is the most significant gift of aging.
This article was originally printed in the Volume 13 No. 3 issue of The Handmaiden, published by Conciliar Press, Summer 2009.