The Sound of Silence

My mother, Joan Southgate, was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929. Her father, Falstaff Harris, was a locally prominent artist who won the Leavenworth Prize in Art as a student at Syracuse University, a fine-art painter who also did commercial work for local businesses. She grew up in a house full of books and paints, a grand piano in the living room. He was the only African American doing such work locally, but according to my mother, his distance from the glorious ferment of the Harlem Renaissance always gnawed at him. Here's a description of them together from her memoir 'Bout Time, published in Ohio by Eagle Creek Press:

When I was four or five my father showed me how an artist sees. Just lie back and gaze up at the ceiling without remembering that the room is a cube. Just look at the corners on the ceiling and see how they are shaped, examine the angles as obtuse rather than right.

From the same memoir:

It was not exactly a secret that my father drank and beat my mother, my brother Shurley and me. I always knew, without talking about it much at the time or later. It was not lost, just not remembered often…. If you are punched in the face hard enough you can really see sparks that flash in a spray. I remember, I watched, so this is what it means, hit so hard you see stars. There is also a sound.

Another memory, describing a moment in my childhood home in Cleveland, Ohio, the place where she lived with my late father and raised four children.

I am standing in my kitchen. I love warm evenings here. I have this beautiful room that is mine because I thought it up. I built the open pine shelves, stripped and stained the washstands and woodwork. I rubbed the one hundred fifty-year-old table's patina smooth. I am holding a floral thin china cup of herbal Red Zinger and the real view of my own backyard through the oversized, deep-set

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garden window. Suddenly I discover an amnesia so specific that no one noticed it was there while it was happening. And I begin to know wh