In Memory of Marjory Wilkins - "Lens"

I wrote this piece to honor Marjory Wilkins, an amazing woman and photographer.  She lived in Syracuse, New York and documented her Community, our lives, our memories.  I read this tonight at the ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse.  The evening celebrated this year's Syracuse Cultural Workers Women's 2013 Date Book which features poems and visual art pieces by CNY artists.  Poets and an artist who's work appears in the Date Book read and displayed their work.  Mrs. Wilkin's artistry is recognized in this year's Date Book.  This story is for you Mrs. Wilkins.  Ashay!

 

LENS

 

They say that the camera never lies.  It memorizes truth; freezes it in the moment of its telling.  Records it in a permanence that can not be denied.  Stark black and white images, spread across life's magazine.  A kiss leaned back and haunting.  Dogs and hoses fighting a raisin people exploding in the heat of injustice.  Footsteps left forever walking on the moon.  Young high-school faces stilled in great expectations of what maybe will be.  Births and Deaths.  Races won and lost.  Wars begun, and begun, and begun.  Stories in motion, frozen in Forever.

 

She asked me to call her Marjory.  But I always spoke to her with a Mrs. Wilkins - respect for one older, wiser, more lived than I.  And my heart whispered Mother, Teacher, Elder.

 

She was everywhere!  Recording. Archiving. Preserving Memory.  Tellin' Truth in Black and White.  Her face, in my memory, melded to the camera.  One shaded eye.  A half smile.  Half a furrowed brow, concentrated and focused.  In between snap shots - "Did you get that job that you told me you were interviewing for?" "How did your program go at the museum?"  "I heard you just got back from Africa!"  Her mind preserved every word spoken.  Her heart encapsulated life moments deemed insignificant by others.

 

She was everywhere!  Juneteenth Festivals.  Community Folk Art Gallery Events.  NAACP Act-So Competitions.  Southwest Center/Dunbar Center/Boys and Girls Club dinners, awards, forums, youth performances.  She recorded Paul Roberson Theater openings, and the closings of Lives celebrated with wreaths, and tears, and dirges.  Her camera documented Syracuse.  The mundane elevated to art.  The ordinary made extraordinary. Our children coroneted Princesses and Prince.  Our elders crowned in light and glory.  By her lens.  By her love for her Community.

 

She was in every time!  When my Father died, an envelope arrived in the mail.  There was a card from Mrs. Wilkins.  "I thought you would like to have this."  My Father, in a black suit.  Pencil thin tie.  All of his hair was there!  Full.  Thick.  He stood tall, handsome, debonair, amongst the fathers of my childhood friends.  Black Business Men.  Community Leaders.  This part of my Father that I was too little to know, and knew so little about.  Shoulder to shoulder with Syracuse legends.  Mrs. Wilkins giving me memory in spaces that were empty.

 

She was in every time!  When my mother died, months later - again, an envelope.  Presented by a parchment covered hand, her camera held in the other.  "I thought you would like to have this."  And she gave me a piece of my Mother, long forgotten.  A photo of the Lambda Kappa Mu Women's Civic Sorority.  My mother's face smooth and unwrinkled.  An hour glass figure in one of those stylish black dresses of the sixties.  The memory of a bus trip to Washington, D.C.  The sorority sisters dressing down the Lambda Kappa Mu little sisters.  They had snuck out of their hotel rooms and were in big trouble!  Amongst the memories of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, I remember the tears running down the little sister's faces.  The apologies and forgiveness given so that they could all move on, together.  My mother mothering along side these Women, these Mothers of Syracuse.  This Gift from Mrs. Wilkins.

 

When Mrs. Wilkins passed,  I wondered, who will now record our truths?  Send us living moments in envelopes with elegant cards and whispered lettering?  I looked to find her in NY State Fair Pan African Village audiences.  At ArtRage openings, a movie at S.U. about Dark Girls, the downtown Street Art Festival, and at Plowshares.  I searched for the one eye...shadowed. The half smile. The furrowed brow, concentrating on the images of all of us that she loved.  Who will tell our stories, in black and white?  Tell the grey nuances of our challenges, and the sharp contrasts of our triumphs?  Who will fill the empty frames of our being here, left blank in mainstream newspapers, and blogs and websites?

 

I miss you, Mrs. Wilkins.  I look for you at every event that I attend in Syracuse.  As my eye scans these places, these life passages where her every - where had recorded the every - times of our lives, her lense focused in on the lifes lived in these moments....the flash-dance of a camera echoes across the room.  A half face comes into focu. One eye lidded. A wide half smile.  A softly lined forehead.  The camera lowers.  A face, edged with the memory of her mother, appears....