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Tell me about your childhood.

My mother was a seamstress.  We were poor, and so, when I was about seven, it must have been in 1933, we took the Greyhound bus up to Chicago, to what was supposedly the industrial north.  People who knew me then said that I used to run up and down South Park (which is Martin Luther King Drive now) barefoot. I was the country boy who came up there.

To try to make some money, my mother did piece work; there would be lamp shades around that she sewed on at home. And she worked in a factory. But my father didn't work; he was a gambler. This was the kind of life we lived as a family, with the typical so-called "strong black woman" running the household. And my father would be running around, you know, trying to be "cool."

BROTHERS AND SISTERS?????????

When did you first get interested in drawing?

When I was still living in Baton Rouge, there was a contest in the Catholic school I attended there. The whole class had to draw a tree, and the best one would get a gold star. Everybody drew the trees like most young people would draw them, you know, the regular thing, where the leaves were the bubbles. But I drew a tree with branches, which was the obvious thing to me. And the nun obviously saw the difference and was so upset, because she didn't like me or my sister Shirley, because we used to say things like "We're going up north. We're going to be better."  So she didn't give me the gold star. I remember that. She just dismissed the whole class and gave no one the star.

The only point I'm trying to make about the tree is, well, here I am, a six-year-old boy, whose talent was actually about copying. I probably just copied down something from a book. I didn't create a tree. I drew the tree, like a tree.  At that early point, I had that kind of ability.

So, in Chicago, that helped with my drawing, that talent to copy exactly what I saw. It was a Catholic school there too, and they needed pictures. Even though I was only in the fourth grade, the eighth grade teacher would ask me to draw something on the blackboard, like angels. They would give me an Easter card, say, and ask "Can you do this?" That gave me a kind of confidence, but, of course, that wasn't creative. All I was doing was copying.

So you're in Chicago and in what school?  Did you like school?