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Saint Anselm's School.  I had a prob;em reading at the beginning, and it took me a while.  I was starting to get left behind; I remember that.  I can remember when the nun would say, maybe in the third grade, "Okay, Edward, you read the first page of the book to the class."  She put me up on a stool, and I would struggle, trying to read, and the class would laugh at me.  I will never forget that.  I was good in math, and I was interested in science, but they didn't teach that.  My mother had very little fiormal education, but she used to take me to the Planetarium and the Field Museum.  But the big plus for me being in Catholic school was that it kept me drawing.

How did it keep you drawing, and what were you drawing?

I like to think of it in relationship to what the Church did for artists back in the Renaissance.  The Church kept the painters drawing and painting pictures, because the Church ahd a need for pictures.

I was drawing flowers, or a Madonna, or something like that.  Maybe I would do the flowers on a large sheet of paper, or they would say, "Can you draw the Nativity scene on the board?"  And I would be copying, looking straight at the Christ Child and at the angels, the whole thing.  Then, of course, I would have to arrange the picture to fit the space.  The blackboard' for example, was very long and horizontal, and what I was copying was more square.  That was challenging and invigorating.  But I was still copying. If it was one flower on a card, I didn't add another flower.

Did you know at that early time in your life that you had talent?  Did you have any drawing lessons?
Oh, no, no.  During the Depression, no black kids, not even many kids in the white community, were into art.  No one had any more than a drawing period.  Nobody I ever knew was in art class.  I didn't know what art meant.  The only thing kids I knew then did was copy.  We would copy from the comics and see who could do it the best.

My father used to draw trains for me, locomotives and cars, and the wheels were round.  He would get logical and say things like the smokestack is really a little bit higher than this.  I would copy these things when he was gone, as a three or four year old.  They could see that the boy was drawing all the time.  But that didn't mean encouragement.  I'm from Louisiana, but there's no music in my blood.  I'm sure that if it has been, they would have said, "Hey, boy, you can play that instrument.  Keep on."  But it wasn't about that for me.  

Who was the first person you can remember that recognized you had this ability and encouraged you to do something?