Viewing page 63 of 123

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[printed on page - 
W.E.B Du Bois Department of African American Studies
University of Massachusetts at Amherst
325 New Africa House
Amherst, MA 01003
(413) 545-2751]]

July 20, 1994

Dearest, dearest David,

Will I ever see you again? Are our lives so separately enmeshed that we have no opportunity to proceed from the place where Jimmy left us? Or have we proceeded, is this --are we--the rubble? He will be seventy in a few days. I see him there where you are (I can do that since I have not been there since he left.). The lines in his forehead are deeper, a bit more leathery particularly between his eyes; the leanness of disease has not left my memory, you see. His hair is almost of an iron whiteness, receded more on top, thinner, but to compensate, he's finally listened to me and let it grow longer in the back right at the bottom of his hairline. And his hands, his beautiful hands, are often stiff with arthritis, but he's wearing that gold ring with the cracked carnelian all loose on the middle finger of his right hand again, and he's not in pain, but fully in pace with the measure of his days and the propulsion of his genius. I see him at seventy, I do. I do. Will I see you before one of us is seventy, too?

Things are all right. Sometimes they are all wrong, but I think I'm doing what I'm supposed to, what matters now. It's about getting my work done, and trying to arrive at the circumstances where I can get my work done. Financially I think things are worse than they ever have been. I have no flexibility at all, but you probably know what I mean. You should do that book of Teddy's photographs, with your own text as a kind of memoir of who Jimmy was then when he was running with and working with Teddy. I haven't read David Leeming's book yet. Don't know what to say to him because of it. I just can't treat Jimmy as a retrospective subject. I just plain can't. I bought David's book and that's the best I can do right now. The reason I love photography is that it can make a person live again in somebody's memory. Sometimes I have my big view camera out, and I think, if I could just photograph Jimmy, if I could just part the dust and dimensions of these seven years since last I saw him, just a crack, just enough to let the lens through...I wouldn't ask for more, just a glimpse of him, a new memory at seventy. It takes only one one-hundredth of a second on that old camera if the light is right.

This is all run together, like thoughts and tears and the missing of him and you with all the rest of what my life is. I love you both still and always.

^[[Cyndie]]

[[printed on page - The University of Massachusetts is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution]]