ink and watercolors
19″x16″
2000
In a fairly typical example of Southern, belles-artes cannibalism, I cribbed the title from a short story by Andrew Lytle (one of the co-founders of The Agrarians at 1920’s Vanderbilt, and my teacher at Sewanee when he was at least 80), who’d previously nabbed it from an old slave spiritual.
For all I know, the slaves might have stolen the title from somebody else…..but I personally think that, when it comes to theft, folks whose own bodies have been stolen get a free-pass (so to speak) when it comes to literary lifting.
The old house is in Winchester, VA. I used to pass it on my way, when I was young, to visit a really gorgeous friend who was rather astonishingly named “Madonna Psyche Sponaugle”. Don’t ask me how she got the name….she never explained it very convincingly.
