In another one, Billy had toppled on his backside, as he often did, and he looked plain startled, and I caught that. And then, suddenly, Arden ran over to him and reached out her hand to help him up, and said “Don’t cry, Billy,” although he wasn’t crying, but I almost did, and I caught that too. A moment of sibling affection! I knew every mother on the block would drool for such a picture….
When my set was complete, I began to show them around. I knew most of the young women in the neighborhood—we all met each other pushing carriages in one direction or another. And sometimes I’d have coffee with one or another. We were all poor, we didn’t have to be ashamed in front of each other. The distinctions were there—one’s husband was going to law school, another was doing his medical residency: we knew who was upwardly mobile and who was not—at least we thought we did. Actuality often confounds stereotypes. Every degree of education mattered: the women who had one year of college felt a superiority over those who had only finished high school, and the one who had been a second-grade teacher tended to behave as if all of us were in the second grade.
I, of course, paid no attention to such snobberies. I was “above” them. I was simply disguised by my life-style, but I knew that one of these days, I’d haul the easel back out and get some new paints and start again. Meanwhile, I was entertaining myself with photography.
As I had expected, all of them envied my wonderful shots, and wanted some of their children. No one had much money, though, and for a while, there was only the envy and the admiration poised over the coffee cup. But one day, Milly Cooper, the most good-hearted and open of the women on the block, burst out in her Nova Scotia accent: “Oh, I wish you would take some pictures of my children!”
That was all I needed. I paused, considered, offered hesitantly: “Well, I could, I guess….”
“Oh, could you, Stahz? I’d be ever so grateful!”
I acted as if I were only then figuring it out. “Well, if you could pay for the film and the developing…”
“Oh, of course!”
“We’ll have to have two rolls, to make sure we get a good set….”
“Oh. Well, sure, whatever you say.”
“And I’d just charge the price of an extra two rolls for my time. How’s that?”
She was thrilled, and planned to go immediately to Modell’s, which sold a cheap brand of film. I had to derail that, but I was able to soften the blow by saying my fee would be for the price of black-and-white, which was cheaper than color. I don’t remember what the whole thing cost, maybe ten dollars or so, much less than a professional photographer would have charged. After Milly, the others, as I’d expected, soon came to strike the same deal. I had enough work to occupy me for months, because of course, the women on the block all had friends, sisters, sisters-in-law, and cousins who lived elsewhere, and who also talked, and who in turn had friends, sisters, cousins, and so forth.
I had no idea at the time that my “hobby” was the beginning of a career. I was doing it for pin money—well, film money. It took enormous amounts of time. We’d get together—the woman and her children and me with mine—at her house or the park. I preferred outdoor settings, but good weather would last only another few months. I didn’t like using flashes on babies, and couldn’t afford to buy regular studio lights. So I photographed almost every day, and sometimes twice a day, trying to garner as much film as I could for the winter, when, I thought, I’d work on my own.
We’d sit around—I told the mothers this was the only way—with coffee or a thermos of lemonade, with blankets and toys, and we’d wait. I’d take two rolls of thirty-six shots in the course of the afternoon, and since I was very patient there were always at least twenty-four wonderful ones. There would be shots of babies falling asleep; or their first sight of their mother on waking up; or rubbing their eyes, or crying—all cute as they could be, enough to make every mother melt.
I felt a bit squeamish about what I was doing, as if it were—unworthy. Well, I’d had a male education. I mean, I’d learned to respect what the philosophers, novelists, historians, I’d read respected. I had been Very Serious as a young person, and I knew that the whole business of women and babies and housework was frivolous and mindless and even contemptible. No philosopher I had ever read had taken women seriously. What women felt about life in general, or their own lives in particular, didn’t seem to interest anyone.
But here I was, listening to these women for hours every day, and I couldn’t avoid seeing their unspoken anguish, their fears, their rage. Nothing around us in those days suggested that a woman had any such feelings, or any concerns beyond her children, her husband, her house, and her neighbors; and the women I knew felt illegitimate in expressing them. Still, they seeped out, steamed out, came out willy-nilly, and what I didn’t hear, I saw.
Because often enough as I was aiming the camera at what promised to be an adorable shot of Johnny eating a cookie, what I caught was Johnny socking Mommy in the eye, and the rage that crossed her face in that instant. Or, as Mommy was arranging baby on a pretty pink blanket she’d washed and dried for the occasion, baby, naked as she was, decided to shit: the picture showed baby’s pink straining face, a mustard-color stain on the blanket, and Mommy’s frustration. What I ended up with was a complete record of the emotional interactions of mothers and young children, with all the anger and despair and frustration and weariness as well as the delight and affection. Whatever appears on film is in some way exaggerated: any instant, caught and frozen out of the flux of expression, seems stronger, more permanent, than it actually is. So when Baby comes over and wipes his hands on Mommy’s fresh white blouse, laundered expressly for the picture-taking, and leaves behind a trail of chocolate from his Oreo, and she sees the mess, she will register dismay, anger, amusement, and forgiveness, all within the span of a minute. But if I am sitting there with my camera, I will catch only one or two of those expressions—the anger, say, and the sad tail end of the forgiveness.
I never showed the women the “negative” pictures. They were not wanted. Still, I kept them myself. I don’t know why. I could never use them for anything. Who wanted pictures of angry mothers? And besides, the pictures were in color. Who knew then that it was precisely this kind of thing that would embark me on my later career? Whenever I get a commission these days, it’s for some series of pictures of women and children—even though I first established myself as an action photographer, and did good work in war zones. Nowadays I often get in touch with the local UNICEF agency, for contacts and assistance, and every time I enter a UNICEF headquarters, there they are, huge blowups of Indian or Tunisian or Malaysian women looking adoringly at their babies, holding them, caressing them. I just shake my head, because you hardly ever see a poor mother treating her child like that. You see worn young mothers, cadaverous themselves, with babies lying on their laps in a stillness close to death; you see mothers watching their children with empty eyes, the little ones in rags, with sores on their bodies, as skinny as their mothers. The gaze of people long hungry or extremely tired and with little hope is not focused on this world; and they have no energy for gestures of love. The love is there: the women will give the children whatever food they have, denying themselves. But it does not advertise itself.
And it seems to me now—and I must have had an inkling about this back then in 1951—that the relation of mothers and children is maybe more profound and important than anything else in life. If it is omitted from consideration by philosophy, philosophy is the less. In 1951, lots of psychologists were considering the relations between mothers and children, but mainly in order to indict mothers for everything that goes wrong with their kids. No one that I knew of then—or now, for that matter—really examined what it means to a woman to have a child, and to devote herself to raising it; or the real nature of that most profound bond of child and mother. When people write about bonds, they’re telling people to break them. Yet in simple societies, mothers raise their children gently and lovingly, and the
daughters often stay on with their mothers and have children of their own, and there is little conflict, and no one charges the daughters with failure to separate, to mature. In our world, we’re all supposed to break all bonds, to be independent.
I don’t mean to make great claims for myself. I wasn’t thinking, when I took those photographs, in exalted theoretical terms. I wasn’t thinking at all. I took them because I couldn’t help myself. I used to wonder, when I saw all these pictures of rage and teary frustration piling up in my bureau drawer, that perhaps I was trying to console myself. Because of course never felt rage at my children. No steam emerged from my voice, seeped from my eyeballs. Like my mother, I never raised my voice. But maybe underneath that “insistent cheerfulness” that Brad later told me drove him crazy, there were other, negative feelings that I concealed from myself. Maybe photographing other women expressing emotions they were not expected or supposed to feel was a way for me to deal with what I did not let myself know I felt.
In any case, I was obsessed with doing this work, and I got better and better at it, coming after a while to know what kinds of situations led babies to relax—when a baby was simply too tired to continue, and should just be allowed to nap for a while. I derived considerable pleasure from these afternoons, far more than the few dollars I earned from them. I knew, I knew that kaffeeklatsching was a waste of time, a foolish occupation, and our conversation mainly trivial, but those trivialities came to seem very important, as if each little concern was really an emblem for a larger context of concerns. Mostly we told stories, made comic fictions of our lives. What we enjoyed most were stories of meddling mothers-in-law (mine, about the semen-stained sheet aroused no laughter at all, only hushed shock), overflowing washing machines, rice blowing up to fill the entire kitchen sink, pressure-cooker explosions, leaking basements. They were centered on things that spilled over boundaries, like mothers-in-law (in those days), like children themselves, like household appliances, like us, whose bodies had overflowed themselves to produce these angel-demons who tyrannized and controlled our lives.
I’d go home more cheerful than ever after these afternoons. I quickly earned enough money to buy the equipment I needed for developing, and all I could think of after a session was to develop the film and see what I had. I’d push, tease, kid, and laugh the children home, into baths, through dinner (as often as not, hot dogs, I’m ashamed to say), and put a couple of frozen dinners in the oven for Brad and me, but I was thinking, thinking, thinking. I’d blow up one print, crop another, my mind was almost entirely on the other prints I’d developed that week, and on waiting for everyone to go to bed so I could lock myself in the bathroom and set up my equipment.
Sometimes there was trouble. One night Billy started to cry when I was at a crucial point in the work and couldn’t open the bathroom door. It was late, after midnight, and I knew Billy would wake Brad, but I thought, the hell with it, let him get up for once. Brad was not thrilled when he realized I was not answering Billy’s cries, and a little later he began to pound on the bathroom door.
“Open up! Billy’s been sick!” he yelled angrily.
“I can’t open the door now, Brad,” I called out apologetically. “Can’t you clean him up? Use the kitchen sink.”
“SHIT!” was his response. I heard his bare feet stalk off down the hall.
It was another fifteen minutes before I could open the door and see how things were. I peeked in our bedroom: Brad was in bed, snoring. I looked into the kids’ room. Billy was lying in the middle of his crib, on a clean part of the vomity sheet. Brad had wiped his face—that was it. I picked him up, he was whimpery and needed cuddling. I took him into the kitchen—I had prints hanging over the bathtub—and sat him on the edge of the sink, pushing aside the dinner dishes I’d left to dry after washing them, and undressed him. His little pajamas were stinky and hard with vomit, and there was vomit caked in his hair. I talked to him gently, wiping him with warm water and soap, and he leaned against me, calmed.
After I’d cleaned him up, I carried him back to his room. I had to turn on the light to find a clean pair of pajamas and a clean sheet, although I knew that would waken Arden, and I’d get little sleep tonight. I remade Billy’s crib, all the while talking to him, trying to find out if his tummy was still upset or if he was better—difficult because he couldn’t talk yet. But he seemed okay, so I put him back in his bed, gathered up the soiled sheet and blanket, and covered him with one of my jackets because I had no other blanket. By this time, Arden was sitting up in bed asking what was the matter and why had Daddy yelled and why was Mommy locked in the bathroom. No way she was going back to bed. So I let her get up, turned out the light so Billy could sleep, and took her into the kitchen with me and fed her cookies and milk while I waited for my prints to dry. We discussed photography and its effect upon daddies. Arden informed me that Daddy didn’t like my taking pictures. I don’t know how she had gleaned this, because I hadn’t. But it turned out she was right.
I thought Brad was pleased with what he called my “hobby.” He’d taken some prints, blown up and framed and hung them in his office—the one of Arden with the butterfly, and the one where she is holding out her hand to help Billy up, and another, a close-up of Arden with the sun shining through her hair. He didn’t seem to be interested in photographs of Billy. He complained about my housekeeping and the meals I served, but that had been the case before I began taking pictures. So I wasn’t prepared for the explosion that occurred the next day.
I started it, at breakfast, the one meal I cooked. He was eating eggs and sausages and English muffins with cream cheese and I was drinking coffee. The kids had had their breakfasts and were playing in the living room, still in pajamas. I closed the kitchen door. I said, in a low voice so the children wouldn’t hear, “Brad, what you did last night was really rotten—to leave that kid in vomity pajamas on a vomity sheet!”
He threw down his fork. “What did was rotten! What about you? What kind of mother doesn’t go to her kid when he cries in the night? Won’t come out of the fucking bathroom even though he’s sick? You and your goddamned photography! Who do you think you are, Margaret Bourke-White? You’re a stupid housewife earning some pin money by taking stupid pictures of stupid babies and their stupid mothers! And that is more important to you than your own child! What kind of mother are you, anyway! I’ll tell you! No mother at all! You’re still a spoiled brat kid who refuses to grow up and accept her responsibilities! Giving the kids hot dogs for dinner practically every night! And if I see another TV dinner, I think I’ll puke! I want that photography equipment, that fucking developing equipment, your camera, all of it, out of this house when I come home tonight! I don’t want to see it again, I don’t want to bump into another clothesline full of prints, I don’t want to hear the word photography again! Is that clear?”
My face felt as if it were 110 degrees and my heart was pumping too hard. If he’d stopped short of the final command, I would have been in trouble. I wouldn’t have known what to answer. I knew it was my job to clean the house and provide decent meals, I just couldn’t stand doing it. But I felt guilty about that. But his order to remove my photography equipment had carried him over the line from being right, or anyway justified, to being dictatorial. I stood up.
“How dare you!” I whispered, in a whisper that I could see penetrated his marrow. “How in hell dare you talk to me that way? Who do you think you are? If you want to spend your entire stupid life in a stupid job like selling real estate, and immerse yourself in numbers and dollars for twenty-four hours a day, you are free to do so. But don’t for a minute think you can dictate what my life will be!”
He had stood up too by this time. “Who I think I am is the breadwinner of this family! I earn the money that supports your stupid hobby, and I have the right to order you to stop it!”
“You may earn the money, but I do everything else,” I countered, undaunted. “I wash and iron your fucking shirts, just like my fucking mother. I scrub th
e floors and cook the food and raise your children….”
I knew the minute it was out of my mouth that that was a tactical error.
“My children! So you say! Who the hell ordered them from the stork, I’d like to know. It certainly wasn’t me. You ruined my life, you forced me into marriage and this career, and if you don’t like it, lady, lie in the bed you made! I have to!”
He shouted this, and I was only grateful the kids could not possibly understand that he was denying his parentage of them, if they heard him, which they could not have avoided doing. Then he slammed open the kitchen door, stormed down the hall for his coat, and slammed out of the apartment.
I sank down in a chair again. My hands were shaking so hard I needed two to pick up my mug of coffee, and even so I spilled it on my leg and it was hot and I cried out, it burned so terribly, everything hurt so terribly. And the kids heard my cry and came running in to see what was wrong. I explained I had spilled my coffee, but Arden looked at me with a wizened little face, as if she were fifty instead of two and a half, and contradicted me: I was being punished, she said, because Daddy didn’t like the way I made the bed.
I had an appointment to photograph that day, but I called and canceled it, saying I had the flu. The way my voice sounded after my crying backed up my lie, and we made another date a week off. After that, I just collapsed. I couldn’t move. I let the kids play in the living room; they knew they were being given some sort of license, and were running up and down the narrow hall to the bedrooms, shrieking and laughing hysterically, still in their pajamas.