Being a Charlesworth Poe

Responsibilities and Freedom BEING A CHARLESWORTH POE

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MEL KENDRICK Aside from all the soft, warm, and wonderful things that came out—and she let them come out more and more as she got older—it has crossed my mind that it would be very difficult to be Sarah’s children. She struck me as very strict.

MARY SALTER I think she was certainly strict. Sarah was a person who really appreciated structure. She appreciated tradition. That was the interesting part of Sarah. She brought that mentality, that structure, that solidity of a culture with her. She was committed to giving the children some rules and regulations and that was quite an exciting decision to make. She was constantly pushing them into thinking about the world in a very specific way. There was a certainty to Sarah. I think she experienced a lot of uncertainty in her life, but not in her actions and in her beliefs—her formalized beliefs. I’m not speaking about religion—but in her formalized beliefs, there was a sense of real direction and certainty. There was a sort of clarity and straightforwardness of vision and opinion that we all very much loved in Sarah.

MEL KENDRICK Intellectual rigor is what she had. Really, you felt you had to be on. At least in the art sense you felt you had to be very on and focused when you talked—no bullshit. She could tell that a million miles away.

MARY SALTER You know what she demanded? She demanded integrity in the rapport, in the relationship. She craved an understanding of the transcendent quality in the relationship. Maybe the nature of her relationship with Amos was that it was the integrity of contradiction— who knows? The Charlesworth Poe children had an interesting blend of…

MEL KENDRICK ...responsibilities...

MARY SALTER ...and freedom. Amos is this free spirit, kind of crazy, kind of wonderful. Amos was all about injecting chaos into everybody’s lives. I think she really had a gigantic love of the impishness and the rules-breaking quality of Amos. I think she was attracted to that and it somehow fed something within her, because she was really much more pristine in her approach. She was engaged in those more traditional parental activities. Amos was always encouraging them to push the envelope.

MEL KENDRICK That’s what made it interesting.

MARY SALTER For a while we had a tradition of getting together for weekends or summer weeks. We had this beautiful carriage house. It looked like a Russian dacha on a pond. We had some lovely times there with the children playing on the lawn and doing all kinds of things. I remember—it must have been when Max and Nick were three or four—and Nick had gotten himself up in the middle of the night. Nobody noticed. He just got up and walked out into the kitchen, and took an apple and put it into the toaster oven and turned it on. There was a fire. The next morning, Amos was so thrilled about how Nick had gotten himself up on the counter all by himself. I don’t think Sarah was thrilled…

Summer, 1991.

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