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COURTESY OF ASHEVILLE ART MUSEUM COLLECTION, GIFT OF MRS. HELEN L. GUMPERT
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then turning blue. Day and night she waits on the old woman, watches the soaps, gets up at four to cook the eggs and biscuits and sit through Lonny’s silence. In June, she starts to cry and can’t stop – these whites is runny, Lonny said – then goes back to her people in coal country. Mama pulls herself out of bed for the first time in years, from her bureau drawer pulls a hat, cocks it forward on her head like a sailor on a toot, and walks into town waving merrily at her strutting plate-glass image that follows her all the way down Main Street, cackling aloud, till she strolls into an office for her new set of teeth. O! she cries, when young Jack Kennedy is shot, he was a fine-looking boy, and takes to bed again. Lonny’s wife comes home, fires up the stove, makes biscuits and grits. Lonny leans off the porch and spits.
KENT WASHBURN, a native of Nashville, TN, graduated from Belmont College in Ohio and then returned to his native state to study at Vanderbilt University. He moved to Asheville, NC, in the 1960s, where he worked with the Redevelopment Commission’s Urban Redevelopment project to document residents and living conditions of the East Riverside district. He later left Asheville to pursue a career in law and eventually became a District Court Judge in Burlington, NC. See more of his work on the Asheville Art Museum website.
Untitled, 1967 (photograph, black and white silver gelatin print, 13.5x10.63) by Kent Washburn