Mason Creative Nonfiction, aaduna in exile, spring 2021 issue, Vol. 10 No. 1

 

Meet the Author

Janet Mason (photo provided)

Janet Mason, who has lived in Philadelphia for most of her life, is an award-winning creative writer, teacher, marketing professional and blogger. Her book, Tea Leaves, a memoir of mothers and daughters (Bella Books; 2012)was chosen by the American Library Association for its 2013 Over the Rainbow List. It also received a first-place Goldie Award. Mason’s novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books – New York/Lisbon; 2018) also received many reviews and was part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Adelaide Books published her novel The Unicorn, The Mystery in the fall of 2020.  

  

Surveillance

(-non-fiction excerpt from The Lens of Eternity: Love from Two Pandemics )

It is hard to find the strength to put one foot in front of the other and keep on marching through life. A good friend of mine calls it “soldiering on”— as in “we have to keep soldiering on” when someone dies. Life inevitably involves suffering and suffering is hard. It is to be endured.

            I imagined that keeping an open secret (such as the photographer Berenice and her partner, the writer, Elizabeth did by pretending they were not living together) must have been hard. It involved suffering and endurance. I imagined it also involved amusement in thinking that some (perhaps, many) people were so naive that they believed that two women who were linked together in their creative and personal lives, who hung out with other lesbians, progressive people, and bohemians, who looked and behaved like lesbians (in that they were their own people and did their best not to defer to men) just happened to live in adjacent studios and were not lovers.

            The photographer, Berenice Abbott was perhaps best known for her poignant photographs of New York City in the 1930s. Her long-time partner, Elizabeth McCausland was an art critic, the author of many books and someone who did not receive the credit she deserved during or after her lifetime.

            I imagined the open secret also involved some amusement in thinking that some, (perhaps, many) people were so naive that they believed that two women who were linked together in their creative and personal lives, who hung out with other lesbians, progressive people, and bohemians, who looked and behaved like lesbians (in that they were their own people and did their best not to defer to men) just happened to live in adjacent studios and were not lovers.

            When I came out as a lesbian in the 1980s, I was twenty-three. After a period of inner tumultuousness caused by no small part in knowing that by coming out, I would be stepping over a line in a society that, at that time, would deem me an outcast, I came out to myself, my parents (who resisted at first but ultimately accepted me), and an often-hostile world in which I had to find my rebellious tribe.  As coming out experiences go, mine was a fortunate story.  Many people, at that time, lost everything – including their families (often their children as well as their parents).

            I worked then in an office in a small town outside of Philadelphia.  The town was called Hatboro and seemed many more miles away (culturally) from the City than it was. It was known as a conservative place even up until several years ago when a trans woman I met at a gathering told me that she and her spouse had made an LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) community center on the main drag in town. It just happened that she had my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (Adelaide Books – 2018) in the library. In the early 1980s when I worked in the area and had recently come out as a lesbian, I remember being astonished that more than a few people in the office assumed I was heterosexual. It was, in fact, laughable.

            In the mid-1940s when Berenice and Elizabeth were together when they were in their forties, things were radically different. This was especially true for LGBT movement or “homosexuals” in the parlance of the day. LGBT people were expected to be secretive and closeted or worse, to kill themselves and simply go away. Women were expected to marry men or to want to marry them. Sexism was rampant and lesbians, after all, were women. The mid-1940s was before the civil rights movement and things were drastically different for black people and other people of color, too.

            In 2020, human rights – at least legislatively and with U.S. Supreme Court appointees becoming more conservative -- had started to move backwards. As Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party that was formed in Russia in 1903, said, “It is necessary sometimes to take one step backward to take two steps forward.”  I hoped human rights were not going to go back to what they were in the mid-1940s. They probably weren’t. But if it came to pass that things returned to what they were, then there was another thing I could learn from the life of Berenice Abbott. Most things — including surveillance and the threat of prosecution — are temporary.

            In the 1940s, Berenice did many things. She was taking on freelance assignments, teaching, and she had become an inventor with her ill-fated economically but interesting company which she called the “House of Photography” that she operated out of her studio apartment. 

            She made inventions that were intended to help the serious photographer such as an extremely large camera called Abbott’s Projection-Supersite camera that produced sixteen by twenty-inch contact prints, resulting in deeper tonality and overall crispness. Her detailed notebooks also revealed ideas and sketches for non-photographic purposes, such as a metal detector (unusual at the time) for protection against assassins.

            Berenice also published a few books including one of the first “how-to” books about photography that was published in 1941. It was titled A Guide to Better Photography. It was written by Berenice and contained photographs by other photographers including Lewis Hine. For a time, Berenice had championed his important documentary photography, some of which was used to change child labor laws in the United States. Also included in Berenice’s book was her long-time friend the Austrian American photographer Lisette Model, known for capturing humanity in her street photography. Berenice also included the work of her colleague Margaret Bourke-White who was known for her documentary and industrial photographs. As Hank O’Neal noted in Berenice Abbott American Photographer (published in 1982 by McGraw Hill) these photographers were not widely known at that time although they proved to be historically significant later.

            In 1944, Berenice published her second how-to photography book, The View Camera Made Simple, which covers large-format cameras. In 1948, her photographs were published in a book titled Greenwich Village Today and Yesterday. The book chronicled the neighborhood she called home for more than three decades. It also featured many of the other artists who lived there. The book with her photographs of Greenwich Village was never that well known, but toward the end of her life, in text that she read and approved in Berenice Abbott American Photographer, (published when Abbott was eighty-four) Hank O’Neal wrote, “The seventy-two illustrations include obviously commercial work and some of the finest photographs that Abbott had ever done.”

            In the mid-1940s, Berenice worked full-time for the magazine, Science Illustrated. The position seemed promising at the beginning. But after it was sold to a major publishing house and revamped, her job became part-time and subsequently uninteresting to Berenice. She resigned.

            Of her many activities – freelancing, teaching, inventing, publishing – that she pursued in the 1940s, Hank O’Neal wrote that, “It was in books, however, that she made her greatest contribution in the 1940s.”

            Around this same time when President Harry Truman announced the start of the Cold War in 1947, Berenice was uncharacteristically nervous all day. She may have been justifiably concerned about what might happen to her and Elizabeth.

            For years, they concealed their personal lives because they feared that someone may be watching. As it turned out someone was watching — the U.S. government.

            Of course, there were other reasons than them being lesbians that caught the FBI’s attention. Both Berenice and Elizabeth had long championed progressive causes, such as civil rights for African Americans.

            In the early 1930s, Berenice had taken portraits of A’Leila Walker, well known for her Harlem literary salon The Dark Tower held in the 1920s. (The salon hosted emerging Harlem Renaissance writers, musicians, and artists.  A’Leila, the daughter of Madam C.J. Walker who is considered the first self-made female millionaire and one of the first African American millionaires, established her home as a meeting mecca and performance venue for creative artists.). Berenice had also photographed the jazz drummer Buddy Gilmore who gave lessons to the prince of Wales, and singer Taylor Gordon, an African American Harlem Renaissance singer who wrote about his upbringing in Sulphur Springs, Montana in his book Born to Be. 

            The portraits were used, with courtesy of Berenice, in the 1934 anthology titled Negro edited by Nancy Cunard who went on to become a communist. Cunard, born into a British family, lived in Paris in the 1920s (where she and Berenice most likely met), had a background in literature and ran Hours Press in the late 1920s, publishing such literary giants as Samuel Beckett and Ezra Pound. Cunard spent her life fighting racism and fascism.

            The Negro anthology — which published such important Black writers as Alain Locke (known for his role in starting the Harlem Renaissance), W.E. Burghardt DuBois, and Zora Neale Hurston (a widely-known author associated with the Harlem Renaissance) — was published by what looks like Nancy Cunard’s own publishing house in London.

            Because it was an election year, I was intrigued by the article in the anthology that James W. Ford wrote in 1932 about Frederick Douglass. Douglass, who was born in 1818, was a former slave who went on to become a social reformer, writer, orator, and abolitionist.

            In 1872, Douglass was chosen to run as a Vice President on the ticket of the Equal Rights party. The Presidential nominee of the party was Victoria Woodhall, a leader in the suffrage movement. Ford wrote that “The convention took place at a time when the Republican Party was already beginning its betrayal of the Negro masses.”

            In his article in the Negro anthology, Ford wrote that “capitalist historians” silenced the fact that Douglass was the nation’s first African American vice presidential or presidential candidate nominated by any party. He also wrote that the Equal Rights party was a collaboration of women for women’s suffrage, workers, and Black people — and that “historians” of the “capitalist class” feared such coalitions.

            Elizabeth McCausland, too, had a background supporting radical causes. Since the 1920s, she had defended Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants and self-identified anarchists who were wrongly accused of murder and executed in 1927 by the state of Massachusetts. It didn’t matter that it was widely held that anti-Italian immigrant and anti-anarchist attitudes were at play. It didn’t matter that intellectuals around the world had come to the men’s defense or that investigations into their defense lasted well into the 1940s. In the 1950s, Elizabeth’s support of the two men was all that the FBI needed.

            In 2020, I thought of racial equality and pro-immigrant sentiment almost as mainstream values. But were they? They were mainstream — in my world. I happened to be a blue person in a red state that I hoped would become blue again. In late summer of 2020, I watched the Democratic National Convention with Joe Biden, as the presidential nominee, and Kamala Harris (the first African American female vice-presidential nominee of a major party).

            The convention, which was done remotely for the first time because of the pandemic, restored hope in me. Because it was done remotely, the viewers got to see areas of the country that the delegates lived in. People were all races, all ethnicities, all genders, and sexual orientations. To me, the DNC represented the diverse America that I felt comfortable in.

            I had a liberal bent all my life. Things were bad before the pandemic, but afterwards they seem to have gotten worse. Even the wearing of masks had become politicized. Bleached blond women who were supporters of forty-five were frequently on the news for spitting on someone in a supermarket or another store because the person who they spit on had the audacity to ask them to wear a mask. 

            Wearing the mask did not protect the mask wearer. It protected the people around you. Wearing the mask stopped the novel Corona Virus from spreading — in the case that you were sick and had symptoms or if you were infected and had no symptoms. The virus could still be spread by people with no symptoms. So, wearing the mask was an act of empathy. It meant that you cared about the health and well-being of others. It also showed that you believed that the germ existed — that you believed in science. Apparently, empathy had a political party. It was sad that it had come to this.

            Hate crimes were on the rise. I knew there were good cops, who did their jobs and protected people, but it seemed like more police were allied with the right wing. The Klan had come back in the form of younger people who called themselves members of the “alt-right.” But there wasn’t anything alternative about it — attitudes were the same.

            For this reason, I decided that I wouldn’t watch the Republican National Convention. I used to watch it, but it wasn’t the same anymore. It used to seem like it represented a part of America that I respected — even if it didn’t represent my values.  

            With the election of forty-five, it seemed to me that the RNC began to represent the worst of America — meaning people’s fears of what would happen if the country didn’t return to straight white male rule. It was the kind of fear that could lead to violence and fascism.

            The RNC probably would have made me ill. I decided that I wasn’t going to risk my health by watching it. 

            In my way of thinking, hatred of others always involves hatred of the self. So, it was hard not to judge but I tried not to. I also tried not to return their hate. I wished everyone true happiness. I wished them so much love for themselves that they would find themselves unable to hate others.

 

So, there were other reasons for the FBI to put Berenice and Elizabeth on their list of potential communists but once it found out they were lesbians and carrying on a “homosexual affair” with each other, it seemed to have sealed the deal. The FBI report noted that Berenice “wears slacks constantly.”

            When Berenice was away on assignment, an FBI agent came to Berenice’s and Elizabeth’s home on Commerce Street in the Village and interrogated Elizabeth. She told the (white male) agent that she was just a woman with no knowledge of communism. I imagined Elizabeth sitting at the kitchen table or maybe on the couch in her living room and telling the agent this. She was short and squat with cropped hair. She was described as “mannish” but was what I would have described as “butch” — right down to the fact that she was a good cook.

            Elizabeth must have been terrified and she must have felt very alone, but she knew how to play to this guy’s sympathy and sexism. He was obviously oblivious, and I could imagine that she found that sad but also slightly amusing.

 <><><> 

aaduna - an online adventure with words and images - a globally read, multi-cultural, and diverse online literary and visual arts journal established in 2010.  

Help us build community!  Share with your friends,  "like" our Aaduna-Inc facebook page and follow us on twitter @ aadunaspeaks !  

 aaduna-Inc  Visit regularly for updates !