Shelter
by Toni Schlesinger

Two-Story 1920s Brick House

Village Voice
1/27/98

Why are you living all by yourself in Queens, in a house with twig footstools and ceramic porcupines, instead of in Manhattan, where everyone has his or her own TV show and goes to 12 parties every night? I used to live in Manhattan, for 10 years - Harlem. And before that, Montana, Paris, Vietnam. Five years ago, I bought this house from my sisters. My parents had owned it since 1943. My father worked at the naval hospital nearby. This was a a navy community where no one ever moved out. Anyway, I always stored my artwork here. Some years after my parents died, my four married sisters wanted me to get the art out so they could sell the house. I said, Let me buy the house. It's cheaper than paying for storage somewhere. They said, Okay, but you have to get a job, start wearing real shoes, and stop going to those go-damn art camps. I said, They're not camps. They're serious scholarly institutions, with artists complexity and depth. A couple of my sisters have government jobs, and one's a nurse.

Southeast Queens is one of the largest middle black communities in the country. No kidding, it's middle-class. So I got a straight job at Dalton teaching ceramics. I worked five years to get mortgage approval. I was really stalling my sisters. I was still getting ceramic residencies here and there. Once I slipped off to an art colony in Baltimore.

I was oppressed by one of my boots the other night at a party. A man was helping me pull it off, huffing and puffing. It was like the opposite of Cinderella. What are these pink and green mounds? I'm making hats. I compress fleece over styrofoam ball,, dribble laundry detergent over them, and boil them like an egg on the stove. Then I step on them in the bathtub, like they do in Yemen.

As I look out your windows at the clapboard houses happily sitting next to each other - each house has two windows for the eyes, a door for the nose, canopies for eyelids - and I look at the way the pale gray winter light comes through the window, the way it must have come through all the years you grew up here, I think, You've to to be constantly haunted by every game of jump rope you ever played. But for an artist, to be back at the beginning can also be a very good thing. No, I'm not haunted by my childhood. Well, maybe around holiday times I get lonely. But then I run and look at my sculptures. I think I have really transformed the place into Sana's place. I have been able to put the past in its place. Though every so often a smell or memory may come through, it's only for a passing minute.