Duma Key

How to Draw a Picture (IV)

Start with what you know, then re-invent it. Art is magic, no argument there, but all art, no matter how strange, starts in the humble everyday. Just don’t be surprised when weird flowers sprout from common soil. Elizabeth knew that. No one taught her; she learned for herself.

The more she drew, the more she saw. The more she saw, the more she wanted to draw. It works like that. And the more she saw, the more her language came back to her: first the four or five hundred words she knew on the day she fell from the cart and struck her head, then many, many more.

Daddy was amazed by the rapidly growing sophistication of her pictures. So were her sisters — both the Big Meanies and the twins (not Adie; Adie was in Europe with three friends and two trusty chaperones — Emery Paulson, the young man she’ll marry, had not yet come on the scene). The nanny/housekeeper was awed by her, called her la petite obéah fille.

The doctor who attended her case cautioned that the little girl must be very careful about exercise and excitement lest she take a fever, but by January of 1926 she was coursing everywhere on the south end of the Key, carrying her pad and bundled up in her “puddy jacket and thumpums,” drawing everything.

That was the winter she saw her family grow bored with her work — Big Meanies Maria and Hannah first, then Tessie and Lo-Lo, then Daddy, then even Nan Melda. Did she understand that even genius palls, when taken in large doses? Perhaps, in some instinctive child’s way, she did.

What came next, the outgrowth of their boredom, was a determination to make them see the wonder of what she saw by re-inventing it.

Her surrealist phase began; first the birds flying upside-down, then the animals walking on water, then the Smiling Horses that brought her a small measure of renown. And that was when something changed. That was when something dark slipped in, using little Libbit as its channel.

She began to draw her doll, and when she did, her doll began to talk.

Noveen.

By then Adriana was back from Gay Paree, and to begin with, Noveen mostly spoke in Adie’s high and happy lah-de-dah voice, asking Elizabeth if she could hinky-dinky-parley-voo and telling her to ferramay her bush. Sometimes Noveen sang her to sleep while pictures of the doll’s face — large and round and all brown except for the red lips — scattered Elizabeth’s counterpane.

Noveen sings Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, are you sleepun? Are you sleepun? Dormay-voo, dormay-voo?

Sometimes Noveen told her stories — mixed-up but wonderful — where Cinderella wore the red slippers from Oz and the Bobbsey Twins got lost in the Magic Forest and found a sweetie house with a roof made of peppermint candy.

But then Noveen’s voice changed. It stopped being Adie’s voice. It stopped being the voice of anyone Elizabeth knew, and it went right on talking even when Elizabeth told Noveen to ferramay her bush. At first, maybe that voice was pleasant. Maybe it was fun. Strange, but fun.

Then things changed, didn’t they? Because art is magic, and not all magic is white.

Not even for little girls.