0.17 Harvey johnson, b. 1947  (Page 4/4)

I was over at Francis Scott Key Middle School one time and I asked them, I said, “Do ya’ll know what a spiritual is” And this young black child, she said, “Yeah, mister. I know what it is.” I said, “Okay, tell everyone what a spiritual is.” She said the most profound thing I’ve ever heard in my life. She said, “Spirituals are secret messages in song about God.” I had never heard a spiritual defined like that before. And from hence on, I use that expression. I use that. It’s the most sophisticated.

Collaborating with biggers

The president of TSU came over while we were working on Salt Marsh at the University of Houston-Downtown. She wanted a mural in her business school and she wanted it to be about business. So John and I looked at each other. Said okay. John was the lead on this. We got back to his house and we would just look at African art. We wouldn’t say anything to each other for quite a while, then John would ask me, “Johnson?” (He called me Johnson. I don’t know why he called me Johnson, not Harvey.) “What is that saying over there?” I looked at it and I said, “Well, I don’t know right now, but it’s coming.”

Through the silence comes the answer to the question when you are still and look—because the idea is that the ability to see is always a dilution of what you see, and what you see is usually a translation of your own limitations until you’re taught how to see.

With business we said, “We have to go to Nubia,” because this is where business as we understood it began from a humanistic point of view, not from a Wall Street point of view. It was based on a sacred reciprocity between giving and receiving. This was business. This was the business of life. So John and I collaborated and he said, “I want you to go home and make a sketch, and I’m going to make a sketch.” So I went home and made my sketch and he made his sketch, and we came together and brought them together. And as we were working on the mural we would sit down and we would just look. We’d look and look and look and look, and then we’d turn our heads and look at each other and we’d say, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I could go up there and start working.

There aren’t any words to express what I had with John, what we had together. And I’m just so happy if anyone can have that with another person because that’s the best—I don’t know, the words just don’t come to me right now to express that. It’s one of the most wonderful conversations that any man or woman could have with another person.

Full circle

I graduated from TSU in 1971, then I went straight to Washington State University [to get a graduate degree]. John knew the department head at the time, and they were looking for black kids because they had all this money they had to do something with. I received my MFA there in 1973 and published a thesis called A Black Aesthetic. And in ’73 I came back to TSU and I started teaching. I was 25, I believe. That’s pretty young—but John, my mother, everybody had prepared me for it, you know. We were more than ready. I thought it was going to be very difficult, you know, but John prepared us very well.

I think our children are truly our salvation because they are the resurrection. And I think we need to nourish them. That’s why I mention the woman in the family. We have to bring that back. That’s our only salvation is our love—love for our children. They must find their own way—and we’re supposed to nourish that way. Art is only a vehicle for these things—for us to become better as human beings. I think this is supposed to be the purpose of education. Not for marketing and money and commercialism and greed—but to find our way in life, and to find our destiny in a greater scheme of things.

Harvey Johnson was interviewed on October 30, 2006. You can listen to the interview here .