My name is Denise Delgado, and I am a curator for the Miami-Dade Public Library System. For this show, I asked artists to read “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” a short story by Edward P. Jones, and create new work or contribute existing work that related to the story in some way. The work did not have to be an illustration of the story or make any literal references to it. Instead of asking people to respond to a broad theme like “homelessness” or “ideas of home,” I thought that narrowing the focus to a work of fiction could yield more nuanced and personal responses.
The story is about, yes, a young girl who raised pigeons--Betsy Ann--and her father, a taxi driver named Robert, who live on Myrtle Street in Washington D.C. in the late fifties and sixties. The neighborhood is described so vividly as to be its own character.
Here is an excerpt from the story:
In the early summer of 1960, there began a rumor among the children of Betsy Ann’s age that the railroad people were planning to take all the land around Myrtle Street, perhaps up to L Street and down to H Street. This rumor—unlike the summer rumor among Washington’s Negro children that Richard Nixon, if he were elected president, would make all the children go to school on Saturday from nine to twelve and cut their summer vacation in half—this rumor had a long life. And as the boys scraped their knuckles on the ground playing Poison, as the girls jumped rope until their bouncing plaits came loose, as the boys filled the neighborhood with the sounds of amateur hammering as they built skating trucks, as the girls made up talk for dolls with names they would one day bestow on their children, their conversations were flavored with lighthearted speculation about how far the railroad would go. When one child fell out with another, it became standard to try to hurt the other with the “true fact” that the railroad was going to take his or her home. “It’s a true fact, they called my daddy at his work and told him we could stay, but yall gotta go. Yall gotta.” And then the tormentor would stick out his or her tongue as far as it would go.
So, for the artists: What about the story—if anything--was in your head when you were making (or selecting) your work? Post your responses in the comments.
