|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Gordon Parks: Choice of Weapons
| Article
# : |
11278 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
3,937 Words |
| Author
: |
John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
|
There's treachery in the air this morning. The weather in Kansas is edgy and strange. The watery blue sky blurs into the horizon. An ominous cloud suddenly sails across the sun. Spatters of rain sift through the dogwood trees.
"You learn to handle any changes in life when you grow up in such a place," smiles Gordon Parks, looking about him as he sniffs the air appreciatively. "I don't know that I realized how beautiful yet unpredictable it is here until I first came back as an adult. Now, even when I'm in New York, I still feel it. A few years ago Life sent me back to do a story on the prairies. I was absolutely shocked to find orchids. You think of orchids in New York or Paris or London--not on the Kansas prairie! But I found them and I photographed them."
He grins, relishing the surprise. Although his once-flamboyant, glossy black mustache has long since retired into a stark wintry white and his face is deeply lined, little else betrays his eighty years. He is trim, dapper, walks briskly. A citizen of the world, he is a renowned photographer, filmmaker, novelist, poet, and composer.
Parks has rarely visited his native state since he left at age fifteen after the death of his mother. Forty years later, in 1969, he returned to his hometown, Fort Scott, to make his first feature film, The Learning Tree. "There was a time when I never wanted to see Kansas again," he tells me. "It was a long time before I could bring myself to it. And then it was just for funerals, an honorary doctorate, and such. But these days I get strength when I come back here, for some reason or another."
As Parks tells it, he barely survived his childhood. To remember his youth so many years later, he says, "is to take a look into even more fear, and the darkness of the dreams that take over during my sleep."
He was the youngest of fifteen children growing up in a small, clapboard farmhouse. A few minutes after his birth, the doctor had to stimulate his failing life signs by immersing the child in a tub of cold water. It's a battle, Parks says, that has continued the rest of his life. Although as a boy he enjoyed the long summer days, the great, tall prairie grasses, and the quiet, rolling rivers, there were disturbing events to disrupt the idyll.
The town was deeply racist. His grade school was segregated, black students were not allowed to participate in sports and social
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
