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Chapter 5 Love Letters Excerpt from: Everything She Touched: The Life of Ruth Asawa by Marilyn Chase, published by Chronicle Books 2020 https://www.chroniclebooks.com/collections/art-design/products/everything-she-touched Chapter 5 Love Letters Albert Lanier’s Model A jalopy was holding up and getting good gas mileage. “It’s the strangest looking car ever,” he wrote to his parents in Georgia. “Children run out and wave and flock around us wherever we stop.” To avoid the heat, Albert and his friends slept during the day and drove at night on their way from Black Mountain College in North Carolina to San Francisco. When they ran low on funds near the end of the trip, Albert resorted to selling his blood in Las Vegas. Tired from the procedure, he slept and awoke to find his traveling companions fresh from a gambling spree and sporting new shirts bought with his “blood money.” They had barely enough for the bridge toll across San Francisco Bay. He’d laugh about it later. By September, Albert moved in with his Black Mountain friends “Rags” Watkins and Peggy Tolk- Watkins. Peggy had drawn Albert to the City by the Bay with tales of a bohemian good life, where young artists could dine on a four-course Italian dinner with red wine for seventy-five cents. Reality didn’t quite live up to the romance. Albert took work as a carpenter’s apprentice for union wages. Torn between staying at Black Mountain and helping her family resettle, Ruth Asawa took a short leave from art school in September and October of 1948 to lend a hand on their new farm near Los Angeles. The Asawas found temporary living space at the gakuen, the Japanese schoolhouse where Ruth had studied calligraphy in a long-ago childhood before the war. They occupied one room, partitioned with makeshift cardboard walls from a dozen other families who also resettled in the school after camp. Now twenty-two, Ruth pitched in to help her parents grow their new cash crop of asters and chrysanthemums, along with the staple produce of tomatoes, melons, beans, and cucumbers. How she longed to return to Black Mountain and her art. But as a daughter, she wrote Albert, her sense of filial duty left her “bound to the future plans of our home & farm. I cannot leave now.” Absence sharpened her feelings for him, but as she wrote to him on September 17, their pathway forward was still unclear: I love you Albert, and wish I could say more definitely what I will do. Will you come and visit us? . .6 of us sleep in a room . Father, Mother, brother, 3 daughters. You have given me a great deal of courage and never will I forget it. If I could promise you something it’s that I’m all yours & part of all my thoughts is you, but when & where? I can’t say yet. Mother is quite shy about the house. She says we can’t let you sleep in a sleeping bag, but if you care when you come, to hear 6 people snoring, you’re welcome to our kitchen floor. During their separation, Ruth and Albert would live through letters. Planning and dreaming, they pondered what it would mean to make a life devoted to art and each other. Agonizing over how to ease parental anguish over their interracial union, they wrote out their own long-distance love story. Each thought the other would destroy such an intimate dialogue. In the end, neither had the heart to do so. Their children would later make a convincing case to save their letters for history. Laboring eighteen-hour days at farming, pickling, and canning, Ruth also tutored her sister Kimiko in English, to help her regain the fluency she had lost during the war, when she was in Japan. In a letter dated September 28, 1948, Ruth began introducing Albert to the family values he would encounter: It is again so good to be with people who work thrice as hard as I do. Mama and I speak of marriage. She is gentle but firm in her beliefs . She wants me near but she will not hold me; She said today to “please study so that you won’t have to be just a farm hand as I’ve been all my life;” and not to think of marriage too soon. I shall go as I’ve always gone, my own way, though it seems like the dutiful way, it is the way I prefer. We are crowded, but you have seen greater crowds than this; the family may not respond, but understand it is in their nature. They are not friendly, but kind-souled people. Do not worry. Hope you can eat our food. It’s very different. We all eat with chopsticks and much rice. Forgive me, I’m tired tonight, and hope for a sound sleep. You’ve made me very happy and I celebrate by proxy this happiness with you. The first weekend in October 1948, Albert appeared at the road to the Asawas’ schoolhouse home, dressed formally in a dark suit. The reunion scene unfolded as if in a movie: Ruth running down the path to meet him, grasping his hands, and leading him up the wooden porch past the rickety player piano, which had somehow survived the war, and into the house for introductions. “This is Albert.” Ruth’s father Umakichi summoned enough English to make small talk, while her mother Haru smiled. Ruth made a lunch of soup, rice, and abalone, a shellfish prized in Japanese cuisine for its texture and tang of the sea. Ruth’s sisters Kimiko and Janet watched him work on a mouthful of the muscular mollusk. He gulped it down in two minutes. Ruth swiftly cleared the table. Then, diverting attention from his struggle with the shellfish, Albert beamed his charm at Ruth’s mother. “Mrs. Asawa,” he said, “you are so beautiful!” Understanding little, Haru replied, smiling, “Yes.” Albert’s introduction to the challenging dish was over, to everyone’s relief. Ruth would later learn to make Southern fare like fried chicken and gravy, catering to Albert’s palate—and thickening his narrow waistline. Albert’s brief overnight visit brought no easy storybook blessing of their union. But the Asawas, despite their reservations, had now met the young man vying for Ruth’s hand. Albert, for his part, had a chance to witness the struggles of his beloved’s family. This gave him an understanding of Ruth’s deep sense of filial duty, which was crucial to loving and being loved by her. Bill, Kimiko, and Janet had a chance to meet the young Southerner who had won their sister’s heart. Albert’s deference and easygoing charm began to thaw her parents’ reserve and kindle a nascent friendship with her siblings. Once she had helped the Asawas resume planting, Ruth could heed the call of her mentors and her art, and make plans to complete her third year at Black Mountain. Money was as tight as ever. Ruth’s teacher Josef Albers didn’t spare the superlatives in a September 18 letter recommending her for a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation scholarship: Ruth Asawa is of an unusual artistic talent in painting as well as in design and in drawing. You might have heard about the exhibition of art students’ work at the Addison Gallery of Andover, Mass. I have seen three reports on that Exhibition in Time magazine, the New York Times and Art News. In all these comments Ruth Asawa’s painting there is considered among the most outstanding . Tiffany turned her down. Albers assured her other funding could be arranged on her return. But Black Mountain still offered no degrees. So it would be a continued gamble. Before returning to school, Ruth met with the editor of the Los Angeles–based magazine Arts & Architecture. Rather than promoting her own art, she talked up Albert’s Minimum House at Black Mountain, sparking editor John Entenza’s interest in a pictorial feature on the project. She arranged new photos of the house by her friend, photographer Hazel-Frieda Larsen. One of the Milwaukee group that preceded Ruth to Black Mountain, Larsen took soulful portraits, despite suffering from polio, their generation’s most-feared epidemic, which had paralyzed the late president Roosevelt and left Larsen similarly encased in metal leg braces. In mid-October, Ruth headed back across the country to Black Mountain, stopping on her way at two places that were dear to her mentors Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller. In Taos, New Mexico, she took in the colors that had inspired Albers’s palette—an ochre adobe, indigo sky, and pink Indian blanket. “I passed as an Indian boy,” Ruth wrote Albert in a card postmarked on October 18. The Indians asked her which tribe she belonged to: Apache, Navajo, or Cherokee? “They greeted me and it was thrilling.” Next, she stopped in Wichita to view Fuller’s futuristic Dymaxion house, a 1,000-square-foot aluminum structure with moving walls and a profile like a spaceship that had touched down in a Kansas wheat field. “It was like spreading the wings of a dragonfly to see what made it move,” Ruth wrote to Albert upon her arrival back at the college on October 23. “I didn’t understand it but such beauty unfolded.” On her first day back at Black Mountain, Ruth sought solitude in the places where she and Albert had fallen in love. Once back in her study, she put a pair of cacti on her windowsill, one lean and one rounded.
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