What is it?

I’m trying really to remember

The clock has stopped

Now I can never know

Where the edge of my world can be

If I could only enter that old calendar

That opens to an old, old July

And learn what unknowing things know . . .

—Romare Bearden

IN ONE OF ROMARE BEARDEN’S collages, a blind guitar player is led by a little boy holding a rose. The memory recreated there is a window on Bearden’s formidable art.

One “old old July” in the mid 1920s, when Bearden was 10 or 11, he visited his grandmother Cattie in Lutherville, Maryland, a rural town near Baltimore. Bearden remembers a Mrs. Johnson,