
ROMARE BEARDEN SEES IN A MEMORY
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,