Arley James

     I was 27 years old when I met Rick Broussard.  He had invited me over to his house along with his friend who was also my boss at the time. Sitting uncomfortably on his antique sofa, I nervously looked around his house to find something to talk about.  I knew from my boss that Rick loved photography. His walls were full of framed prints of his work.  My eyes kept coming back to one particular photo. It was a black and white photograph of an African/American woman. What made this one particularly interesting was the fact that she was holding an ax.  I asked him about the photo and if there was a story to go with it.  And of course there was.  It seems he was driving the back roads of Webster Parish and came upon this woman chopping wood at the edge of a pasture. He stopped and asked if he could take her picture.  I asked Rick if she had ever seen this picture of her or if he ever gave her a copy of it. He said 'no and that he hadn’t thought about it.' I quickly told him he needed to do that. At which point he said, “oh alright, you want to go with me?”  And without even thinking about it, I said ‘yes!’ 

    It was November and it was cold. Rick spent the better part of the weekend printing a copy for the woman with an ax. We didn’t call. We climbed into his Blazer and drove out to her house. When we pulled up, I couldn’t help but take note of the fact that her home was quite modest, to say the least. The wooden structure had not been painted in years, if at all. We walked onto the porch and Rick knocked on the door. It took a while for her to answer the door. I’m sure she saw his Blazer outside her window and wondered who would be calling on her on a Sunday. She answered the door and she looked just like she did in the photograph. It was so good to see her in person. She smiled and asked us to come in. I was waiting for Rick to beg our forgiveness and give her the photograph. Instead he said, ‘thank you’ and began to walk through the door.

      Mrs. James offered us a seat. I looked around and you could see the ground between the cracks in the wooden floors. The room was small and there was just a wood burning stove in the middle, two cow-hide bottom chairs on one side and a rocking chair on the other side. Before we sat down, Rick handed her a large copy of her photo. She looked at it and said “Who is that?” Rick chuckled and said, “Why that’s you, Mrs. James.” “Oh, naw, “she said. She looked a little longer at it and finally recognized herself. She took the photograph and called for her husband to bring her some paper towels. He came out of the back room from beneath a quilt that hung on the door frame between the room we were in and the back area of the house. He handed her the paper towels and she immediately began to pull off several sheets and wrap the photograph in paper towels. “Don’t want nutin’ to happen to this,” she said. She handed the wrapped photo to her husband and asked him to put it up for her.

     She sat down in her rocking chair and we sat on the cow-hide bottom chairs. She began to poke the fire in the potbelly stove with a stick while she leaned over and spit in a coffee can. A trail of snuff juice ran down the side of her mouth. She wiped her mouth and continued to stoke the fire. “Mr. Rick, that be yo wife?” she asked.

     “Oh, no, we’re just friends,” he said with a big grin. “Now, why you wanna deny yo wife?” she said. Rick chuckled and again said, “Oh,no mam, we’re just friends. “Now, I know that be yo wife,” she said. “I see the way you two look crossed eyed at each other.” We both laughed and Rick changed the subject.

     There was a stainless steel pan sitting on top of the potbelly stove. I noticed that the handle was broken off. She had some turnip greens cooking and the water was starting to come to a rolling boil. She let it cook a little longer and then called out to her husband again to ‘come get his greens.’ Her husband appeared from behind the quilt. She apologized for him saying that he had been down in his back. She reached down and without a potholder or anything to grab the hot pot with; she lifted the pot off the stove with her hand while her thumb dipped into the hot boiling water. She didn’t flinch. She held the pot and gently handed it to her husband. “That didn’t burn you, Mrs. James?” I said. “Oh no child, these hands are like leather.”

     We continued to sit and visit with her. She scolded Rick for not letting her put on her Sunday bonnet the day he photographed her in the field. She went on to say that she was out chopping wood because her husband was down in his back then, too. We visited Mrs. James for several hours that day. We discovered from our conversation that she was half African/American and half Native/American. She didn’t know how old she was because there was no record of her birth but she did remember that they would celebrate her birthday at harvest time, so she figured she must have been born in October. At the time she thought she was nearly 80. When we left I felt as though I had been offered a gift, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet a woman that didn’t seem to mind that she was poor and didn’t seem to mind that these two strangers had entered her world.

     We would see Mrs. James again the next year. Rick and I got married that spring. We drove up to her house and she was outside. She recognized us. We got out of the car and walked up to her. She hugged us both. We told her we came to see her so we could tell her that we had gotten married. She grinned really big and said “I told you that was yo wife.”

Photograph of Arley James by Rick Broussard, taken around 1978.