I feel like I've been told to touch grass by a dog

Clementine Hunter at Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches, LA.

Mrs Hunter began as a field hand at Melrose when she was twelve years old. Originally born at Hidden Hill Plantation in 1887, her family moved to Melrose as sharecroppers for the Henry family. Later she became a housekeeper, but it was while she was a cook that she found some discarded paints left behind by an artist at Melrose. Those discarded paints changed her life. Mrs Clementine Hunter’s paintings continue to touch those who view and admire her work each day.

She was a self-taught, primitive artist. Her unique African-American perspective, considered “insider art,” tells stories that historians overlooked while documenting plantation life. She captured the community of workers, the life of the “gears” that make plantations successful and prosperous.

In 1955, at the age of 68, Mrs Hunter completed her most famous work, the African House Murals. They were painted with oil on plywood and installed on the second floor of the African House at Melrose Plantation.

Original Color Photograph by Tom Whitehead,

Courtesy Melrose Plantation,

Henri Rousseau “The Equatorial Jungle” 1909

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (21 May 1844 – 2 September 1910) was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner.

He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector.

He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time. A true testament that it is never too late to do what you love and are good at.

(I've decided to post some more of my bug book, if you like this and want to read it in a better-organized format go here: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/105895/gods-inside or here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/63668572/chapters/163206946)

It was the winter-season, which was the third in which Skith had lived, when Skith first walked Outside where there are many dangers.

While she first walked from the Colony's entrance, the widom that Akkis shared steadied her legs and quieted her fear. But when there were great trees all around her, she could no longer hear Akkis, and a fearful silence filled with hidden things was all around her. As she had learned to do from Akkis, she walked until she could no longer count her steps. Without even counting to follow, fear was welcomed among Skith's thoughts for the first time since her climbing. She walked imprecisely, for there were no scents that were familiar around her. Skith followed then where fear sent her, and it was a spiral path.

With the press of hidden things around her, things that together seemed as silence to her, Skith felt six deaths. She had carried the drumming in the Colony's walls between the plates of her armor. It grew faint, and was gone from her thoughts; this was the first to die. The patter of busy legs on smoothed dirt was second to die, and she then heard only herself walking. The little songs from the egg-chambers were third, for they found no answer Outside. Fourth was the clicking of jaws and the scrape of feelers on armor, for Skith could not touch her own. The fifth death was of the taste of kissec as its last drops dried on her tongue. Sixth and final was the death of scents Inside, until all she smelled was Outside.

Skith felt great pains. She walked in long spirals under the shadow of the leaves above, but the trees did not have her path home. Her fear dug to where her deepest thoughts were buried, where her learning from the pit was pressed flat, and it caused much upset to her. Her thoughts became slow and troublesome, and she was often needful of rest that was shallow and left her legs weaker than before. The comfort that she had left with was rotted away, and its space was filled by evil voices from the Gods Outside.

“Soon,” they said to her. “Soon we will eat you.”

Skith was hungry, for the last of the food that Akkis had shared was gone. And as her hunger grew, she trembled. She ate the bitter armor of beetles, and she found fruits with strange juices that would not stay inside her. But even with unpleasant food she was able to sate her hunger, for a time. Her fear lost its full power when her stomach was full, but it always returned. She lost the strength to walk far for food, and soon there were no beetles or fruit to eat around her. Her sharing-stomach was full to bursting, and with no sharing to be done, its contents leaked from her mouth, and from her backside. It stung her armor, and surrounded her with a fouler stench than any she had smelled.

Always Skith watched the eyes in the dark. She learned of many strange beasts, and all of them seemed allied to her fear which rose to meet them. She felt her first hatred then, wishing that the beasts around her would be killed so that she could go and find her comfort. Her shallow rest did not let her travel far in sleep-travel, and her travels were filled with the killing of beasts large and small. She often awoke with her jaws dripping venom, until her weakness was such that it dried away.

“It is nearly the time,” said the Gods Outside. “You are nearly ours to eat.”

She shivered under moon's gentleness, and under the sun's warmth, for there was cold at her insides. She then hated the Gods Outside as she hated the beasts that watched her. She sleep-traveled into the sky and her weakness followed her; still the Gods Outside looked down on her, tasting her with searching tongues.

“I will die with labors incomplete,” Skith said. “I will not reach the Tunnels That Glitter.”

“The beasts will eat your armor,” they said to her. “We will eat the secret things inside you.”

The Gods Outside were loudest when the sun was above. She hid from them in the hollows of trees and in great burrows that were made by beasts stuffed inside them. She found comfort nowhere, and was always moving as a sister burdened. She had become like a tumbling stone, with the wide sky above her and the empty Outside before her to fall into.

It was in the final days of the winter season, when the sun's labors became longer, that the last of Skith's strength was gone. She had come to the foot of a stone from which water was falling always, where the voices of the Gods Outside were buried beneath its roaring. There she found the bones of a killed beast at the water's edge, and beneath crossing shadows, her legs failed.

A darkness that was not the moon's fell upon her. She no longer felt the lifted scars that marked her armor, and the cold of the winter-season released its grip. The Gods Outside came to her and picked away her thoughts. The Colony where she had labored was left empty, and its remains were scattered away. The pit from which she had climbed became only a dip in a simple flatness. The Gods Inside were eating, and Skith was losing her pieces.

“I will wound you in the taking,” she said to the Gods Outside that she had learned to hate.

And still they tore at what she held closest. There was no more Skith from the First Foraging. She was only Skith who had climbed, Skith who had learned, and Skith who had walked Outside. And still the Gods Outside took from her. It seemed to her that she had not climbed, for her strength had left her at the foot of greater things that the pit was very small beside.

They made to pull away her name then; it was all that was still inside her. She held it more fiercely than she had held her bite in Rathak's eye, more fiercely than she had held the wall of the pit.

But when her jaws were clenched so tightly that they creaked and whined, she felt a gentler pull on her learning; it was a the gentle hold of food-sharing. With no strength in her, she agreed.

Then was her strength returned to her, and it was scented. It held new learning. She found her name there, and it was larger than before. She found Akkis there, and the Replete, and they were small parts of good and bountiful gift.

Food was in her stomach. It was not kissec, nor the foul flesh of beasts. Skith was Outside once more.

Morris Hirshfield (1872-1946)

“Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July)”, 1941