#roughwood

Dear Horace Pippin, 

Your peppers brought me to know your paintings, and I am so grateful for both. Your acts of personal healing have brought so much to the world. Yourpaintings on my screen give me goosebumps. I want to see one in person so the textures and details can give me fresher imaginings of you and your time. I’d like to see the brushstrokes of grandmother’s face in John Brown Going to His Hanging. Pete Seeger sings in John Brown’s Body: ”They hanged him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew, his soul goes marching on.” And grandma is looking, into the future, at us, silently demanding: which side areyou on.

As I hold seeds of beautiful peppers in my hands, I think of yours. Your left hand helped your right hand paint after getting shot in your shoulder in World War I. Your hands painted every day life, past and present; victory gardens, harmonizing quartets, and Mr. Prejudice; Abraham Lincoln, Marian Anderson, and Jesus. Your hands brought peppers from your friends in Black communities in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and beyond in exchange for honeybee stings to ease the arthritic pain in your injured arm. Those bees were loved and kept by your pigeon club buddy, H. Ralph Weaver - William Woys Weaver’s grandfather.

Will found your pepper seeds labeled in baby jars in his grandmother’s chest freezer, more than a decade after his grandfather’s death, and two decades after yours. The seeds were alive. Would the Fish Pepper, Elephant’s Trunk, Ole Pepperpot, and Black Bird’s Beak peppers have made it to the future if not for you? Perhaps. But as far as I know, it is because of you (and all the seedy hands that came before yours and after yours) that they are still here. And from each of of these pepper seeds comes stories unfolding, echoing and brimming with many generations of everyday glorious life, much like your paintings. 

Read about your Fish Pepper here.

With love and admiration,

Owen

p.s. I work for Will Weaver now, managing his Roughwood Seed Collection. You and I meet regularly in passing, when my hand stirs your shadows under pepper plants in the garden and when I drop little round discs of potential into the soil in the Spring.

"Pictures just come to my mind, and I tell my heart to go ahead" -Horace Pippin