Dream Window #4: Life Ain’t No Crystal Stair

Sunday, October 28.  The pre-Superstorm Sandy sky was surprisingly calm, and I had plenty of shootable 120 camera rollfilm in my freezer.  Yep, the freezer is where all photographers should keep their film, so that it can be used without worrying about it going too far past its expiration date.  Don’t laugh at me, you know your parents used to keep batteries in the fridge for the very same reason.

Anyway, I grabbed several packages of 120 rollfilm, grabbed the Kowa Super 66, and headed toward downtown Albany.  On mornings like this, I needed something to photograph – something, anything, whatever would work out.  And then, as I drove through a desolate area of Arbor Hill… I saw them.

The steps.

The Swan Street steps.  The bleak, ominous, concrete pedestrian pathway that connected Washington Avenue with Sheridan Hollow.

I remembered the Swan Street steps as part of my conduit from home to high school.  Back in those ancient times, I lived in the Delaware Avenue neighborhood (76 Southern Boulevard, to be more precise).  I could catch either the #6 CDTA Second Avenue bus, which would drop me off at the corner of North Pearl Street and Clinton Avenue, with a three-block uphill hike to school; or, as I thought was a better choice for me, I could easily catch the #18 CDTA bus up Delaware Avenue, then get off the bus as it turned at Lark and Washington.  Once there, I could easily walk past the State Education Building and the Cathedral of All Saints, and then walk down the crumbling, rotted stairway to Sheridan Hollow, then up three blocks to get to high school.   After school, I took those stairs back to Washington Avenue, and then walked to the Empire State Plaza where I had an afterschool job.

This is 1980, and there’s a lot of people who have given up on me.   Family members who wished I had never been born.  Family associates who equated me with the genus homo inferiorus.  Less than human, if your Latin is rusty.  I also had to deal with bullies and griefers and people whose mission in life was to celebrate my failures.

I chronicled those moments in a blog post a few years ago.  It was a very rough time for me.  I could have crumbled.  I could have given up.  I won’t lie – there were days when I almost did give up.  What did I care?  It’s not like anybody gave three beans about me back then.  Let the bullies win.  It’s what the bullies want.

It was at that point that one of my history teachers at Street Academy, Dorinda Davis, introduced me to the works of Langston Hughes.  Langston Hughes was a legendary poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whose words spoke for a generation and for a nation.  I read the poems, absorbing the works of a man whose name I never previously knew until I attended this little school on Clinton Avenue.

One of Hughes’ most famous early poems was entitled Mother To Son; it’s a narrative in which the speaker talks about how life may not be fair, but that no matter what adversity is put in your path, you have to get past it.  You have to conquer it.

Every time I walked up or down the Swan Street Steps, I thought about those words.  Every time someone in my family would make some crack about me not going to a “real public school,” I thought about those words.  Every time some kid in the neighborhood made some snide remark about my attending the “dumping-ground school,” that I wasn’t smart enough or coordinated enough or whatever enough to attend Albany High, I thought about those words.

Even when I was snowbound at Hamilton College, a hundred miles away from everything I ever knew, those words in Mother to Son rang out every time I walked up that snowy College Hill Road for classes.  And let me tell you.  No matter how cold it was in Clinton, New York, no matter how much snowfall Mother Nature heaped on Central New York… that walk up College Hill Road was like crossing a parking lot in comparison to the steep, crumbling Swan Street Steps.  And the words of Langston Hughes, whose poems actually saved my grade in an elocution class.

I looked at the walkway.  I looked at the autumn leaves that cascaded over the iron rails and onto the repaired concrete steps.  It’s been 30 years, hasn’t it.  The stairs and I.

I assembled the tripod and packed a roll of Kodak Elite Chrome 100 into the Kowa Super 66 camera.  Hurricane Sandy would be arriving in what, a day or two?  And these autumn leaves are perfectly spread across the steps.  A couple of squirrels scampered by, searching for whatever leftover acorns they could scrounge.  As much as I wanted to get the entire staircase in focus, I could not – I had a choice, get the bottom half of the walkway in focus or the upper half of the stairway, but not both.

Oh yeah, like that’s going to stop me.  Like that’s ever stopped me before.

Undaunted, I shot the first half of the film roll with the bottom half of the staircase in crisp focus, then shot the rest of the roll with the upper part of the staircase tack-sharp.  I then carefully removed the Kowa’s detachable backplate from the camera, so that the Kowa would stay in the exact same position from rollfilm to rollfilm.  Next into the camera – a pack of Fuji Velvia 100 slide film.  Same procedure.  And after I shot with the Velvia, I finished up the morning by shooting that same location with a pack of my prized efke 100 B&W rollfilm.

I still have memories of things that happened to me – both good and bad – in my lifetime.  Sometimes the good things make me smile.  Oftentimes the bad things make me wince.   I remember all of it – not just to celebrate when I got it right, but to build on where I failed.  Build on those failures, and never make them again.  Walk up those stairs and never let anything hold me back.

And when I received the film back from McGreevy Pro Lab, I looked at the negatives – and I smiled.

You know what this means, don’t you?

That’s right.  Dream Window material.

I arranged the images and cropped each one to appear as if they were panels in an overall 20″ x 26″ image.  I framed the six images so that they would look as if one was staring out the window into the distance, so that all the stairway paths matched up.

And now there’s a Dream Window to symbolize the journey.

And here it is.

There it is, folks.  Dream Window #4.  They don’t have to be based on Queen Anne or Tudor framework, so long as I can get the image and effect out of the final product.

And if you look in the upper left corner of the artwork, where you see a black-and-white panel with leaves and drab space – I included the entire text of the poem that inspired me every school day, the Langston Hughes poem Mother To Son.

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So, boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps.
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s words like those that kept me going when everything and everybody else wanted me to stop.

And as you might have gathered… Stopping isn’t part of my routine.