Janice Kennedy remembers home as it was when she was a child growing up in rural Georgia.
One of six siblings born into a family of sharecroppers, she went to work in the fields picking cotton as early as she can remember. She earned 50 cents for 100 pounds and could pick 200 pounds in a day, sometimes until her hands bled.
The family lived in an unpainted cabin with no running water or electricity.
"It was a harsh, hard, wicked life for children," recalls Kennedy, now 64 and living in a North Tampa apartment complex. Her bright folk-art paintings and collages, of cotton fields, milk cows and weathered tin-roof shacks, tell the story of that life.
A half-century later, her thin hands knotted from arthritis, she suffers from depression and other physical ailments, but still she paints: hundreds and hundreds of scenes that document the sharecropping life in the 1940s and '50s in Dacula, Ga.
In an arrangement called "halving," Kennedy's family paid for half the fertilizer, half the seed and 100 percent of the labor. The landowner took 50 percent of the profits. Her father often hired his children out to other farmers. She went to school just two days a week.
"I would like to preserve the true life of sharecroppers," she says. "We were people, we weren't just castaways."
School stood a mile away, a three-room luxury that she was forced to quit by the eighth grade. No art classes. Just clouds she looked at and painted in her mind when she lay down in the fields at day's end.
But mostly she remembers wild honeysuckle, pink and fragrant, the bounty she used to pick in the woods and drape in the family's raw, unpainted cabin to make it pretty.
"It was stunning to us," she remembers. "We would come home and you could smell it all through the house."
Many of her new paintings deal with the idea of home in Florida - Jim Walter's Homes, to be specific, tidy rows of storybook houses beneath a wide tropical sky. She is intrigued with them, she says, because they offered ordinary people "a decent place to live."
Other paintings depict unpainted, now derelict cabins once inhabited by fellow sharecroppers. She turns fields to brightly colored quilts. Stars shine fat and silver and childlike. Skies glow beneath a lemony, Crayola-yellow sun.
There was no money for paint and canvas in her childhood, so now she draws from memory.
Her mother taught her to "take something ugly and turn it into something better," she recalls.
In a cabin so crude that the spaces between the wooden slats "were so wide, you could see the sun rise and set between them," her mother tried to make the surroundings palatable by cutting out beautiful abstractions with scissors and paper.
Kennedy's own artistic talent went unnoticed, partly because she had to work so hard just to survive. She eventually left the cotton fields, but she still worked: making leather shoes in a factory, serving plates of meat and potatoes in a restaurant, sewing labels into men's suits, stocking shelves in grocery and 5-and-10-cent stores, cleaning houses.
Married at 18, she had three children, one of them sick all the time with asthma, requiring her to often hold down three jobs at once to pay the medical bills and the medicine.
"I was busy, busy, busy," she recalls. "Whatever occasion arose, you knew you had to work for it - not wait for your fellow man to give you a handout."
It wasn't until about nine years ago - about the same time she became a born-again Christian and began attending Tampa Shores Baptist Church - that she picked up a brush and paint for the first time.
A year later a local art dealer, the son of a man she had known at the Oldsmar Flea Market, took her paintings to an antique show in Atlanta, and later to a major folk art show.
Now her work is shown in galleries and collected by people all over the world. Her paintings of her mother in her red dress holding a basket of cotton, of their cabin and fields and cats, hang in fancy homes in dining rooms and over hearths.
Her own apartment is simple. A quilt made by "an old sharecropper friend" covers the sofa. Oranges sit on the counter, a simple still life. Her husband, Richard, comes home after a long day driving a tractor at Tampa Bay Downs and gently calls her "Mama." He makes the frames for her paintings from wood. She paints stars on them.
They're "a team," he says.
They have a home in North Carolina and a little apartment for the winter in Tampa, but it doesn't really matter where they are.
Home, Janice says, is "just like a melody in everybody's hearts. If it's kept nice, it's a haven to go to."
