© St. Petersburg Times, published September 17, 2000
Hey mister jailer, will you please bring me the key
Hey mister jailer sir, will you please bring me the key
I just want you to open the door
'cause this ain't no place for me.
-- Jailhouse Blues, by Lightning Hopkins, 1946.
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[Times photos: Toni L. Sandays]
"I was laying in bed one day not asleep. A shadow passed over me. I said "God, help me break those old bad habits and forgive me for what I done.'' Al Black started painting again, his canvas a prison wall. Now you can't go anywhere at the Central Florida Reception Center without encountering an Al Black original.
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If Al Black has a favorite place on earth, it might be over on Florida's other coast. At dawn on a fall morning, the south fork of the Indian River winds dark and mysterious. A bit like him.
During summer, at high noon, he enjoys visiting the Fort Pierce waterfront for the poinciana trees. Their blood-orange blossoms make a man feel good to be alive. At dusk, on an overcast winter evening when the cold-front clouds scud above the cypress, he favors a majestic swamp in the east Everglades. Curlews glide into their roosts.
At present he has a poor view of nature's beauty. When he gazes out his barred window, he sees an interstate, and peeking over the interstate, the top of a dying pine tree. Dominating the bleak landscape is a 10-foot fence wrapped with razor wire.
"I never thought I'd end up here," he says.
Al Black is assigned to Room 201-A of the Central Florida Reception Center near Orlando, Inmate No. 793362. Prison is a hellish place for a landscape artist to find himself, but Black, a charter member of an obscure African-American art tradition known as "the Highwaymen," always managed to go down the wrong road.
Blessed with the talent to paint striking scenes of natural Florida, he possessed the charm of a born salesman who could knock on a mahogany office door in Palm Beach, lower his brown eyes in humility and persuade a bow-tied white architect to buy a trunk load of landscapes.
He had an unfortunate darker side as well. He was a thief and a cocaine addict. Now he is 54, a career criminal doing 12 years for stealing from an old woman who had tried to help him stay sober and concentrate on art.
The man who once lived to paint scenes of natural Florida saw his last river about four years ago. As for the Everglades, pine forests and poinciana trees, he thanks the Lord for his good memory.
"It's all in my head now," he says. "I carry nature in my head. It can be hard sometimes when you don't have nothing to feed off of."
It's been four years since Black has seen a river, a palm tree or Spanish moss. He has been reduced to this view, out his cell window. Says Maj. Rick Stanley, at left: "Al Black is a model prisoner, a mentor to younger men.''
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Let it be, let it be
When Black entered prison in late 1996, painting a pretty picture was far from his mind. His tasks were adusting to life without freedom and understanding why his world had come crashing down. He had never been a religious man, but like the saying goes, "There are no atheists in foxholes," and so it was that Al Black got down on his knees and prayed for help. And it came to pass that help found him.
On his regular visit to the medical clinic one afternoon, Dr. Dianne Rechtine studied his face.
"You the Al Black I read about?" she asked. The doctor had been moved by a magazine article about "the Highwaymen" that told how Black had thrown away his talent for a cocaine high. At the end of that story, Black no longer was painting; he lived in a crack house and hustled for every dime.
By the look in his eyes -- the doctor saw the pride -- she knew the man on her exam table was her guy.
"There's something I'd like you to do for me," the doctor said.
Black was a year into his sentence when Rechtine bought him paints and brushes. She gave him a job, painting a landscape on the wall of her prison clinic.
In Fort Pierce, where Black began painting three decades ago, royal poinciana trees … he calls them "flame trees'' … were among his favorite subjects. He painted this one in the prison mess hall. It took him less than 30 minutes.
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He painted her a river scene. It was a classic Highwayman landscape, with bent palm trees, a crooked river, flapping birds and a surreal sky. Black did not labor months on it. Nor did he spend a week, or even a day. He did the painting in minutes.
"So fast," Rechtine said.
"I'm like lightning," Black said.
He since has painted more than 100 murals throughout the prison, in the mess hall, on the walls of the exercise yard, in the staff break room, in the warden's office. Some are a foot or two long. A few stretch 30 feet.
Some are as colorful as a gaudy quilt. More often they are as brooding as a Robert Johnson blues. The surf in Black's seascapes looks ferocious. The fog in the riverscapes is thick enough to swallow a man.
Black had been telling guards and inmates about his painting career. "You painted houses?" they would ask.
Now he pushes a cart filled with paints and brushes donated to him by Rechtine, by art historian Gary Monroe of Daytona Beach Community College and by other Highwaymen fans who have found out that he is working again. Black stops to touch up a painting.
"That's my favorite, man," says an inmate, admiring a swamp scene.
Warden Ron McAndrew likes to drop by to watch Black transform a lime green hall into Florida wilderness. "They take the breath away," he says. "When you look at this kind of talent, you wonder what went wrong."
Black wonders the same. But for him and the Highwaymen, life always seemed to turn out more trial than triumph.
Their tradition began more than a half-century ago in Fort Pierce, a sleepy community an hour north of Palm Beach. A black teenager, Alfred Hair, took painting lessons from a prominent white landscape artist, A.E. "Bean" Backus. Hair, painting in his own back yard, created landscapes in the style of his mentor, but with a twist.
Backus could devote months to a painting because his art demanded a high price tag. Hair painted fast and sold cheap. His customers, mostly middle-class white people, were seldom willing to pay more than $30 for a painting. Of course, 30 bucks represented more than Hair could earn picking oranges in a day.
Hair talked other talented black friends into painting Florida scenes. He hired a silver-tongued relative, Al Black, to sell everybody's work. Black loaded paintings into his car and hit the road, selling them at mom-and-pop motels, doctor's offices and at intersections up and down U.S. 1.
"If you give me 50 paintings to sell, I'll sell 50 paintings," he liked to brag. "Just give me 30 percent of your profits."
Eventually Hair handed Black a paintbrush. He turned out to be as good an artist as he was a salesman. And the fastest painter his friends had ever seen.
"They didn't think of themselves, at least back then, as real artists," says Jim Fitch, who documented the Highwaymen tradition for the Museum of Florida Art and Culture in Sebring. "Their idea was to make money as quickly as possible and not have to do farm work."
Nobody liked turning a quick buck more than Al Black.
Fitch once wrote about Black in an anthropological journal: "Not willing to invest any more of his time, talent or material in a painting than is absolutely necessary, he has developed a style that is free of laborious toil. He puts it down and lets it be."
Many of the Highwaymen died obscure and poor; today their work sometimes fetches thousands of dollars. The survivors are experiencing modest fame. James Gibson, Roy McClendon and the only woman of the group, Mary Carroll, are guest speakers at art and history museums. Still dripping wet, their paintings sell for $300 or more.
If Black were a free man, he could be enjoying the celebrity and money. Instead he shares a cell with two other convicts, reads his Bible and prays that God will grant him a few healthy years if he lives long enough to enjoy freedom outside prison.
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I gots to keep on moving, I gots to keep on moving
Blues falling down like hail, blues falling down like hail
And the day keeps on remindin' me
There's a hellhound on my trail.
-- Hellhound on My Trail, by Robert Johnson, 1937
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Maj. Rick Stanley, right, leads a staff meeting, the standard drab prison decor broken courtesy of prisoner No. 793362. Al Black has covered the prison walls with more than 100 landscapes.
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With his self-destructive tendencies apparently under control, Al Black is transforming a prison for 2,500 convicts into an art gallery.
"I think prison saved my life," he says as he paints a woodsy landscape in the pavilion where prisoners visit with their families.
Watched by the ever-present guard, Black first paints a section of the wall white. Then he starts with the sky, adding grays and oranges and blues as he moves along.
He steps back, rocks on his heels, wipes his hands on his white uniform.
"The colors, they're the hard part."
If a room is dark, he might take take advantage of the low light and do a sunset or a sunrise. If there's a window, or if the fluorescent light is bright, he'll bring out the sun. Then come the trees and the water. He often finishes with three birds, which represent the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
Raised on the Bible, he had a hard time following it.
He fled Mississippi when he was 14, tired of picking cotton. He ended up picking potatoes, string beans and cucumbers up and down the Atlantic Coast until somebody asked if he could drive. Because it meant more money, he said yes, and drove a produce truck from the fields to the packing houses. He settled in Fort Pierce and became a Highwayman. He was all of 19 years old.
He has been married and divorced and had other women friends. He is father to eight children, including a son serving 30 years in another prison for home invasion, and has 20 grandchildren. He hopes his grandbabies never take cocaine.
His rap sheet, which dates to 1971, is nearly 11 feet long. He has been arrested for assault, contempt of court, writing worthless checks and probation violations. He was arrested for sexual assault, though charges were dropped. He was arrested for pretending he was a more successful artist and overcharging the customer for a painting.
His first cocaine arrest came on Halloween in 1988. He still remembers the first satisfying snort and who introduced him to white powder. He doesn't blame Eugene; Eugene didn't make him put those rocks in the pipe, didn't make him inhale the smoke.
Like that Blind Willie Johnson blues song says, he did it to himself.
"When you're on cocaine, there's nothing you can do," he says in a buttermilk drawl. His brown hair is flecked with gray, and the chin that anchors his baby face is graced by a sinkhole of a dimple.
"I used to do 10 paintings a day and go out and sell them for nice money. I had nice clothes, a nice place to live. I even had a limousine. I think I was the onliest black man who wasn't an undertaker to have his own limousine.
"Then cocaine. At first, I'd take it to limber me up when I'd start to paint. But I ended up hurting myself and lots of people. I thank the Lord I was able to stop. Jesus Christ is my savior now."
The view from the cafeteria, improved by an Everglades scene. Painted in less than half an hour.
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The 10-minute neo-Michelangelo
At the recreation hall, inmates play dominoes. Nobody has ever vandalized an Al Black painting. They've leaned up against one, or touched a scene that was still wet, but no one has deliberately ruined one.
"I've come into my own since I come here," Black says. Sometimes he wonders what his old painter friends might say if they could see him now. None of the other Highwaymen ever visit, of course; they liked him, but they shook their heads about his dishonest ways. Among other things, some suspected he took more than his share when he sold their paintings.
"I like challenges,'' Black says. He looks for new and interesting places to lay down a landscape… even on the shutter that is pulled down at night over a cafeteria stall.
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In the prison recreation hall, Black holds forth about his paintings like a museum docent. He points out his favorite swamp scenes, tortured cabbage palms shrouded by fog, oak hammocks and pine forests.
"I did this one in about 10 minutes."
He invested a half an hour in another.
"This here poinciana tree took me 35 minutes."
He still visits Dr. Rechtine in the medical clinic, where he receives treatment for his autoimmune disease. Every wall boasts a mural. When the doctor delivers bad news about TB or AIDS, the inmate can gaze over her head at a beach full of coconut trees.
"You'll never see two paintings of mine quite alike. I always try to change at least one little thing. Sometimes it's the season, sometimes it's the time of the day, where the sun or the moon is."
A guard opens a gate, allowing Black entry to another section of the prison.
Michelangelo had the Sistine Chapel. Al Black has the prison mess hall. It features more poinciana trees, and pine forests and foggy mornings on the Indian River. He clearly spent more time on these paintings, his best work at the prison.
His favorite is an Everglades scene stretching about 30 feet. It's painted on a metal door that rolls down over the cafeteria line. "I did that in about an hour, an hour and a half," he boasts. "I'm a wild man with a paint brush."
At night, in his cell, Black switches from paints to pencils and makes sketches he can convert the next day to new prison landscapes.
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* * *
Tombstone is my pillow, cold ground is my bed
Tombstone is my pillow, cold ground is my bed
The blue sky is my blanket, and the moonlight is my spread.
Death Room Blues, by Willie McTell, 1933.
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Black offers a tour of his cell, which is more like a small dormitory room. His is the bottom bunk. He's been working on sketches, which he keeps in a drawer under his bed. They are 8 by 11 depictions of the best of Florida, flowering trees along lonely river roads and moss-draped pines that line heron-filled marshes.
"I've come a long way since I got to prison. Strange, ain't it?"
Strange all right. Black brings up the day five years ago that art historian Jim Fitch and I found him living in a crack house in the worst neighborhood in Fort Pierce. His eyes were watery and he looked like a skeleton.
"I look you in the eye and talk to you plain,'' Black says. He used to avoid eye contact,
back when he was a crack addict. After years off drugs, he's rediscovered his artistic muse.
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"I wouldn't look you in the eye, hardly talked and didn't want to sit next to you in your truck, so I rode in the back. Know why? I knew you'd smell the crack on my breath."
That day he begged Fitch for $300. Knowing the money would end up in a crack pipe, Fitch instead handed Black 10 bucks for dinner and still wondered if he'd been conned. That was Black's reputation.
"He's 100 percent artist, and 100 percent con man," Fitch said. "You do the math."
Black acknowledges his old problems.
"Now I look you in the eye and talk to you plain," he says. "I get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, take care of myself. That don't seem like much, but used to be I didn't do even that."
Crack addicts are notoriously careless with their bodies. Black has HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. He says he does not know how he got it, says he feels fine.
He is scheduled for release in early 2008, but with time off for good behavior, he could get out as early as next summer.
If he makes it, if he ever lives outside of prison again, he vows that with God's help he will take a higher road. He says he would paint and teach and stay out of trouble.
He is a Baptist, but he keeps a Catholic rosary on his bedpost because of the cross. He reaches under his pillow for his big, red Bible.
He favors the New Testament. He likes when Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead because it reminds him of his own redemption. He likes the Acts of the Apostles, especially when Saul is knocked off his horse and is reborn as God's fiery messenger, Paul.
"God took the scales from his eyes," Black says. "Same as me."
He looks forward to a new life on the outside, where he can cast new eyes on real rivers and swamps and beaches and paint heavenly pictures.
For now, though, his dreams are less ambitious. Like what he might eat for supper tonight. Maybe they'll be serving his favorite, spaghetti and meatballs. As he dips garlic bread in the sauce, he can admire his own handiwork. Hmmm, the wall over there. That bare patch could use a landscape. Maybe a palm tree and sunlight cutting through the morning fog.
Then he can add his trademark birds, curlews, three of them, representing God's Holy Trinity. As Al Black tries to survive life in prison, they are his most reliable friends.
For more information
To read more about the Highwaymen art tradition, click on:
The Museum of Florida's Art and Culture:
Antiques and Art Around Florida magazine:
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To send art supplies to Al Black:
Albert Lee Black, DC#793362
c/o Major Rick Stanley
Central Florida Reception Center
P.O. Box 628040
Orlando, FL 32862-8040
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