Where Are You From?: Atlanta

By Barbara Fahrnbauer

Albert Fahrnbauer vows on his Mothers deathbed that he will dedicate his life to the service of Mankind. He will develop a new scientific system of portraiture through color matched to each personality - a portrait that reveals a blueprint toward a radiant better life. But he has a problem. His portraits are terrible. Nobody wants them.
He marries Barbara, a fellow art student, with the understanding she will help him develop his system. They will have no children. He wants her to join him every step of the way, painting only with his scientific mixtures. Unfortunately. Barbara prefers her free-spirited, messy way of painting. Her portraits sell, but she cheats on his system
Volume 2 opens when they leave Florida for Atlanta, GA. They buy 14 acres on a hilltop. Albert is thrilled with the view all the way to Atlanta beyond the trees. Barbara is appalled at the crappy old house, no hot water, and a bathroom outside on the porch.
They are both city people with romantic ideas. They want to live off the land, milk goats, and grow vegetables. They have no farming experience whatsoever. They make hilarious mistakes, suffer emotional traumas over crops and animals, endure periods of starvation, moments of euphoria, and violent arguments over ways to paint.
It is also the time of Civil Rights, the 1950s. Their landlord visits them at Christmas with a K.K. Klan buddy. The preacher, politicians, neighbors and customers oppose any change in the racial customs and treatment of Negro people. Albert confronts them with his humanitarian philosophy. All people have a unique and wonderful radiance of living color, he tells them. His system will prove it - if only Barbara will use it. So goes the story of their different personalities, where each of them came from, and how their backgrounds inspire, damage, and diverge throughout their lives together.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504905770

Barbara Fahrnbauer

The author Barbara Paige Fahrnbauer majored in art at Bennington College, and studied at the Art Students League in New York City. Albert died in 1981. Barbara is retired. She works in her garden and visits her three children and their families.

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© 2015 Barbara Paige Fahrnbauer. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 06/12/2015

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0578-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0576-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-0577-0 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015905594

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE

ATLANTA

1 Hunting for a Home

2 Fantastic Possibilities

3 Jailette Road

4 Welcome to the Circle

5 This He’ah Well

6 Goats and Neighbors

7 Canvassing for Work

8 Portraits and Politics

9 An Education in Segregation

10 No Deliverance

11 FEARS

12 The Art of Earth Moving

13 WINTER

14 Tragedies

15 A Portrait of a Painting

16 1957

17 Visits and Tomatoes

18 A Letter to Myself

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my three children, Theresa, Ernest and Maria, who waited many years for this story about them.

Thanks for their opinions, corrections and encouragement, and sometimes alarm at what was said.

To those who went before:

the now dead ones, parents, relatives, teachers in their ever changing times from where I came from

Many thanks to the Wizards at Computer Tech USA who kept my computers working, without which, for better or worse, this book would not be written.

Finally, to the memory of Albert Fahrnbauer.

His artistic vision was always dedicated to Humanity.

His tragedy was an inability to bring his ideas into concrete expression by himself, and his need for me to fulfill that part. Now at least, I can acknowledge his artistic creation and try to understand it.

PART ONE

ATLANTA

1

Hunting for a Home

On the Road Again

It’s time to leave this dreadful place, Albert announced.

I agreed. The tourists’ winter season in Miami Beach had dried up right after Easter. There were only a few out of season guests or convention folks around the pool. No one wanted an expensive pastel portrait. The photographers were selling black and white snap shot types. That was good enough. I hadn’t made a dime in three days; keep going like that and the concession would throw me out – me, the superstar pastel artist without a job! As for the leaving to where, that was a fuzzy unknown. We threw all caution out the window and dove into the whirlwind of possibilities, with only a map of Florida and Georgia to guide us.

We packed up everything we owned in a van and house trailer – mostly art supplies – and left Miami and its grand hotels, and took off into a wilderness of highways and small roads in search of a place called Atlanta, we had only seen on the map and heard of vaguely.

I doubt if at any other time we could have attempted such a trip. In June of 1956 Albert turned 36, and I was 27. Still young enough to dare, old enough to know time was slipping away. We had no children, no commitments except those we carried in imagination. We had no ties, except to my family miles away in New York and Connecticut. In the summer of 1956 we could still boast a let’s-see-what-happens attitude, guided by plans around a foggy dream.

Foggy hardly describes it. We knew nothing about Atlanta, the place we finally picked as Home – or rather home in the clouds for now. We had zero contacts for business, no thought how to survive once we got there, just endless talk and poring over maps. No research in the conventional sense – like knowing ahead where exactly we were going. None of that. Just a powerful desire to GO! Go find it!

Times were good, economically speaking. America was booming, and we felt a part of it. We had saved about $500. We felt fairly rich! My short-lived fame and fortune as a portrait artist in the Fontainebleau Hotel had inspired me with a sense of worth. Many times I had fought my way in to unfriendly places. Another new place seemed more of a thrill than a threat.

Albert was beside himself with joy at my acquiescence. Albert, who hated hotels, now looked ahead to buying land, preferably a hilltop with a magnificent view where we would develop his lifelong dedication to his color system as a gift to all mankind. He talked endlessly about our future paradise. It sounded strangely like nostalgia for the Alps in America. Once Albert got a strong idea he swept everything and everyone – mostly me of course – along in the windstorm of his plans.

He was homesick for the Bavarian Alps in Germany where he had grown up. He talked wistfully about hiking with his uncle Ernst up the mountains, the view of lakes and glorious scenery. To find anything resembling this – here in America – he started with the Rocky Mountains out west. I vetoed that because my family lived in the northeast. So reluctantly, his finger on the map slid down from the Adirondacks (we had tried there – too expensive), to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Tennessee and North Georgia which had captured our delight traveling down to Florida in November 1954.

Atlanta is the biggest city in the south-east, Albert assured me, even though neither one of us knew a damn thing about it, except that it looked impressive on the map because of its big black dot. We can go there for business, to find portrait customers, and live out in the country. How far would we have to travel? I asked, with a hint of reality creeping in. Don’t worry, he said. Everything will work out! Doesn’t it always?

Atlanta? Mother said incredulously when I telephoned her about our decision. Georgia? Why on earth would you want to settle there? she asked disgustedly. Georgia is one of the most backward states in the US. It’s nothing but a rural pig pen with a few scrappy towns here and there. You say you think the South would have cheaper land? Why don’t you try Charleston or Savannah? They have some sort of culture at least. But I think the whole thing is a big mistake. You would make far more money up north and have worthwhile clientele.

I’ve been all over the world, she declared in a plaintive voice from the other end of the phone. I know every state in the union. There’s no place better than New York or close around for you to establish a marvelous portrait business.

When I told Albert what she had said he gave me a polite (because she was my mother) exasperated smile, and remarked that Mother might have been through Atlanta back in the Depression when few places were doing well, and wasn’t she a bit prejudiced? To Mother, how could any place compare to Manhattan? He remarked that my mother’s opinion was out of date. Mother was probably right also – to some extent. One could hardly drive through the South without noticing a big change from northern states and cities. Northerners had a prejudiced view of The South from way back. However, some articles we had read and people we talked to in Florida had told us Atlanta was up and coming, a leader in the New South, not at all like it used to be. We wanted to believe that. No matter whose report was authentic it made no difference in the end. Albert wanted land. Land it would be. Nothing less. Didn’t I want that too?

Of course I did, and therein lies the source of unwise longing for something neither one of us knew anything about, and never tried to learn before the plunge.

*     *     *     *

Albert had closed his color box. The art supplies were packed securely in our magnificent cream-pickled storage cabinets inside the house-trailer. We too had closed some doors and were looking only forward for those wonders we imagined must be just over the horizon. We had packed up several times before, but this time was decidedly different. Despite Albert’s dedication to his color theories and all his passionate, mystical vision of its promise for mankind, right now his focus had definitely shifted to finding the unknown. Anything familiar had blown away behind us.

I often wondered how Albert could reconcile his impulse for getting into debt and his dislike of business entanglements. He agreed that money mattered, but insisted there was only one right way to make it. He put it graphically: making money for itself spread black fungus over our search for artistic enlightenment. We must never lose sight of the whole purpose, he reminded me, the reason we came together. His color system would lead the way!

His optimism seldom wavered. He had bought three trailer houses, each larger and more expensive than the one before, never bargained for a price discount, and waited happily for its delivery to share his enthusiasm with me. Then he immediately turned his attention to his projects, reluctant to worry about income with the assumption that everything would work out somehow, if only we stuck to our commitment.

We needed a Home Place. That gained, right away would begin the advancement of art through development of the colors. That was his plan, laid out in simple brief words, with heavy weight. Although at that moment I gave an inward shrug to the last part about his color system, I joined enthusiastically in our big adventure as we stared at the black dot of Atlanta on the map and talked about the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains undulating through the north of Georgia into Tennessee.

Impressions of Georgia

Our house trailer was coasting along behind the van. We had to stop in trailer parks because of it. No stopping anywhere we fancied by the roadside or with some friendly people as we did on our first trip through the Blue Ridge Mountains when we living in the van. As we crossed the state line from Florida into Georgia we drove north through an endless pine forest, passing through Valdosta, and Albany, and Americus, where, no doubt, a man we had never heard of, Jimmy Carter, was tending his peanut fields, (taken over after his father’s death in 1953).

Now in late spring, peanut, tobacco, and cotton fields stretched between the towns for miles in variegated greens and light brown of newly furrowed fields. We drove past Columbus, and then followed signs for Atlanta. We noticed the earth was changing from its familiar sandy color to a rusty hue. Most peculiar! Was something wrong with the soil? Albert searched his chemical knowledge and came up with an abundance of iron.

Even more striking than reddish earth, was a contrast of houses on the farm land. Here a mansion, there a disreputable shack. Here a modest home of fair quality, there small, barely livable houses evidently belonging to the same farm or community. I asked myself how significant this was. What social arrangement did these people have? Better house – white folks? Yes, of course, and those others – those shacks – who lives in those? The poor people who do the work? Poor white people? Negroes?

I knew about segregation in New York, in Florida too, but I had never been so aware of it as now. In New York you had Harlem. It was up there. You either lived in it, or somewhere else. I never saw Negro people where I lived. There was mixing on the fringes, like places in Greenwich Village, where the counterculture lived. It struck me – Here it’s part of life, at least the rural life we see right now. I wondered what Atlanta might be like. Then the old smugness rose up: why worry? We are white people, those on top, the people in control. (Aren’t we?)

I hoped the race business was not much of a problem here in the South. That we were entering into the midst of Georgia’s civil rights and the tumultuous change it was bringing we had no warning of, or the effect it would have on our lives.

I wonder if Georgia is warm in the winter, I remarked, as I pushed hair out of my eyes from the hot breeze blowing in through the open window. It had been quite cool that morning until the sun rose high in the sky. Albert said what a fine day it was, but he too was absorbed in the passing scenery. Albert noticed the same things I did, but saw them differently. He studied the buildings and the land in his own way, remarking on some handsome homes, and declared his disapproval at the sight of small wooden buildings hiked up on rocks beneath their four corners, with flimsy looking corrugated tin roofs. How is it allowed, to build such things? In Germany that kind of building would not be allowed.

Our thoughts about the social difference crossed somewhere beyond our words, but we spoke only about the physically obvious. It glared at us in silent visible shape, the very structure of wealth and poverty, and the issue of race appeared like an open book, a book of Life which Albert vividly knew about concerning the chapter on Jews, but the part about blacks and whites we had hardly been aware of. We both saw it. We both knew. But we did not discuss it, except in passing, like skimming pebbles across the water. So fired up about our own big adventure those disturbing currents had to remain running under for now.

It’s like – like going back years ago! I ventured. What do you mean? he asked. I tried to explain. I told him my impressions when I walked from Mother’s street between Park and Madison in New York City, over to the east side in the tenement district. In the space of a few blocks the people and their way of living changed drastically. Buildings were old. We had an icebox instead of refrigerator. Many people barely spoke English, were uneducated and superstitious. It was like the turn of the century, I said. Now I have that feeling again as we drive through these farmlands, here in Georgia.

Albert asked me what connection I made. What did Georgia have to do with New York’s east side? It’s like the El, I explained. "The train that rode elevated above the street instead of underground like a subway – the one that ran over 3rd Avenue. We