How Georgia Became O'Keeffe by Karen Karbo Read Free Book Online Page B

where you placed a rocking chair in a room or lined up the toes of your shoes against the baseboard. Feng shui had been kicking around China since antiquity, but you can bet no one in the Texas panhandle had heard of it.
    When Georgia arrived the new high school hadn’t been finished yet, nor did she have any books or supplies. She didn’t mind. In fact, she preferred it. As she would her entire life, she used what was at hand. Once, a boy rode his pony to school and Georgia coaxed the animal inside so he could serve as a model for the day’s lesson on line and form. “I enjoyed teaching people who had no particular interest in art,” she said later in life, remembering these unsung years.
    I’m not the first person who has written about Georgia to try and square this giving, inventive, popular high school teacher with the solitary, secretive, bleached-cow-bone–­loving misanthrope she became in her dotage, but we can’t forget that the other thing she loved about teaching was that people left her alone.
    To be a woman in 1912 meant to be a wife or not-a-wife. To be not-a-wife meant being an old maid forced to live with your parents or other relatives. Or, you could be a schoolteacher. Schoolteachers were usually also old maids, but they had their own money, could come and go as they pleased, wear odd shoes, and cultivate strange enthusiasms, and no one paid them any mind. Being a teacher allowed Georgia to hide in plain sight. She could get away with wearing her customary black clothes and flat men’s shoes, take daylong walks out on the prairie and then come home to the Magnolia Hotel where she would beat windburned cowboys and gap-toothed prospectors at dominoes, because no one saw her anyway . To live happy, live hidden , or so the French proverb goes, and Georgia was living proof.
    Living at the Tail End of the World
    Would Georgia have become O’Keeffe had she taken the job at the University of Virginia? After a year in Amarillo she returned to Charlottesville to work in the summer program as Alon Bement’s teaching assistant. She was offered a full-time position that was more prestigious, paid more, and allowed her to be closer to her family, ‡ but she couldn’t quit Texas and those over-the-top sunsets that begged her to stop every day and stare. Whatever it was about that bellowing wind, that scorching sun, she could not give it up. It not only spoke to her, but it also made her feel in tune with her true self. She taught for a second year in Amarillo, but was not asked back. Her eccentricities caught up with her; the school board wanted her to use a stodgy but well-respected textbook and she wasn’t having any of it. She preferred to use ponies. Or, she may have made one too many cracks about what she considered to be the cloying, dumbheaded patriotism exhibited by the upstanding residents of Amarillo, as they and the rest of the country faced American involvement in World War I. Or, her complicated nature simply demanded she move on. By 1914 standards (she held the position in Amarillo through spring of that year) this failure to settle down signified a failure to launch. It was one thing to be an old maid schoolteacher, and quite another to—well, no one really knew what she was doing, including Georgia herself.
    For the next six years a list of her addresses reads like one belonging to a felon trying to get back on her feet. New York. Charlottesville. Columbia, South Carolina. §§ Back to New York. Back to Charlottesville. On to Canyon, Texas, for more teaching in the middle of nowhere.
    Of all the Georgia O’Keeffes—the devoted and uncompromising artist, the mysterious much younger lover of Alfred Stieglitz, the iconoclastic painter of erotic abstractions and monumental big flowers, the middle-aged woman in black who put northern New Mexico on the map, the self-sufficient crone with a weather-beaten face whose work was rediscovered and