Norman Jr. Reading in Bed

Norman Jr. looks like a cool kid. He is lying on a bare, striped mattress, reading a book. The walls loom large over him; there are holes the size of fists and larger. The plaster crumbles as Norman reads.

There is light in the room, but it doesn’t warm Norman. He is under a blanket, wearing his jacket. No heat.

This is a 1967 Gordon Parks photo, part of a photostudy of poverty in Harlem. It hangs in the Cantor building, the art museum on the Stanford University campus. Walking down the line of Parks photos, you come upon Norman’s mother lying in bed, shielding her face, holding her youngest. This photo was taken the day after she scalded her husband. That’s all the caption tells you.

Further down the line, you see Norman’s mother surrounded by her children as she applies for aid. She holds the baby on her lap. Her oldest son bends close, playing with her ear or her hair. Another son lays his cheek against her shoulder. The little girl sucks her thumb.

Over the year that he took the photos, Gordon Parks came to care for the family so much, he convinced Life magazine to buy the family a house on Long Island.

Norman was young and African American and poor in 1967. Exactly how old was he? Why it matters: Vietnam.

In the 1960s and '70s, the United Negro College Fund plastered the airwaves with its slogan: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” The tagline said “mind,” but the picture was always of children.

In those decades, college was the Underground Railroad to escape the draft, poverty, Vietnam and Harlem. The United Negro College Fund was sending kids like Norman a message: We will help you board that train.

Someone at UNCF loved children.

* * *

In the Stanford gallery, down one floor and over a room or two, is a portrait of Leland Jr., who died 100 years before Norman was born.

Leland Jr. looks like a cool kid. He studied accounting with a private tutor. He collected antiquities. He died of typhoid at age 15 while touring Italy. His parents, broken-hearted, founded this school in loving memory.

Leland Jr.’s death mask—an unearthly white even after 100 years—hangs in the museum beside a huge, stuffed owl. The owl stands in a glass box, its wings raised over its head like a ballet dancer, tips meeting two or three feet above the head. In literature, owls symbolize death or freedom or hope.

Every one of the founding love triangle—father, mother and child—is one hundred years gone, but the school and the symbol remain.

* * *

Darlene knits while she waits for tango class to begin. She is in a club that knits gifts for homeless women. She is making a baby sweater. It is adorable in the way miniatures are. It is soft and stretchy, perfect for the fragile, squirmy thing who will inhabit it.

The baby will never know it had such a sweater. But the mother knows. She knows that her baby deserves such a garment, that by the grace of love, someone out there agrees. When she nuzzles her child, the sweater caresses her cheek. It will warm her heart forever.

Love gives Darlene’s fingers long reach.

* * *

Outside the Cantor building, in the Rodin sculpture garden, the centerpiece is The Gates of Hell. It is an enormous chaos of grotesque shapes, tortured humans.

Look close: Hell is full of babies.

One has wandered off. This little tyke is outside The Gates but is in a Hell of its own: alone. It is screaming.

In Hell, babies sit on their mothers’ laps, stand at their mothers’ knees. Mothers and babies cuddle peacefully together. Enrapt in one another, they fail to notice their surroundings.

Love blinds them to the Hell they are in.

* * *

Love seeketh not itself to please
Nor for itself hath any care
But for another gives its ease
And builds a heaven in hell's despair.
William Blake

* * *

Kudos to you, Gordon Parks. To Norman Jr., reading in bed. To the UNCF. Kudos to the Stanfords. To Leland Jr., collecting antiquities. To Rodin.

Kudos to you, Darlene.