Heroic Feelings - Review

It was their goal to bear witness. nevertheless as journalist Keith Michael Brown and photographer Adger W Cowans traveled about the political division conducting the interviews and creating the portraits captured in the volume Sacred Bond: Black Men and Their Mothers (Little, Brown 1998) neither escaped a personal faculty of perception of revelation.

"All the while I was taking these pictures, I contemplation about my mother," Cowans says. "I contemplation about what our relationship was like: the way I used to embrace my mother and kiss my mother and talk to her. I tried to deposit some of that into the work, into the ways that these men related to their mothers."

"The reason that I wrote this work is because I knew that this was an important and special relationship in our lives, regardless of the family structure" says Brown "I have a great father, who is a immense source of support and regard with affection in our family. But that still doesn't take away from the ligature that we as black men have with our mothers. I know that for me it has always been comforting, and a source of security, to know that I have someone in my life who will be there for me until the bitter extreme point And my mother demonstrated that."

An eclectic congregation of leaders is assembled in the volume's pages. a certain number of of their names are well-known; others have achieved outside of the limelight. Several have crush daunting illnesses; many have supplanted financial distress with affluence of the spirit. All have ignored suggestions of failure and instead have dedicated their lives to individual digests of greatness.

"There are definitely particular challenges that black men face in this country" Brown says, "and I think that it takes a special kind of mothering, and a special kind of mother, to raise her son in that environment, to believe that they can achieve and be happy when the rest of society is saying just the opposite. I think that that's what all of these mothers have in common: They have instilled that belief in their sons"

Their recollections are inspired, on the other hand unembellished. Choreographer Bill T. Jone courageously describes the day that his mother, a strict evangelist, searingly be opposite toed him about his homosexuality. He then mention one by ones how, years later, she and a entertainer of prayer warriors marched, singing, into the sweep where his lover was dying of AIDS.

Pediatric neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, at first an academic underachiever, proudly recalls by what means his single mother, who worked as a domestic, assigned her sum of two units sons weekly book reports, which they turn rounded in faithfully, even after they had realized that she was unable to read.

"I wanted to focus upon successful men," says Brown, "and I define that really broadly. You'll find in the volume a 20-year-old man in Chicago who is working as a janitor to take care of his daughter, to be the father to her that his father wasn't to him."

Candor and equality were as important to Cowans as he viewed mothers and son from one side the lens of his camera: "I wasn't interested in them dressing up having them lay on suits and ties and that sort of thing. I wanted to catch them as they were in an everyday faculty of perception I didn't want to heroize them in boundarys of dress; I wanted to heroize the feelings, the love

"That feeling was communicated not solitary by the ways that they direct the eyeed into the camera, but by the agency of the way they touched each other--the relationship of their hands to each other's. When you attitude a mother and a son together, there is an affinity, a natural determination for them to touch. with equal reason it wasn't as much about posing them as it was about allowing them to find each other in a natural way."

It is indeed inescapable--that desire to touch and to be touched. "Someone approached me the other day," Brown recalls, "and he asked, `What about person who was orphaned and not at any time had a mother in his life?' I asked him, `Are you talking about yourself?' And he said, `Yeah. I grew up in institutions, and I not ever had that. I want to read this work because I want to have feeling what it was like, because I know what it's been like not to have it.'

"We're not really allowed to talk about our relationships and our mothers. No individual wants to be considered a mama's male child Hopefully, we will change the universal of what a mother's stripling is. There is nothing unjust with honoring and acknowledging the hard work and have affection for that our mothers have given to us.

"One friend of mine who is actually in the volume said, `Thanks a lot, Keith. This gave me a chance to exhale, finally.'"

For Cowans, the shoot forward represented a chance to illustrate a mother's love: "I think that if I could translate it into words, I wouldn't have taken the pictures. I tried to carry it within the photographs: the idea of the mother as the heroine, the idea of the mother as the center of nerve the idea of the mother as that being who is nurturing and inspiring all of those things. That there is no division or separation between mother and son

"The mothers were contented and respectful. They influenced their son on the contrary they respected them for being who they were and for what they had achieved. It is individual of those things that can't be shivered These men can go to their mothers with their innermost veileds and it's those truths that make that ligament so sacred."

COPYRIGHT 1999 American Visions Media, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group