you would be reunited with all things lost, with Lee and your father and some of the men from the 385th who had died since the war. If you placed your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, you would never, ever die. Your tears would be wiped away and forgotten. If you placed your faith in Jesus, it didn’t matter that you cleaned toilets and lived alone, that sometimes the people on your street scared you, called you a crazy fuck, a hermit, that sometimes the voices in your head called you things even worse, things you didn’t want to hear; and it didn’t matter that so many of the people you loved had vanished from the earth and your life and you could actually feel the empty spaces they left behind. None of it mattered. And if you truly believed, you were not just a poor man alone in the city among the poor, toiling in a poorly lit garage, babbling to a brick wall; you were not just a janitor, a forgotten vet scraping by on a paltry check. Your life mattered now and forever. Your life actually mattered.
He worked. He covered bottles and jelly jars and light bulbs with gold and silver foil, which he got from wine bottles and imported beer bottles and cigarette cartons and boxes of aluminum wrap. He used the tops of coffee cans for bases. He mounted upside-down drawers on cheap glass vases, wrapped them in foil. He trimmed the edges of a sawed-in-half table with government electrical cable before covering it all in gold foil. He used kraft paper and cardboard for angels’ wings, used carpet rolls to support the greatest weight. He used glue and nails and pins, and sometimes he encased an object in layers of foil until it was exactly the right size and shape.
And then there was The Throne itself, the centerpiece of the huge structure, an old red plush chair bought secondhand. He gave it gold wings and put it up high, a seat for the coming Savior. He gave it a high back—four feet, five feet?—of wooden shapes and smaller cardboard wings and bulbs of silver and gold. He named objects for saints and tacked his walls with biblical quotes and a picture of Lee, who was now, God told him, an angel living inside His body, God’s body as big as eternity—eternity itself. At the top of it all, this expanse that filled the entire back of a cold, damp garage at the end of a dark alley in one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city of Washington were the words FEAR NOT.
7.
Saint James left the earth before he was ready, before he was finished, even though he once told the merchant he rented the garage from, “The Throne is my life. I’ll finish it before I die.” He had been working on it in the garage for fourteen years, thinking about it perhaps forever, and he wasn’t done. He had had stomach cancer for some time, though it had only recently been diagnosed at the free clinic for World War vets. He refused to believe he was dying. It wasn’t his time yet. He worked on The Throne up to the very end, and the work eased his pain.
Death kept Saint James from knowing so many things about his “Throne.” Like just after his death when the merchant brought a reporter named Ramon Geremia from The Washington Post to look at it in the garage, where he poked at it and picked things up and probably didn’t quite put them back in the right spot, thus slightly altering the entire history of time. And he never got to read the story, which ran under the headline “Tinsel, Mystery Are Sole Legacy of Lonely Man’s Strange Vision” on December 15, 1964. And he didn’t get to see the photographer out there either, the guy with the Beatles haircut, telling everyone in the local art community what an amazing thing The Throne was and how a little black janitor with absolutely no friends and an unknown history had made it over many years. He never got to know that critics would write about his life and work, comparing him to people and movements of which he’d never heard. But most of all, he never got to see The Throne, sparkling amid a field of purple in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, never got to stand on those marble floors in his best Sunday suit, his Saint James crown glittering on his head, and be proud of what he’d made using nothing but belief and thrown-away things.
Ghosts in the Mirrors A Portrait of Geraldo Alfonso
1.
Geraldo Alfonso’s mother lived as a ghost in light and reflection, her soul pure energy made briefly visible if he did everything right, if he continued, night after night, his conjuring act. When dusk came and he clicked the wall switch, the interior of her small cottage glowed red, and she moved again through the ornately decorated, mirrored rooms on Catherine Street in Key West. She was even there at the end of his life, in 1998, after his childhood with her as a Santeria “Voodoo Queen”; after his time as a street percussionist in Cuban bands in the ’20s and ’30s; after his service in the navy during World War II; after his return to Key West from the war; after his short, tumultuous marriage and estrangement from his wife and son; after his defeated retreat back to the cottage to live with his mother, his one true love; after his depression.
He was fifty-seven when she died, and he had never made a piece of visual art until then.
That year a heaviness came. It had always been nearby, at the edge of his perception. Now it covered him like a veil, or was like a shadow stuck behind his eyes. He changed, people said.
He began to create a portal between the world of the living and the dead.
And in light, in reflection, in the hundreds of tiny mirror shards he glued to the walls and ceilings and floors, he could reunite with his mother, have his own image float across hers. He could hear her voice, feel her feminine power, and sometimes see the beams and glimmers of her spirit fling around the rooms of ceaseless glass as he paced through the house at night.
“Miracle Home,” he called it. Others would call it an “outsider art environment.” Neighbors called it strange. He devoted the final twenty-two years of his life to it, and it was all for her, so that she would keep talking to him, telling her stories, speaking in tongues, the way she did when he was a boy, when she and the other Santeria women on the street of small cottages sacrificed chickens for their blood and performed rituals to speak with the dead. His Miracle Home, he once told a reporter from the Spanish-language edition of The Miami Herald, gave him a reason for living.
2.
Alfonso was born in 1918. His mother’s name was Sophia Ferrar. She must have come to Key West from Cuba when you could still do that, after the Spanish but way before Castro. She worked in Key West as a cigar maker for most of her life. She had four children: two daughters, Geraldo, and another son, with two or perhaps three different men. They were working-class immigrants in the promised land. Geraldo had no relationship with his father, but it didn’t matter. He was his mama’s boy, her inspired one, her makiki—the powerful little rooster, cock of the walk, strutting along Catherine Street with his black hair shiny and combed.
Here is a story, like many of the stories about Alfonso, which may or may not be true: When he was five, maybe six, his mother became too sick to work for a time. The bills kept coming. The family needed money, needed food. Geraldo took his charisma and his talent and an old oil drum, his bold rooster self, and went out into the streets to play for the locals and the tourists, who were so impressed they paid him, the little Cuban boy, el santero. Mama was so proud she got well again. He saved her spirit, which fixed her body. He saved the family, Sophia’s special boy.
3.
Toward the end, when he was seventy-eight, when he was sick in his body and sick in his mind, when he knew the government was tracking him and he was hearing voices, when he and his pistol started having philosophical dialogues about choices, he still believed in parts of his mother’s religion and its power to open doors between life and death, though most of his art was more directly influenced by Catholicism. He had built a shrine of mirrored glass, Christmas lights, dolls, and framed pictures of his youthful familia. In the center was a black, plastic saint, which may have once been his mother’s.
In Santeria, a mix of African and Caribbean belief, of Yoruba traditions and Catholic ritual, there is a porous border between human and spirit worlds, and sometimes