It was news, and everyone said what brilliant pictures they were and what a great future I had: This gal is going places, mark my word. I had to laugh. I knew that the pictures were easy and only the subjects amazing, like shots of bad weather or big game, hailstones and tigers, or our old friend “Snake Swallowing a Pig.” The subject was the thing, and so my skill was praised, but I knew that there would always be someone to say I was a photographer of accomplishment if I exhibited a picture of a person with two heads, giant or dwarf, or blood-splashed murder victim. Even the Cummings one — it was his head that counted, not his name.
With Teets it was his mouth. All the blacks talked while I had done them, but Teets, whom I had met on the Vineyard, had kept up a nibbling monologue that lent a sour scavenging expression to his buffoon’s mouth and gave glimpses of the roots of his teeth and the way they molded his gums, like carved wax inside the scratched tissues of his lips.
He had the liverish just-dug-up color of an earthworm, he wore a sock on his head, and he hid his intelligence in clowning. He was a reader; not a self-improving type, but a man of restless solitude who searched in books for his counterpart. He read everything and, like many of us, he failed to find in any book a clue to his own world, a familiar smell or gesture, a quality of light — that little kick in fiction that tells the truth and makes the rest plausible. “It’s just a story,” he would say, tossing a book aside: he did not believe.
In him I saw, as I often had with Frenise, a fellow sufferer, passion sandwiched between innocence and duty, yearning to soar. And he even looked the part, like a crow on a branch complaining with his beak, “Dummies. I can’t read this book. It’s about dummies.” Or his more solemn conclusion, “I’d rather read your pictures, Maude. They’s like stories.”
Teets’s photograph, in stiff robes, a pharaonic profile, was praised for its weirdness — wild eyes and a gobbling mouth full of teeth. But there was a voice, like the “shet” and “bidge” that didn’t go with Frenise’s church clothes, that insisted there was more to Teets than his pose.
That day in the dunes above Edgartown, dressed as an Egyptian and sitting cross-legged in the sand, he said to the camera, “There’s only one book which is the truth, and it’s the Bible.”
Troof, Bahble. I thought: So it comes out at last — he’s a religious nut, a roller or a jumper.
He explained to the camera, holding his hands forward, as if he expected birds to light on his wrists, “Not the Holy Bible, but the other one, the plain old Bible they hit you with when you’re little.”
“Do tell.” I was winding and snapping, winding and snapping.
“It’s the truth about what people do. They cuss. They kill their childrens. They do wrongness. They suffer for years and years and they look around and suffer some more. And sometimes nothing happens for two-three hundred years but begetting.”
I said, “But lots of books are about that.”
“Cussing, yes, and dying, yes, but not begetting with their own daughters and brothers and sisters. But that’s the truth.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“Doing it hard,” he said. “It ain’t in books — it’s in the Bible.”
I said I wasn’t happy with the pose. I told him to relax and get on his elbows and keep talking and don’t mind me.
He said, “Sure it’s the truth. I know someone that done it, and,” he smiled, “that someone is me, baby.”
“Cussed?”
“Jammed.”
“With your daughter?”
“With my sister. Hard.” He sucked his teeth. “Got no daughter.”
I said, “I don’t think you ought to be telling me this, Mister Teets.”
“It’s the truth, so don’t get vex. The truth is the truth.” He did his crow-squint, lowering his head and saying into the camera, “Know how it come about?”
I didn’t know what to say. His head shook in the viewfinder and swerved at me.
“Sit still.”
“I am setting still, but your camera is vex, jumping up and down, and the reason is you just heard the truth.”
Troof again. “I didn’t hear anything.”
“Here she come then, Harry and me — Harry is my little sister, living in Oak Bluffs, where my father was stewie for the Phippses. That’s where it all come about. It was maybe October, blowy, sand in the streets, all the summer people gone and only us there and a few Phippses. There were town people there, the ones you say hello and thank you to, but you couldn’t do nothing with them and you couldn’t touch the Phippses. We was alone, Daddy, Harry, and me, and Daddy was doing all day, which leaves Harry and me.” He had inched forward. I was on my knees — I took all my best pictures on my knees. His broad black face was not a foot from the camera. I saw a nose and two eyes, like a face pushing through a door I was trying to close.
“Think about it — no one else on the island. We’re the only ones, her and me. Like in the Bible.”
I noticed he was avoiding the words white and black, but I got the picture, the pair of them and their belief, a simpler version of my own family.
“Pretty soon I realize I’m a boy and Harry she’s a girl, and one day in the soft barn loft I lifts up her dress and I say, ‘What you got down under there?’ and I reaches.”
Teets licked the cracks from his lips and looked tenderly at the camera, perhaps using the lens as a mirror. I probed his perspiration.
“Harry doesn’t say anything, a grunt like ‘nuh,’ but she reaches, too. We start reaching and reaching, and kissing so hard my teeth hurt, then she says, ‘Stop nuh.’ This goes on for a few days — no one there, like in the Bible, just Harry and me, boy and girl — and she keeps saying stop. But one day I’m reaching and she’s reaching, and I got such a nice grip choking her tadpole she forgets to say stop and we do it, sinning and sweating like holy blazes.”
He raised his speckled eyes and looked at me hiding behind my camera. A great hairy cuddly thing began to carouse in my entrails.
“She cried. I couldn’t stop her. But then we knew how to do it, and we kept on, until the summer people came back. I was almost sorry when we weren’t alone anymore, and I liked her better than any woman, because she was my sister. That’s the truth.’’ He thought a moment, then said, “At the end, when she wasn’t afraid anymore, she kissed my snake, and I cried I was so happy and pushed her nice little thighs against me ears like I wanted to drown.”
This left me shocked and full of hope. I said, “Weren’t you afraid someone would catch you?”
“There wasn’t no one, so it was all right,” he said.
For seconds he smiled beautifully, a light filling his face. He dropped his jaw to think, and darkened, and the smile was gone.
I said, “No, like you were before. Smiling.”
He grinned like a jack-o’-lantern.
“Lost it,” I said. “Try again. What were you thinking about?”
He said, “I loved that little girl.”
The smile moved up his face, from his mouth to his eyes, creasing his forehead, making the crystal pimples of sweat meet and run, tightening the skin at his temples and drawing his scalp back, a kind of sorrowing satisfaction.
I snapped the picture and at once the expression passed, as if I had peeled it from his face.
This was my last Provincetown picture. The exhibition, my first, was held in that boathouse on the wharf and Papa and Mama drove up with Phoebe for the opening. Orlando came in the steamship from Boston. I showed them around, introduced them to the gallery owner (who was disappointed by the turnout) and I felt that because of my photographs the place was mine and no one could take it away from me.