Forever Free Playlist

 These musical works follow the plot of my book, Forever Free: A Novel of Edmonia Lewis. You can listen to them on my Spotify playlist.




Native American flute

Edmonia Lewis was raised in her mother's Ojibwe culture. Flute and drum music would have formed the soundtrack of her childhood.

Lead, Kindly Light

Yet this Christian hymn would not have been unknown to the Ojibwe, who translated songs they enjoyed into their own language. 

The Song of Hiawatha

In turn, the Ojibwe tale of Hiawatha was retold in English in Longfellow's epic poem. It was a familiar note for Edmonia when she left her forest home to attend a white school.

Blow Ye the Trumpet Blow

Later, when she settled in Boston to study sculpting, Edmonia understood her father's Haitian heritage. She celebrated with other blacks when Frederick Douglass announced the passing of the 13th Amendment, the abolition of slavery, in Tremont Temple.

The Old Folks at Home 

I imagine Edmonia and the other residents of her Boston boarding house gathering in the sitting room each evening. Whoever had an instrument would have played it, with the others singing along to melancholy songs as each of them remembered faraway families. 

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

The sight of the 54th Battalion marching off to war inspired Edmonia to sculpt a bust of their leader, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.

Napule Bella

The bust of Colonel Shaw was a tremendous success. She sold enough copies to pay for passage to Rome, where she began her sculpting career in earnest.

Regina Caeli (plainsong)

As the threads tying Edmonia to her native beliefs unraveled, she sought a new spiritual life by converting to Catholicism.

I Vespri Siciliani

Isabel Chomeley, one of Edmonia's new Catholic friends, joined her in attending Verdi operas at the Teatro della Quattro Fontaine near her studio.

Cantico del Sol di San Francesco

Isabel introduced Edmonia to Franz Liszt, another Catholic convert who entered a monastery after the deaths of his son and daughter.

Cleopatra's Theme

After years of study and work, Edmonia created her masterpiece, The Death of Cleopatra, which she showed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition.


Different Drum

In Philadelphia, Edmonia sees John Langston, the attorney who represented her when she  was accused of attempted murder while a student at Oberlin College. They had grown close during her previous visits back to the States, and finally, Langston proposed. Edmonia was torn. Langston was now a politician; as his wife, she would be expected to give up her art.

Hi Henry's Triumphal March

In the years after Edmonia's return to Rome, her life grew quiet, centering around work and prayer. That is, until the day she learned that Buffalo's Bill's Wild West Show--featuring "wild savages"--was in Rome. She was drawn to the show, which was pervaded by a carnival atmosphere.

Tribal Drums

When Edmonia comes across the encampment where the Indian performers live, long-lost feelings of belonging returned. Her life had come full circle.

Review: Georgia, by Dawn Tripp

Georgia focuses on the period in the artist’s life when she was in relationship with Alfred Stieglitz. When the photographer first encourages Georgia O’Keeffe and begins courting her via letters from New York, she is overwhelmed. She tries to take it in during sojourns through the Texas night:

“I lie there in the cold quiet, a small though moving at the edges of my mind-

the possibility that he is like that open space, vast like these plains, this night,

vast enough it seems sometimes to hold me.”

            Georgia joins Stieglitz in New York, where he makes a series of nude photographs of her. She’s unself-conscious about them, as they portray someone so beautiful that she speaks of the woman in the photographs in the third person. When Georgia begins to show her work in Stieglitz’s avant-garde art gallery, the public is already familiar with her through the nudes. Every critic references them. The series of giant flower paintings she creates only provide the critics with all the more evidence of her “feminine” nature. No wonder Georgia later so vehemently denied feminists’ interpretation of her flower shapes as vaginal!

            In response, Georgia returns to the hard, abstract style she originated in Texas. But Stieglitz advises against painting in this style. He won’t show the abstracts or the city paintings Georgia creates from their apartment window.

And he’s controlling in other ways, like dissuading Georgia from having a child. She feels “cut down if I want too much”. Stieglitz loves her, or his idea of her—her new American painting, her clarity and strength—so much so that he cannot bear for her to go on painting trips on her own. Yet Georgia can’t bear to be constantly contained.

            When Georgia’s independence is too much for him, Stieglitz is unfaithful. After his third affair, Georgia travels to Taos, New Mexico. It’s reminiscent of Texas, and she begins to remember who she was before she met Stieglitz. “Curious, how something as inarguable and simple as wide-open space can rearrange me back into myself,” she thinks. And “…For the first time in a dozen years, it occurs to me that perhaps Stieglitz is not my life, but a detour from it.” Still, Georgia returns to Stieglitz again and again, until the psychic contortions required to fit his image of who she is result in a crisis that convinces her return to Taos.

                                   

            The author’s lyrical writing matches Georgia’s paintings. Her grasp of Georgia’s character and how it intersects with Stieglitz’s feel utterly authentic. And her descriptions of the process of painting give you the vicarious thrill of being in this artist’s head.

                        Day after day, it is the desolation of this country that enthralls

                        me. How the wind sweeps the light and throws it into vibrant

                        shifting patterns of color and shadow against the cliffs…I paint,

                        and I am not the woman that he made.

In the end, only the sky is vast enough to hold Georgia. I wish that every young woman who has been told she is complicated or difficult would read this book to learn that—like Georgia—the truth is that she is powerful.