Love the Blood

I was an undergraduate student in Yale’s American Studies department—a department that claimed my heart and my mind—but even after four years, I was still trying to find my place on campus. That search went on during my subsequent years in New Haven as a PhD student in American Studies. I was looking for models, for fellow travelers, particularly like-minded women who had things to teach me. This is what I found in Kymberly Pinder. As graduate students, Kym and I “was girls together,” to use a phrase from Toni Morrison’s 1973 novel, Sula. We were Black girls together at Yale, to be specific.

Kym was at the beginning stages of what would be a formidable career as an art critic and a historian, one that has led her back to Yale as dean of the School of Art. Back then, her fascination with medieval art fascinated me. It was clear that she had the same passion for the bold colors on the works to which she introduced me as I felt for black type on the page. It was a passion that was bottomless.

We were the same age, but Kym seemed to have the kind of intellectual authority and creative boldness that I did not think I possessed. I thought she was courageous, mastering a body of work that had not even anticipated her very existence. I was excited by my chosen field of study—the Harlem Renaissance—but my own commitment felt a bit predictable compared with the scholarly adventure Kym had designed for herself.

I was also, at the time, suffering from deep ambivalence. Beneath my placid exterior roiled a true conundrum: I had fallen in love with a white man, and not just any white man but, very decidedly, the wrong white man. That man was Carl Van Vechten. As a champion of the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten helped further the careers of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and many others, and his photographs of the movement’s artists were brilliant, vital, and enduring. But it was the publication of his 1926 novel Nigger Heaven—which depicted the lives of Harlem residents—that incurred the wrath of W. E. B. Du Bois and others, for both its title and its lurid content. By the time I was a graduate student, I had loved Van Vechten for years, but I still didn’t really want anyone to know how far I had truly fallen.

I thought Kym might have gone through a similar kind of struggle, or had entertained a similar kind of ambivalence when it came to medieval art. I wanted to know how she had answered the internal and external voices that might have urged her in another scholarly direction. I wanted to know where her courage came from.

What was it about medieval art, I asked her, that so compelled her?

“I love the blood,” she said, without missing a beat.

And that was it. A woman laying claim to her own imagination without apology. A woman in charge of her own curiosity. Liberation. Awareness. It was, for me, a eureka moment.

In a 1984 interview, when asked about the process of his “coming out” (a term that he did not use himself), James Baldwin said, “You have to go the way your blood beats.”

To have a passion is to have an identity. And the forging of any identity is almost always a bloody business.

“I have had a lifelong obsession with blood, and I’m not the only one,” writes Lawrence Hill in the early pages of his 2013 collection of lectures, Blood: The Stuff of Life. “As both substance and symbol, blood reveals us, divides us, and unites us. We care about blood because it spills literally and figuratively into every significant corner of our lives.”