“I was invited to be a part of a poetic and musical response to an exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) in partnership with World Cafe Live in Philadelphia. The Making American Artists: Stories from PAFA, 1776–1976 exhibition drew from the artworks of PAFA-affiliated artists from over the centuries. This poem arose after looking at Charles Willson Peale’s painting, George Washington at Princeton, 1779. According to the exhibition notes, the painting also depicts, in the background, an enslaved person who holds Washington’s horse. My ancestors served under Washington during previous wartime expeditions, thereby earning a huge swath of land in western Pennsylvania. They were a mixed-status family, both free and enslaved, white and Black. when Virginia’s laws changed, removing the right of free Black persons to maintain and prove their status in court and so subject to possibly being captured and sold as enslaved persons. My entire family left Virginia to start a town in western Pennsylvania, where they have remained for over two hundred years. The poem very briefly also invokes [painter] James Brantley’s work, Brother James, 1968, his self-portrait as a veteran, draped in the American flag and standing in the same position as Washington does in Peale’s painting. The poem invokes history and is a call for the colors of life, particularly in some of the many names of shades of green.”
—Raina J. León