Living Color

This afternoon in the classroom, his fingers are coated in chalk dust. He mentions that he feels a little wrung out from the night's work, and also because he hasn't been eating right lately. (His diabetes sidelined him for several weeks last year.) But he's also watching his students intently and waiting for his moment. Now he rises and calls out an assignment: Take a piece of paper, and draw something. "Anything you want," he says. "And don't rush! Take your time."

When the time is up, Carter begins a walk around the classroom to inspect the students' work. One has drawn a rose, but the stem is as thick and stiff as a ruler. Carter shakes his head. "If you draw a rose, it must look like a rose," he says. "Look at that stem. That stem is big enough to hold 100 roses." The other students smile, but there is no joy in it. They know they are next. "If I had to grade you on that, I'd give you a D," Carter says, continuing. "But if you go deeper into it, think how a leaf is bent. You have to start thinking."

"Look out that window!" he commands, turning left to face a wall of glass that looks out onto Lee Highway. "Look at that church. Look at it!" he commands, his voice keening. "What happens to it out there? It's so beautiful." He surveys the class, voice sharper now. "Talk to me! What do you see? You see sunlight hitting it! Dark and light! Ansel Adams, that's what he was doing with those photographs. Dark and light." He walks over to the chalkboard, where he has drawn a black bowling ball, a rendition that appears so remarkably three-dimensional it seems ready to roll off the chalkboard. He made it using only two pieces of chalk, one black, one white.

"Dark and light," he says. "There are 10 different shades of black here. Ten! You are blessed with eyesight. Some people don't have that. You have to think and look! Go deeper!" He turns to the would-be rose portraitist and commands, "Now give me another one," like a drill sergeant ordering a set of push-ups.

Later in the class, Carter tapes a piece of large, white paper onto the freshly painted cream cinder-block wall. "What do you see?" he asks. "This is negative space. You have to fill it." Working quickly with a thin, square-sided stalk of compressed charcoal, Carter sketches an oval for a face, a long slashing diagonal line that becomes a pair of shoulders.

"Watch what I do," Carter says, sketching quickly, smudging the charcoal lines into a field of black. He uses the heel of his hand to rub in shadows and light, and, on the paper, the face of a handsome African American man with a short beard begins to appear. The man's expression is solemn, intelligent, dignified. "I go lighter, and darker. And, all of a sudden," he says heavily, and holding up the slender wand of charcoal with an air of triumph, "this is an instrument that becomes powerful."

GROWING UP IN THE PUBLIC HOUSING COMPLEXES of South Arlington in the 1950s, Carter went to sleep and dreamed about colors. His father, an insulation installer, would hear him calling from the back bedroom: Blues! Use blue! Greens! Red! Add red!

His parents had a different source of inspiration. Three times a week, every Sunday, Wednesday and Thursday night, his parents bundled Carter and his brother and sister into the car and headed west, past Gainesville, Va., to the small Golden Church of God of Prophecy, where his parents, both preachers, proclaimed a fierce and uncompromising gospel. In winter they arrived after dark and stayed until after midnight, sleeping in the car on the way home and tumbling into bed at 1 o'clock in the morning. Devotion was for God, not sports. His parents regularly pulled him off the football field -- he played guard on the team at Wakefield High -- and off the pitching mound in the local Jimmy Dean baseball league to attend church services.

"I was a sports nut," he says. "But if you rebelled against the churchgoing, you got spanked."

But he also remembers being swept up by the shouting and excitement of those church nights. The echo of that time can be heard on the outgoing message on his answering machine, where he declaims in ringing tones: "I seek the time of day when the stars cry out in the heavens above and the river gives way to the sun. No one can see the power of God's hand as it moves the soul of man. I cry thee, I cry thee, please, Lord, bless this land. Leave a message, please."

He felt that same passion for art. For as far back as he can remember, Carter had an overpowering urge to sketch. "I couldn't stop drawing. Anything that was white I had to draw on it." His eyes banked images all day, every day, no matter how many times the teacher shouted at him to stop looking out the window. Birds and leaves, the bark of the trees, the faces of the people he passed on the street registered as dazzling puzzles of shadow and light. He went to bed clutching blank rolls of paper. Sometimes he couldn't eat his dinner until he'd sketched what he had in his head. When he didn't draw, he told friends later, his head would hurt.

"When I drew on something, my parents said, 'Give me your hand!' Bit-bat-bit," he says, mimicking the staccato of a series of quick slaps. "But I was gifted in art, so I never stopped. There weren't any gifted and talented programs back when I was coming up. So they all just thought I was weird."