The Knotty One: Obscurity and the Black-Male Artist

Knotty-head is the ugliest piece of art that I own. Yet you would not be able to pry him out of my arms for any amount of money. Originally sculpted out of rusted junkyard metal, he stands proudly in my living room like a defender spirit, ready to unleash his wrath on any unwanted interloper. Or at least that’s what his body language seems to indicate.

He is defiant, yet controlled. Cylindrical eyes protrude like a pair of small binoculars from his elongated tribal-mask face, and the peep-hole shape of his mouth suggests that he’d rather fight than argue. His indestructible two-foot-tall skeletal body carries that subtle grace of stance often associated with men of African descent—a loosely-held tension in the limbs, a slow-quick, don’t-blink, fluid changeability that holds steady under scrutiny. Although his long torso is essentially one uninterrupted stretch of iron about the width of a man’s wrist, his slender frame is surprisingly heavy to lift. The moment you pick him up, you are forced to reconsider the strength of his sheer bone-density. One blow to the head from Knotty could kill the strongest human being.

Knotty’s angular head is crowned with the metal chain that is his namesake. The name itself, Knotty-head, implies a person who is stubborn and perhaps hardheaded. Someone you’ve grown up with, yet know only by their nickname—a name that suggests a complete lack of regard for other people’s standards. Yes, the name says, my head is knotty. So what? Knotty-head: A strong name, one you would call if you were in trouble. One you might not want to call unless you were prepared for more trouble.

One thing I love about Knotty is the way people react to him. They are either instantly captivated by his tough, charismatic presence or they visibly shrink from him. No one ignores Knotty. Many are perplexed. Or they just point and laugh as if they recognize him but never expected to run into him at my house. This pleases me. “That’s Knotty,” I say quickly, letting them know he’s more than just an ugly face.

“Oh, you! It’s you, you funny man,” my niece Corinne once said to Knotty when she was about three. Knotty’s tree-stump pedestal rendered him almost eye level with Corinne. “Hello!” she chirped, ogling him with wide-eyed delight. “I like you.”

Seeing her brightly-ribboned head next to Knotty’s unleashed a rush of joy, reminding me of my own early years with him.

“His name is Knotty-head,” I told her. “Knotty for short.”

“Yes, he is short,” she agreed, nodding emphatically. At that time Corinne was the youngest in her family and perhaps happy to meet someone her own height. But more than that, I believe she saw in Knotty some intangible quality that resonated within her young soul. I think she instinctively recognized that he was more than someone’s carefully crafted leftover junk, and that somehow, he was both a part of our family’s past and our future.

Knotty joined our family before I did. My father, now deceased, purchased the statue a few years before my brother Jesse and I were born in 1969 and 1970, respectively. As a child, when my parents would regale me with the tantalizing details of their early life together, it made me bemoan the lateness of my birth. I couldn’t believe they’d had so much fun without me—after all, Jesse and I were the undisputed stars of every household event. How dare they have a fulfilling and exciting life before us? It seemed disloyal, perhaps because the reverse was not possible.

Knotty-head was a product of the magical era when Mom and Dad owned Bunch’s, a soul-food restaurant on the Lower East Side, a few blocks from Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan. After dating for about a year, Mom, who is from a white middle-class Jewish family, relinquished her entire savings...