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Saturday, January 18, 2003
Old Africa wall tells new, colorful story
By Ronald Williamson | News-Journal Columnist
At a glimpse, it's a long, irregular streak of patchy color set into a grassy hill -- an automatic doubletake in the plain, open areas of Painter's Park, between the courthouse and Stetson University in DeLand.
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Mural memories |
Up close, it becomes a wall of bright, lively faces, buildings and machines. There's a hotel, an electric plant, and men laboring with ice, oxen and timber. There are children, a train, and a thin woman with a hoe.
Many are African images.
Around the Volusia County seat in 1900, Africa wasn't a country. It was a small black neighborhood nestled in the curve of the train tracks near jobs at hotels, freight yards, sawmills and other small industries.
Africa disappeared with the jobs. The hotel was gone by 1950. The trains stopped coming. The lumberyard closed. The last two-story home burned in 1982. Now the area is a city park with grassy retention ponds, a walking trail lined with lampposts, and a gazebo.
Nothing's left of Africa. Except perhaps this wall, and this hill.
The hill is a fragment of a late 19th-century railroad grade curving to the train station and the biggest hotel. The concrete retaining wall was built around 1900, hard against a siding behind a lumberyard.
It's an old wall, in an old place, telling an old story in a fresh, new way -- exactly how Courtney Canova planned it.
Canova, 42, a commercial artist, has helped with nearly all of MainStreet DeLand's half-dozen murals. He designed this one -- the seventh -- and has painted most of it. Another local artist, Bob Brooks, has painted several details and student artists painted one scene.
"I want it to work as a storytelling wall," said Canova. "Looking at it is nice, but you can pull out different parts as stories, and make history a little more alive."
The wall's story follows the railroad grade from the outskirts of the city into downtown, past loggers, farmers, ice men, a packing house, and printing plant, through Africa and on to John B. Stetson's hotel filled with northern tourists. The mural, almost complete, has characters of many colors.
One of the wall's stories is of five barefoot black boys with jugs and harmonicas, making enthusiastic music for tourist coins. The jug band's faces, like most of the wall's faces and scenes, are taken from photographs Canova found in local history books.
This is the first DeLand mural to celebrate the city's black heritage. One section of the wall has several large portraits of expressive black faces -- quite unlike other local murals where black faces are few and mostly fictitious. "I'm not qualified to tell the black man's story in any sense," Canova told me. "I just wanted to show something of how black people in this place lived and worked."
The wall is a complex canvas. It may be 200 feet long, with dozens of irregular, separate planes of differing heights and shapes. Some face opposite ways, so different perspectives reveal different images.
The entire mural cannot be seen from any single point.
"It's a unique wall," Canova said. "It took a lot of thinking."
For five or six years, he studied, measured, sketched and thought about the mural, and the story he wanted to tell. The wall is part of the history of the place, he said, and part of the story it tells.
It's no exaggeration to call the wall unique. There's not another like it on the planet. Men built it for this place and this place only, where it has survived to become the centerpiece of a 21st-century park.
Perhaps the wall was built to tell this story.
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