1. Most days, and every Sunday morning, she took her church to the streets. Corner of St. Peter and Royale, a fixture like the ironwork balustrades around her. Sister Gertrude lifted the spirit of the Lord through her paper megaphone. She sang in the old ways of her ancestors, the field hollers, the hush arbor ring shout, the low voice, heart high, call and response. She preached the Bible on the streets of the Vieux Carré. Hosanna, glory, hallelujah! Tambourine pounding praise.
   
   
2. One of seven kids, born in LaFayette, Alabama. She left school in second grade, before she could read and write. Worked as a servant and a nursemaid. She learned to play piano at her church, and learned to read from the Word. She became an itinerant preacher, answering God’s call in the bayou.
   
   
3. It was after a vision that Gertrude left everything behind in Georgia and joined two other prophetess women, from the church of Holiness and Sanctification, on the outskirts of New Orleans, the headquarters of sin. They donned black missionary gowns. They built an orphanage for hungry children and daycare for overworked mothers, visited prisons, raised up vegetables and livestock on their land, until the city made up some bylaws and shut them down.
   
   
4. “i ar[r]ived in New Orleans LA in Feb 26 in 1939. O, how I thank the Lord. He blessed this soul of mine. ...He ha[s] taken me out of the black robe and crowned me out in white. We are now in revelation. He married me. I’m his wife” (from Sister Gertrude’s painting A Poem of My Calling).^[1]
   
   
5. Gertrude moved into a ramshackle shotgun-style house in the Lower Ninth Ward, downriver, the “murder capital of the murder capital.”^[2] Painted it white, called it The Everlasting Gospel Mission. She donned a nurse’s cap, white clinic nursing shoes, and a white dress. Not just the bride, but the nurse to the Good Doctor.
   
   
6. “And I saw another angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people, Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to him; for the hour of his judgment is come: and worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters” (Revelation 14:6-7, King James Bible).
   
   
7. She opened the doors to anyone and everyone for worship and prayer. It was a humble house of the holy, but the small yard was covered in clovers, the four-leafed ones as common as weeds. The hurricanes took the place some years after she died peacefully inside. The chapel is gone, but the shamrocks are still growing everywhere.
   
   
8. Sister started painting after another call in 1954, to illustrate the Word, another tool for her ministry. She scrawled God’s verses across scraps of wood and lampshades with dime-store paints and crayons, angelic choirs with black and white faces, her own portrait as a bride or nurse, Jesus as a pilot (“Jesus is my airplane.”) And the New Jerusalem, crowded high-rises stacked up to the sky.
   
   
9. “The toe bone connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone connected to the leg bone, the leg bone connected to the knee bone, the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone connected to the hip bone...” (words in one of Sister Gertrude’s paintings, from a traditional Black Spiritual).^[3]
   
   
10. “...it is time to rise up from the beer tables card partys domino games, to[o]. God take[s] no part with your worldly lust People what’s wrong with you .... Wake up, them dry bones, dry bones shall rise again” (words from the same artwork).^[4]
    
    
11. “Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord God unto these bones; Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and ye shall live: And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and ye shall live; and ye shall know that I am the Lord” (Ezekiel 37:4-6, King James Bible).
    
    
12. “Dem bones Dem bones Dem dry bones, Dem bones Dem bones Dem dry bones, Hear the word of the Lord” (Black Spiritual).^[5]
    
    
13. Her art of the apocalypse and gospel covered the walls of her mission and any sales helped support it. Art dealer Larry Borenstein found her. His gallery later became New Orleans’ famous Preservation Hall, devoted to the preservation of music traditions, especially African-American jazz, blues, and gospel. Andy Warhol wrote letters to her. Her work showed up in the Arts and Science Center of Baton Rouge, the Museum of American Folk Art, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. The world’s best-selling poet, Rod McKuen, was a fan and a collector. He created a book with her paintings and Bible verses, and sold 300,000 copies. It was called God’s Greatest Hits.
    
    
14. Mixed media: cardboard, crayons, pencils, ballpoint pen, felt-tipped markers, Styrofoam meat trays, dime-store paints, paper, found wooden panels, lampshades, paper fans, toilet-paper tubes, tempera paints, white shoe polish.
    
    
15. Sister Gertrude Morgan signed her artwork differently each time: Black Angel, Bride of Jesus, Bride of Christ, Lamb Bride, The Lamb’s Wife, Mother Gertrude, Momma Gertrude, His Nurse, Missionary Morgan, Morgan Prophetess, Everlasting Gospel Teacher, Mother Darling, Everlasting Gospel Revelation Preacher, Little Ethiopia Girl, Prophetess Anna. The name didn’t matter—her paintings were composed by God.
    
    
16. From a 1973 interview with Rosemary Kent: “Just be sure and give Jesus credit for what I do. He’s the one that deserves all the praise. He’s the one that made me do it.”^[6]
    
    

Publisher’s Footnotes:

Links below were retrieved on 23 December 2022.

1. Sister Gertrude Morgan (née Gertrude Williams, born 7 April 1900 and died 8 July 1980), A Poem of My Calling, undated. Crayon, tempera, graphite, and ballpoint ink on paper, 8.25 x 9 inches. The New Orleans Museum of Art (2000.108):
   https://journalpanorama.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/word-image-2.jpeg
   
   Image appears in “The Love in Labor: Reconsidering Amateurism in Sister Gertrude Morgan’s Performances and Paintings” by Elaine Y. Yau, in Panorama (Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art), Spring 2019 (5.1):
   https://journalpanorama.org/article/the-love-in-labor/
   
   
2. As quoted by Peter Scharf in “Last of the Ninth” by Frank Etheridge in Salon (13 September 2005):
   https://www.salon.com/2005/09/13/ninth/
   
   “‘It’s the murder capital of the murder capital,’ says criminologist Peter Scharf, co-director of the University of New Orleans’ Center for Society, Law and Justice, referring to statistics revealing a per capita homicide rate in the Lower Ninth Ward over the last 10 years [1995-2005] of 120 people per 100,000 residents, a rate six times higher than that of New York City....”
   
   
3. Lyrics quoted in Sister Gertrude Morgan’s painting Calling the Dry Bones (for details about the artwork, see Footnote 4 below).
   
   “The toe bone connected to the foot bone...” is from “Dem Bones” (aka “Dry Bones” and “Dem Dry Bones”), a traditional spiritual whose melody is widely credited to author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938). His brother, John Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954), may also have collaborated with him on the melody. As per Wikipedia, “the lyrics are inspired by Ezekiel 37:1–14, where the prophet Ezekiel visits the Valley of Dry Bones and prophesies that they will one day be resurrected at God’s command, picturing the realization of the New Jerusalem.”
   
   The first recording of the song was in 1928 by The Famous Myers Jubilee Singers. Interesting that at least one other spiritual whose title (and one of its stanzas) mentions dry bones was also recorded in 1928. Performed by Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882–1973), aka “The Minstrel of Appalachia,” the song is notable, among other reasons, as an early example of the banjo being played in “biblical” music.
   
   To hear more, visit My Old Weird America: An Exploration of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (20 February 2011). Scroll down to the section near the end, “The Dry Bones Variations,” for nearly a dozen recordings by various performers.
   
   
4. Sister Gertrude Morgan, Calling the Dry Bones, circa 1965–70. Crayon, graphite, acrylic, and ballpoint ink on paper, 6.75 by 5.5 inches. The New Orleans Museum of Art (2000.107):
   https://journalpanorama.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/word-image-21.jpeg
   
   Image appears in “The Love in Labor: Reconsidering Amateurism in Sister Gertrude Morgan’s Performances and Paintings” by Elaine Y. Yau, in Panorama (Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art), Spring 2019 (5.1):
   https://journalpanorama.org/article/the-love-in-labor/
   
   
5. See “Dem Bones” under Footnote 3 above.
   
   
6. From “Sister Gertrude Morgan” by Rosemary Kent in Interview magazine (September 1973: Interview 3, Number 9, page 40).
   
   Ms. Kent’s interview lines the back of Sister Gertrude’s painting And I Saw Another Angel, as referenced in “‘A new world in my view’: the art of Sister Gertrude Morgan” at Christies (9 January 2020):
   https://www.christies.com/features/Divine-art-by-Sister-Gertrude-Morgan-the-self-styled-Nurse-of-Dr-Jesus-10247-3.aspx
   
   

Publisher’s Postscript:

Recommended reading, in The Daily Beast (9 November 2018); link retrieved on 23 December 2022:

“The Saintly Sister Who Found Art and God in The Big Easy” by journalist Jason Berry, an in-depth excerpt from his book City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), which includes “the inspiring story of an outside artist and gospel singer who epitomized the Crescent City’s gumbo culture”:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-saintly-sister-who-found-art-and-god-in-the-big-easy

Lorette C. Luzajic

reads, writes, publishes, edits, and teaches flash fiction and prose poetry. Her own fiction and prose poems have appeared in Ghost Parachute, The Disappointed Housewife, Bending Genres, Unbroken, Trampset, The Citron Review, Flash Boulevard, New Flash Fiction Review, and beyond. Her works have been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and The Best Small Fictions. She won first place in a flash contest at MacQueen’s Quinterly. The author of two collections of small fictions, Pretty Time Machine and Winter in June, she has also acted as judge for the Tom Park Poetry Prize.

Lorette is the founding editor of The Ekphrastic Review, a journal devoted to literature inspired by visual art. She is also an award-winning neoexpressionist artist who works with collage and mixed media to create urban, abstract, pop, and surreal works. She has collectors in thirty countries so far. She is also passionately curious about art history, folk horror, ancient civilizations, artisan and tribal jewelry, and culinary lore, to name a few.

Visit her at: www.mixedupmedia.ca

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Two Must-Read Books by The Queen of Ekphrasis, commentary in MacQ-9 (August 2021) by Clare MacQueen, with links to additional resources

⚡ Featured Author: Lorette C. Luzajic at Blue Heron Review, with two of her prose poems (“Disappoint” and “The Piano Man”); plus “Poet as Pilgrim,” a review of Pretty Time Machine by Mary McCarthy (March 2020)

⚡ Fresh Strawberries, an ekphrastic prose poem in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019), nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize