_Standing in an art gallery in downtown New York City, I am trying to recall the scarecrows of my childhood. North Carolina mountains and foothills. My grandparents on my dad’s side were, proudly, small farmers from generations of small farmers; my grandfather on my mom’s side managed to escape the cotton fields of an equally long line for another life. But scarecrows? No, pie pans, both my parents remember when I ask them: strung up amid the cornrows. One uncle, my mother’s brother, summons a hazy image of a shirt on a pole when posed the same question. But mostly, yes, he concurs: pie pans. “Fluttering and flashing in the sun.”

The pans shimmer in memory for me too, though as a child I didn’t register their practical purpose. But here, in Shrine gallery, in a show of works billed as scarecrows, I’m seeing something else entirely. There are hubcaps with silver-dollar-sized holes punched through, all those extra eyes, endowed with enhanced, mystical vision; they’re lashed to a tall wooden stake with wire and strips of leather. Some have cardboard tongues, flaps of leather for ears; a colander wears a permanently shocked expression, punched mouth agape, like a turned-over exclamation point resting on a tall branch whittled smooth.

They call to mind another childhood spectre, which also resided amid cotton fields and rows of corn and now soy too, along a blue highway: housed in a small storefront, a witch doll staring us down from the interior of Spake Antiques. My sister and I learned to look for her expectantly—“the witch in the window, the witch in the window!”—and feel her painted gaze on us as our car’s turn signal flickered briefly at the stop sign. Was she wicked witch and scarecrow in one?

Real scarecrows as I mostly understood them had insides full of straw, lived in the cornfields of movies and in the Land of Oz mountaintop theme park I also visited as a child. They could tumble off their poles and spring to life. They felt feelings. They could sing.

_The story of how and when the self-taught Memphis artist Hawkins Bolden began to make his enigmatic scarecrows and totem-like sculptures alters in the telling. In the handful of archival films and videos in which Bolden appears, he says he began making the scarecrows at the urging of, variously, a niece, a nephew, a brother, whomever—suggesting he ought to put out something to keep the birds out of his garden. This was likely around 1965. But in those videos, Bolden also tends to demur at such questions. He prefers to talk about baseball, his morning coffee, his evening prayer, cooking his favorite meal (vegetable soup with grits). He recalls Tuesday visits to the Memphis Zoo with his father as a child; it’s quite possible he never visited an art museum. He might turn instead to laugh when rediscovering a toy frog among his materials, or get involved with an ongoing project, stuffing leaves and Christmas tree pine needles into the leg of a rescued pair of pants, or running his hands over a larger find: an old bedspring, full of creative possibility. He might answer simply: “I thought about it, and I started doing it,” as he says in one video. “Old buckets. Making eyes in there. Sometimes they got four eyes or three eyes, or a middle eye.”

Holes that were also, consciously or not, portals, conveyances, conductors—allowing for the passage of light, and, when winds swept through, the transmission of sound. Call it music.

“It were the sounds of the birds that caught his attention,” is how my friend, the artist and musician Lonnie Holley, put it recently, speaking to me from his home in Atlanta. Holley first visited Bolden in 1987, when his own accumulated sculptures and paintings had begun to form an immersive art environment. There was some unspoken kinship in Holley’s work with the outdoor world Bolden was building in his Memphis backyard. Bolden, who wasn’t trained as an artist or accustomed to calling himself one, never conceded he was a musician either, even when visitors pressed him. He wasn’t a singer, he’d say, though those same visitors observed him singing and humming to himself constantly, a lilting, lyric-less tune that he made up as he went along, birds chirping in the background—an abstract expression of the interior, a private hymn of art-making.

“It’s not always the artist’s intention to give explanation,” Holley said. “They give us something to put into the plane of thought for us to create explanations.” See Holley perform live more than once and you will still never hear the same song twice. Even if musical phrases or words from his recordings surface in concert, they’re transformed into new songs, improvised on the spot; they become part of an ongoing, living song of experience.

“Hawkins was also giving an offering, to lifetime,” Holley told me. “He was giving an offering from himself that would one day be a gift to the humanities. Because a lot of us walk around here with our eyes wide open and don’t see a damn thing. We never see any possibilities beyond what somebody else have taught us. And we’re walking in the midst of zillions of possibilities.”

_If music is the most difficult thing on earth to put into words—and yes, it is—it is almost impossible to convey in writing the real, overpowering feeling of Hawkins Bolden’s works. I can tell you instead what some of them are made of, how one part fits into the next.

Yes, often, old buckets for heads, for bodies. A construction worker’s hardhat could be a head, an ironing board a face, a shield. A shovel-turned-head has the body of a barstool base. Once in a while, a bit of fabric or scrap of rug may hang from a ceramic or aluminum pan, mimicking an odd patch of hair on Bolden’s chin. Sometimes leather belts protrude snakelike from the openings drilled into a ceramic pot. Another metal pan crests a wooden cross, which is covered in more hubcaps. A window fan cut in half, with a can of Budweiser and a couple cans of evaporated milk hanging from its vents, is attached to the back of a wooden chair. In Scott Ogden and Malcolm Hearn’s documentary Make, Bolden said: “There were PET milk cans and when you tie ’em together it sounds like a bell—ting a ling a ling—had ’em strung up on a fence with the speaker and when the wind hit…!” Ellipses trail to the imagination. For, indoors, in the gallery, years later, we experience them as silent music.

One of Bolden’s most haunting sculptures is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum: a pair of dirty blue jeans stuffed with straw and maybe other material, pinned or sewn shut at the cuffs, sits in a wooden chair. The waistband is wired to the rusted handle of a metal bucket, galvanized, with Bolden’s numerous punched holes, eyes to spare. A heavy chain extends from a chair leg, perhaps to keep it in place, or, perhaps still, to protect it (the protector) from potential backyard thieves.

The scarecrows are Memphis, Tennessee, transplanted; yet their true origin is memory, which resides everywhere. And so in April 2021 when I first see several of them together, and in April 2024 when I see another dozen or more against the white walls of Shrine gallery in the Lower East Side and then in downtown New York, I believe I know them instantly, in a deep-down way. In the way that the window fan chair feels as recognizable as an older relative sitting out in the carport shooting the breeze. In the way that the carpet remnants flapping from his found sheets of metal feel plucked from my grandparents’ hallway in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, that exact pile and shade, the mustard hue faded over decades from French’s yellow to Gulden’s brown. Send me on a scavenger hunt to their chicken house and hay barn and basement, and I will return with most everything that Hawkins Bolden stored up under his own house in the crawl space that was his studio. Meaning, materially his figures and sculptures are familiar—and I lean the word deliberately into italics for weight and resonance, for layering. Familiar as in family, as in to be intimate, as to be the familiar of a place, and mostly as a noun: the spirit contained within its object host. In photographs and on film, gathered in the backyard, popping up in the garden, leaned up against the fence, they look like people. Familiar as in they look like a family—ancestors and relatives, otherwise lost to time, rendered immortal in art.

Familiar as in, to paraphrase one of my grandmas, in praise reserved for the work of the local embalmer after a viewing of a loved one: they look as though they could sit right up and talk to you.

_Hawkins Bolden was born in Memphis on September 10, 1914, two minutes after his identical twin brother, Monroe, and grew up in a household of four more siblings: Clarence, Lula, Rosetta, and Elizabeth, called Lizzie, the eldest. The Boldens’ first child was stillborn. The family roots were Creole and Native American and Geechee.

When he was seven years old, Hawkins was struck in the head by a baseball bat when Monroe missed a pitch—an injury that preceded several bouts of seizures. Eventually, Lizzie said, doctors drilled a hole in his skull, ostensibly to relieve pressure. Asked about his blindness, Hawkins sometimes omitted the accident entirely. “It’s not unusual, you know, for people to answer questions differently, but when I asked him what happened to his eye, he told me that he likes to look at the sun and that he looked at it too long,” the artist and curator Judith McWillie, who made and filmed numerous visits with Bolden, told me. “I do think about that, that he looked at the sun too much and that he made these things.” Was it the sun, a seizure, the accident that came before? After one of those seizures, at age eight, Bolden became blind. He was able to sense light and dark. He would never regain his eyesight, but he was always drawn to the light. He was always listening.

When the twin brothers were still kids, Monroe taught Hawkins how to build a radio from a crystal kit, which, other than its few simple parts, relied purely on the power of a radio signal. Years later, after the kits became hard to find, they modified their own, using the same crystals but craftily sourcing coat hangers and other household objects, borrowing speakers from neighborhood children’s castoff pocket radios: “You’d get a cigar box, get them wires, run ’em across there, make holes in there,” Bolden remembered—almost as if describing the way he would come to make his scarecrows and other sculptures.

He likely received no formal education after the accident. When Bolden was sixteen, the family moved into a house in midtown Memphis. This would have been around 1930. There was no electricity, but Hawkins and Monroe figured out how to wire the house themselves. They listened to ball games. Bolden directed his loyalties to the St. Louis Cardinals, who were the closest major league team north of Memphis. He loved the Cardinals all his life. On his storebought radio, which could pick up local stations, he listened to the news and to WDIA, and especially gospel on WLOK in Memphis. “When I hear those church songs on the radio, I be listening to that music all the time,” Bolden said. Via radio he traveled to every stadium in the country the Cardinals were playing, never missing a game. The farthest from Memphis Bolden would ever recall physically traveling in his life was to Kentucky once and to Arkansas on another occasion, where some of his aunt’s people were from—“I ain’t never been to Chicago or Nashville or none of those places,” he once allowed. But the radios he built allowed him to go everywhere: He picked up stations two hundred miles away and in China; he listened to Radio Havana on the regular. “I can hear Cuba. I hear them men arguing and fussing,” he told one visitor after another. “Yes, ma’am, Cuba comes through on that shortwave. They be reeling and rocking.”

He strung a wire through the open window to his homemade radio, which he’d dragged outside. After all, he’d endowed many of his scarecrows with ears.

_By the 1980s, Bolden began to receive visitors interested in his art-making. He felt the neighborhood changing around him; a big field where he’d once scrapped for material was paved over. His parents had died. Other relatives had moved to other parts of town, other parts of the country. His backyard garden became increasingly populated with faces and figures of his creation, astonishingly personable. Some stood tall, like friendly backyard sentinels; some leaned against the wire fence; some clustered together in little huddles that must have chattered and clanged in concert with the wind. Longhaired coffee cans consorted with trash can lids grinning ear to ear. Once in a while, Bolden admitted, his father appeared in his dreams. As a child, he remembered his father mixing paint; now he had inherited his father’s tools. For years, his sister Lizzie lived with him. After she died in 2002, a niece, Verna, moved in. Bolden would outlive all his siblings, a holdout till the end. He died in 2005, at the age of ninety-one, at home in his sleep. He had long survived his identical twin. “He was in the Army for five years—he had to travel, you know—and he got the meningitis and died,” Bolden says in one video. “He was a soldier, yes ma’am. He was my twin brother.”

_No one I speak to can recall the exact street address in midtown Memphis where Bolden lived and worked from his teens into his nineties. Instead, I receive the most Southern-familiar directions, favoring landmarks, especially those that no longer exist, over street names (when you get to Montesi’s grocery store, hang a left; you could see it through the bays of the car wash that used to be on the corner), invoking the Mississippi River to describe points west—all of it meaningful, storytelling geography.

Judith McWillie, who grew up in Memphis, remembers hearing talk of Bolden around town. But she first found her way to his backyard in the mid-1980s, after she had begun habitually driving back roads and alleyways to build a remarkable archive of interviews with Southern vernacular artists. She returned with a camera in December 1986. Scott Ogden, founder and director of Shrine in New York, supplies a street name—North Willett—road memory, from when he began to film Bolden for his co-directed documentary Make. I roam through Google Earth archives, hunting down what I decide is the block, freeze-framing the blurry house number from McWillie’s archival videos of Bolden and other artists at the University of North Carolina. I look up the mid-century modern building with the geometric façade whose parking lot bordered Bolden’s yard; its looming exterior, he perceived, reflected a wall of heat that scalded the pods in his plot. It turns out, it was the old Southern Bell offices at 1544 Madison that burned his green beans. I am convinced that an early-1980s profile of Bolden in the Memphis Commercial-Appeal has a typo in the numeral of Bolden’s street address. Does it matter? The little house, once hidden in plain sight, is no longer standing; even the 1544 Madison building has been razed. The works themselves survive because of the miracle of Bolden’s visitors.

McWillie introduced Bolden to Bill Arnett, who would establish Souls Grown Deep, an organization financially supporting, collecting, and advocating for the work of Black artists of the American South. Bolden would become one of the artists whose practice Arnett was instrumental in sustaining. In Arnett, Bolden recognized a fellow fan of Cardinals baseball, the topic of many of their conversations, but occasionally he’d talk shop too. Of any text or hue that might find its way into his works, via bottle or license plate or other object, he once told Arnett, “Sometimes I feel words on something, but I don’t know what it is. I don’t ask nobody about it or about color, neither. I don’t worry about color. I know when I can make something by how it feels.” Arnett in turn brought Lonnie Holley and Paul Arnett, one of his sons, then a college student on winter break, to meet Bolden. On their first visit in January 1987, they arrived without realizing it was the tenth celebration of Elvis’s birthday after his death, all piling into seemingly the only motel room left in town.

Like Bolden’s, Holley’s practice utilizes found objects—yet their approaches are vastly different. Where Bolden’s entire life’s output might’ve come from the same square mile, Holley brings home vernacular material from all over the world in extra luggage, filling his studio. He reminds me that, in a childhood accident, the vision in his right eye was permanently altered too. As Holley later described Bolden’s way of working to Bill Arnett, “He is always looking for the sound to please his spirit. He is a constant listener, reaching to receive the right material to catch the perfect sound.”

“When we got back, Lonnie was so pumped up,” Paul Arnett said. “He’d decided he wanted to try to find other Black Southern artists who had not had any recognition, and right in Memphis he met Bolden, and Joe Light, and Henry Speller.” They brought Light to visit Bolden too.

“They were all right there, just down the road,” Holley said, creating his own meaningful geography as he maps Bolden’s place in history in relation to his own. “These were people not far from slavery—humans not in the aftermath of slavery but humans on the edge of slavery. It all came through the Mississippi River, through Memphis. You got the blues going on. You got music going on. You got the creativity of soul going on. You got people playing with the soul, dancing with the soul, celebrating the soul. You got hoodoo, voodoo, you got all these different crafts going on. You got people thinking way beyond anything. And Hawkins was in the midst of it, doing the same thing, not in secrecy, but what did we say in COVID times? Isolation.”

“Just think if we had had most of the stories that people develop,” Holley continued. “We got it through the blues. We got it, most of all, through the African American Negroes. We got them through the musicians because they were the only ones that had that kind of outlet. They were singing about it, and when they found out that their master was understanding what they were singing, they put it in a whole other term of speaking it. That’s all Hawkins was doing. He was putting it into another term of speaking it. And back in the day, we didn’t have a verbal outlet for our freestyle. Hawkins was giving you a freestyle offering. An absolute freestyle offering.”

McWillie, too, was struck by the purity of the way Bolden’s work merged with his entire life. “He had just that, that unity of being, that he had the oneness, the simplicity and connection of his house, his clothes, his work, his gentleness. Oh Lord, what a gentle person,” she said from her house in Athens, Georgia. “Everything was about the way he lived and spent his day and time, picking up the trash from around the neighborhood to work with it. He couldn’t carry a whole lot at once. He was a small man, and so everything was in the movement and economy of it. He always said what he was doing was cleaning up the neighborhood.”

Guided in part by Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit and The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds, McWillie also sees Bolden’s art as sharing—perhaps intuitively, perhaps synchronously—aspects of Black Atlantic artistic traditions: a metaphysics rooted in the ancestral. “His [artistic] vocabulary was so modest and so natural. He has this little vocabulary of the carpet strips, simply because he’d found them,” she said. “He turned them into tongues. If he found an old skillet, he felt that it contained all the people who had used it and cooked on it and eaten from it. It was a continuum—an Afro Atlantic continuum, a certain kind of consciousness.”

Perhaps the clearest picture of this is contained in McWillie’s footage of the artist at work cutting the grass, opting for small blades and handsaws rather than machinery—operating tenderly and on his own time. It’s the eve of the Fourth of July, 1987. Bolden dips low to the ground, bends to grasp palmfuls of green. He assesses their length, slices across with a handsaw. Whatever rhythm exists in lawn care here becomes reverie, a world unto his own. Here, it is possible, as McWillie’s camera does, to catch Bolden humming as he almost always did, a solitary, wordless tune.

Bolden is just a few months shy of his seventy-third birthday here, trim and agile; graceful in his movements, in his whole person. The camera, the white neighbor sitting on Bolden’s porch, cars passing by on the street—Bolden pays them no mind. “You take care, old fella,” says the neighbor finally. USED, CONFUSED & ABUSED reads the hat on the man’s head. Bolden’s cap responds in a purity of abstraction: a sloganless, camouflage pattern of browns and grays. The USED, CONFUSED & ABUSED man goes on his way, and Bolden goes along on his, continuing through a narrow side gate, to the flourishing collards and tomatoes, watched over and protected by the scarecrows in his backyard. This visit, like most of the ones that survive on video, is on a placid sort of day. You have to imagine the backyard concerts that must have struck up when the weather hit, a harmonizing garden. All along the fence and in the garden, the scarecrows stand on alert, as if waiting to be conducted by a rush of air, memory carried on wind.

There’s a moment in Make when Bolden breaks into actual lyrics. It arrives shortly after he’s shown listening to his indoor radio, telling a story about being pulled from the water and saved as a child. “I got shoes,” he begins to sing, tremulous, quiet, familiar, and rising in volume. Bolden’s working, sanding down a rusted metal sign, slowly revealing the vintage image of an old Esso tiger; he dances a little as he sings and sands. “All God’s children got traveling shoes…” The verses accumulate, got a robe, got wings, got a harp, got a song.

In Greek myths, the raven—the crow—is associated with Apollo, god of prophecy, god of music. In Max Porter’s novel Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Crow is a frequent visitor, a mediator between life and death, arriving at unexpected junctures to counsel the bereaved, like the surprise of snow or rainfall. Crows remember faces. They’ve been proven to be self-aware, self-conscious. They’re smart enough to tell the difference between a stuffed doll-person dangling above a row of corn and the gardener who put him there.

Yet they could be dazzled by a metallic glare, by their own reflection, by the noise of a commotion of pots and pans rattled by wind. Stand in front of a congregation of Bolden’s scarecrows, totems, and sculptures and imagine them stirred by a storm into outright song, a lively orchestra of spirits—for the parking lot, people strolling past, but mostly for their maker.

“They were his companions,” Holley said. “They became his friends. They became his music.”

This story was published in the print edition as “An Absolute Freestyle Offering.”  Subscribe to the Oxford American with our year-end, limited-time deal here. Buy the issue this article appears in here: print and digital.