In a very small town, the infrastructure of street and highway, stoplight and intersection, seem pasted on, as if temporarily grounded, sunk very lightly into an earth that will eventually reclaim it. Here a brand-new sheet of asphalt had been laid over a swath of kaolin, which crops up around the edges and gently dusts it when it is lifted by foot or automobile. Kaolin is mined in the area and is made into industrial products without number. I got an earful of these products from one of the town’s leading citizens, who runs the bank and takes a lively interest in local phenomena. His mind ranges restlessly over the length and breadth of the town’s culture and economy. Ask him something about the place and you’ll get a well-considered digest of historical fact and sifted prejudice – a too-powerful word that does not, in this case, apply to race at all.
In any case, you’ll find kaolin jack-planed into walkways, ridged into banks, or just sifting around. It is as common as red earth – something that doesn’t seem to have any practical use except to provide fodder for jokes and stories.

I didn’t ask my banker-friend about that, though I really ought to someday.

This crossroads is a sort of gateway to a little off-road community that appears somehow independent from the town itself. Its small, but tidy-looking houses are indifferently painted, its scraggly yards are a crazy-quilt of sun-dried patches and dusty greensward, its people move around to rhythms that seem strictly private – which is to say just barely connected to the overall rhythm of the town itself. Perhaps there are similar offshoots all over town; I do not know the place intimately.

Here in DC such places strangely abound: cut-off places reserved, it would seem, for foot-traffic alone. Stranded places that do not thrive, but have a secretive life-force that props them up somehow. If throw-aways, they’re still connected to an obscurely viable source of nourishment – though, to walk through them, it is not easy to discern.

The title of the picture is sternly deliberate. When I painted the picture, the Robert Johnson song was very much on my mind. It wasn’t very far off in time when such a place might have meant hope, redemption, or sudden violence for somebody who wanted to get the hell out of town – or needed to. And given what he was likely to face on the way out, he might well be eager to make a pact with the devil if he could find him.

Robert Henri said that noon was as mysterious as those long-shadowed hours that more typically summon the landscape painter. And I agree with him. At a glance, the noon hour seems innocuous. The sun is at its zenith, fewer people are out, the air is clearer than it is when the sun drops farther down toward the horizon – or starts to sink beneath it. The washed-out color on a shingle-coated wall is more luminous, if less saturated. If you try to paint it, you learn something about the subtle, but absolutely crucial, differences between the colors that bounce up into an eave or awning and the purer hues that inform them. All sorts of higher-keyed colors you won’t find at four p.m. are there for the asking.

The symbolism of a village crossroads aside, it was the sensation of experiencing a specific time of day in a particular place that drew me to it. Which is to say: I was attracted as much to the visual elements of the scene as its story-telling potential. Anchoring an unseen row of little houses, the structure I chose as a kind of distant focal point had some of the ingredients I’m sure I wanted to explore – though any search for a subject is informed, in part, by the unconscious, which doesn’t “talk.” Yet I think I wanted to show something about the noon hour in a place that is fairly sleepy to begin with. Until something happens.

I would like to mention that the intern at the Firehouse Gallery joined me there at the site and painted his own picture of it. A dedicated philosopher, with a degree in same from St. John’s University, he had discovered – to his possible peril – the more visceral challenges of painting out-of-doors. He proved to be an eager and enthusiastic student who, often as not, came out and painted with me. His day-job at the gallery was his only curb. Had he been in my position, he would have become a hard man to find – to be sighted only after a lengthy search of the town.

I showed this picture to a lot of prosperous Louisvillians and not a single one was able to identify the scene. It was something they saw in passing – or not at all.