A month later, the center celebrated its reopening. Parents and children gathered inside as I walked through the entrance, and the wall was gray, and I had made my peace with the gray, and then a woman named Rosalind Archuleta stood up on a folding chair and asked everyone to please look at the paperwork in her hand.
Rosalind is a retired title clerk. She is seventy-three and she reads things.
What she had read was the 1999 agreement between the neighborhood association and the artist, which is me, and which I signed in a kitchen for one dollar and a case of paint, and which everybody including me had forgotten existed. But a woman on the board in 1999 was married to a lawyer, and that lawyer put in the clause that people put in for murals, because murals get painted over. Ninety days’ written notice to the artist before removal, and the artist’s right to document, and the right to remove the work if it can be removed.
I never got ninety days. I got a shrug.
Now, I want to be honest about what that clause is worth. It is worth a lawsuit I would never file against a community center that feeds children. Rosalind knew that too. She did not read it out to threaten anybody.
She read it out to explain the second piece of paper, which was the notarized letter she and eleven other neighbors had sent the board, offering to pay for the wall to be restored out of their own pockets, and asking one thing in exchange: that the center let the artist put it back.
The director cried. I want that on the record, because she was twenty-nine years old and she had been told to make the building look modern for a grant application, and she had never once been told what was on that wall. Nobody had explained it to her. That is not a villain. That is a young woman with a paint roller and no history.
Here is the thing about latex over old acrylic. It comes off. Slowly, with a solvent and a plastic scraper and a great deal of patience, and we had patience, because we had one hundred and four handprints under there belonging to children who are now grown people in this city.
It took the whole summer. Some of the original kids came back to work on it, in their forties now, one of them a school principal, one of them a plumber who brought his own compressor and would not take money.
I kept a paintbrush in my bag all those years, and everybody thought that was sentiment. It was not. Inside the handle, wrapped tight, is the paper I put there in 1999 when I finished, with every child’s name in the order they pressed their hand to the wall.
Whoever finds this — the names go with the hands. A wall is only paint. The names are the mural.
We repainted forty-one prints that were too far gone. We used the list. Every one went back in its own place, with its own name lettered small underneath, which the original never had.
The director asked to add hers. She is on the far right, at the end, next to a plumber and a principal.