Letters



Editor,

“I knew Tom Robbins before his cowgirls got the blues.”

I’m an independent Afro-American painter and scholar of the life of Arthur Ashe who has lived in San Miguel two decades.

In the late fifties, I met Tom Robbins when I was 18 in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, a place which does not have a clue about the world stage. He was a reporter on the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

I knew two white painters, Bill Kentrick and Bill Jones, in the days when white and black were divided in Richmond, just like in South Africa.

I grew to dislike our limited all-black high school. Tom got the Times-Dispatch to publish profiles on some of us Afro-American students with lots of ambition.

After cutting class one day, I went to visit Tom Robbins at his apartment in the Fan district. I’ll never forget how I cracked up laughing when I was reading a copy of The Horse’s Mouth by Joyce Cary at Tom’s place. 

Arthur Ashe and I were desperate to leave our all-black high school and slow-moving, suffocating hometown in Virginia. Tom knew this because he was older than both of us.


Each of us left without completing out studies at Walker High. Arthur went west to develop his tennis. But Tom sent me to Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod to develop my painting. I got a one-way bus ticket with only five dollars in my pocket. I packed a lunch, art books and tubes of oil paint with a special paintbrush. The inspiration was a passion for life.

I am indebted to Tom Robbins for my success in painting.


Clarence N. Hagins