Catalog Entry from If These Walls Could Talk Exhibit, Neill-Cochran House 2020:

An old-fashioned scale for weighing infants could be found in every pediatrician’s office, and in many homes. The squalling naked baby would be placed on a tissue and if he/ she ever stopped wiggling, you might get an accurate weight, one to be compared to the statistics of national growth charts. Here the chilled child is greeted with open arms in a 1943 painting by William H. Johnson, an African-American painter. All the skin tones in his picture reminded me of the little song we sang in Sunday school: “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight…” Johnson’s painting is entitled Come unto Me Little Children, from the story in Mark 10 where Jesus welcomes kids after the disciples don’t want to bother with them. The Kings James translation is curious: “Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Suffering children, indeed, come unto detention center cages? The image on the round scale is a medieval rendition of the weighing of souls. Here a scrawny devil and the Archangel Michael square off to tip the scales, as heavy souls went to hell and lighter ones floated up. Medieval theology was heavily hell-oriented, and this non-Biblical theme became part of the lore of the Last Judgment. The ancient Egyptians weighed the actual heart of the deceased, and the Greeks had theories of divine determination of fate. But how many cubic centimeters are in a soul? How much does it weigh? Why must we quantify everything? After installing Born Equal in the Dependency, I heard the term “soul value,” coined by Dr. Daina Berry of The University of Texas.29 As opposed to market value or appraised value, soul value could not be commodified, weighed, priced, traded. It was the human sense of self-worth. If enslaved bodies were for sale, their very lives considered property, what they had left was their soul value. This internal resilience could not be taken from them. It must be nurtured to survive. Born Equal alludes to the U.S. Declaration of Independence’s assertion of equality in the second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” The author of this passage, Thomas Jefferson, and the other drafters knew they were writing words of liberty while keeping slaves in bondage. Jefferson owned slaves and fathered children by them. How do we balance such a contradiction? America is still grappling with this original sin of racism. The scales have always been tipped because the system is out of balance. The question remains: What can we do?