Her presence was so eloquent she did not need to speak. When she did, her words were often memorable. 

   On the first day of Divinity School she lingered after class & stared up at me curiously. She was a poor black woman, the seventh of eight children & attending Vanderbilt on scholarship.  I must have looked like an alien to her as I buckled up my brief case. Simultaneously President of Baptist Hospital & a full-time student, I was the only one in a business suit.

   "So," she said, "are you one of those anal-retentive white guys?"  She always spoke slowly, her speech labored due to the sarcoidosis that also hampered her gait. 

   "I hope you will find out that I'm not that uptight," I laughed.

   Over the next three years Michelle Jackson & I became best friends & that friendship included her partner, Lillian.

   It could have been the suffering of her illness, or growing up poor, or growing up black, or discovering her lesbian orientation that enabled her to offer compassion of a kind beyond my privileged life experience.

    A year into our friendship she informed my I was not "anal-retentive after all" by declaring, "Erie, you are the blackest white guy I ever met."

   One day during a class, someone referenced Descartes' famous line, "I think therefore I am."  Instantly, Michelle leaned over & whispered to me, "I hurt therefore I am."

   In 2003 Michelle graduated with her Masters. Somewhere I have a great picture of her in her mortarboard laughing & smiling. Three weeks later, at 38, she was dead. A heart attack stole her in the middle of the night.

   Twenty of us gathered in a circle to honor her. Michelle's words spoke for each of us: "I hurt, therefore I am."

   On September 19 a two-month show of my art, honoring the idea of a female messiah, opens at the Vanderbilt Divinity School Gallery. It is dedicated to Michelle. 

-Erie Chapman 

Image: "Tryptic of Suffering" – Erie Chapman, variations on a theme by Murillo