She picked cotton at Melrose Plantation for fifty years and never learned to read. In her fifties she found some paint a visitor had left behind and started painting on a window shade. She painted five thousand pictures. They hang in museums now. When the museum nearby held her first exhibition, she was only allowed in after hours, through a side entrance. Clementine Hunter was born on a Louisiana plantation in the 1880s to a family that had been enslaved on that land. She worked in the fields and then in the big house at Melrose. In about 1939 she took the leftover paint and used it. She painted what she had seen: picking, washing, weddings, baptisms in the river, funerals, a zinnia, people dancing on a Saturday night, and the same plantation buildings over and over from memory. She painted on whatever was to hand — shades, bottles, boards, snuff boxes, cardboard — because canvas cost money. She sold them for twenty-five cents. People bought them off her porch. By the 1950s collectors and critics had found her. The Delgado Museum in New Orleans — now the New Orleans Museum of Art — gave her a solo exhibition in 1955. She was not permitted to attend during public hours. A friend arranged for her to be let in privately, after closing. She kept painting into her nineties and died in 1988 at over a hundred. Her work sells now for tens of thousands. Clementine Hunter’s story is a reminder of what gets lost when ordinary Black lives are treated as unworthy of being recorded. This book is for those stories—the lives, injustices, and histories that deserve to be remembered savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…