Mona Lisa Was a Man
“If I don’t love you baby…
Grits ain’t groceries,
Eggs ain’t poultry,
And Mona Lisa was a man.”
“All Around the World/Grits Ain’t Groceries” written by Titus Turner
I was struck by this Blues number this morning, written by Titus Turner and a hit in 1955 for Little Willie John and others afterward. It is an oft repeated theme in R&B, based on an argument that works its way into Country music, too. It goes something like this:
“You know I love you, baby.”
“No, you don’t. You’re a liar.”
“It’s an absolute fact that I love you.”
“Nope. Lie.”
“It is truer than true. It’s the absolute truth. I love you.”
The overall genre can be named “Please Take Me Back.” Subgenres include:
— How can I prove my love to you?
— Now that I’ve lost you, I realize how much I love you.
— I will love you forever and a day.
We all know what this man is up to. He’s brought his lyin’, cheatin’, gamblin’, drinkin’ self back home after a binge or after taking off with another woman. He’s got no place to go. He can say he’s sorry, but the only thing sorry is his sorry ass dragging up to her door. And she’s having none of it. So he keeps repeating it, a refrain.
What’s at stake here is: “What is the undeniable truth?”
When I heard the song this morning, I thought: “Wait, was Mona Lisa a man?” I mean, she is mannish.
Just this morning, my husband and I were talking about experiences that kind of reoriented us from what we thought we knew as absolute truth to something else. For S., it was during an Old Testament class in college. It was taught by a monk, who stood before the auditorium of students and lectured, and smoked cigarettes the whole time. One day he said that the Red Sea was actually the Reed Sea, not the roaring body of deep water that Moses (a la Charlton Heston) separated into two walls of water so the Israelites could pass through, but more of a weedy swamp in which one’s horses and chariots could get stuck. The Israelites did not get stuck, but Pharaoh’s men did.
S. raised his hand. “If that’s not true, what’s to say anything in the Old Testament is true? The burning bush. Jonah’s whale. Are there other things like this, with an alternate explanation?”
“Yes,” said the monk. He was welcoming them into the Historical Critical mode of Biblical criticism, though he didn’t say that at the time.
“It was like being four,” my husband said, “and being told there’s no Santa Claus. Unfortunately, the monk didn’t have an alternative lens to offer us.” He didn’t, for example, follow up saying that it is the powerful story of God delivering his people against enormous odds. It tells us that God cares about the slaves, cares about suffering and subjugated people, and God’s purpose is to set the captive free and deliver the people from their enemies. He didn’t say, “The question isn’t and shouldn’t be: did this really happen? The question that interests Christians is: what does this text tell us about God and God’s relationship with humankind?” You can revisualize the story of Moses, the facts, and the story can remain true.
Then I heard the song, and I had to look it up. Wikipedia told me that there has been a lot of speculation over the identity of Mona Lisa. Art historians are in agreement that the model was Lisa Gherardini, born and raised in Florence. Mostly. But there’s plenty of other speculation. We have technology! Using digital scan technology, Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs determined that the portrait “aligns perfectly” with a self-portrait done by DaVinci. This follows the assertion in 2002 made by artist Susan Dorothea White that the architecture of the cranium is masculine. Sigmund Freud believed the smile was a memory of DaVinci’s mother. This may have led to the speculation that the Mona Lisa is based on DaVinci’s mother. One thing we can be sure of, thanks to “emotion recognition” software created at the University of Illinois and applied to the Mona Lisa at a lab in Amsterdam, “the smile [is] 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful, 2% angry, less than 1% neutral, and 0% surprised.”
There are a lot of theories. Even that Mona Lisa was a man.
I’ve never bought grits in my life, but I do firmly believe them to be groceries. Whichever came first, I know the egg in my breakfast came from a chicken. Then again was it, abomination, one of those egg substitutes? And do people sometimes grow their own grits?
Of course, the point of the song is not whether the model for the Mona Lisa was a man or a woman. The point is this man’s claim that his love is undeniable. And I am pretty sure that the man in the song loved this woman “in his way.” And because I don’t trust him one bit, I hope she sent him on his way. But if his moves were as slick as his way with words, I suspect that she didn’t.
