Sylvester Jacobs (Bruce Ray Smith)

My friend Sylvester Jacobs, the photographer, inspires me. He makes me think, makes me laugh, and sometimes, though rarely, exasperates me. He’s irrepressible. At 67, he’s older than I, but possessed of an inexhaustible energy. He exhausts me. He likes doing magic tricks, especially for children. He likes big ideas, new challenges. He likes doing things.

His work inspires me. His first book of photographs, Portrait of a Shelter, records a place—L’Abri Fellowship in Huemoz, Switzerland—and a time—the early 1970s—with a warm, intuitive eye and powerful, informed aesthetic. There are pictures in his second book, Portrait of England, I can’t live without, especially three lovely things called “Cambridge.” I love the work he’s doing now.

Sylvester was born and raised in rural Oklahoma, but like many talented young African-Americans, especially writers, musicians, and artists, left, in the Sixties, for the relative freedom of Europe. I’m told he was, in those days, an intense, frustrated, sometimes angry man. He’d met his share of humiliation and hostility. In France, he looked up Cartier-Bresson. In London, he learned from the English photographer Tony Ray Jones, who became a friend.

Sylvester returned to America in 2007 and lives now, with his wife Janet, in St. Louis. I never thought I would actually meet him. I’m still not sure what to do with the fact that I know him as an artist, but also as a man—as a friend. I can drop in at his house.

It astonishes Sylvester that there are so many people like me, white people, in his life, people he has learned—though it hasn’t always been easy—to love and trust. He considers this fact miraculous, the certain work of the God he trusts, the God who saved him from confusion, anger, self-hatred.

As for me, I remain, whether I like it or not, an American of a certain age, born in the South and raised in it before, during, and after the Civil Rights revolution. I didn’t really believe that we, Americans black and white, could be brought together, that our sins, and our hurts, could be healed.

But maybe they can. Sylvester gives me hope.