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(Long) The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter

ashbee

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Camille Billops and James Hatch, New York City, circa 1978.

Camille Billops abandoned her four-year-old to become the artist she knew she was meant to be. Twenty years later, her daughter wanted to know: why did you leave me?


AT SIX O’CLOCK ON A SPRING MORNING in downtown Los Angeles, 1961, a family of black women convened in the middle-class home of the matriarch. They spoke in hushed whispers behind pulled curtains, careful not to wake the child sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. With their hair still tied back in rollers under silk scarves, and their morning responsibilities abandoned, they had gathered to convince one member of the family to not give her four-year-old child up for adoption. A car door shut in the driveway outside, and 27-year-old Camille Billops entered the house in search of her daughter, Christa Victoria.

If Camille felt any shame or doubt about her decision, there was no evidence of it on her face that morning. The women assembled around her—Camille’s mother, her aunts, her sister, and cousins—each called dibs on Christa, as if the child were up for auction. The strongest offers came from Camille’s sister, Billie, and her mother, Alma, who had raised Christa while Camille juggled the demands of school and work, studying childhood education at California State College, Los Angeles, at night, working at a local bank by day, and developing her art. But Camille wouldn’t budge. She worried that her mother was too old and too tired to raise a child, and she was suspicious of her sister’s husband, who she felt was unpredictable.

“I’m going to take her. She’s mine,” Camille announced to the women. “And there’s nothing any of you can do about it.” Camille woke Christa up, walked her to the black Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway, and drove the child to the Los Angeles Children’s Home Society of California. There, she released her grip on Christa’s hand and told her to go to the bathroom inside. When Christa reappeared, grasping her small teddy bear and looking for her mother, she saw the black car driving away.

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Camille Billops and her daughter Christa in Los Angeles, circa 1957.
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Christa, age four, circa 1960.
IN THE NEARLY 60 YEARS since Camille Billops made the decision to give up her daughter, she has become an internationally recognized artist and filmmaker. I first encountered Camille’s work at the 2017 Brooklyn Museum exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, which included two of her prints. That fall, after visiting the studio of Emma Amos, who spoke admiringly about a radical artist friend with a quick tongue that she never held, I recalled the name from the exhibition. Emma shared Camille’s number with me, insisting that I speak with her. Camille answered on the first ring and invited me over.

Now 85, Camille lives with her husband, James Hatch, in a sprawling artist loft in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. She never had another child; after giving up Christa, Camille threw herself into her art and, along with Jim, nurtured the careers of young black artists in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, using their loft to blur the line between public discourse and private domesticity. Over the decades, Camille and Jim have amassed an archive filled with over 5,000 books, letters, papers, and scripts, and twice as many photographs documenting contemporary black art since the late ’60s, when black artists were excluded from showing in many galleries and museums in New York City. They shared rare intimate pieces with me, including handwritten letters from artist Emma Amos, audio files from filmmaker Julie Dash, and first drafts of Amiri Baraka’s plays. The collection is a way for Camille and Jim to assert the existence and insistence of black artistry. “It is important that we write our own histories,” Camille insists. “Otherwise, they will say we were never here.”

Surrounding themselves with artifacts of their journey is, perhaps, also a way for the couple, married since 1986, to be reminded of their own pasts: Both Camille and Jim are losing their minds to dementia. Jim’s condition, diagnosed 15 years ago, is more aggressive; in a conversation I had with them in 2017, he often became confused and interjected comments about his Iowa childhood. Camille, unprompted, kept coming back to the matter of giving up her daughter 56 years ago. “You have to forgive your guilt,” she says. “I gave her up when she was four. I should have done it earlier. It was hard, but I did what was best for both of us.”

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Billops and James Hatch in De Neve Square Park, Los Angeles, circa 1961, shortly before moving to Egypt. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.
CAMILLE’S FAMILY BELIEVED she abandoned Christa because of the affair she was having with Jim, a white man who was then married with two children. The two had been introduced by Camille’s stepsister, Josie, in 1959; Josie had been Jim’s student in the theater department at UCLA, where Jim was a professor. Camille was working as a teacher of physically handicapped children in the Los Angeles public-school system and doing amateur ceramics work in her free time. Camille asked Jim to come over and take a look at her pots. Camille tells me that Jim was the first person to tell her that she was a good artist.

Camille grew up in Los Angeles to parents who had come to California during the Great Migration. Like many southern blacks, they came in search of opportunity and a chance to escape the violence inflicted on black bodies in the Jim Crow south. In L.A. they worked in service to white folks; it wasn’t necessarily work that they couldn’t attain in the South, it was their dignity. In Los Angeles, her father, Luscious Billops from Texas, worked as a cook, and her mother, Alma Gilmore from South Carolina, was a domestic and seamstress. Their southern traditions folded neatly within their being. Whiteness was still seen by her parents as superior in eloquence and refinement; the Billops would emulate white customs in their home. But when the burlap curtains were closed at night, Luscious would drink like a fish until he passed out and his wife would carry him to bed.

Alma bestowed her beliefs of black female servitude on her daughters, Camille and Billie, from a young age. Camille had been taught that motherhood and womanhood were inextricable. If you were not a mother, then what would you be? But the youngest child will always rebel, and at the age of ten, Camille decided she would never have children.

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Billops working at her apartment on 11th Street in New York, circa 1970.
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Camille Billops’s artwork 9/11 #4, 2005. Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.
CAMILLE MET CHRISTA’S FATHER, Stanford, through a mutual friend in 1955, when she was in her early 20s. Stanford was a tall, striking lieutenant stationed at the Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo. As she told bell hooks in a 1996 interview, Camille was drawn mostly to Stanford’s appearance and the validation that his beauty would bring in her community. “I loved him, because he was fine,” she said. “He was everything I wanted that thing to be”—that thing being the performance of opulence.

A few months into their relationship, Camille discovered she was pregnant. Despite her disinterest in motherhood, she decided that if she and Stanford were going to go through with parenthood, they had to do it traditionally. Five hundred wedding invitations were printed, but before the guests received them by mail, Stanford was gone. Camille called around, searching for him, and the Air Force base informed her of his military discharge.

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Billops in Los Angeles, circa 1952.
When she met Jim, his confidence in Camille’s work was a catalyst for her shift into a new way of being. His emotional and creative support provided her with permission to be whomever she pleased in any given moment, even if that meant not being pretty and proper, something Camille’s family had taught her a woman should be at all costs. She began slowly shedding the cultural influences of middle-class black America and entered a milieu made up of artists and activists who spent their days protesting school segregation and black oppression. It was the early 1960s, the height of the civil rights movement, and Camille was the mistress of a white man who believed in her, a relationship that contradicted all that she had been taught about whiteness. Photographs of Camille with baby Christa show a polished and respectable-looking young woman with permed hair and slicked-down edges, wearing tailored dresses and kitten heels. But in photographs taken with Jim in 1962, just after she gave up Christa, you can see the start of her physical evolution. She cuts off her permed roller-set curls and begins wearing her hair in a small, perfectly picked Afro. As the years pass, her eye makeup becomes darker and more pronounced until she settles into her signature personal style: vividly printed clothing, hair in beaded cornrows, and makeup of thick black eyeliner, resembling the ancient Egyptian symbol the eye of Ra.

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Christa, around the time Camille gave her up for adoption.
Jim respected Camille’s decision to give up Christa. But he also suspected that Camille was leaving the child for a life he could not promise her; he was still married to someone else, after all. (“Don’t give Christa up for me,” he told her.) A few months after Camille abandoned Christa at the Children’s Home, Jim was offered a Fulbright appointment to teach at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo, Egypt—one of the centers of the 1960s Pan-African movement, in which young American artists and activists like Maya Angelou and Malcolm X developed stronger ties with African nations. He invited Camille to visit before his wife and kids arrived, and she went without hesitation. Before heading back to the United States, Camille told Jim she would not return to visit him unless he left his wife and children; he did. “We chose each other and entered into another life,” she tells me. “That’s when the world opened.”

After joining Jim in Cairo in 1962, this time for good, Camille began experimenting with sculpture; her first exhibition at Gallerie Akhenaton, in Cairo, comprised a small collection of ceramic pots and sculptures modeled on those close to her—especially Jim, who would become her muse. Camille had a voracious appetite for exploring any medium she could get her hands on: photography, painting, printmaking, and eventually filmmaking. She spent many years creating and showing her work in Egypt, Germany, and China before returning to the US with Jim, only to find her own country less than welcoming to black women artists.

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Hatch and Billops with their cat, Shango, 1972. Courtesy of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library at Emory University; used with permission.
IN 1965, AFTER COLLABORATING on a self-published book of poetry called Poems for ******* and Crackers, which included poems written by Jim and Ibrahim Ibn Ismail about racialized violence in America with illustrations by Camille, Camille and Jim returned to the United States, where they settled into New York City’s East Village. Jim had secured a teaching position in theater at City College of New York, while Camille worked toward her MFA at City University of New York, where she also taught ceramics.

It was less than two years before the United States Supreme Court would make interracial marriage legal in all 50 states, and racial and gendered injustices persisted across all sectors of America. The art world was no exception. The erasure of black artists, particularly black female artists, from museum and galleries throughout the 1970s and 1980s led many of them to form coalitions of resistance without financial support or institutional funding, often gathering around the kitchen tables of their Manhattan walk-ups, forming collectives like Women Artists in Revolution. “I was with all of the various ***** b!tches,” Camille tells me. “May Stevens, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett. We were fighting so hard, but they wouldn’t let us in. So we said, ‘Well, fµck you and the horse you rode in on.’”

Camille and Jim began hosting shows and selling their work in their small studio loft on East 11th Street. In the early ’80s, a friend of a friend came to them with an offer: he was selling a bare, 4,000-square-foot loft in SoHo, and told Camille and Jim that if they could gather $11,000 in cash, it was theirs. Over the years, the couple built out the loft with a studio for Camille, an office for Jim, and a library that was open to their peers and students from City College. “We invited everybody here: friends, students and white folks, gallerists and curators. We sold art right off our walls,” Camille says. “I stopped begging a long time ago when I discovered I could sell art without having to kiss booty.”

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The 11th Street loft, 1972. Hatch can be seen at his desk in front; Billops is in the back, working on her pottery.
IN THE EARLY 1980's, Camille’s work began to shift from the figurative toward the biographical. (She told bell hooks that the most revolutionary thing an artist can do is make work about their own life: “Put all your friends in it, everybody you loved, so one day they will find you and know that you were all here together.”) Camille began staging plays in her living room, then eventually transitioned into 16 mm filmmaking, through which she explored themes that she witnessed as a child but wasn’t quite able to interpret. Her memory collided with the new world she had carefully and meticulously molded, and she began dissecting the normalcy of suppression that led many to addiction in her family.

Then, in 1981, Camille received an envelope containing a cassette tape. It was from Christa, now 24 years old. Christa’s adoptive mother, a jazz singer in Oakland, had begun to sense a sadness and longing in her daughter and had encouraged Christa to find her birth mother—to find closure.

“It was a great shock to me,” Camille says. Christa wrote, composed, and recorded a song for Camille, as art was her most fluent form of communication, too. “Naturally, she was an artist like me. It’s in her blood,” Camille tells me proudly. Christa’s lyrics asked if Camille would meet with her.

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The KKK Boutique, 1994, color offset lithograph by Billops. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Brandywine Workshop; used with permission.
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The KKK Boutique Ain't Just ********, 1993, etching and aquatint by Billops. Courtesy of Manneken Press; used with permission.
After receiving the tape, Camille, generally fearless by nature, was terrified. “I had already learned how to live with my guilt about giving her up,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to come out from beneath the water.” However, after considering the artistic possibilities, Camille sacrificed her comfort for the opportunity to share their story through art. Camille, not fully able to predict the emotional consequences of this commitment, contacted Dion Hatch, Jim’s son from his first marriage, and asked him to be the cameraman and director of photography on a film documenting their reunion; the film would be mistitled Finding Christa. “That was Camille’s approach to everything,” Dion tells me. “Make it art.”

Camille called Christa and invited her to visit her in New York City. Camille, along with Jim, would meet Christa at Newark Airport with a warm but brief embrace. Christa, beaming with a palpable energy, would greet Camille as “Bootsie,” the name she had called her mother when she was a child; even then, she was not allowed to call her Mama.


The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter
 

Michele24K

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When Christa reappeared, grasping her small teddy bear and looking for her mother, she saw the black car driving away.


That part was brutal to read.
 

miamiwanderer

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Very interesting read......thanks for the post...

I'm a little disturbed by the mother and very sad for her daughter.....
 

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I feel sorry for Christa. I can't imagine the heartbreak. This was very frustrating to read. I'm going to check out some of her art.
 

MyHeadHurts

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Thanks for sharing.

I clicked the link to finish the article. Camille was a jealous selfish piece of work. My god. Like I'm a creative myself so I get it, that near impossible balance of mothering fully and creating, which is why I'm Team No Kids (for now), but wow. How can anyone be not only devoid of maternal instinct, but basic empathy. RIP Christa.
 

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Wow! I loved that. I'll be sure to check out her art. It looks very interesting. Her whole life was interesting!

I've always said that Women should have babies only if they have a sincere desire to do so and zero doubts. Too many Women have children they don't want. They do it because they feel they're supposed to do it.

It shocks me that she had so many Women in her family who wanted her child, but she dropped her off at the Children's Home. Damn that's cold.
 

Michele24K

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Thanks for sharing.

I clicked the link to finish the article. Camille was a jealous selfish piece of work. My god. Like I'm a creative myself so I get it, that near impossible balance of mothering fully and creating, which is why I'm Team No Kids (for now), but wow. How can anyone be not only devoid of maternal instinct, but basic empathy. RIP Christa.


Clicked through too, after reading your comment. Camille gets zero sympathy! She absolutely was jealous. She was also manipulative (using meeting Christa to make the documentary) and a pretender (naming it Finding Christa), exploitative, negatively competitive and extremely selfish (not allowing Christa to attend Sundance).

Excellent and disturbing insight into maternal narcissism.
 

AuroraRogue

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Thanks for sharing.

I clicked the link to finish the article. Camille was a jealous selfish piece of work. My god. Like I'm a creative myself so I get it, that near impossible balance of mothering fully and creating, which is why I'm Team No Kids (for now), but wow. How can anyone be not only devoid of maternal instinct, but basic empathy. RIP Christa.

No lies detected.

Dion, working as the cameraman, tells me that the power exchange between mother and daughter on set was palpable. During filming, which would take over a decade to complete, Camille let Christa stay in her home and Jim began mentoring Christa as an actor, encouraging her talent and earning the ire of his wife, who felt she was suddenly in competition for her husband’s attention. While Camille embodies a more obvious dominance, she becomes threatened by Christa’s subverted power and becomes territorial.

Camille acknowledges this candidly, saying, “She took up space in a way that was threatening to me. This caused friction when she was staying with us.”
-----
But the postproduction success of the film led to the deterioration of the very reconciliation that it purported to document; Camille felt that Christa was trying to take credit for the film. “She was beginning to claim the film, saying it was her film,” she says.

“I would correct her and let her know, ‘This ain’t your place. You don’t own this,’” Camille continues. “I suppose there was some essence of competitiveness.” She insisted that Christa not be present at the Sundance award ceremony, against Jim’s suggestion.

----

Jim and Christa continued to nurture their relationship, meeting daily at the Tai Chi courts downtown. Even when Christa and Camille were not speaking, which happened intermittently for years, Jim assisted Christa in writing and revising her self-published spiritual memoir, On the Path, published in 2007.

---
 

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The girl was already being cared for by other people while she worked and did whatever. She didn't even call her "Mom".

I think she gave her up because bringing her along would make Camille just as mundane and boring as what Jim was trying to escape from with his wife; the only catch would be that Christa wasn't his. Also, she resented her because the military man abandoned her.

The fact that Jim maintained a relationship with Christa despite Camille's wishes says a lot. I think Jim and Camille had an intellectual connection and he admired Camille as an artist, so she pushed herself as an artist to keep him intrigued with her. I'm not saying that he cheated with Christa, but I don't believe he was faithful to Camille. The insecurities that Christa brought out of her stemmed from something within their marriage.

She got him, but I don't think she ever knew peace with him. He kept a relationship with his kids and made sure she had some sort of relationship with them. That man did whatever he wanted to do.
 

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This woman truly is a horrible person and I wish there were a hell so she can burn in it. To reject your daughter twice is so unbelievably heartbreaking only for the poor girl to die of heart failure. How odious.
 
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Poor Christa. I am sure she went through one of her worst nightmares at being given up twice by her mother when she only went to find the answer as to why she was given up the first time.

fµck.
 

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I don't like this b!tch. AT. ALL.

The insecurities that Christa brought out of her stemmed from something within their marriage.

She got him, but I don't think she ever knew peace with him. He kept a relationship with his kids and made sure she had some sort of relationship with them. That man did whatever he wanted to do.

Yeah.

The homewrecking heaux knew that the way she got Jim, she could lose Jim.

Smdh.



.
 

Singulier

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This b!tch really gave up her black daughter to be with a white man. There is nothing woke about this hairy upper lipped, ugly narcissist.
 

ashbee

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This b!tch really gave up her black daughter to be with a white man. There is nothing woke about this hairy upper lipped, ugly narcissist.

I'm glad I wasn't the only person who this made feel some type of way. That no good ass woman, smh.
 

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This b!tch really gave up her black daughter to be with a white man. There is nothing woke about this hairy upper lipped, ugly narcissist.

I think you miscontrued my post as having sympathy for the woman btw. The daughter was also an artist.
 

COMPLEXXX

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The one “good” thing I can say is that at least she didn’t kill the child like so many women have when they became obsessed with some man and decided to choose a new life with him over being a mother.

It seems like she deeply resented Christa and as a way to punish her for what she believed was holding her back, Camille left her at the orphanage instead of letting one of the people who loved and were clearly fighting for her be guardian. It wasn’t because he didn’t want her around, it was because she saw the child as a roadblock and something that was in HER way. Christa served as a reminder of her old life and she couldn’t reinvent herself carrying around “baggage.” A little girl walking out to watch her mother just drive away and leave her behind is sad as hell. So confusing for her and she was probably wondering if she did something wrong to be abandoned.

She should’ve just declined to be in her daughter’s life altogether instead of pretending she wanted a relationship years later when it’s clear she didn’t. She only wanted to use that girl for her own gain and to pat herself on the back. I’m sure it would’ve still hurt to never get to know her mom but it probably stung even more to play with her emotions like that.

ETA: Based on the groans, I can tell some people aren’t comprehending what I’m saying or are focusing on the first portion of my statement. To be clear, I’m not giving her a pass for sh!t or excusing her being a no good deadbeat. She’s a terrible person and I thought I was making my feelings apparent about that. I’m just posting my observations from what I read.
 
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ZeeZeeblue

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It seems like she deeply resented Christa and as a way to punish her for what she believed was holding her back, Camille left her at the orphanage instead of letting one of the people who loved and were clearly fighting for her be guardian. It wasn’t because he didn’t want her around, it was because she saw the child as a roadblock and something that was in HER way.


And I want to add that she was probably very jealous of the girl. Some Mothers look at their Daughters and think of them becoming teenagers. They're jealous of the Male attention their Daughters will get. It's sad, but a lot of Women are in competition with their Daughters.
 

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Camille Billops and James Hatch, New York City, circa 1978.

Camille Billops abandoned her four-year-old to become the artist she knew she was meant to be. Twenty years later, her daughter wanted to know: why did you leave me?


AT SIX O’CLOCK ON A SPRING MORNING in downtown Los Angeles, 1961, a family of black women convened in the middle-class home of the matriarch. They spoke in hushed whispers behind pulled curtains, careful not to wake the child sleeping in the bedroom down the hall. With their hair still tied back in rollers under silk scarves, and their morning responsibilities abandoned, they had gathered to convince one member of the family to not give her four-year-old child up for adoption. A car door shut in the driveway outside, and 27-year-old Camille Billops entered the house in search of her daughter, Christa Victoria.

If Camille felt any shame or doubt about her decision, there was no evidence of it on her face that morning. The women assembled around her—Camille’s mother, her aunts, her sister, and cousins—each called dibs on Christa, as if the child were up for auction. The strongest offers came from Camille’s sister, Billie, and her mother, Alma, who had raised Christa while Camille juggled the demands of school and work, studying childhood education at California State College, Los Angeles, at night, working at a local bank by day, and developing her art. But Camille wouldn’t budge. She worried that her mother was too old and too tired to raise a child, and she was suspicious of her sister’s husband, who she felt was unpredictable.

“I’m going to take her. She’s mine,” Camille announced to the women. “And there’s nothing any of you can do about it.” Camille woke Christa up, walked her to the black Volkswagen Beetle parked in the driveway, and drove the child to the Los Angeles Children’s Home Society of California. There, she released her grip on Christa’s hand and told her to go to the bathroom inside. When Christa reappeared, grasping her small teddy bear and looking for her mother, she saw the black car driving away.

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Camille Billops and her daughter Christa in Los Angeles, circa 1957.
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Christa, age four, circa 1960.
IN THE NEARLY 60 YEARS since Camille Billops made the decision to give up her daughter, she has become an internationally recognized artist and filmmaker. I first encountered Camille’s work at the 2017 Brooklyn Museum exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, which included two of her prints. That fall, after visiting the studio of Emma Amos, who spoke admiringly about a radical artist friend with a quick tongue that she never held, I recalled the name from the exhibition. Emma shared Camille’s number with me, insisting that I speak with her. Camille answered on the first ring and invited me over.

Now 85, Camille lives with her husband, James Hatch, in a sprawling artist loft in the SoHo neighborhood of New York City. She never had another child; after giving up Christa, Camille threw herself into her art and, along with Jim, nurtured the careers of young black artists in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, using their loft to blur the line between public discourse and private domesticity. Over the decades, Camille and Jim have amassed an archive filled with over 5,000 books, letters, papers, and scripts, and twice as many photographs documenting contemporary black art since the late ’60s, when black artists were excluded from showing in many galleries and museums in New York City. They shared rare intimate pieces with me, including handwritten letters from artist Emma Amos, audio files from filmmaker Julie Dash, and first drafts of Amiri Baraka’s plays. The collection is a way for Camille and Jim to assert the existence and insistence of black artistry. “It is important that we write our own histories,” Camille insists. “Otherwise, they will say we were never here.”

Surrounding themselves with artifacts of their journey is, perhaps, also a way for the couple, married since 1986, to be reminded of their own pasts: Both Camille and Jim are losing their minds to dementia. Jim’s condition, diagnosed 15 years ago, is more aggressive; in a conversation I had with them in 2017, he often became confused and interjected comments about his Iowa childhood. Camille, unprompted, kept coming back to the matter of giving up her daughter 56 years ago. “You have to forgive your guilt,” she says. “I gave her up when she was four. I should have done it earlier. It was hard, but I did what was best for both of us.”

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Billops and James Hatch in De Neve Square Park, Los Angeles, circa 1961, shortly before moving to Egypt. Courtesy of Third World Newsreel.
CAMILLE’S FAMILY BELIEVED she abandoned Christa because of the affair she was having with Jim, a white man who was then married with two children. The two had been introduced by Camille’s stepsister, Josie, in 1959; Josie had been Jim’s student in the theater department at UCLA, where Jim was a professor. Camille was working as a teacher of physically handicapped children in the Los Angeles public-school system and doing amateur ceramics work in her free time. Camille asked Jim to come over and take a look at her pots. Camille tells me that Jim was the first person to tell her that she was a good artist.

Camille grew up in Los Angeles to parents who had come to California during the Great Migration. Like many southern blacks, they came in search of opportunity and a chance to escape the violence inflicted on black bodies in the Jim Crow south. In L.A. they worked in service to white folks; it wasn’t necessarily work that they couldn’t attain in the South, it was their dignity. In Los Angeles, her father, Luscious Billops from Texas, worked as a cook, and her mother, Alma Gilmore from South Carolina, was a domestic and seamstress. Their southern traditions folded neatly within their being. Whiteness was still seen by her parents as superior in eloquence and refinement; the Billops would emulate white customs in their home. But when the burlap curtains were closed at night, Luscious would drink like a fish until he passed out and his wife would carry him to bed.

Alma bestowed her beliefs of black female servitude on her daughters, Camille and Billie, from a young age. Camille had been taught that motherhood and womanhood were inextricable. If you were not a mother, then what would you be? But the youngest child will always rebel, and at the age of ten, Camille decided she would never have children.

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Billops working at her apartment on 11th Street in New York, circa 1970.
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Camille Billops’s artwork 9/11 #4, 2005. Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.
CAMILLE MET CHRISTA’S FATHER, Stanford, through a mutual friend in 1955, when she was in her early 20s. Stanford was a tall, striking lieutenant stationed at the Los Angeles Air Force Base in El Segundo. As she told bell hooks in a 1996 interview, Camille was drawn mostly to Stanford’s appearance and the validation that his beauty would bring in her community. “I loved him, because he was fine,” she said. “He was everything I wanted that thing to be”—that thing being the performance of opulence.

A few months into their relationship, Camille discovered she was pregnant. Despite her disinterest in motherhood, she decided that if she and Stanford were going to go through with parenthood, they had to do it traditionally. Five hundred wedding invitations were printed, but before the guests received them by mail, Stanford was gone. Camille called around, searching for him, and the Air Force base informed her of his military discharge.

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Billops in Los Angeles, circa 1952.
When she met Jim, his confidence in Camille’s work was a catalyst for her shift into a new way of being. His emotional and creative support provided her with permission to be whomever she pleased in any given moment, even if that meant not being pretty and proper, something Camille’s family had taught her a woman should be at all costs. She began slowly shedding the cultural influences of middle-class black America and entered a milieu made up of artists and activists who spent their days protesting school segregation and black oppression. It was the early 1960s, the height of the civil rights movement, and Camille was the mistress of a white man who believed in her, a relationship that contradicted all that she had been taught about whiteness. Photographs of Camille with baby Christa show a polished and respectable-looking young woman with permed hair and slicked-down edges, wearing tailored dresses and kitten heels. But in photographs taken with Jim in 1962, just after she gave up Christa, you can see the start of her physical evolution. She cuts off her permed roller-set curls and begins wearing her hair in a small, perfectly picked Afro. As the years pass, her eye makeup becomes darker and more pronounced until she settles into her signature personal style: vividly printed clothing, hair in beaded cornrows, and makeup of thick black eyeliner, resembling the ancient Egyptian symbol the eye of Ra.

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Christa, around the time Camille gave her up for adoption.
Jim respected Camille’s decision to give up Christa. But he also suspected that Camille was leaving the child for a life he could not promise her; he was still married to someone else, after all. (“Don’t give Christa up for me,” he told her.) A few months after Camille abandoned Christa at the Children’s Home, Jim was offered a Fulbright appointment to teach at the High Cinema Institute in Cairo, Egypt—one of the centers of the 1960s Pan-African movement, in which young American artists and activists like Maya Angelou and Malcolm X developed stronger ties with African nations. He invited Camille to visit before his wife and kids arrived, and she went without hesitation. Before heading back to the United States, Camille told Jim she would not return to visit him unless he left his wife and children; he did. “We chose each other and entered into another life,” she tells me. “That’s when the world opened.”

After joining Jim in Cairo in 1962, this time for good, Camille began experimenting with sculpture; her first exhibition at Gallerie Akhenaton, in Cairo, comprised a small collection of ceramic pots and sculptures modeled on those close to her—especially Jim, who would become her muse. Camille had a voracious appetite for exploring any medium she could get her hands on: photography, painting, printmaking, and eventually filmmaking. She spent many years creating and showing her work in Egypt, Germany, and China before returning to the US with Jim, only to find her own country less than welcoming to black women artists.

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Hatch and Billops with their cat, Shango, 1972. Courtesy of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, & Rare Book Library at Emory University; used with permission.
IN 1965, AFTER COLLABORATING on a self-published book of poetry called Poems for ******* and Crackers, which included poems written by Jim and Ibrahim Ibn Ismail about racialized violence in America with illustrations by Camille, Camille and Jim returned to the United States, where they settled into New York City’s East Village. Jim had secured a teaching position in theater at City College of New York, while Camille worked toward her MFA at City University of New York, where she also taught ceramics.

It was less than two years before the United States Supreme Court would make interracial marriage legal in all 50 states, and racial and gendered injustices persisted across all sectors of America. The art world was no exception. The erasure of black artists, particularly black female artists, from museum and galleries throughout the 1970s and 1980s led many of them to form coalitions of resistance without financial support or institutional funding, often gathering around the kitchen tables of their Manhattan walk-ups, forming collectives like Women Artists in Revolution. “I was with all of the various ***** b!tches,” Camille tells me. “May Stevens, Faith Ringgold, Elizabeth Catlett. We were fighting so hard, but they wouldn’t let us in. So we said, ‘Well, fµck you and the horse you rode in on.’”

Camille and Jim began hosting shows and selling their work in their small studio loft on East 11th Street. In the early ’80s, a friend of a friend came to them with an offer: he was selling a bare, 4,000-square-foot loft in SoHo, and told Camille and Jim that if they could gather $11,000 in cash, it was theirs. Over the years, the couple built out the loft with a studio for Camille, an office for Jim, and a library that was open to their peers and students from City College. “We invited everybody here: friends, students and white folks, gallerists and curators. We sold art right off our walls,” Camille says. “I stopped begging a long time ago when I discovered I could sell art without having to kiss booty.”

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The 11th Street loft, 1972. Hatch can be seen at his desk in front; Billops is in the back, working on her pottery.
IN THE EARLY 1980's, Camille’s work began to shift from the figurative toward the biographical. (She told bell hooks that the most revolutionary thing an artist can do is make work about their own life: “Put all your friends in it, everybody you loved, so one day they will find you and know that you were all here together.”) Camille began staging plays in her living room, then eventually transitioned into 16 mm filmmaking, through which she explored themes that she witnessed as a child but wasn’t quite able to interpret. Her memory collided with the new world she had carefully and meticulously molded, and she began dissecting the normalcy of suppression that led many to addiction in her family.

Then, in 1981, Camille received an envelope containing a cassette tape. It was from Christa, now 24 years old. Christa’s adoptive mother, a jazz singer in Oakland, had begun to sense a sadness and longing in her daughter and had encouraged Christa to find her birth mother—to find closure.

“It was a great shock to me,” Camille says. Christa wrote, composed, and recorded a song for Camille, as art was her most fluent form of communication, too. “Naturally, she was an artist like me. It’s in her blood,” Camille tells me proudly. Christa’s lyrics asked if Camille would meet with her.

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The KKK Boutique, 1994, color offset lithograph by Billops. Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Brandywine Workshop; used with permission.
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The KKK Boutique Ain't Just ********, 1993, etching and aquatint by Billops. Courtesy of Manneken Press; used with permission.
After receiving the tape, Camille, generally fearless by nature, was terrified. “I had already learned how to live with my guilt about giving her up,” she says. “I wasn’t trying to come out from beneath the water.” However, after considering the artistic possibilities, Camille sacrificed her comfort for the opportunity to share their story through art. Camille, not fully able to predict the emotional consequences of this commitment, contacted Dion Hatch, Jim’s son from his first marriage, and asked him to be the cameraman and director of photography on a film documenting their reunion; the film would be mistitled Finding Christa. “That was Camille’s approach to everything,” Dion tells me. “Make it art.”

Camille called Christa and invited her to visit her in New York City. Camille, along with Jim, would meet Christa at Newark Airport with a warm but brief embrace. Christa, beaming with a palpable energy, would greet Camille as “Bootsie,” the name she had called her mother when she was a child; even then, she was not allowed to call her Mama.


The Artist Who Gave Up Her Daughter
Camille is one of the best examples of somebody being a parent who shouldn’t be. Just because a woman can get pregnant doesn’t mean they have it in them to be a mother. I think she wanted an escape, and her husband wanted an entry to Black life.
 

violette1984

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That is so sad. I wonder if Christa refused the surgery because of financial difficulties. Camille makes me mad. Great that she made art but to run off with some white man while your daughter is left suffering in an orphanage? Even then, she should've just allowed her family to keep Christa.
Well, Christa didn’t spend a long there. She was actually adopted pretty soon after she got there. It’s that she was 3 years old and could remember her mom leaving her. That’s the trauma. Camille didn’t have any kind of mothering in her. I think there were a lot women who had babies that didn’t want them, but didn’t give them up. They were resentful and mean to those children. That’s wrong, too. I really believe this is why I’m pro-choice. When someone doesn’t want to be mother, they need to say anything more.
 

Anacaona Taino

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Does the article mention Christa's biological father?
OMG the fact that she died alone was sad. I guess her adoptive family was gone or maybe detached since she was consumed with being this witch of a mother.
 

violette1984

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I know about this situation from other things that I’ve read. I don’t think the bio dad was involved. Camille had to raise her alone. I think she had a nice adoptive family. I’m not sure what happened towards the end of Christa’s life.

I feel sorry that her daughter wanted something she could never get. How anyone could make a movie about the situation is beyond me.
 

CarmenJonesGal

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I’m watching the documentary the egotistical b!tch made “finding Christa”
The lack of self awareness with this tramp is astounding.
Christa was such a beautiful lady
 

CarmenJonesGal

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Does the article mention Christa's biological father?
OMG the fact that she died alone was sad. I guess her adoptive family was gone or maybe detached since she was consumed with being this witch of a mother.
Sad because she in the documentary her adoptive mother really fought hard to adopt her. Apparently the husband wasn’t too keen on adopting a child because they already had children but the mother insisted on giving Christa a home.
The family seemed really loving but the mother says that growing up it wasn’t enough because Christa still felt that trauma
 

Lucious Lioness

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I agree with the person that said Camille felt competition with Christa when Christa was a baby and an adult because she felt that her art was what kept the white guy and Christa got in the way of that. But saying she gave up Christa because of the white guy deflects responsibility. Camille gave up Christa because she didn't want her. If the white guy wasn't around, she would have done the same thing because Christa cramped her style. Which is why she erased Christa from the entire family by giving her to the orphanage.

Camille was a disgusting human being.
 
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