Gordon Parks’s compelling photograph of Bessie Fontenelle and her youngest son Richard, Jr., was published by Life magazine on March 8, 1968, as part of a special feature on blacks and poverty called A Harlem Family (or At the Poverty Board). Parks’s essay and twenty-five photographs vividly depict the hardships of a Harlem family living under deplorable conditions. Taken shortly after Bessie violently retaliated against her husband’s abuse, this image, which appears on the opening spread, captures both her love for her son and her deep frustration and exhaustion—the dichotomy of a life torn between hope and despair. Her sadness is tempered by her child’s wide-eyed innocence. The article begins with this admonition: “What I want/What I am/What you force me to be/is what you are,” suggesting that we are all part of one global family. Sadly, only young Richard survived the family’s hardships and grew up to escape poverty.
When the subject of the Fontenelle family comes up, Parks becomes somber. “The problem in documenting a family like that,” he explains, “is that, you wonder, in the end, whether you should have touched the family, or just left them alone.” Parks questions the issue of altering lives, such as the Fontanelle family’s, because of the tragic outcome of their story. Parks assignment began when LIFE managing editor Philip Kunhardt asked Parks why black people were rioting throughout urban areas of America. Parks answered Kunhardt by going to live with a black family for one month in Harlem. After assuring Bessie Fontanelle, the family matriarch, that Parks’s essay would benefit the community, she welcomed him into her family’s home in a decrepit Harlem tenement building. Here, the family is shown at a Harlem welfare office. “It was difficult,” Parks admits. “The husband was unemployed, the family had no food, it was wintertime but the kids couldn’t attend school because they had no winter clothes. And it was difficult not to immediately, being in my position, take money in, take food in, to ease their situation. Because the minute you do that you’ve lost your story. So you pray and hope that you can get your story over as quickly as possible, and that there will be a response from the public.” Which is what happened, but before money poured in from the public, Parks had to stand back and watch the family suffer. With the funds LIFE and its readers contributed to the Fontenelles, a small house was bought on Long Island as a refuge for the family from the filth and chaos of the Harlem tenement. Three months after they moved in, the father [drunk at the time] burned down the house by dropping a lit cigarette on the family’s new sofa. “The father died in the fire, little Kenneth, one of my favorites, died in the fire. Little Norman died mysteriously two years later, the other girl [sucking her thumb in the image shown here] died from AIDS, as did two of her sisters. The whole family was destroyed,” Parks sighs.
