First

By JONATHAN COLEMAN

Maya Lin was living on New York City's Lower East Side when she received a call from a man in Louisiana in late February 1988. Edward Ashworth, a member of the board of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, said he was sorry to disturb her at home but hoped she would seriously consider the reason for his call: he wanted to know if she would be open to the idea of creating a memorial to those who had given their lives in the struggle for civil rights. Since she had designed the much celebrated Viet Nam Veterans Memorial, he was certain that she was the right, perhaps only, person to do this. As with Viet Nam, there had never been such a memorial.

"I had told myself," Lin says, "that I was not going to design any more war memorials, but this wasn't that. The idea sounded interesting, and I told him that it would be fine to send me something."

For Maya Lin, the process of creating the Civil Rights Memorial will not only culminate with its dedication in Montgomery this Sunday but will almost certainly thrust her, against her basic wish that her work speak for itself, into the public eye once more.

Seven years have passed since the Viet Nam memorial was dedicated in Washington. Seven years since the heated, at times ugly, controversy that swirled around the design and its designer seemed to evaporate, in an instant, once the nation could witness for itself the overwhelming effect those two walls of polished black granite have on all who visit them, place flags and flowers beside them and touch the more than 58,000 names inscribed on them.

Lin's deceptively simple design -- entry No. 1,026 in a contest she never dreamed she would win -- had enabled America not only finally to confront the outcome of the Viet Nam War but also to begin the long process of healing. The memorial made it possible for the country to come together and honor those who had served -- those who had died and those who had come home to anything but a hero's welcome. Lin was proud of her achievement, yet disillusioned by the negative reactions her design had initially elicited ("a black gash of shame," to cite one), by the battles she had to wage to keep the "additions" of a flag and statue far away from the memorial, and by the fact that even her Chinese heritage was maligned. Young (she was a 21-year-old senior at Yale when her design was chosen), by her own admission naive, and secretly terrified that perhaps she had accomplished all she was going to accomplish, she left Washington with a brutal understanding of the incompatibility of politics and art.

Her feeling of terror quickly passed. The short answer to the question "What ever happened to Maya Lin?" -- a question that makes her bristle -- is that she has been obsessively doing what she likes to do most: she has been working. But what she has done, she has done quietly, as is her nature, shirking the celebrity others might have embraced.

"You really can't function as a celebrity," she says, sitting at her drafting table, where she likes to sketch and talk at the same time. "Entertainers are celebrities. I'm an architect, I'm an artist, I make things. I just love the fact that I can make a work and put it out there and walk away from it and then look at it like everyone else."

Her enthusiasm for that work is infectious. In person, she is shy yet affable, serious but quick to smile, and full of energy; she doesn't so much walk as dart. Her private life, centered on a Bowery loft with the sculptor Peter Boynton and a cat named Sam, is something she guards fiercely. Her black hair, which once extended to her waist, has been cut short for quite some time, and her dark eyes draw you to her with their intensity. She dresses simply -- T shirts and sneakers whenever possible -- is self-conscious about her youthful appearance (she turned 30 in October, and had looked forward to it for months) and prefers reading a Borges short story to anything that might be on television.

As Lin grew up, one of the subjects she excelled in was mathematics. That skill not only led her toward architecture but also shapes her outlook on work. "If you present me with a problem, and if I like it and think I can work with it, I'll do it." That's an understatement. In point of fact, she finds herself driven to solve it, immediately.

In the seven years since she left Washington, some of which she spent briefly at Harvard and then back at Yale, getting a master's, those "problems" have included the renovation of a Victorian house in Connecticut; the design of a stage set in Philadelphia; a corporate logo for financier Reginald Lewis; an open-air gathering place at Juniata College in Pennsylvania; and, soon, a "playful park" outside the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina (using trees shaped like spheres), and for the Long Island Rail Road section of New York's Pennsylvania Station, a glass-block ceiling, featuring fragmented, elliptical rings. In addition, there is her sculpture, which has been part of an exhibit at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City. Combining lead (which she loves for its malleability and its "seductive" quality) and broken safety glass, her pieces achieve her goal of being "beautiful but not pretty, strong and tough, yet not intimidating." They are very direct, in the same way she is.

Even though this array of projects suggests an artist who refuses to specialize, who doesn't see limits, who, perhaps most important, doesn't want to be forever categorized as the "designer of the Viet Nam memorial," her approach to her work is intrinsically the same as it has always been. When she looks at a site, she says, she considers more than the mere physicality of it. She considers the "emotional and psychological context" of the place -- the people, the background, the history. Then there is the form itself. "Tactility," she says suddenly, with such emphasis that it suggests the essence of her perceptions. "Immediate sensations of material. Things are minimal in my vocabulary, so that means everything counts. Light counts. Sound counts. Height differences count.

"You don't see a piece of sculpture without touching it," she emphasizes. "When I taught a class at Phillips Exeter, I told my students to close < their eyes and feel an object, feel its proportion. Then I would take it away and make them draw it. If you create something unusual, people will take the next step in."

She pauses, seems lost in thought, then begins again, determined to make her point. "I just don't think we give enough credit to our public. The Viet Nam memorial was first seen as some sort of elitist statement. It's like you see it before you really see it. But if you don't have preconceived notions, the presence of the object will touch you in some way, and you'll be in dialogue with it. I mean, what do you do with people like Tom Wolfe? His fear of modern art is sad. He must have been flogged with a Brancusi somewhere along the way."

Lin concedes that her artistic vision is "distinctly Asian" in its stark simplicity and virtual requirement to "look inward." If it, and her almost single-minded devotion to work, can be traced to anything, it is to the close- knit, ascetic world of her family. Her parents fled China just before the Communist takeover in 1949 and eventually settled in Athens, Ohio, where her father, a ceramicist, taught for many years at Ohio University, and where her mother, a poet, still does. Her older brother, Tan, is also a poet. Lin's family in China, which included an architect and a famous lawyer who worked for progressive causes, has been described in Jonathan Spence's The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980.

Since she didn't date, didn't wear makeup (still doesn't) and took college classes while still in high school, she didn't have a typical American adolescence, but says she didn't care. From childhood on, she could go "for hours and days just playing by myself or reading," and recalls with pleasure how she would build little towns in her room or beg her father to let her throw a pot, or have spirited games of chess with Tan. "I find it very fun to be thinking all the time, figuring things out. I guess you could say I was somewhat of a nerd," she laughs.

It wasn't until she arrived at Yale that she felt she belonged and that her creativity and diligence were fully appreciated. But something happened during her junior year in Denmark to mar that feeling of assimilation. She got on a bus in Copenhagen one day and became acutely aware that people moved away from her. It was the first time in her life that she felt discriminated against.

In ways that he couldn't have fully imagined, Edward Ashworth found the $ right person to design the Civil Rights memorial.

When she flew south to Montgomery, the "cradle of the Confederacy," in May 1988, Lin was excited but apprehensive. The material she had been sent from the law center included videotapes of the PBS series Eyes on the Prize, the book that complemented it and a short documentary on the Ku Klux Klan, one of the groups whose activities the SPLC monitors. Before receiving all this, Lin knew very little about the civil rights movement. She wasn't even born when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus in 1955, the arrest that led not only to a yearlong bus boycott but also to the "official" beginning of the nonviolent movement. The first thing she remembered, and not from the time it happened, was an image of Governor George Wallace looming in a doorway at the University of Alabama, unwilling to let any black student enter. The fact that she was neither a participant in the movement nor a well-versed student of it did not prevent her, as it did not prevent her with Viet Nam, from having an intuitive sense of what was needed.

At lunch that day, all she could think about (and all Richard Cohen, the legal director of the center, could recall her talking about) was water. On the flight down, she was particularly struck by a line from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, the line, partly borrowed from the Bible, that said, "We will not be satisfied until 'justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.' " It occurred to her that water would be an ideal element for a hot climate, that its calm, soothing quality and quiet, constant sound would be perfect for the "contemplative area" she wanted to create in front of the center, a place that would have all the tranquillity of a Japanese garden, a place "to appreciate how far the country has come in its quest for equality and to consider how far it has to go."

What she showed Morris Dees, the SPLC's executive director, and Cohen that day, roughly sketched on a paper napkin, was a slightly curved black granite wall, 8 3/4 ft. high and 39 ft. long, that would bear part of the King passage. Above it, on what would be the upper plaza, water from a small pool would flow gently down the wall, gently enough that one could easily read the words. To the right of the wall would be a curved set of stairs.

This, she said, was "the universal" element, and she would return with "the specific" to balance it.

When she did, a few weeks later, she brought an unusual-looking model: an asymmetrical black granite disk that would be 11 1/2 ft. in diameter at the top but only 20 in. across its base, an object that from a distance would appear to be floating in air. It would be 2 1/2 ft. high and have water flowing evenly and slowly across its flat surface. Underneath the water, etched in the stone and looking like points of a sundial, would be the words -- the names and the events -- that would tell the history of the civil rights era. They begin with 17 MAY 1954 SUPREME COURT OUTLAWS SCHOOL SEGREGATION IN BROWN VS. BOARD OF EDUCATION and end with 4 APR 1968 DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. ASSASSINATED MEMPHIS, TN (there will be 53 entries in all, with a conspicuous space before Brown and after King, suggesting the struggle didn't begin with the Brown decision or end with King's death). Anyone, she said -- be it someone who had lived through the events or a child who had not -- could move around the piece, putting his hand through the water to touch the words or simply seeing his reflection in the water itself. And by doing so, the person could either remember, or learn for the first time, the history recorded there.

"It's the kind of thing," Lin says, "that requires patience, awareness and added sensitivity. Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole. I wanted to put the truth down, just once. Placing it, just once." After all, she asks, "if you don't remember history accurately, how can you learn?"

But in asking that seemingly simple question, she raises a complex issue that will surely not be resolved until the memorial is dedicated, if then: How will the South in general, and Montgomery in particular, feel about this tribute to a painful time? And will Maya Lin find herself and her work surrounded by controversy once more?

"You put that memorial in front of your building, Bubba, and someone is bound to come over and tear it up," Dees was told earlier this year by Calvin Whitesell Sr., an attorney for the city during the Freedom Rides of 1961. "George Wallace once said to me," Whitesell recalls, "that the thing that always kept the South down was that the minute the South recovered from the Civil War, they started sending money to the North for bronze statues. We've got a bunch of them here, and I think you'll find that most people don't give a damn about memorials." He sees the real reason for the memorial this way: "A wonderful fund raiser for Morris. He came to Montgomery to do good, and he's done very well."

Dees has heard all this before, and contends that there are people in Montgomery who will never forgive him for successfully filing suit to integrate the city's YMCAs. And while he doesn't rule out the possibility of vandalism (a 1983 fire bombing forced the SPLC's move to its present location), he feels that anything like that would come from outside Montgomery. He feels that way primarily because he believes Montgomery has changed.

"It's like a divorce," he says, sitting in his second-floor office from which can be seen, in the distance, the state capitol at whose steps the historic 1965 march from Selma ended and where the Confederate flag still flies. "For a long time you don't want to talk about it. But after a while the pain is gone; you're able to live with it, discuss it. I think the city is coming around to that now. Montgomery fought the movement at every turn, but I think it can be a very positive, cathartic thing for the city to face up to its past."

One Montgomery resident who agrees with him is Robert Beasley, a black, 75- year-old retired high school principal whose only connection to the memorial is his fear -- his fear that without it "much of what happened -- the sacrifices that were made -- will be forgotten, unless we leave it in stone for generations to see."

As Ken Upchurch, 33, a native of Montgomery whose firm is building the memorial, puts it, "If its purpose is to educate people, it's already worked with me. It's made me aware of a period that I might never have learned about."

And Lin herself, he says, has helped him understand a design that he initially viewed as a contractor's nightmare. Last April, Upchurch finally asked her what he had been meaning to ask for quite some time. He wanted to know how she had come up with it all, curious about the relation of the vast water wall to the low-lying table that will be in front of it, surrounded by a plaza of white granite.

She spoke of aesthetic quality, of "dissimilar elements maintaining equilibrium." She spoke of shapes echoing one another, of objects and concepts coexisting in harmony. "Things can look different," she said softly, "but still be the same."

She might have said people, but didn't. Ken Upchurch understood.

For two weeks now, the memorial has been in place behind the white plywood walls on Washington Avenue. But Lin won't really know if what she envisioned truly works until someone, someone like Calvin Whitesell Sr., can experience it for himself.