Photo: Fahamu talks with former teacher Arturo Lindsay at Lindsay's home. Fahamu was a student of Lindsay's in 1995 at Spelman College.

The artist debuts
At Atlanta College of Art, Fahamu discovered there were more possibilities than cartoons. There was Picasso, Warhol and Rauschenberg. Off campus there was the city’s growing hip-hop scene. Arrested Development, OutKast and Goodie Mob weren’t bragging about guns like gangsta rappers. Their music during the early 1990s embodied a new black creative aesthetic. The work was thoughtful. It was ironic. It was playful. It was smart.

He told anyone who would listen that he was tired of being taught by “white folks” who didn’t know anything about black art. So he signed up for an independent study painting class at Spelman College with Arturo Lindsay. Lindsay had a reputation for being relentless. He locked his classroom door so latecomers couldn’t enter. Students weren’t allowed to buy pre-made canvases. He required students to build their own. Excuses were rewarded with an “F.”

Fahamu swaggered into the first class, eyeing Lindsay, judging him. Afterward, Lindsay asked him why he was there. Fahamu said because Lindsay was black. Lindsay looked at him like he was daft.

“You don’t come to me because I’m black, you come to me because I’m good,” he said.

He sent Fahamu on his way.

It wasn’t rap lyrics that rang in his head when Fahamu walked out of the classroom that day, but his grandfather’s last words of advice to him before he left for college.

“Whatever you do in life, be the best at it. If you gonna mop floors, mop ’em better than anyone has ever mopped a floor,” he’d said. “If you not gonna be the best, you’re wasting your time and everybody else’s.”

For the next three semesters, Fahamu showed up at Lindsay’s classes. He’d stay afterward just to talk.

Fahamu thought Lindsay had a Cosby vibe. He was creative. Accomplished. Opinionated. And he was from Panama, just like Fahamu’s father.

Lindsay would not let Fahamu cut corners. His admonishments held a challenge.

The cartoons are good, but make them say something. A self-portrait must be a window to something more. If the corners are not square, start over.

Lindsay knew a swagger was empty if a man was not in command of his talent. To command it he had to be honest with himself and Fahamu hadn’t done that for a long time.

He was broke. He thought he was unattractive. He was angry and could find no fix.

In his dorm one night in his junior year, he was lying there listening to Goodie Mob’s “Soul Food” CD. The song “Guess Who?” made him sit bolt upright.

The only one that cares for real and really understands how I feel,

Help me overcome my fears...

There will never be another that will love me like my mother.

He played the song for what felt like hours.

When he finally stopped, he wanted to cry. The tears wouldn’t come. But he knew it was time to finally face what happened when he was 4 years old.

To graduate from Atlanta College of Art, seniors had to do a final project to present in a student show.

On the day of Fahamu’s senior show, he was worried how everyone would receive the work. Total strangers walked out of the gallery, some in tears, some blank and silent.

His brother, sisters, friends and extended family from New York showed up, but not Aunt Punch. It didn’t matter, he’d written her out of his story. In the gallery he was telling another one, the one the Pecou children had held in for too long.

Fahamu had turned back time, transforming the space into that day in January 1980, rendering it in symbols and fragments. On one wall was a large pixilated picture of Betty Ann. On the opposite was a composite of Alphonso. On another were four scorched cabinets, representing each child. Inside they told the story of the moment they’d run at their father’s command.

Betty Ann had been trying to escape from the bedroom when she wailed Kwasi’s name.

The door to the room slid open. Alphonso stepped out and ordered the children to run.

One flight. Two. Three. Four. Until finally they were on the sidewalk.

Their pajamas as useless as raw skin against the cold. Kwasi walked barefoot, numb from cold, numb from knowing. The girls’ tears mixed with light rain against their cheeks.

After a few yards, Fahamu asked his father to “ride his neck.” Shifting a book in his hands, Alphonso hoisted the 4-year-old onto his shoulders. His son’s legs dangled above the stains on his white T-shirt.

As they entered the 78th Precinct two blocks away, he put Fahamu down.

Alphonso approached a sergeant. Officers had begun to look at him.

“I am Jesus Christ,” he said.

He told them he had just killed the devil.

“It’s all in here,” he said, and he placed on the counter a blood-damp Bible.

Phones at the station began to ring in chorus. Callers reported flames visible through a fourth floor apartment window on Vanderbilt Avenue.

Betty Ann lay there on a bed of fire. The machete Alphonso used to kill her still lodged in her chest.

Their father was convicted but found not responsible by reason of insanity. He would live most of his life in a psychiatric hospital. He was only 28 when he entered the ward and the doors behind him clicked shut, locked tight for 33 years.

Betty Ann was 32 when she was buried in the South Carolina soil.

On the way to the funeral, Fahamu and his little sister danced and did a skit in the train station to entertain the relatives accompanying the children from Brooklyn to Hartsville.

Fahamu knew his mother wasn’t coming, but he danced as though she was there, watching and laughing as he leapt.

An art star emerges
Before he left Atlanta for the show in Dallas, Fahamu knelt before the shrine in the living room. Punch was not up there, though she died in 2002. His grandfather’s photograph anchors the left corner. And, there, in the center is Betty Ann’s picture, bigger than all the rest.

Now, outside the Conduit Gallery in Dallas, it is sweltering. Inside, Fahamu Pecou is cool, moving easily through the crowd there to see his lastest work, “How to Eat Your Watermelon.” It’s a meditation on the stereotypes and self-imposed fetters that hold black men back. He’s quietly explaining the meaning of each piece to clusters of interested buyers. The pencil drawings in the corner are half crow, half man, like the creatures who tormented the timid scarecrow in the movie “The Wiz.” They were bullies telling him he could never make it, that he could never win. Three of the paintings are of Fahamu in a white dinner jacket, preening, strutting and unbowed.

For six years after the senior show, Fahamu’s work mirrored his attempt to address his loss. At first there were paintings of African women as angels, another depicting the aftermath of the murder, even a Cubist portrait of his mother with the words, “I know, I know, I know, She watches” scribbled in the negative space. It wasn’t until he entered his first marriage and later became a father that he had a breakthrough. Just as hip-hop acts represented one sort of black male identity, so could he as a fine artist, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Glenn Ligon and Barkley Hendricks before him. He would be his subject.

First came the sticker campaign and soon after the oversized self-portaits. In them was not the soft-spoken father of two little ones who’s about to embark on his second marriage. Not the student earning his doctorate at Emory University. No, not that guy, but an alter ego. A brother with swagger. Swagger for days. Boxer shorts bragging above the lip of low-riding jeans. His slim, newel of a chest hitched with fat, gold chains. Dapper in a gray suit and a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor in his grip. But in the negative space of each canvas he has scrawled messages: “not behind bars and “I aint been shot a whole bunch of times.”

It took a while to catch on but by 2009 his work was in galleries around the world. Viewers were taken by this neo-pop vision of a black man, each image asking bold as day: Are you giving it your best?

When he completes his doctorate he doesn’t necessarily want to teach. He wants to use his degree as Bill Cosby used his — to develop programming to help young black men wandering without a guide.

“I got a superpower,” he said not long ago, laughing as he said it. “I gotta use it for good.”

Four years ago, when he was still institutionalized, Alphonso got a chance to see his son’s artwork in a solo show at the Lyons Wier Gallery in Manhattan. Fahamu arranged for his father to get a chaperoned pass for a few hours to see it.

The two had not had much contact over the years — a handful of phone calls; some letters; three brief, awkward visits. Fahamu was still working through forgiveness but he had decided to give his father a glimpse of the life he’d made, of the man he’d become.

Alphonso studied every line, every drip, every word on the portraits of his son. Fahamu waited. Finally his father spoke. Alphonso told him he was proud of him. And that Betty Ann would have been, too. Fahamu smiled.

“Every boy wants to please his father,” he said later.

Years ago, in one of those phone conversations, Alphonso told his son the meaning of the name Fahamu: Understanding.

The artist has finally captured a bit of it for himself.