Mary Morse Jacobs has made her reputation painting some pretty classy animals.
She's painted Yardley, the favorite thoroughbred hunter of John Schapiro, once proprietor of Laurel race course. She's done the portrait of a prized pet dog that belonged to Marjorie Merriweather Post, the socialite cereal heiress. And she's painted an elegant and prolific bull owned by John Henry Royer Jr., for years president of the Polled Hereford Association.
A resident of Glenelg since it was bucolic, she's an ardent horsewoman who has ridden all her life, just about as long as she's been making art. She loved fox hunting with the Howard County-Iron Bridge Hounds. For years she was a whipper-in, a hard-working subaltern of the master of the hunt.
So it seems a little odd to find her on this day in a back alley deep in southwest Baltimore, hanging out with street a-rab hucksters at the Kratz stable. There are no thoroughbreds here, no socialites or huntsmen.
But here is Jacobs, taking pictures of the men known as "a-rabs," of their colorful wagons, of their fancifully bedecked horses and ponies. From the photos will come drawings and paintings of this remnant of a vanishing Baltimore folk culture, artwork that Jacobs hopes will help ensure their continued survival. The animal portraitist from the country has become a champion of a-rab preservation.
Complaints by animal rights activists first drew her to the a-rabs and their stables, complaints she now says are unfounded.
"I can remember reading about the terrible conditions these ponies were in and how they were mistreated and not fed enough and all this stuff," Jacobs says. "I thought those animal rights people are really doing a good job. And even I didn't know any different."
She does now. So in her Howard County studio, her first pastel drawing of an a-rab wagon laden with fruits and vegetables takes shape, like an exotic flower blooming in an empty lot, a tribute to this endangered but tenacious band of entrepreneurs.
The a-rab street peddlers have long been a unique part of the Baltimore streetscape. For generations their red, green and yellow wagons pulled by ponies in elaborate harness with polished brass and jaunty feather plumes have splashed color on some very drab neighborhoods.
They're emblematic of an older, slower, more secure Baltimore, a city with a rich street life, lively gossip on white marble stoops, sidewalk photographers with their own ponies, scissors grinders, hurdy-gurdy men and monkeys, peanut vendors -- the Baltimore H. L. Mencken described in his "Happy Days."
Hundreds once plied the streets, white men along with blacks before World War II. Their cries became folk arias as they sang out the produce of the day: watermelon and cantaloupes and strawberries, and, once upon a time: "Hard crabs alive/Four dead out of five/Every time the wheel turns another crab dies/Hey lady/Come get your hard crabs."
Musicologists have annotated the a-rab calls; the Smithsonian Institution has recorded them. Each is a distinctive cry, unique to a single a-rab.
"That call dies with them," Mary Jacobs has learned. "No one else gets that call."
No other city in America has them. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival has invited a-rabs over to the Mall in Washington every summer since 1972. Eugene "Fatback" Allen and George "Blue" Kellum, who have been working together 50 years, are taking their pony and cart to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesboro, Tenn., in October.
"They've got stories to tell all day long," says Steve Blake, president of the Arabber Preservation Society. The society has just received an award from Baltimore Heritage, the preservation advocacy group, for their efforts on behalf of the a-rabs.
The 98-year-old Kratz stable where Jacobs is doing her studies is one of three left in the city. Perhaps 40 men still call themselves a-rabs; only 19 still use ponies and wagons.
"This stable was built by Charlie Boyle in 1899 for the city of Baltimore," Blake says. "It housed mules and dump carts, for picking up trash."
When the city mechanized trash removal in 1928, it sold the stable to the Kratz family, Blake says, "so it's been in continuous operation since 1899." The preservation society now leases Kratz's stable for the a-rabs.
On a hazy summer afternoon, the back-lot stable, just off the end of the 900 block of Lemmon Street, seems like a place out of time. A rooster's crowing blends with bird songs and the murmurs of a-rabs lounging in the shade of acanthus trees. Horses and ponies shuffle and neigh in their stalls.
Jacobs pokes around, alert for material for her paintings and for a new poster that will celebrate the a-rabs and their way of life -- and maybe raise some money to help preserve it.
On July 13, the preservation society will hold its annual sale of old harnesses and other a-rab artifacts, as well as the work of about 60 contributing artists like Jacobs in the courtyard of Gypsy's Cafe, across from the Hollins Market.
