Artist and Influence 1995

Volume XIV

Editors

James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian

Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc.

491 Broadway, 7th floor

New York City 10012-4412

Artist and Influence is published by the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc. Transcriptions herein reflect the authors' opinions and not necessarily those of Hatch-Billops.

All rights reserved. No part of these transcriptions may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publisher.

Photo Credits for

Rashied Ali, Billie Allen, Claude Brown, Charles Byrd, Winona Fletcher, Kathy Perkins, Marta Moreno Vega, John A. Williams belong to Camille Billops. Emma Amos and bell hooks by Becket Logan.

The cover is the courtesy of Coreen Simpson ©1995

Manufactured in the United States of America

©1995 Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc.

Acknowledgements

Artist and Influence is made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, subscriptions, and private donations.

A very special "thank you" to The Peter Norton Family Foundation for giving us a computer and printer which has saved us a hundred hours and many heartbeats in the publication of this journal.

The journal also expresses its appreciation to Romeo Enriquez for the cover and for overall design and our gratitude to Judy Blum for typing the transcriptions; to O. Vernon Matisse for sharing his expertise with computers; to Ellen Simon for proofreading; to Professors Susan Duffy and Paul Adalian for indexing all issues; and to Camille Billops who secured the funding. You, the subscriber, reward us if you are pleased to read about multi-ethnic artists, their lives, their work, and the disclosures of data and insights into history available nowhere else.

THIS ISSUE IS DEDICATED TO

Poetry

16	Haiku Suzanne Noguere
17	Latin Man Barbara Lekatsas
30	Cancer Victoria Sullivan
79	After the Flood Marita Joyce Occomy-Stricklin
92	Letter to Catullus James V. Hatch
118	Used to Was Cliff Chandler
119	Mother's Language Lili Barsha
124	My Royal Heritage Glenngo King
125	Custom Stuart Miller
A Kiss Suzanne Noguere	A Word before You Go James V. Hatch
143	Before the Winter Solstice Glenngo King
189	This Heavy Sleep Victoria Sullivan
201	Untitled Stuart Miller

Musician

Interviewer: George Brooker

April 3, 1995

We have one of the seminal figures in African American music, Rashied Ali. First, when were you born, and are you a native of Philadelphia?

I was born and raised in Philly, in July back in the 30's, to a very musical family.

Musical in the sense of traditional Black families in Philadelphia, church.

Yes mostly church. My grandmother was an ordained minister, and she had her own little cornerstone church.

AME? [African Methodist Episcopal]

No, Baptist. It was sort of a little store front church, with a piano as opposed to an organ. But to be frank with you I don't remember that church because I was really to small to know about that church.

You heard about the church

Yes it was in the tenderloin, the part of Philadelphia that's sort of like the Bowery. It's downtown Philadelphia. Chinatown is in that area. It's the loft section with a lot of meat-packing houses and factories. Then we had the derelicts laying on steps and sleeping in the streets. She had a church on Darien Street, my mom used to tell me. She had five daughters and each of them played piano and sang in the choir.

What was your role in this?

That was a little before my time. When I came along, what I can remember was, my grandmother didn't have a church anymore, but she was part of a church that was run by a white minister whose name was Bob. Bob was very generous to our family. In fact, he found the house that my grandmother lived in for her and my grandfather. He would bring her big baskets of food all the time. So my grandmother was part of that church, so were her daughters, and so was I. But my youngest aunt, who I grew up with, was the real musician of the family.

She was a trained musician

Self-taught but unbelievably talented. Her name was Esther and my grandmother called her Queen Esther because she wanted to have a little royalty in the house. She was beautiful and played the piano unbelievably

What were the tunes you heard around the house.

Yeah I heard "Scrapple from the Apple" from Bird. I heard a lot of Bird tunes because my aunt's boyfriend was a drummer, and they had a little band. They used to rehearse in the front room except Sunday. My grandmother didn't allow jazz on Sundays.

Yeah, I was going to say a lot of religious households in Philadelphia didn't encourage jazz music.

My grandmother didn't encourage jazz. She liked church music only; the only thing that could be played in our house on Sundays was church music. But during the week my grandmother worked as a seamstress, so when she'd go to work that's when my aunt and her musicians did most of the playing. She didn't get mad or anything when she came home, and they were still playing, but she just didn't like other stuff that was happening in the house. You know with

musicians smoking this and smoking that. She would come home and put everybody out, but they would be there the next day. My grandmother was very liberal with my aunt. She loved my aunt, her youngest daughter so she would let her play whatever she wanted.

So you're hearing religious music as well as jazz. The earliest jazz that you heard was it Jimmy Lunceford? Lots of Black big band jazz?

It's weird that you mention Jimmy Lunceford because when my mom was a kid she had a chance to sing with Jimmy Lunceford's band at a place called the Earl Theater in Philadelphia that was something like the Apollo Theater. They would have shows, and they would show a movie, and it would go on all day. I used get a chance to go down there and listen to Bird and listen to a lot of different jazz artists like Charlie Parker, Lucky Millinder, Louis Jordan and The Tympanny Five, Paul Williams, Moms Mabley with her jokes, and Steppin-Fetch-it.

Andy Kirk

I don't remember Andy Kirk too much but Steppin-Fetch-it, Sammy Davis Jr. as a kid with his father and his uncle. He like twelve or thirteen or fourteen years old. We would just go down there and look at the shows, and then they would show a movie, and then after the movie, they'd have another show. I would just spend my whole day down there.

How much did it cost you to spend the day?

Twenty-five cents. And a hoogie [sandwich] would be fifteen cents. So you'd buy a couple of hoogies and my mom would give me two dollars and I'd take a friend sometimes. I used go down there a watch Bird, I watched Bird a lot of times.

Who was Bird playing with then?

I don't know. I think it was Jay "Hootie" McShann. He would be with Dizzy Gillespie and Bird would have a band. I can't remember who the guys were 'cause I was kind of young, but it just the idea of being able to see Charlie Parker.

You already knew who Bird was?

Yes but see I was going down there because a friend of mine named Hal Moore used to take me down there. He was a little older. I wasn't totally into jazz because of being into to Doo-Wop like The Ravens and The Orioles.

Do you sing?

Yeah, I sing. That's what I was doing in elementary school and junior high school. In fact I sang my way right out of junior high school because I was getting bad grades, but the teacher liked my voice so he passed me. He'd let me sing graduation exercises, and I wasn't even graduating. My mother being a singer insisted that we sang in the house. She would have contests, play song quizzes in the mornings before breakfast. She would go "I'm a' whistle a couple bars of this song, and you tell what the name is"

Name That Tune

So we all grew up singing songs and learning words. We would go and buy the twenty top hits song books. Every week they used to put these out like Jet Magazine, and they would have the words to all the songs. I knew every word,

that's why I know so many songs now. It's really great for a budding musician to know songs. In fact Bird once said "Learn the words, learn the lyrics. When you play a ballad you'll play it sweet because you'll know the lyrics; you'll know what it's about." I was eight or nine years old.

Singing for your breakfast. Did you end up working as a vocalist?

No, I never really worked as a vocalist. I used to just sing to impress girls.

Very, very popular motive -- a romantic baritone.

They liked it whatever it was. I got over with that. I just went to drums a little later.

As you know many parents who encourage their children to play music avoid encouraging their children be a drummer because they neighbors they get evicted. How did your people put up with it when you got into drums.

My mom was just the opposite. My dad and my mom they sort of split up when I was ten or eleven but not split up and never speak to each other again. My father was very active in our growing up. He was always on the scene, and he always supported my mom and us. He always made sure that we had what we needed. So it wasn't like he was away. I could go see my dad anytime I felt like it. I could go live with him if I wanted. It was a very good relationship with my dad. It was just that my mom and dad had differences.

Was he musical?

Well, not as much as playing an instrument, but he listened to a lot of jazz records. Bird's records and stuff like that. My dad had most of the instrumental stuff, and my mom had most of the vocal stuff like Billie Holiday and Bessie Smith. He was instrumental in me coming up. He did a lot and he was very Johnny on the spot about things.

But he didn't say, "Let my son be a drummer."

No, in fact, he didn't say anything. He has two first cousins named Charlie Rice and Bernard Rice who were drummers. Charlie was playing with Chet Baker. Bernard played with Charlie Parker at my high school dance. Bird played at my high school dance at Mercantile Hall on Broad and Jefferson, and my dad's cousin played with the band.

How did he swing that?

Because we used to dance often to Bird's music. We used to dance to Be-Bop. We used to do the off-time on real fast numbers, and slow tunes we used to do the grind. So we danced to Bird's music. Woody Herman and his Herd also played our my high school dance. "Lemon Drop Kid" we used to call him because of his song "Lemon Drop." Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson sang at our high school. We were very lucky cause we were in Philadelphia and so close to the Apple. Billie Holiday lived in Philly when they kicked her out of New York, when they took her cabaret card away from her. She couldn't play in New York so she played a lot in Philadelphia

To digress for a moment. This thing about the Philadelphia musical family -- tons of players come out of Philly. How many do you know from your youth?

Just about all of them. All of the ones you can think about.

Lee Morgan

Lee Morgan was the youngest one. I was always jealous of him because he was younger than everybody, and he was playing better than everybody. I couldn't stand him. This kid was thirteen years old, and he was playing trumpet better than anybody ever, and I hated him because he got all the gigs. Art Blakley would come to town and only wanted him to sit in. His sister played the trumpet; he took the trumpet from her when he was twelve, and at thirteen years old he was working it. That was unbelievable. Lee Morgan was a genius. We had a place called Music City where Ellis Tolan was a drummer. We used to have all these sessions that the guys would come to, pull up to the clubs and play. They would have one day out of the week when that band that came to Philly used to play at Music City which was where we all were going to learn how to play music. They would do a seminar there for the kids, and whoever had enough heart or enough balls, would go up there and play with them. I was always sitting down because I was scared of that.

When did you develop the courage to jump up?

When I got older I decided that it was time for me to step out.

First drummer who impressed you?

My cousin. Bernard. He was a stunning drummer; he died at an early age. In fact, I studied drums with his brother Bernard. He was the first person to put me on a drum set. I had a cousin named Johnny Salgado. Johnny's mother was Bernard's sister. Johnny played trumpet. Well, he started playing drums, and I was playing trumpet. Johnny's dad switched us around because he thought I played drums better than Johnny, and Johnny played trumpet better than me. I have been playing drums mostly ever since.

What age did you sit down first

I guess I was around twelve because I was playing at Mercantile Hall. I was in the marching band playing coolers and stuff but then I really got started when I reached service. The army really turned me out.

So you learned military drumming?

A little bit out in the street. I went to the army when I was sixteen and that is what really turned me out on drums.

You played in with the military band?

Yeah, with the Second Army Band

Who was in the band?

I don't know if you know a lot of these guys. Emmet was a guitarist who made a profound statement on me. Then there was a sergeant named Charles Brown who was really good. Most of the guys in that band -- I don't know too many of them that turned pro because when I left the band a lot of them stayed in the army. It was a sweet job and nobody wanted to leave. In fact they thought I was crazy leaving.

The army bands seemed to be a popular gig.

Yeah, and they stayed together. Guys don't retire from those gigs because they don't really want to get out into this rat race. You just get promoted and get

more money the longer you stayed there, and you get all your benefits. They looked at me like I was stupid for leaving.

A little more about that gig. Did you travel?

I got into the band in Germany. I was already a year in the army. I was looking for a way out of the real army life 'cause that was pretty hard. I volunteered to get into the Army. I didn't know too much about anything but I was a good convincer. I could convince people that I was great at something. Once I got into it, I'd do my best. Sergeant Brown saw that I couldn't read that good, but he saw that I had a little bit of chops from playing at Mercantile Hall when I was kid. I knew a little couple of rudiments so I faked like I was reading those charts, but he knew right away that I wasn't. But he liked my spirit, he liked my...

Testosterone

Yeah, so he took me... what ever that word is you used. So he took me and said "Okay, you're in the band." Under him I learned how to read. I got into it so good that I became squad leader.

So were you playing a trap set in the armed forces band.

No I was playing tympani and vibes and congas and the snare drum. They didn't have a trap set in the band 'cause it was a marching band. We played reveille and the end of the day stuff. Then I also played with a lot of the German musicians off post.

In what cities were you

I was in Munich, Neuremberg, Heidlberg, and Frankfurt. I traveled all around.

How's your German

Well, it was good then, but there's nothing happening now.

What years?

This is in the fifties -- '51, '52, '53 and '54.

What's the musical world like at the time? What are the Europeans listening to? When you went off the base to play in Germany what did they call for?

They were listening to BeBop. It was straight out BeBop, Charlie Parker influenced music. Germany was into jazz. Germany was always into jazz; before the war they were into jazz. In fact, when I was there, they were listening to Charlie Ventura, and Charlie Parker and people like that, and Flip Philips, Illinois Jacquet. Even though they had bombed out buildings there they still had clubs that played jazz. They played dixie land and straight ahead which was bebop. I wasn't into dixieland at all so I was playing a lot of bebop licks.

Good players?

Well, I would say they were better than me because I was seventeen-eighteen-years-old what did I know. I was lucky to be there. As far as I'm concerned they were good players because I learned a lot.

So you were doing "Cherokee," "How High The Moon?"

Stuff like that, and "Two Bass Hit," those basic classic songs

Small groups -- quartets, quintets

Quintets and quartets and sometimes I'd play with a big band, but I wasn't that

good because they had other better drummers play with the big bands, but sometimes I'd play with the big bands, but then I'd play the congas

So you generally had a tenor sax, trumpet...

Tenor sax and trumpet or piano or vibes. Mostly all tenor sax or alto sax and the trumpet. Alto was the way to go back then, because everyone was imitating Bird, trying anyway.

You're in Germany, you're seventeen years old, you're bopping. Why didn't you stay in Germany?

When it came time for me to leave the army I was ready to leave because I really wasn't an army person. I wasn't really into...

Taking orders?

Yeah, coming back when I felt like it. I had a lot of restrictions on me. I just really didn't like the army. I really wanted out of the army after the second day I was in the army, but my mother wouldn't let me out because she felt it was better for me being in the army than being on the street because I wasn't going to school.

Did you ever have guard duty when you were in the army in Germany?

Yeah when I was in the regular army. When I got into the band, I didn't have any.

Did you have bullets in your gun when you on guard?

Yeah, in Germany but not in the States.

Did they tell you why not?

No, they just didn't give us no bullets. They gave us clips of bullets in Germany, but you would catch hell if you fired one.

I know my father and uncle said they could walk off the post if the Black guys were on guard duty because they knew the guys didn't have any bullets.

When I first went into the army, I was in an all black outfit with all white officers. That was weird. Then all of a sudden, I think it was in '51 or '52 they marched everybody outside -- this is before I got into the band -- and told us, "The army is integrated today, the whole army. We're gonna switch sides." They took half of the guys from here and half of the white guys from there, and just called everyone to attention and just marched them to different places. That's the way the army did it. They integrated the whole army in one day.

There was no psycho-therapeutic effort to...

There was a lot of fights. People would be shooting dice and one guy would go "Oh, you niggers," or something else. Racial things happened, but you know how we resolved it? The sergeant said, "Look, I know about this racist shit -- everybody calling everybody names. You calling people `wops' and you calling people `niggers,' and you calling people `guineas.'" He said "When you bring somebody to me, I want you to bring them to me unconscious. Just knock them out. Don't even think about bringing them standing up. They say something to you, you break something over their head." We had a couple of fights, rough ones, but everybody got along, really quick in the army. They didn't play that shit in the army.

Something like confrontation therapy.

Anybody didn't like what was happening, you just stopped it right then, and you brought it up to the first sergeant. We had a first sergeant named Brown who was Black too. White, Black, he didn't care what you were. You came in there and acted stupid to him you would be a private in two seconds. He'd take all your stripes, take all your money and restrict you to the barracks. I wish they could do America like that. The army did it in one day. A lot of tension was there, but you were sleeping next to a white guy whether you liked it or not, and he was sleeping next to you whether he liked it or not. He had to get up with you and go to the bathroom with you and go eat with you and work with you whether he liked it or not. That's the way it was done. The army was integrated in one day.

A lot of Black men come out of the service; they didn't want to come back to the states. As you said there's a little more equity in the service than there is in the States.

You gotta like it. You get a pension. You got a job. You get three squares a day, and you get money every month. The higher you are in rank, the more money you get, and everybody had cars. The band s living right in downtown Nuremburg. We didn't live on post. The army had a hotel in downtown Nuremberg with all special service forces there like the MP's, the dramatics, the arts, the music. We had our own village. They called it the Army Village which was a German hotel that the army bought. Right in the middle of Nuremberg.

Kind of a nice hotel?

We had two people to a room. It was really nice. That's why the army band was so nice because we didn't have to get up in the morning to make reveille. All we had to do was get up to make rehearsals. We had to do the end of the day march. I would give somebody some money to do mine for me.

You could do that legally?

Yeah, like I'd say, "Hey man, I'd like you to make my taps for me today 'cause I've got a gig tonight, and here's ten dollars, so do it for me. Yeah, it was all right. I would in Nuremberg at the club.

What time did Nuremberg close down?

three, four a.m. And then I had to get back to the hotel. A lot times I didn't go back, to tell the truth.

Time well-spent, anyway.

I didn't make it back, but I had somebody to cover for me.

You had a good time.

Hey man, I had the best time when I got into the service. That was my best army time because you're more or less your own person.

You had a chance to be independent. You came back to the states to become a real live musician. Was your mother around to tell you, "Son don't do this. This is the wrong thing. I don't want to see you get hurt."

No. Well I came home to my mom. Hey man, you know, I was too uppity so she put me out. She couldn't stand my shit. I came home and I stayed there for a little while, but I had to go because I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to pay

rent. I didn't want to help out with nothing. I just wanted to spend all my money on myself, and when I got myself enough money I just bought a car. Mom went, "Wait a minute, man. You're eating this food; you stand there not paying the rent; you've got to help out with this."

Did you buy a Cadillac.

No, I bought a little Buick. Roadmaster '49. It was nice too. So she just put my stuff on the porch and left me a note and that said "You gotta live someplace else," so I went to my grandmother's house.

Traditional response to a traditional dilemma.

I went to her mother's house and stayed there for about four or five months until she came down there and shamed me and made me leave there. She said, "Why you wanna come and do this to my mother? You come over here and you're bumming off my mother." My grandmother loved me. She didn't care if I bummed off her. So then I got a job and after I got a job I eased myself out and got my own place. She turned me on to taking care of myself.

When was the first gig you got out of the army?

That took a while because I was home for years before I started really playing because I had to work. But then when I did start playing again, I got myself a teacher named Ellis Tolan. And then I went to Granof School of Music for a little while. I had the GI bill thing. So I wanted to go and get some schooling, not that I went to classes or anything, but it was just good to get that notoriety and prestige of going to the school. It was a big school in Philadelphia at the time. Coltrane? I don't think he graduated, but I didn't either. I just went there. I went to a few classes. I wasn't going to every class. I just picked and chose the classes I wanted to go to.

Composition, technique, theory

Stuff like that. Mainly, I was playing with the band there. That was what I really wanted to do 'cause they had a great band. Lee was in the band. Jimmy was in the band. In fact Jimmy went to high school with me.

Which high school

We went to Ben Franklin High School on Greene and Broad. They had a good band there, but I wasn't in the band. I don't think I was good enough to be in that band. I was playing congas and marching drums. When I was sixteen years old I wasn't that confident. I had confidence in the congas but I didn't the confidence in the traps that I needed. The army gave me that. Then when I came out of the army I went to Granoff for about a year. Then I got with Ellis Tolan, and I started studying with him for a while. Then I got my first gig with Dick Heart and the Heartaches. You heard of Dick?

Sure

Dick Heart and the Heartaches was like a rhythm & blues band.

Were they conked?

Yeah, so was I. We all had our hair finger waved, and all up in the air and sprayed hard so it didn't move. They called it "processed" in those days. I played with that band for a while. Then I played with Muhammed Hibebla for a while. This is rhythm & blues, back beat, like playing shuffles. That was good

because in the army I really learned good stick control. I has those shuffles in the pocket. Then I played with Big Maybelle.

Had you played blues and R&B shouting prior to this?

No. Dick Heart was my first major R&B gig. I had just played with the local cats. They were local, too, but they were bigger local. They were Philadelphia, going to New Jersey, going to Atlantic City. When I'm talking about local, I'm talking about my peers. We used to play at parties. Then when I got with Dick Heart & the Heartaches, Muhammed Aebele and Big Maybelle, then I started looking seriously, real seriously at Bird because in the army I played around with that stuff but it wasn't serious. I was playing with German musicians, and I was getting over but I wasn't that confident with what I was doing.

Good question comes up. The continuum of African-American music; you get Church, Blues, Big Band, Bebop etc. There are those who obviously played through the entire continuum to get to that end point. You're playing R&B with The Heartaches, but you've been hearing Bird. The percussive concepts are different, you're going to lock up an R&B group they have to have the four solid. When did you start hearing the stuff that made you stand out? When did you start having the ideas that Rashied Ali stands out as the man who invented a new way of playing the drums?

That's after I started playing Bebop drums.

You left the Heartaches and Maybelle and went to...

Playing Bebop drums. I had my first gig, my own gig was my gig. So I got this guy Len Bailey, we called him Little Bird; he played baritone saxophone around Philadelphia. I got him to front the gig because I felt like "Hey, you're a saxophone player. Let this be your band, and I'll just play in the band." But it was my band. I played with that band for a long time.

What material? Original or old stuff?

Yeah, we were playing original music. He was writing stuff for it. I wrote a couple of tunes for it. It was all original stuff we was doing and some Bebop things, too, you know like "Room 608" stuff, like that. See, my brother was also playing drums, and he had a friend, and his friend was named Sunny Murray who was a drummer too.

The Sonny? Murray?

Yeah, Sonny Murray and my brother were very tight. They went to school together. Sonny Murray was three years younger. Sonny Murray, as soon as he got into playing drums he moved to New York, before I did. The next time I see Murray he's playing with Cecil Taylor. So I had heard Cecil Taylor before, and I had heard Ornette Coleman. I heard the double quartet, and listening to Philadelphia Joe Jones with Miles Davis and listening to the way he played, and then all of a sudden I started listening to Elvin Jones. That's when I decided that I wanted to play differently.

First time you heard "out" music. The very first time. Do you remember?

Yeah the very first time I heard it, I heard Philly Joe Jones play something on the drums which just took me out. He was playing with Miles Davis and there was some kind of thing that he did and he extended it for a long time. Instead of just playing the ride cymbal on the two and the four beats, he extended a passage

that just really made me go "Wow, what was that?" He extended it for such a long time until I was thinking "What if he just played like that, period? Just stayed right there, instead of coming back?" And I started practicing like that. What I would do, I would keep the tempo and the rhythm in my head, and I would try to play against it. That's the way I do it now.

I've heard it described of your playing that you take the time signature that the group is in, and you would extrapolate from there. You would be playing on top of that or around that. So in the time initial feel, the two and the four doesn't even need to be accented, but you can hear it.

Yeah it's there. So I started working with that kind of thing. Then when I heard Philly Joe Jones and John Coltrane play for about forty-five minutes just drums and saxophone, that was it. I went, "This is the way I want to play. This is the style of music I want to do."

The feel that your drumming brought to the instrument must have met with some resistance from the guys you were playing with. It made it hard for some players. Some players have a real difficult time if the drummer is not locked into the metric.

Yeah I've had things like that happen to me before. Clifford Jordan once snatched my cymbals away from me because he didn't like what I was doing.

Excuse me? I was playing on the bandstand, and he just walked up to me, and just took the cymbals off the stand because he said that they were too much. He couldn't figure it out.

Philly Joe Jones as an inspiration. Elvin Jones is like a perfection of that idea.

Yeah sort of. Well, I could say that but they're so different. Philly Joe Jones was more of a perfectionist, and Elvin just let it all hang out.

One is more like technique and one is more like expression.

Yeah that's it. Joe was like technique. In fact, I studied with Joe extensively. I even went to England to stay with him for a few months. He turned me on to technique as to how to play the drums without exhausting myself totally. To be able to use technique instead of strength. I found that by using technique, I was able to play as strong and as hard as anybody, but I could play longer because I had the technique working instead of just brute strength working. So I could sit straight and relax, and I could play for an hour, two hours. Then I developed both sides so I could go from my right hand to my left hand, either way, and that gave me longevity. That's the way I tried to get my brother Muhammad to do it.

Elvin Jones made us tired watching him.

He was strength. If you listen to him play now, he doesn't do anything near the way he used to play before. Because as you get older your body just won't work like that anymore. But you take a drummer like me. I can hit on that for an hour at a moment's notice, because I deal with technique more than brute force.

The idea, the concept that you developed in your playing of multidirectional polytones. At what stage of development was it when you had your first exposure to Coltrane.

Well Coltrane is not the reason why I play like I play, but he helped me to

develop it.

Kind of like a catalyst.

Yeah, he helped me to develop that style. It was a style that I down. I knew what I was doing. I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn't exactly confident in what I was doing until I got with him. Although I had played with Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp and Marion Brown and different people like that. I had gotten my chops in that. I had recorded that kind of stuff. I noticed, at a lot of gigs, I'd be playing with Albert or Archie, Coltrane would be in the audience. So he was scoping me out. I knew Coltrane back in Philly because Coltrane was from Philly. He lived four or five blocks away from me. I used to go down to his mom's house when he lived. I used to sit out on the porch and listen to him practice, because he used to play with Miles Davis during that time. So I'd be listening to John practice and sometimes he would let me come up to his room and listen to records. So I knew him, but I just never got a chance to play with him. I knew one day I was going to play with him. I thought he was a great musician, and I lived four blocks, and I would go over to his house and sit on his porch. Mrs. Coltrane, his mom, she would never let us go upstairs while he was practicing. Would not disturb him at all. You would just have to wait until he finished. So me and a couple other friends, we would stand out the porch and we'd listen to him for a few hours. Sometimes it would be too long and we'd leave.

Many players do three and four hour rehearsals but it doesn't usually seem that when they were that young that start playing that long.

He would play sometimes for two or three hours straight. Sometimes we wouldn't even get a chance to see him. But sometimes we'd come in on the tail end of it, and he'd come out on the porch or if it was winter time he would let us come in.

Your first date with 'trane. Do you recall the date and the location.

Yeah, the very first date with 'trane didn't happen because I had quite an attitude when I was coming up. When I first approached Coltrane to play with him I had an attitude. I was playing really good; I thought I was playing really good at that time in Philly before I moved to New York. I was terrorizing people sort of, just going on people's gigs and demanding to play and all that kind of stuff.

Bogart.

A Bogart. Yeah, giving out wolf tickets. I remember one time when 'trane first came to Philadelphia I was waltzing around. It was a place called the Showboat in Philadelphia, a little club.

You would sit down with Garrison, Elvin, McCoy.

Yeah, And I was telling 'trane to let me play. 'Cause "man I could cut Elvin Jones."

This is a remarkable sense of confidence.

Yeah. This is where I was coming from. He went "yeah man but I just got this band together. What you really need to do is leave Philadelphia and go to New York, Rashied." He'd say, "Philadelphia you've used it up here. You just need to go to New York." And so I did. I moved to New York.

Where did you live when you came here?

Right on Eighth Street and First Avenue at a boarding house there. I was here for about three years before I even bothered 'trane about anything again. I went to see him, but I never approached him about playing with him. I was working with Albert, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown different people like that. I noticed sometimes 'trane would be in the audience when I was playing with Albert. He'd be watching us. He was interested in the new music. So he would come out and listen to all the guys that were playing. In fact, he did this record `Ascension' with a lot of the new cats at that time. I didn't get on that record because I thought I was so big time. Anyway the kick to that story is I went over to the Half Note. They used to have a club called the Half Note, used to be on Spring & Hudson Street where Coltrane used to play on his off days, when he wasn't working or on tour. They let him play at that club. He would play at that club for three months, two months as long as he wanted. Every night. I went there and I asked him to let me play, and he said no. I said "Cool." I didn't give him a hard time. I would go there every night. One night Elvin wasn't there, and Coltrane was ready to play. The drums were set up. I asked him to let me play. Jimmy, even though we went to high school together, we had a little problem with each other. Jimmy goes "'trane, there's such and such and such," he's pointing out to different cats. And 'trane says "no come on up, Rashied," and I

He practiced all the time. He practiced on trains. He practiced on planes. He practiced in the hotel. Coltrane always had his saxophone in his mouth.

The record came out, and I'm going, Oh shit!"

He was getting ready to open at the Village Gate. He went out to Seattle first, and he took Pharoah Saunders with him, and they made a record out there. He came back to New York and Pharoah was telling me "Yeah, John is playing at the Village Gate." He said "You ought to call him." I said, "Okay." So I called him up, and I said "I heard your working at the Village Gate next week." He said, "Yeah". I said, "Can I play?" He said, "Elvin's gonna be playing." I said, "That's fine."

You had grown and risen. A new attitude.

He said, "You sure it's Okay" I said, "Yeah, Yeah, it's Okay."

So the first date with the double drums was at the Gate.

It was at the Gate. My first time playing with Coltrane was at the Gate with Elvin Jones.

What material were they doing on those nights?

He was doing "Meditations" because he hadn't recorded it yet. He kept playing that over and over again until he got it together to record it. And then we went into the studio with it and recorded in the studio with the same band. Alice wasn't in the band yet; it was still McCoy playing piano. But that was just one of my lessons learned. I learned a lot of lessons. Coltrane taught me a lot of things. He got me down off of that high horse, and he got me thinking more about being a musician than trying to be a smart ass and thinking my butt weighed a ton.

A lot of musicians and a lot of performers have ego.

I had a terrible ego. It was really, really bad. One time, a friend of mine, the late Frank Wright, had been playing with me when I wasn't working with 'trane. We had been playing around. He just come into town. He was an out player but I didn't respect him. I felt like he was just an out player. He couldn't play inside. He couldn't play nothing. I didn't respect cats that couldn't play all kinds of stuff. I felt like he just wasn't happening. So he asked 'trane if he could sit in. He said, "I play with Rashied, I played with Diz; can I sit in?. So 'trane came back to the back and asked me, "You know there's a kid out there, Frank Wright, asking me could he sit in. What do you think?" I said, "Oh man, shit! He can't play." I dissed him! I said, "Don't even think about it. The cat ain't playing shit!"

You were pretty cold.

I was. I'm telling you I was like that. We get on the band stand the first thing Coltrane did was "Hey, Frank, come on up." I felt like just hiding behind a bass drum or something. I felt terrible. Frank came up and he played his thing. And when we came back to the dressing room I was very quiet. So 'trane walks up to me and says, "You know what? I kind of like some of that stuff the kid was doing." I said, "Right, Yeah." He said, "A lot of the stuff he didn't kill me at all, but there was some things I liked. If a musician is playing, any musician, and if you really are true to your musicianship you'll find something that you like -- in anybody. There is some note, some element that he's gonna play that you're gonna like. All you have to do is open up and listen." That taught me a lesson. I never put anybody down since then. I've just changed ever since.

Elvin has made some comments about the influence or effect of working

with 'trane broadened his whole thing.

Yeah 'cause he was the kind of a person who was just true to the game. He taught me how to be true to the game.

Question, working with Alice. Your response to the music. Alice had a very religious bent, and we thought that some people who dug John did not understand or fully deal with the direction Alice was taking.

Yeah, but she had this Buddhism and see John was Muslim and he didn't put no religions down. In fact, he made a statement once that he was involved with all the religions as long as they all were about the creator. As long as they were about God. He didn't want to deal with idols and stuff. Any religion, he said, that was worshipping the creator, he could identify with. I'm gonna tell you what the man was to me -- I think his religion was his music, because that was all he did. He never did anything else. He practiced all the time. He practiced on trains. He practiced on planes. He practiced in the hotel. Coltrane always had his saxophone in his mouth. When Coltrane died, I went with Sonny Rollins for about a year. And then I played with Jackie McClean after that for about a year. These are all top notch saxophonists, but I have yet to ever get with a saxophonist that was like Coltrane. He practiced all the time. I never seen anybody that played so much.

He'd be in the dressing room practicing. You know, like a fighter in the dressing room warming up, and he works up a sweat before he comes out on the ring. Coltrane would be ringing wet when he came out on the bandstand from practices inside the dressing room. He used to be running scales and people used to sit there and watch them. These are guys with pencils that write stuff about him, and he didn't even have time to talk to them because he'd be practicing. They would ask me "What do think Coltrane, this and that.." I said, "Look, man, I don't know you have to talk to him." They said, "Well does he ever stop playing the saxophone?" And I said, "Yeah, he stops, but when he stops he's usually rushing out to the bandstand." He always practiced. I wish I could do that.

Well, a lot of people say that when you worked with 'trane, a number would go on for as long forty minutes, fifty minutes for one tune as I recall. I remember guys losing weight, sitting there playing the drums. You and Elvin could not get fat.

No, not then.

How was working with Elvin?

That was another learning period for me. After we got over calling each other names, after I got with him, after we got past all the bullshit, after we got over all the competitive stuff, we started playing really good stuff. We really started right, we started playing drums. It wasn't about I'm gonna out bash you or out bash me, we started gently. At times I felt like Elvin should being playing just by himself, I would just drop out and play something else. I would pick up a percussion instrument or something like that. And there were times when he would just drop out and let me play certain things. We really started working it out. It started working out really good. Then he just left the band.

I heard that Elvin said that you didn't know what John was going to play

when he walked out onto the bandstand.

He very seldom called anything. He would just start playing, and you would hear what he was doing, what song he was playing, then we would just join him. He would just come out, and he would just start playing, and you would hear it, and start playing with him. One time in particular, the first time I ever played with him, he came out, and he started playing, and I was just standing there. I didn't know what to do and he kept playing. He turned around and went "Play," and I went "Oh," and I started playing. 'Cause I didn't know what was happening.

Elvin leaves the band.

Yeah he left the band to play with Duke Ellington. We was out in California.

That must of seemed pretty amazing.

It was because, that job didn't last Elvin but a hot second because Duke wasn't going to put up with much of that.

Yeah, it's like a mismatch.

Because Elvin at that time, was coming to the job when he felt like it. In fact that's how I got the job because sometimes Elvin wouldn't show up.

I remember he had a gig at the Symphony on Broadway. Elvin was supposed to be there at three, and he doesn't show up til five.

Sometimes you're lucky he showed at all. Jones was a dynamic drummer. He was an unbelievable drummer, and I learned a lot from him, I really did. I learned lots from most of the old cats like Max Roach and Elvin Jones and Joe Jones and Papa Joe Jones. I actually went to Papa Joe Jones for different techniques on the cymbals; the soft cymbal. I learned all that from him because Max Roach told me to go to him. Because Max Roach would go to him. I was wondering where he got it from. So I went to Max and Max said "There's no point in you coming here, go to the source." So he sent me to Papa Joe Jones. Me and his son Joe Jones Jr. we were taking lessons at the same time.

You had a place called Ali's Alley. How did you come into being a jazz club owner, and why did you want to?

It's kind of a long story. They had this live jazz thing happening now in New York.

George Braith and a couple of other cats had places.

Bond Street, Studio Rivbea, Environ. It was sort of like, when 'trane died, avant garde music died with him. When he left, the music died. Nobody could get no jobs. 'trane was the main force of this thing. He was carrying this music. When he died, Miles Davis came out with "Bitches Brew" and changed the whole scene around.

It kind of went fusion on you.

Everything got into that kind of a thing. Avant garde musicians weren't hardly playing any place. A few hand picked guys were working. In the late sixties, early seventies, 'trane died in the late sixties. Early seventies was disastrous for avant garde players. We didn't have any place to play except in a loft. So everybody just started playing in lofts. Like the Rivbea? Places like that started opening up. To make a place to play. So we all started renting out lofts and fixing them up as best we could and having sessions. Started out sessions, but

then it got to be a little two or three dollar admissions. It worked out like that. I moved down to Soho during the seventies. The landlord in the building had a place downstairs. He didn't want to deal with it. So I rented the place from him. And friends of ours painted it up and started a place to play. It escalated and turned into a full-blown nightclub actually. We kept it going like that for a while. I played there myself for the first year or so, just my group every weekend. Then my wife and I we put our heads together and said, "Lets try to make this thing work for us." We went through all the pains and closed the place up, revamped it, did everything over again. Got a liquor license. Got a restaurant license and opened back up as a club. But then that sort of took me out because I had to work behind the bar because the bartenders were killing us. They were stealing everything, man. They were putting us out of business. So I had to work as a bartender, and I had to work as a manager, and that put me out of playing for a while. Then we had other bands coming in there playing, and I had to make this thing happen so it became a club. It was working out good for us, but I really wanted to play. So Trish and I went into a huddle, and she goes, "Look, maybe you should just close the place and just start playing." So I got this tour to go to Europe. I did that and I came back, and I was really into wanting to play. So we closed the place. We had a nice successful club for four or five years.

One of the few places that was a venue where you could hear Out music. There is nowhere now. What is the state of the music right now?

The music now is making a come back, because there's a lot of different clubs that cater to the new music like Knitting Factory, The Cooler, and even some of the major clubs are behind some of the avant garde players. People like Don Cherry and David Murray sometimes get to play in some of the major clubs like Iridium uptown and Sweet Basil and even the Village Vanguard has taken on some of the newer musicians, but still they take on a lot of the newer Bebop type musicians, too, because there's a lot of young musicians that are still playing in the old tradition. They haven't really come into playing the newer type of music. Which is Okay, but I would rather see a lot of younger players concentrate more on the new music, but not to have chops, though I think they should also know about what Bird did, and they should know about what Diz did. They should have those chops. But I don't think they should try and play like that.

I think we have a problem. We have a commodification of jazz as a history piece. It's the Wynton Marsalis syndrome to some extent.

You know Wynton is a good player, but he hasn't stepped up to Booker Little. Booker Little played a different trumpet, but it was the same intensity, same kind of feel -- just like Don Cherry. These guys play the trumpet, but they sound like -- I mean, come on! You can't play better than Clifford Brown. I don't care how good a trumpet player you are, not playing that type of music. I would like to see a lot of younger musicians embracing the newer music.

It catches my eye -- a dropped coin on the pavement, the first autumn leaf.

-- -- Suzanne Noguere

-- 17 --

Latin Man: Composed to Bongos

dedicated to Guillermo Noriega, Jr.

Latin man You're like a Greek In the pleasures that you seek

And you like your women so As you sway them to and fro To a son or mambo beat Latin man You've got sweet lips And the muses love those hips They inspire Words made of fire Made of savannas of desire

Yet I wonder where you are I live with you but you are far In the tropics of the past Where you often take a rest. You deserve it, Latin man, This city has put you to the test. Like a Jesus among the poor You work where humans fall Praying for a miracle It's getting harder, Latin man, They'll nail you, if they can, And you better have a plan

Latin man, let's dance awhile Think of life on tropic isles It will all be over soon, this life, man's greed, the sun, the moon.

Let's take a road by a sparkling brook while the bongos play ticky ticky ticky took Dance with me, oh Latin man Love is lovely Life is sad.

-- -- Barbara Lekatsas

Actor

Interviewer: Thulani Davis

Nov. 6, 1994

I would like to introduce the interviewer, Thulani Davis, who will introduce our guest of honor. Thulani Davis has published two books of poems, Playing the Changes and All the Renegade Ghosts Rise. She is a novelist with a book entitled 1959. She is also a journalist who writes for many magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post Book World, Essence, and the Village Voice. Her work for the theater include The Life and Times of Malcolm X, and her adaptation of Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle, which George Wolfe directed at the Public Theater. She is this year an Artist-in-Residence at the New York Shakespeare Festival.

I am very honored to interview Billie Allen, to pick her brain about her experience in theater and performance in New York. Billie was a dancer, actress, director, producer, and an administrator. She began as a classical ballet dancer, studying at the American School in New York, and danced with a number of dance groups. She went on to perform in the Broadway musical On The Town, with Jerome Robbins. You may have seen her more recently on television, and in those years in between she's been in film and quite a bit of theater. I have seen some of her memorabilia, the most thrilling of which was when she was the Chesterfield poster girl in the early '50s. I recently saw a film of hers from 1948, Souls of Sin.

Billie, you seem to me to have been the luckiest of people in that you came to New York with a dream, you saw your dream fulfilled, and then saw all these other wonderful things that you could do that went beyond what you had imagined. Was dance your focus originally?

BA Yes, I knew I wanted to be a dancer, knew I wanted to be in theater, knew I wanted to perform. To do it all, actually. I don't feel so lucky. I feel I am just coasting, waiting, and getting ready for the biggie.

I think serendipity came into your life quite often. You were a young dancer and working in Macy's when you got a chance to do your first film appearance. How did that happen?

I was with a dance group and one of our contracts was canceled. It was near Christmas, and I knew I had to go home with gifts or they would discern that I was poor and should come home and teach. I didn't want that to happen, so I took this job at Macy's. I looked so efficient in this black dress with the white Peter Pan collar that they put me in charge of special-order carpeting. I was making my calls and doing my rounds when I got this call from a man who said he was a film producer named Bill Alexander, and he wanted me to do this film. Well, I wasn't that interested. He told me he had written it for Ruby Dee, but that she was pregnant. I told him I wasn't an actress, but he said he had to finish the film by the first of the year for tax reasons, alimony reasons, and a whole lot of reasons. He told me I would be making $175 a day. I said, "Let's talk!" Well, we did this film in a warehouse, and the young women that I worked with in Macy's signed me in and out because they didn't want me to lose my job. I split my salary with them and kept my movie job. I told the producer I wanted to be paid

in cash when I finished shooting, and I was. I've never seen this film, but my nieces in Los Angles have.

Well, I have seen it, too. It's wonderful. She's a young, very good first-time actress who turns like a dancer whenever she has to exit. It's a very interesting naturalistic drama about the potential of being corrupted in Harlem and the fast city life for people who come from the country in the '40s. I thought the film was very interesting. It is part of the archives that were discovered in Tyler, Texas, which are now called the "Missing Link" in Black film. It is an important piece linking the film of the '20s and '30s like Oscar Micheaux's films, which we have seen a lot of, and the films that came in the '50s. There was almost no independent Black film made in the late '40s, early '50s compared to what had been before and what happened since. I think it is one of a very few films that make an important link in our history.

You had a similar kind of moment in an elevator with Ethel Waters that led to a long-time collaboration.

I had been doing this television audition, and we were all in this big elevator coming down. There were a lot of Black performers in this elevator, and we were all talking. I saw Miss Waters and I was in awe of her. She said, "I am going to be doing summer stock. We are going to be traveling all around. I am looking for somebody to play my daughter. They are trying to give me this Communist, but I don't want her. How would you like to play Melissa?" I had just read Mamba's Daughters, because I was studying with Lee Strasberg at that time, looking for something for a young Black woman to do. I knew what she was talking about, but I didn't think she was talking to me. I kind of turned aside so she could get to some other actress, and she turns me around and says, "I mean you." I said, "Oh, I would like that." She said, "Call me at my hotel tonight at seven o'clock, at the Empire Hotel." So I ran home to Long Island and

Some people who were concerned told me that she liked little girls. I thought, "Oh, dear, what am I going to do!"

know you have heard a lot of things about me, and most of them are true, but remember, I know when to and who to and not you, so relax!" Well, I just thought I was going to die! All I said was, "Yes, Ma'am." I sat down, sweating, drenched, and she got out her notebook and wrote up all of her role in longhand, and we had a wonderful tour. I learned a lot from her.

You went on to do some other projects with her. You went to Berlin together?

The U.S. State Department gave Berlin a big cultural center, and we went over to dedicate it in 1957 with Eileen Farrell, Martha Graham, and the Juilliard String Quartet. It was fantastic. We were in Thornton Wilder's play Happy Journey. Wilder played the gasoline attendant. Bill Gunn played my brother. Richard Ward was in it. Vinie Burrows was my sister, and Ethel Waters was very funny. We had to go to all these concerts every night, and this huge woman had borrowed this little evening bag that was sitting right on her thumb. We were sitting in the limo and she said, "Oh, Martha Graham is a very agile woman. But I can't get excited about her. You know, Negroes have been doing pratfalls for years." We all kept very quiet, but I could never look at Martha Graham again with a straight face. I told Martha Graham this and she thought it was funny.

Tell me about making that transition from dancing to acting.

I think it is a natural transition, but I was in this show that was in Boston when Streetcar was trying out, and we all ate in the same restaurants and got to know each other. Marlon Brando, Kazan, and everybody. Kazan used to stand up in the wings and watch me dance. He was casting Camino Real, and he called me, and I did several improvisational auditions with Eli Wallach. I was enjoying it, learning a lot, and getting turned on to acting. He called me in and said, "Well, I'm not going to use you because so-and-so at the Studio will bring in a lot of Chicago money." I didn't expect to be hired and I thanked him and so forth, but he said, "I have arranged for you to have a scholarship with Lee Strasberg." I said, "Fine. Thank you very much." He said, "He's waiting for you. His secretary Mrs. Hanson is expecting you in ten minutes." So I decided I better go, and that's how that happened. I stayed with Lee a long time.

Did you keep dancing as well?

Yes, I kept dancing, and then I began acting after Miss Waters hired me. I began getting other jobs and became increasingly more interested in acting. I was in Lee's professional class. A lot of people were there, like Maureen Stapleton, Marilyn Monroe, James Earl Jones. A lot of people came and went.

That was an incredible moment in American theater, associated with some of the greatest work that has been done. Did it seem to you that this was an exciting moment with a lot of new stuff happening in the theater?

Yes, it was incredibly exciting, because of the idea of this kind of new reality, the Stanislavsky Method. We were trying all kinds of experimental things.

You grew up in Richmond, Virginia. What were your parents' names?

My mother's name was Mamie Winbush Allen and my father was William Roswell Allen. The Winbushes are very important because they were from Atlanta, you see!

You went to Hampton Institute at a very early age. How did that happen?

My mother was a teacher, and there was nothing to do but to go to school. In the summer, I would come to New York when she would go to Teacher's College at Columbia and study dance.

What did you study at Hampton?

Liberal arts, but I was really interested in psychology, because Kenneth Clark was there teaching it. I thought I was going to be a pediatrician and needed to study it. I was also interested in the theater, and Hampton had a dance group. I was baffled because I had rather sophisticated taste. My mother would bring us to New York to see theater and ballet, and the Hampton dance group was folk dancing. It was interesting but not what I wanted, and it was frustrating after a while.

When did you come to New York?

In 1948.

In those days a young woman didn't come and rent an apartment.

Oh, no. The studio clubs for women were for white women. I could only come to New York and study if I would live with friends of my parents. My sister, who was a physicist at the time, was already in New York, so we both lived with these friends of my parents who had a big co-op at 435 Convent Avenue at 149th Street, where Countee Cullen lived and a lot of exciting artists lived. Robeson, and the DuBoises lived there. We were in the middle of it. The people we lived with were big bishops in the A.M.E. church, the Bowens.

You didn't go back to Richmond?

For Christmas. My parents were very interested in our leaving the nest and doing things, getting out there, working, and finding ourselves. They were very surprised that I chose theater. My brother was very upset because he knew that he was going to be a successful, rich dentist, and he was afraid that he was going to have to take care of me.

What was the most important support or training that you parents gave you?

I always knew that I had support, love, and a home to go to. That I didn't have to put up with anything. I didn't have to take second, or in any way compromise. That was very comforting. They would come and see me perform and tell everybody in audience, "That's my daughter up there." I knew they were there for me. I felt that if this didn't work, I had a thousand other things I could do.

Today so many people don't feel that they have lots of possibilities. At that time finding work as an actress and as a Black woman was tough. There weren't that many jobs, so you needed to have some faith.

I did a lot of things. I taught at a progressive school in Queens where kids threw blocks at me and "expressed themselves." I worked in the Department of Health doing Wasserman smears. I was a buyer for an import-export company. I bought printing presses. Then I had the job at Macy's for a short while. I used to get wonderful jobs through Equity. One job was to be a mystery shopper. I would drive to a location, like the drugstore, and say, "Do you have something for itchy scalp?" If they recommended this product, Sulpher 8, then you gave them a dollar. Each day that we worked we earned fifty dollars.

What did you do with the National Negro Opera Company?

I was studying dance, and somebody called me from the National Negro Opera Company. (I later learned that my husband Luther's father was a part of it, but I didn't know him then.) They were doing "La Traviata" and looking for a prima ballerina. I was an opera buff, and this was one of my favorites. I got there and saw all these people with this bad acting, and I was embarrassed and didn't know how to get out of the production, yet I wanted to be there because it was exciting and something to do. Somebody took my photograph during one of the rehearsals and said, "I need your name in case we use this." I didn't want my name associated with it, so I said my name was Doris Blake. There it was, a big picture of me in the Post with "Doris Blake!"

I want to ask you about The Harlem Detective. I don't know if anybody has heard of it.

Harlem Detective was a television series shot live on the top of the Empire State Building. I did fifteen episodes. William Attaway, a marvelous writer, wrote a lot of the episodes. Bill Gunn and I were the ingenues. We would be sitting on a park bench, talking about deep and sensitive things, and the whole tower would be swaying! The wind would be howling, and the stagehand would be snoring. We would grip our buttocks, trying not to sway while on top of the Empire State Building! We did one special called Carmen in Harlem.

A Raisin in the Sun came along, and that was quite a different piece of theater.

Yes, because it was naturalistic and wonderful. It was about a Black family, but it was universal because it could have been about any family. I was pregnant at the time, and we did many, many auditions with Lloyd Richards, who was directing it. Then it got down to Diana Sands and me. I didn't tell them I was pregnant and wore long, bulky sweaters.

Meeting Lorraine Hansberry was exciting. I called Diana and said, "They are going to start rehearsal December 26th, and my baby is not here. I called to congratulate you because they are going to call you." Later, the baby came, and I went on standby for Diana.

How were people receiving the play?

I remember this actress, Georganne Praeger, who hung out with Wally Cox and Doc Simon. She said, "Billie, I saw Raisin, and it never occurred to me that a Black family would be so much like my own." This was shocking to me because I knew about families in Iowa, but she had no idea about me, and we were friends. I heard this a lot. It was groundbreaking, exciting because a lot of people who had never invested in theater did and got wonderful returns.

Did you get a chance to see any of Lorraine's other work?

Oh, yes. I saw all of what was produced. She was quite a writer and quite a thinker. She was a good friend of Gladys Schwartz, who was a painter and who did the line drawings of the cast that were displayed outside the theater.

Diana Sands appeared in another production you worked on, Blues for Mister Charlie, by James Baldwin.

That was at the time of the deaths of the three civil rights workers, and we were doing this play about Emmett Till, who was murdered for looking at this white woman. We were living it, and we were doing it, and we were in it. I wore

sneakers on that stage so that when people invaded us (sometimes the audience would get quite upset) I could leave. We did benefits for those civil rights workers, and there was a lot of feeling about that. We knew where we stood and we had to work together. Look at Richmond now. My mother had always been a radical woman, and she would say, "Oh, yes. I'll go to the NAACP conference. I'll speak here, I'll speak there, but nothing is going to change until there is bloodshed on our streets, and then we will understand that we need to do this."

I saw Raisin when I was a teenager. This was all very fresh for me, too, just having come from a segregated Virginia myself. The immediacy of it made me think that theater could address your immediate reality in such a way that people would get in arguments on the sidewalk. I thought the newspaper reactions to that play were extreme. We all knew James Baldwin could write, but they tried to say he couldn't write.

Blues For Mr. Charlie was very lean. No scenery, risers, a few benches. Abe Feder was the lighting designer, and it was Abe's lighting that made it happen. The Actor's Studio, one of the producers, was shocked that it did so well. They were always threatening to close it, and we would always go out and rally, getting people in there, do benefits, raise money, and keep it going.

I want to ask you about another production that was a real landmark in Black theater, Funnyhouse of the Negro, by Adrienne Kennedy. This was in 1964. That had a huge impact on future writers in the theater. Tell me how you got involved with Funnyhouse.

Theater 64 with Richard Barr, and Clinton Wilder as a production team with Edward Albee were going to do a production of this play, and they sent me a copy and called me. I met Adrienne with the director, Michael Kahn, at the Russian Tea Room. Adrienne was sitting there, looking very apprehensive. She said, "Well, what do you think of my play?" I said, "Actually, I think it is quite wonderful." She said, "Well, what do you understand from it?" I said, "I was reading along and loving the language and loving the movement. I was having such good time, not really knowing if I was understanding, but I was not caring about that because I was enjoying the words." There was a line in it: "My mother went to school in Atlanta." I knew exactly what the whole play was about. I knew who Sarah was, what her problem was. My mother went to school in Atlanta, to Spelman. My mother told me, "I'm from Atlanta. We don't do this, we don't do that. Spelman women don't do this and don't do that." When I read this line I understood why this woman is having these experiences.

You revisited Funnyhouse as a director. Tell us about that, looking at it twenty years later.

John Wolfe was producing it at the Tisch School at NYU. It was their first year in the new building. He asked me to come down and direct Funnyhouse. I had been thinking about it and felt that it had never really been finished. If you have four weeks of rehearsal, you can't do Funnyhouse in four weeks. I used students and had Carmen Moore write some music, and I scored it. I scored it like a dream, and we worked very hard. We did it in one semester, and I was very pleased with what the students did. There was one young woman who

seemed aloof, and I cast her as the queen. I went over to her one day and said, "What's the matter?" She said, "Nothing, but can I talk to you? When they told me that Billie Allen was going to direct, I thought Billie Allen was a white man. I came in and I found you and I didn't know what to think. In all of my academic career I have never worked with a Black woman in charge of anything. And besides, why did you cast me as Queen Victoria?" I said, "Because you were regal and because of your voice. You are Queen Victoria." She said, "Most people think of me as a truck driver or a bartender." I said, "Well, I think of you as Queen Victoria." So we stood there head to head, and that was worth it for me.

How did you get into directing?

James Earl Jones was in our class, and we used to go to see each other's performances and critique them. I got very interested in directing. Phillip Hayes Dean had a play at the American Place Theatre called Every Night When the Sun Goes Down, and I had done several of his plays as an actress, and we spent hours and hours talking about this. I played Cockeyed Rose in this play, and it was a wonderful character. He asked me to direct a stage reading of his The Last American Dixieland Band, and I got very interested in directing, knowing how things work, and very happy to be in charge. Then I realized that my whole life had been spent in preparation for this one particular thing. Every time I went anywhere I knew exactly where everything was, and every time I would go to a specific place I would be staging something. When I was a little girl, every time I went to this Italian garden in Richmond I would stage a wedding.

It seems as though if you get ready to do something you haven't done before, you don't languish waiting. You want to direct, you direct.

It is not so simple as that. I studied with Harold Clurman and Lloyd Richards, and I really worked at it. I usually have reams of notes before I do anything.

Recently Law and Order wanted you. How did you get into doing television?

I have done a lot of it through the years.

You were the first Black woman to do an ad on television with Vinie Burrows.

Yes, that was interesting, because I knew nothing about commercials on television.

Did you use Oxydol soap?

We were called to do this, and I walked in there and saw all these serious white people sitting around in gray suits looking very serious, and I got the giggles. But then, when I got the checks, I got serious! I realized that a lot of money is involved in it.

After my first child was born, I got this call about a comedy series called The Phil Silvers Show and they wanted me to play a WAC. I didn't know if I wanted to do that, but I went and stayed seven years. I learned so much from those guys, doing twenty-six scenes in a half an hour in front of a live audience. I learned everything about timing. I remember dialing a number on a phone, and Nat Hiken said, "What are you doing? Don't dial seven numbers, dial three!" We had to move it.

You did some of the serious drama that used to be on television, like Hallmark Hall of Fame and Omnibus.

I remember playing Eve with Earl Hyman as Adam on the Hallmark Hall of Fame in The Green Pastures with Bill Warfield.

Tell me about raising a family and trying to do this kind of work where you get a call on short notice.

Difficult. My children now say to me, "We don't see how you did it." Especially my nieces who are in film. I have to say to them that I didn't know how I did it either, but you just do. I would get home at eleven at night, check homework, do the dishes, do the laundry, learn my lines for the next day, get up, and do breakfast. It was kind of crazy.

What did you do if you were doing a film like The Wiz, or any long-term job?

I had this really great housekeeper at one time, Mrs. Weekly, who reoccurred in my life last week at Landmarks, a Harlem affair. This woman came up to me and said, "Don't I know you? Lena Weekly used to bring me to see all your plays when she was your housekeeper." This is twenty or thirty years ago.

Did any of your children follow you into the arts?

They are interested, but not really. The thing they got out of it is how difficult it was. I think it is also very wise not to follow parents into things, and they are very wise children.

Tell me about the Frank Silvera Workshop. That must have been important, considering the difficulties Black actors and directors were having in New York.

Especially writers. I was one of the founders of the workshop. We founded it as a clearing ground for Black writers, actors, directors and it was very exciting. Every Monday we read a new play and had it critiqued with Lloyd Richards or Owen Dodson. It was a very valuable time. People came from all over the country to have us read their plays. Richard Wesley was part of it; Morgan Freeman was one of the founders. We were in the Martinique Hotel.

I think it was the only place a Black writer could actually hear their plays. And hearing your play read by a professional cast was about the most important thing that could happen to a writer. It is very tough to get a hearing.

That was the point. We thought that to have this New York theater crowd hear your play, to offer a critique was very important -- feedback.

I had a friend who used to run the Black Writer's Workshop out there, and I remember it was one of the highlights of his young and very short career to be able to come there and have the top Black actors and directors do his play. The people in the audience critiquing your work would be writers, so it would be a little terrifying.

It was terrifying, but most of the time it was good times. The Women's Project was founded on such an idea. Getting womens' work out there into the mainstream.

Around what time did that happen?

In 1978. Julia Miles got the idea and founded this place for women to work in all

aspects of the theater. All together you'll find that the pioneers and the people who went ahead have been somewhat rewarded. I directed Anna Deavere Smith's first play, I, Yi, I, I'm Integrated.

You also did a piece of Adrienne's, Things That Lead to My Play, that featured Gloria Foster. There has been an awareness as you go along, not just of doing the work, but, what other people needed to do the work. You seem to have had some vision as you were going along, that "if I can do this, other people like me might do it too."

That's why I have been very careful to always lend myself. One of the young people I have mentored for years is singing with the Chicago Symphony, and she needed a gown. She came and tried on my gown. I always said that if I had a "me" when I came to New York, this is what I would want. This kind of support, like feeding, nurturing, and guiding.

Tell us more about your dancing at the Apollo.

I was a student, and I was walking with a dancer on 125th Street when this man came over and said hello to my friend. He turned out to be Mr. Shiffman, the owner of the Apollo. Mr. Shiffman said, "When are you going to bring me something?" The dancer said, "Oh, we're a team. I'll bring you an act in two weeks." I was shocked! The dancer turned to me and said, "We have to do this. Do you know how much money we'll make?" So we did. We practiced this act and presented it at the Apollo with the Jimmy Lunceford Orchestra. I went up to the orchestra leader and said, "Hello, Mr. Lunceford." He said, "Mr. Lunceford is dead; I'm so-and-so." Well, I handed him our music! That was a wild act. We opened with the minuet, and I thought they were going to stone us out of Harlem doing the minuet at the Apollo! But they loved it! We got this big review in Variety.

When I got to work with Miss Waters in that play and we were traveling, we got to the Salt Creek Theater outside of Chicago, and she said we would have to stay in Chicago because there was no place in the suburbs for Black people to stay. She did have a place for me to stay with some friends of hers, Butterbeans and Susie. Well, I thought that was a great opportunity, so I accepted the invitation and stayed at their house. They treated me like their long-lost crown jewel! It was wonderful! Butterbeans and Susie were a wonderful comedy act in the vaudeville circuit. They were a very loving and charming couple, and they had this immaculate brownstone.

How did you get to know Owen Dodson?

Through the Frank Silvera Writer's Workshop, but I knew him before that, because when I came to New York he was working at the American Negro Theatre up at the old Schomburg Library. I went to see something that he had written called The Garden of Time, with Gordon Heath.

How about Rosetta LeNoire?

I met Rosetta also in Chicago. She was doing Anna Lucasta. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and I told her so. I had worked with Hilda Sims at Hampton in Creative Writing, and she was starring in this play. Later I worked with Rosetta in her theater, the AMAS Repertory Theatre, and we worked together for quite a while. I performed and was her associate artistic

director. I am very glad I did that, because I realized I did not want to run a theater; I wanted to do all the other stuff. She is still very much in my life. I tease her by saying. "The reason I got married is so you would stop calling me up at seven-thirty in the morning." She is a remarkable woman who has had a lot of fortitude. She was my mentor in the theater. We did Take a Giant Step together on Broadway with Bill Gunn and Godfrey Cambridge. She was always there, counseling, and so forth.

Did you ever think about writing?

Yes, I'm writing now. It is painful and slow, but a lot of fun. I was inspired by your book 1959, in a way. There was one passage where you are doing the dishes, leaning against the sink, and you have water on your midriff. That connected me to you in a very odd way because I remember always having water on my midriff, leaning on the sink, daydreaming.

I decided to write about growing up in Richmond, about things I have always wanted to share, and to put it down for my children, mostly. I have a very good friend, a Black woman who said to me, "I had no idea what it was like being a Black woman in the south until I met you." When I came here and was meeting other Black teenagers, they thought that I picked cotton in the morning, then got on the truck and went somewhere. I thought I just better write this!

It seems to be another way of giving us something that we need. I am happy to hear about it. Do you still act?

I don't do it regularly, but I'm looking at some things that I want to do as an actress. I want to experience my maturity onstage. When I started I was always the kid. Now I'm the grandmother, the mature person, and I'd like to experience this in a wonderful role on the stage, as an actress. I feel I have some things to say.

I get disturbed by the lack of roles for Black actresses over thirty-four. We need to be writing plays that talk about being in the middle years and getting to the full strength of fifty.

When I think of the perception of younger people about me, it's hilarious. But I remember also, when I was working with Ethel Waters, my mother had died and my father was going to remarry. One day I said to her, quite out of the blue, "Miss Waters, do you think that sixty-five-year-old people have sex?" She laughed and said, "Well, I don't know, but I imagine they do something!" Then I went to visit my parents and saw my stepmother in this baby doll nightie, and I knew that.... But I really felt stupid! Now I know I was stupid!

Tell us about your trips to Beijing and Tokyo.

One thing about this work, it affords a lot of travel, and I've enjoyed that. When my husband was going to Tokyo, I got a letter of introduction to this wonderful theater performer, Kahara Kisaragi. She came over immediately to the hotel and took me to rehearsal with her group, and we worked together while I was there. She invited me to her parents' home for tea ceremonies and we saw each other almost every day and had long conversations.

You studied Kabuki and Noh?

We did some workshops and it was exciting. Sitting next to me on the plane going over was some guy who wanted to practice his English on me, and he

talked nonstop for about nine hours. I was very happy because this man got me into the Noh theater and had me invited to the robing, which women don't usually get to do. It made me think again about Bearden and rituals and the prevalence of ritual. This bathing, dressing, and doing. I went to a rehearsal of the Kabuki Theater, which most people can't do.

How did you meet Luther Henderson?

I first met him at an integration showcase that Equity did in 1948. They are still doing it and it still ain't happening! He was musical director, and his then-wife called me and said, "Oh, I hear you are a wonderful actress, and I'd like to do a scene with you." I went over to their house and I met him very politely and superficially. Then we became friends, and the kids visited each other back and forth. We were buddies for a while, and then his wife died and I helped him with his daughter. A few years after my divorce he invited me to go to a party for Judy Garland. Several years later I went to see his daughter singing somewhere in the Village, and there he was. We have been working together at marriage and work ever since.

You have collaborated together on Little Ham, a musical from the Langston Hughes play, The Crystal Tree.

The Crystal Tree started the week we got back from our honeymoon. Samm Art Williams was doing this musical, and he pulled out. Rosetta LeNoire was heartbroken. Luther said, "Oh, I have something, maybe." So we did The Crystal Tree, a musical that Luther wrote. The cast knew Luther as a strong person in the theater, but they didn't know me as a strong person in theater. There was a lot of mutual respect and I think it worked well. I soon learned that I couldn't get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, because he would hear me walking and would say, "I found out how to fix the first act!" It is three o'clock in the morning, and he is parading in the living room, banging on the piano, fixing the first act, and we wouldn't get back to bed! From then on I decided that I couldn't get up to go to the bathroom!

In terms of what you have seen in the theater, and what you see going on now, where are we headed?

I see us moving into the next phase. I can see from some of the work that's going on that nobody is asking for mercy, nobody is stopping at the stoplights. They are going straight ahead. Of course, we know that there is nothing new under the sun but the next cycle. We are waiting for the next cycle. We are waiting for the concepts to bring us forth. I think that we have gone about as far as we can go in certain respects and that we need to start thinking and not trying to make the buck to win it, to get the prize, to get the good review. I think we are going to see some really solid theater now because we having been fooling around for a while.

I think also there are so many people with real solid skills. They come more prepared in some ways, maybe less experienced in life experience, but more prepared with all the training that we all got on the job. I think there is some ground for mixing your skills and experience, and then the new skills.

I am very excited about the new playwrights that I have met. I just can't wait for

them to bring it about. We are all waiting to catch the baby, because we know what to do with it.

How did you get that first role in the film when you were working at Macy's?

The director was called Bill Alexander. Bill Greaves was in it. I can't remember how I got it. I was a known dancer at that time, a known presence in New York theater, but I had no idea that he would know anything about me, so I was very surprised when he called. Someone must have suggested me.

You said that your children shouldn't follow their parents' professions. Did you mean that?

I don't really feel that. I was being facetious. They didn't follow exactly in the profession. My daughter once said to a friend of hers, "I know how you feel about going to church because my mother is always dragging me to the theater!" I heard my son say to a friend, "Don't talk to my mother; she's preparing." My children were wonderful. We would be all packed up in the car to go on a vacation, and mommy would get a sudden audition and we would all drive back into town. I would do the audition,and we would all drive on to where we would be going. I explained to them that this wasn't always what I wanted to do, but that I had to look at the larger picture and think about health benefits! I remember my son was doing a television show with me and he didn't want to go back the next day because it was too much work. I told him that he would make enough money in one day to buy a Schwinn bicycle. He said, "Oh, let's go." I think it has made them stronger in many ways and much more sensitive.

Cancer

Is the land eroding beneath the house? We do not know. The sea keeps washing in, & currents dark below push sand & land, so while the house looks steady on its piles, it just may be that rot has numbered its days, & in a storm, a single wave will topple it -- dragging out to sea the boards and bones that were our mighty house by the shore.

And there is more. When my husband sleeps at night, I lie beside him, holding his dear back, feeling the satin soft skin which hides inside cells dividing at a furious pace. His face is still his face, his body slender but still his body, his eyes brown and liquid. He is my husband, but he's embarked on a mysterious journey & I am still packing my bags to accompany him, though already he's out past the shoreline with the screaming gulls and rotting seaweed.

If I call and call, he'll turn and smile & the best I can do is blow him a kiss.

-- -- Victoria Sullivan

Visual Artist

Interviewer: bell hooks

November 13, 1994

Part I

Emma Amos is important to us not just because of the really compelling work she's doing right now, but because she spans a period of time where we have a great dearth of knowledge and awareness about the presence of women artists, and African American women artists in particular. It amazed me, when I first met Emma and saw her work, that she had so much of it. I would think that everybody in the world would be craving to have an Emma Amos work right now. There will be a period of time when people will be searching for Emma Amos's works as people begin to understand the value and importance of it. Emma says that every time she thinks about color, it's a political statement. Did you always feel that way, Emma?

No. I think I did what a lot of figure painters do, which is to paint what they wish or want. I remember the first time I noticed that I wasn't painting what I really knew was when I realized that I made all my figures much darker than I was. That's because I had internalized Blackness. I always felt like a Black artist, and I felt that I should only depict Blackness.

Why did you feel that way?

I don't know. The comment was made when I was a member of Spiral in the '60s. Spiral was a group of Black painters which included Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, and Hale Woodruff. Hale had invited me to the group, and somebody said, "I don't know why you guys always paint figures darker than you are." If you remember, Bearden was so white that if you saw him on the street you would have thought he was Khruschev. That's who he looked like. You never would have known that he was Black unless he said he was Black, and of course he did.

Do you think it had anything to do with the expectation of the white-looking audience? It was one of the ways to register that "I am an artist coming from an African American background." I especially think of someone like Romare Bearden.

I think that's the answer. We both are Black and artists, and we are confused because we are "Black" artists. Every artist who is Black or a person of color is probably aware of color as more than just the medium in which they work. I once said to my friend Claire Moore, who was a wonderful white painter who died five years ago, "it must be a luxury to be able to paint all those pink people and never to have to think about what color to make people." As a figure painter, and a Black figure painter, what are you going to do? Just paint Black people? Then that's negating my color. If I painted people all my color, then who the hell am I talking about? It has to come into your work from the get-go.

Why do you think that people have just begun to talk about the question of color? To be able to think critically about what it means when white artists have traditionally been able to use Black subjects whenever they wanted to, but when Black artists decide to use a range of subjects, that's called into

question.

I did a lot of research on white artists doing Black figures because it related so much to that question about people not accepting the white figures in my work. I remember someone looking at my work at the Newark Museum, and saying, "That's your daughter, right?" They couldn't accept that it could be me painting a white person. If it was somebody in my family that would be all right. But if it were me making a comment about a white person, that's a no-no. That forced me to ask if white artists had any strictures against painting Black people, and the answer is "No, Honey! Not one little bit!"

It strikes me as being very similar to the kind of hegemony male artists have had over the female nude. If we were to look at the whole way that males have exercised a certain kind of artistic license in terms of the female body, we can't see that registered in women doing male nudes of any ethnicity, and certainly we can look at people like Romare Bearden and see how much the dark-skinned Black female nude figures in his work. I was interested to see those early paintings that you did while you were in Spiral, because you were working with the Black female nude. Can you talk about grappling with the nude body, and now as you come into your power and into greater awareness, that you would in fact give us the white male nude body. How many Black women artists have felt like they could even think about doing white male nude bodies?

Perhaps many. I did a few images of Black women nudes, and they had to be out of my head because I never, ever, once in art school had a Black female nude model. Of course that doesn't stop an artist from changing a model's race. The point I want to make about doing my research is that I realized that artists in Europe used Black models because either they were slaves or they were cheap. A good artist can transpose a figure from Black to white, just like that. Even if the body type is wrong, even if you have the high buttocks that a Black athlete would have and the head shape, you can look through the picture books and see it, and then you can see it transformed into the painting that white artists made, sometimes turning that figure into a white figure. I knew that all of that was possible, but in the work that I was doing when I did those few tentative Black nudes, I couldn't be comfortable with it. I did not want to see Black women with no clothes on. It means something else when a Black woman has no clothes on.

Well, girlfriend, please talk about what it means!

It means that you are for sale. It means that you are a whore. It means that you have "got no class." It means all those things, and I was not going to buy into it. I don't think that there are very many Black men (except for what we are seeing now with gay Black men trying to show who they are) who are able to do the photographs that Mapplethorpe did. Because it's a downer. You are somebody for something.

I think you are talking about how it is so sad and amazing the way Black artists must still confront a colonization of the imagination. There is an emptiness for us not to have those images of the nude Black body, male and female. Not to have a range of those images. So the question

becomes how do you work with those images in a way that does not reproduce the paradigms of domination, the body for sale, the body that is positioned in a voyeuristic way?

I am dying over the phrase "colonization of the mind," because I think that is so true. We can always be misread. I love misreading Colescott, and I have been misread. I learned that there was a payback, and I could be punished for the act of the curator who chooses not to exhibit those of my paintings with white figures when I show in a public space. It doesn't happen to me in a private gallery, but I have had very few private gallery shows in the first place. In my show "The White Blue Yonder" in the Newark Museum in 1990, the paintings show mostly Black figures falling. Then I overheard Black people coming into the gallery saying, "Why is she pitching Black folks through the air?" If you interpreted everybody as being Black, that meant I was showing a negative thing happening to Blacks, and that was not what I intended. In my studio I showed white people falling, I showed western civilization pitching through the air. I showed the Colosseum and Greek statues falling through the air, and I said we are losing everything because of AIDS, racism, homelessness, and by not caring, by Republicanism, by voting for Newt Gingrich.

What keeps coming up in your work which is particularly fascinating is the whole way in which both the marketplace and curatorial practices, to some extent, place boundaries on not only what artists from marginal groups create, but how that work can be seen. How it can be judged. The fact is that I often get annoyed when I don't see your work in all the places that I feel it should be. Even in African American museums, like the African American museum in Tampa, we see the politics of gender, having a lot to do with Black women's art especially. There are two worlds that an artist Inhabits: the world of your own dedication to your art practices, and then that world of the marketplace and the curatorial space, which is to say, how can you feel that you've arrived, that you have succeeded as an artist? What's the place of fulfillment? Where does it reside?

It resides in the reflection on your value to your peers. I don't get any sense of play from the broader art world. The gallery world is not interested in me.

Why? Are you not trendy enough?

I have been here a long time and have been dissed or dishonored for a very long time. When I came out of England with my degrees and I moved to New York from Atlanta, I walked around with my prints and tried to get a job at the Art Student's League and Pratt. I was twenty-three years old and I had no idea that those guys were probably looking at me, laughing, "I can't believe that little girl came in here, and she's Black!" They didn't have any women teaching, so I was an absolute idiot for going around. But I didn't know that. When I was in Belaggio, Italy, last year there was a whole table of these Rockefeller scholars who said, "What does it feel like to be a Black woman and have everything?" So, you are damned if you do, and you are damned if you don't.

It is interesting that you were the only woman in Spiral, and I want you to talk about whether you think it would have been more sustaining for you not to have occupied that position of the solitary woman, but if there had been

more women in the group itself. Why do you think there was not a concern to have more women?

I am amazed that they wanted any. They wanted the token one, and they wanted a young one who had no voice. If you think about who they could have chosen from then: Faith Ringgold, and Vivian Browne (who was an absolute peer and should have been in Spiral). So they went around and they chose a kid who was twenty-five and posed no threat to them whatsoever.

Did you understand that at the time?

I did on the level that I thought, "I bet they think I'm going to get lemonade and make coffee and take the notes." The first thing I did was I said, "I'm sorry babes, but I ain't doing none of that!" I took part in all of the discussions, and I did not ever lift a broom. I did not do any of those things. It probably came as a shock to the men that I wasn't willing to "do" for them. Otherwise, why would they have invited me if that wasn't what they thought when there were women artists who were their seasoned equals?

Given all of the ways of the marketplace in the art world and the hegemony, sexism, and racism, what do you think has sustained you in your art making? I know one of the ways that you certainly serve as a mentor for me, as someone I look up to, is the sense of a continuum of discipline and dedication to your work. I am interested in what sustains that will to create in the midst of not having the rewards that often affirm people and allow them to keep creating.

I think that I look to people like Elizabeth Catlett and to the women artists that I read about and found out about. If you could just live long enough, the hope is that somebody will finally pay attention to you. The pressure to do my work, I don't know where that comes from. I have had it since I was eight years old.

I think you are absolutely right. I think that if you had died twenty years ago, we would know very little about you. We wouldn't know anything about your presence in Spiral because there would be none of those Black men that we could go talk to. It is so parallel to the experience of African American writers up until the '60s and '70s.

One of the things that I feel about being your friend is the sisterhood of having to push all the time. I went through Cornell West's new book, Race Matters, looking for bell's name, and it is not in there, not once. Now, this is after he had written a book with her. In his whole discussion of intellectuals, he could not bring himself to mention her name one time. How many of you count the number of women who are in shows? How many of you look in the backs of the books to see whose names are in there? If you don't do it, then you are not really thinking about what's going on.

I also think that people really minimize the degree to which reward does increase your zeal to create. I think that people try to act like it doesn't matter, particularly the white male-canonized people who get it the most. For my own self, I have seen throughout my whole writing career that the more I am rewarded and recognized, the more I want to work, the more I want to produce. I think that we have to break down that false assumption that there isn't anything meaningful in being acknowledged and recognized

because there is something concrete that happens when you are acknowledged, affirmed, and recognized. It gives you a sense that there is more reason to keep working. I think I would write as you would make art, whether we were recognized or not, but I would work under both conditions, and I know the difference. That it is harder to keep going and to sustain yourself. I think it is very telling that it took me seven years to write Ain't I A Woman?, and that book was rejected many times because race was not the "in" topic when I first wrote it. The fact is that I now am producing book after book after book in a world where I clearly have readers. I would like you to talk about what people need to do. I think people need to buy the work of women artists. It isn't enough to simply admire the work, but it is important to exhibit the work, to buy it, to show it. In the book-writing world we well know that you sell more books if Emma reads my book and then shares it with ten to twenty friends who then share it. It sort of spirals. I think the same thing can happen in the world of art making. When people come to my house, and I am certainly trying to build a collection of your work, people say, "Who is this? I didn't know her work." It creates this whole thing. What are the conditions that must exist for the advancement of the work by artists from all kinds of marginal groups, but specifically African American women artists?

I think that everyone has to practice being a collector. I'm a collector, and I learned this from Benny Andrews. By looking at Benny's loft, I was amazed. That was about fifteen years ago, when I discovered that it was within my power to collect as well. Every time I sell something I buy something. If you don't collect anything, then you shouldn't be sitting here, because the air doesn't nurture artists. It's ownership, and for artists it's knowing that somebody wants something that you have.

I have this new book on art that is coming out that has essays on Emma and lots of other women artists. I did not grow up in an environment where people bought art. I learned to appreciate art, and I started out as a painter. Of course, my working-class parents tried to squelch that desire in any way to be a painter, precisely because they did not see a source of income. The first piece of art that I bought by an African American woman artist was your work "Falling House," which is out of the "Falling Series," which I talk about as very much being expressive of post-modernism, of the sense of fragmented identity of the world being out of control. I felt that through you and through other women artists like Clarissa Sligh and Camille Billops, I had to learn that it is important to buy specific artists. I also thought I wasn't in the right class to do that. Maybe if you are from a working-class background there is a sense of modesty about grabbing stuff. But then I remember all those white people who used to come to my grandmother's house and had no trouble saying, "Annie, I'll give you five dollars for this on the wall." All these little artifacts of our life that had been handed down from slavery, many of them were simply sold by my grandmother to white people who came and who offered her money for those things. Yet we would have been raised to think of that as a very

violating, invasive thing to do. So it seems like we have a lot of work to do in sifting out ways of thinking about how we should respond to art. I think that there are a lot of us from working class and poor backgrounds who still think of art as this kind of sacred untouchable space. Not as a space of collecting.

It's true. I grew up in Atlanta where we had a huge collection of books. My parents loved books, and we had some friends who were artists. Hale Woodruff was a friend of my parents. My parents had a little bit of art. I remember that we would go into other people's houses in Atlanta who had Cadillacs, pink carpets on the floor, French provincial furniture and not even a magazine in the house. So, I think that in buying art you first have to want to read books, then look at art. I don't think that there is any way to jump it. Unfortunately, buying art in this culture is an elitist activity. The only way to not make it an elitist activity is to shell out some bucks when somebody has got some work to sell.

It is interesting that a lot of the young Black women artists who are receiving attention are not painters -- they are photographers, and people who mainly do installations. I find that interesting because we know that there is still a hierarchy in place in the art world, where when it comes to those individual men who are on the rise, it is important to paint. Why do you think that is? What do you think is happening with African American women painters in general? Certainly you raised Vivian Browne's name. Clearly, many people in this room have not heard of her, have not seen her work. What's going on there?

Painting is going through kind of a bad time because media has entered into everybody's idea of what should be the cold hard edge. But I believe that artists can use media in their work. I'm certainly using it in my work. I believe that media, particularly photography, lies, and that you can make it lie a lot faster than you can make a painting lie. People assume that paintings lie all the time, so when you combine it with photographs, which we know can be altered to the last little degree, you get that hot look. The women artists whom you are talking about, who have reached a public, are using the photograph. I am thinking of Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and Clarissa Sligh. That work looks "hot" because it's using the media image that we are all plugged into.

Even though you just evoked an older woman artist, Clarissa Sligh, in fact her work has not received any where near the acclaim of Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson. Contrary to what the Time magazine told us, instead of being free at last, it seems that the Black artist has become more commodified in the sense of, it's not enough for your work to have power, you also must have a kind of personal charisma that white people are seeking, that white consumers want to be close to.

Yes, absolutely! But I've lived through the media saying that this is a Black renaissance. I've seen it at least three times. I was in a Newsweek article in the '70s where they said, "Oh, it's coming back! The Black Renaissance is coming back!" It happens every ten years, and all I think that it engenders is resentment from the white world. I must say something about the "Black Male Show." I think that it will be similar to what the Whitney did when they had the "plantation" room on the first floor. Maybe every fifteen years the Whitney will have a big

thing, and it's unfortunate that this one doesn't have any of the wonderful images that we know are out there, like artists like Tony Barboza, Kerry Marshall, Mel Edwards, and Clarissa. Michael Kimmelman gave us a list, too, in his review in the New York Times.

It's very interesting, because I think it has so much to do with the question of audience, because I remember when I first met this grand diva of African American art, and of art in general, Elizabeth Catlett. I was speechless, and I didn't even feel like I could call her Elizabeth. I realized how much it meant to me, one who has appreciated her work, but to see her in the flesh and to be able to talk to her, it just reminds you again of how legacies are made, how people recognize that this art-making practice is something we can do, and it is not an insignificant thing to be present. It matters a great deal that one can have a show like the one at the Whitney, where so many incredible African American artists, who have worked with the Black Male Show not for a hot minute, but through time, through a whole continuum of an artistic vision, are not recognized or seen. What I think happens in that process, and what I would like you to talk about, is what I see as the white mainstream art world negating the continuum of a historical legacy of African American art making, and it makes it seem always as though there is no tradition, no cultural legacy that we all come out of, but that there is a magical lone individual who sort of springs up out of nowhere. If you look at the age of most of the African American artists represented in that show, they basically are between thirty and forty. What that does to the viewer who comes is give them a sense that African American art is like really new. People are just beginning to think about the Black male body. What about these long continuums of people who have worked with the Black male body? I think these are the things that are dangerous. What do you think about that? I think there is always a tension between the preservation of the sense of a historical legacy and a continuum, and an opening up the space for new artists to appear on the scene, for there to be a diversification of who receives attention and power.

I was thinking when you were talking about Jake Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and Norman Lewis (in his figurative work from the WPA period) and how their work is about a time in history when we cared about history and that the new work is not at all about that, so there is something about newness for its own sake that negates. It is the culture that buys into newness. If you think about the 1994 elections, and the way they negate anything that was past or present, the broom said sweep everybody out no matter who they were. That is exactly the same thing that is happening in this particular exhibition that we are talking about. Newness for its own sake.

Except for Leon Golub's work in the Black Male Show, which I find to be quite uninteresting, and I am quite a fan of some of Leon Golub's work. That particular piece that he did on Black men I think is not at all interesting when one would think about it in light of Romare Bearden's work with the Black male body, in light of many other people we could name. What I was fascinated by is that this show doesn't actually subvert the tendency to

always enshrine the canonized white male artist because it does that as well, it just places those artists alongside the younger Black and gay artists that it wants to bring into visibility. But what it does do is continue the silencing of a continuum of African American artists working with a subject. Are we being petty here?

No, I think that the concept that Jerilea Zempel and I were talking about earlier this week, of a museum, having to make sure that the work that the trustees own is seen on the walls in another context, would explain why there would be a Golub, etc. In other words, the trustee doesn't own Elizabeth Catlett's work. The trustee may not own Mel Edwards' work. When you start talking about the mechanics of ownership and the mechanics of what work gets put in a show, it is something on that order. We can't have a picture of what's really going on or who has really done work because you've got to take into consideration how a museum works.

It also seems to me that if we lived in a world where everyone had available to them an understanding of the art practices and art making traditions of diverse African American artists, then it really wouldn't matter so much. I think the fact is that we haven't really changed how we are educated. The Eurocentric biases that govern the teaching of art continue, so that there is still a way in which so much work by African American artists is rendered invisible. Not based on the quality of that work at all, often just based on the ignorance of the public so that, to me, there is still a political commitment that museums have to make to inclusion that is not about shows that involve a certain kind of tokenism, but that actually involve a respect for tradition, for continuum, for a historical legacy. I think that there are people who would say to me, "Well, why are you so obsessed with Emma Amos?" Which I think is an important question, because I think it is important for us to name why be obsessed with an Emma Amos? To me, why be obsessed with Elizabeth Catlett? Why not be obsessed with the people that have made it possible for us to be here? For me to think of myself as an artist, there has to be an Emma Amos, there has to be an Elizabeth Catlett. Talk a little more about your own sense of strongly identifying yourself as an artist in a world where young Black female children aren't being told that this is what you should grow up and become.

Growing up in Atlanta, I showed at the Atlanta University Annuals. They were started by Hale Woodruff and by Aaron Douglas. In those shows the first-prize winner every year was a sculptor named Jewel Simon. She was just an Atlanta artist, and I thought she was a goddess! My ignorance of the dynamics of being a woman artist was huge. I had no idea that women artists would not be equal to male artists, but there is a definite schism between women artists and male artists, and there is a definite schism between Black male artists and Black female artists, and there is schism between white male artists and white female artists. It goes across the board. What one group gets the other group is not necessarily going to get. I will repeat: when I give a list of names of artists, I mention men and women. When men give a list of artists, I think they mention themselves.

It is really interesting to think about where do we get a sense of aesthetics in art? I was writing in my new book on art about the fact that one of the ways I learned a sense of aesthetics as a poor working-class kid in the south was from the church. What was interesting to me is that our sense of art making was that it was a gift from the Divine to be an artist. I think that's part of why I did not have a sense that it was gendered. Whenever anybody in our little world of segregated, racial apartheid had a gift, it was considered that you would uplift the whole race with this gift. If a female had that gift, you were made to feel like, "You, too, have on you the weight of uplifting the race." Not uplifting the gender, but if you could play the piano, if you paint, whatever you did in art practices, you were to do for the glory of your people. I think what's interesting is how much that segregated world created this space of oppositional aesthetics where, rather than thinking, "O my God, we are not white men! We can't do it!" we were made to feel like we could do everything, and that all of these things were available to us. I am often saddened when I see the young children now in the integrated schools who early on learn all these things -- that there are barriers, that white men really keep you down. Sometimes I am so glad that I didn't learn that because I felt that I could paint. I felt I could do all of those things, and it never occurred to me when I was reading Emily Dickinson that she was this little white WASP that could make it, but I wouldn't be able to. Don't you think that a lot of that segregated world we came out of had a lot to do with empowering us to create?

It certainly did. I witnessed that growing up in Atlanta where we had a complete separate community. The schools that we went to, the restaurants that we went to, the theaters we went to, etc. There were five or six colleges in Atlanta where all of the intellectual life flowed through Atlanta. That's why I didn't have a sense that I was going to fail or that it was possible that I wasn't going to be supported. It's as if I could go back to before I was sixteen-years-old when I left Atlanta and go back to that cocoon; it would be the same. But I want you to know that in Atlanta, Auburn Avenue is as dead as a doornail! Where my father's drugstore and my grandfather's drugstore were are nothing but shells now. There is no genuine pride in a Black intellectual art world or anything like it in Atlanta anymore because it was killed by desegregation. Now, desegregation was wonderful, but I remember specifically when the Black community lost it. One of my friends said, "You know, I can go down to Rich's department store and get my hair done." And they stopped going to their Black hairdressers. They stopped going over to Auburn to the three or four restaurants that were over there. All those businesses failed. My father's drugstore had to close in 1968 because people were taking their prescriptions to the Rexall, which was the white drugstore, because now they were being served there. So, in many ways we lost a lot, and that sense of being and getting died right there.

What we then have to talk about and envision is what is going to alter, what is going to be the empowerment now for young Black boys and girls dreaming of being artists who are not going to come out of that

background. That is why I think it is important for them to see an Emma Amos. If I could, I would put you in all these schools so that people could say, "Yes, yes, that can be me! I can do that."

It is not going to come from being considered a twofer. It is not going to come from being considered a Clarence Thomas, where you are the only one, and where you have to go and whine. It is going to have to come from this commitment to doing what you do without having to say "it's because I never had anything." That wasn't in our vocabulary when we were growing up. There must be people who remember, as I do, that it wasn't this way twenty five years ago. All of a sudden now we are carrying the burden of being embarrassed for succeeding or even trying. We are also faced with a total lack of memory that we have achieved things over a long period.

One of things that the Time magazine article did that was so troubling was to tell us about, the Black people who just don't do Black subjects are somehow a measure of how free we are. What really struck me about that was that that whole insistence that greatness lies with leaving your culture behind is in itself a lie and a myth, and if people buy into that we certainly will end up with emptiness. In fact, if we look at Romare Bearden, we see his own evolution as somebody who finally realized that if he was going to find true magic in his art-making practices, it was going to be, "how will I take all the tools that I have learned in school and use them to make an art that alters fundamentally the representation of reality?" I think whenever we place Black people at the center of our imaginative process within white supremacy, we alter reality. Tell me, Is your retrospective show at the Studio Museum going to travel?

It has travelled, so it's ending at the Studio Museum. It started at Wooster College Museum of Art a year and a half ago.

Q: I hear Black people are separating themselves from white people in an effort to get recognition. I hope that it will peak and that things will smooth out so that everybody is judged for their art, no matter what color they are. You say that white artists can paint Black men and can get recognition for that. I think that has all to do with novelty, and that ties in with the results of the elections, which is that Americans want something new.

I would like to address the thing of separating and trying to get somewhere by separating. Absolutely! It is both a negative and a positive. I just said that the Atlanta that I grew up in was successful because we were separate, and that meant that our institutions worked for us. I can give you an example of where, when there is a large white institution, it does not necessarily work that the unit that is Black within gets any power. That example would be WAC, which was the group of feminists who met in New York City for about two and a half years, and which ended a year ago. I remember all the energy that went into it, and then they looked around and said, "Oh! This is a feminist group, and there are no Black people." So they called and said, "Why are you not there?" Well, I had been invited at the very beginning, but I said, "I don't want to be invited after you have met. Who wants to be an afterthought? I don't want you to look around and say, `There are no Black people.'" So a Black unit had to be formed, because one Black person cannot stand up and take on a huge white group. It

is not possible to succeed as "the only one."

But don't you think that one of the messages that young Black artists were given by the Time magazine piece, and by the artists that were chosen (I think particularly of Martin Puryear), was that, "you will succeed better if you try to disassociate yourself from Blackness." If you try to present yourself as this pure artist who isn't thinking about race and gender and those mundane topics, but is only thinking about your transcendent work, which of course is not even true to Martin Puryear's career, because he damn well knew when he was in Africa that he was learning things out of African diaspora tradition, so it's not even that he as an artist himself negates the impact of Africanness on his work, it's the way the white critical world reacts. If they see a piece of his and it doesn't have Black written all over it, it must mean that, therefore, Blackness doesn't have any meaning for him in his life. Which of course is absolutely not true. To send this message seems to me to be about making us think that you do get it as an individual. That if you try to act in solidarity with other people, whether as a woman or as a Black person, that is a negation of a true commitment.

I don't like that. I don't like the thought that you could only get it as an individual. I think it is a lie. If I'm going to get anything, I want four other people to get it with me. I'm going to take Vivian Browne with me everywhere I go. I am not going to leave her behind. She may have been in the ground for a year, but she's coming with me because we were together at one point, and she's always going to be there, and anybody else that I see I can drag along as I make my two little steps. I am not going to do anything just for myself. I am not just this single person.

Q: The creative energy of the Black community is a bottomless pit, and it is perceived as a great threat. It must be held at bay, and it must be neutralized in some way. I don't think that it is any accident that the public education system has been allowed to collapse. Black people have been greatly disabled by the collapse of the public education system, and that puts something of a cap on those creative energies. Secondly, I have a bit of a problem with the notion that Emma's preoccupation with color possibly has a layer to it that was about colonization. I have a real problem with that because I think that preoccupation is one of the sources of the originality of her artistic vision, and it is also a source of one of the enriching elements in the work. It is part of the insurgency in the work. It is one of things that makes the work rich. The thing about color is one of the driving themes, it seems to me.

But I don't think that was the point that was being made about colonization. The point about colonization was that, yes, while it can be that expansive possibility if it hounds you in a way that it limits what you do, it doesn't serve to open you up, it closes you down.

Q: I don't feel in Emma's work, or in most of the work of the Black artist I have never felt that as a limiting aspect.

I think concretely when Emma was saying, "When I paint I become so self-conscious at a certain point about certain figures that would not get me

in a show." That is saying that it is serving the function of repression and not opening you up. It is no accident that Black gay male artists can display the Black nude body in a way that is still not available to straight Black men because it has a lot to do with the fact that there is a large consuming, monied white gay male art audience that can support and affirm this display in this way. Where is the large Black population that's clamoring to see all kinds of straight Black male nudes and consuming those and putting them in their living rooms? That means that a Black straight male artist who might want to do nudes of Black men might think twice about doing that if they were really interested in selling and displaying work.

I always ask who the work is for. The answer to the question for me is the one that Toni Morrison gives, and that is, "I want to do work that I want to see, and that I don't see anywhere." I feel that I get power from comments about people of all kinds of colors. I did a whole bunch of work which I didn't talk about, but it was in some of the slides that you saw about Native Americans and about the fact that I am part Cherokee. But I don't know anything about it, and I am interested in it, so I have done a whole bunch of work about Indians in this country. I have done work about other parts and parcels of my family, and other families. I think it is powerful to be able to write a story that is a mystery to everyone, but if you realized that the narrative is going to keep you out of the only venue that you have that is open to you, then there is a little nasty devil that's sitting on your shoulder saying, "You can do that, Honey, but ain't nobody going to show it!"

Q: But that devil is not coming from the preoccupation with the color. It is coming from somewhere else. Do you consider yourself a post-modernist? I personally see you as a modernist.

I don't know that those labels really go very far. I think it's nifty to have such a hot-sounding label, but I don't know that it really applies because I don't know that even in hindsight I wanted to call myself an abstract expressionist. I was at one point for about six months! But then there is no word for what it is that I do.

I think as a critic it is important because I think that if I were Emma's agent a lot of people would say, "Well, her work is dated." The importance of terminology is, yes, there is a modernist influence in your work that we can chart, but it is important to also talk about how the post-modern world that we are in has influenced your paintings. There is a reason why you are doing those "X" paintings now and not ten years ago. There is a reason why that flag can be what it is now, and part of that is post-modernism. I think that if we can't contexualize her in that way, then we become a part of that silencing apparatus that would keep her like some relic from the past and not acknowledge the degree to which you have developed as an artist within the milieu that you live in. One of the dilemmas for all African October 6, 1995 American artists, and that includes highly successful ones like Carrie Mae Weems, is that we do not have enough African American art critics contextualizing in a sophisticated and excellent way what is happening. Even if you take someone like Carrie Mae Weems - I was

astounded when I did the new piece for her catalogue, and I read all the stuff that had been written about her work. It was so mediocre and so mundane, and I am talking about the stuff that comes out of a mainstream art world. We are talking about an incredibly successful young Black woman artist, but the fact is until art criticism about the work of African American artists achieves the level of excellence of the art itself, we are always going to be moving backwards.

The general review of my work is, "Oh, Lord, isn't it interesting that that woman is still working?!" There was article after article as my retrospective went around the country saying, "Oh, it is so interesting that this is a Black woman who is doing work!" Never any recognition of the subject matter of the work or of any critical response to the work. That's what's happening to Carrie Mae Weems, I assume.

Q: To reach an authenticity as a Black person in your work, do you find that you ever catch yourself doing stuff that you know is not real to yourself?

No, it doesn't happen to me, even though I went to art school in England, to NYU, to Antioch, and all that that implies. Growing up in Atlanta, I lived with the Hale Woodruff murals and with the art that I saw. Our models were the Black intellectuals, and I really had a two-level teaching influence. I saw the murals at FISK and A.U. and the work of godfather George Shivery, whose photographs (really snapshots) I have used since his death. He was a painter and a sculptor. His teacher was Arshile Gorky, but that was after George had gone to Mexico and studied the murals of Rivera and Orozco, and he had taught himself. When I was in his house in Queens, his walls were covered with both Mexican-influenced murals and paintings that were memories of the sawmills in Louisiana; the works were an amalgam. I grew up on that, and I used to look at them and be amazed at the power. When I saw Norman Lewis's work I knew that it was from the same period. Hale Woodruff, Romare Bearden, and all of those people had the same kind of thing. I just wished I had known about Augusta Savage. I had to read about her myself. I was never taught about her or any other Black women artist. There were big gaps, but I am not filtered through the European experience except in technique.

The fact is that we learn from Eurocentric knowledge. One of the examples that I always give is of Louis Armstrong. Sure, he is playing a European instrument, but what's compelling is what he did as an African American man with that instrument. I don't think that the key for us in authenticating Blackness is to deny that we are fundamentally western and that we are influenced by Europe, but we are also influenced by the African diaspora, and the point is that we can lay claim to all of those multidimensional parts of ourselves and not that we have to flatten ourselves out one way or the other. One of the things I have been writing a lot about is why were so many of us as African American artists so taken with abstract expressionism? One of the first lessons I had in art class was to choose a painter and to work with that painter's style. I chose Willem DeKooning. I don't think that Black artists have to deny that legacy and that impact, but that doesn't make us any less authentic in our Blackness. The question

becomes, what do you do with abstract expressionism? How do you claim it within the framework of Blackness and rearticulate it so that it becomes of a whole matrix of something you are trying to deliver? Look at what Bearden did with abstract expressionism. Clearly, the work that has Black representation is infinitely more compelling than those pieces that look as though they are simply mirrorings of those white European artists that he was cronies with.

How important or necessary is it for Black artists to return to the African masters?

I think that contemporary art is at a very interesting point right now because the work that my students at Rutgers do is about the self, and that self could be an Asian American self, an African American self, a Hungarian American self, or anything else, and it does not have to cue into the Hungarian art of Hungary. It has to cue into how did your family get to now and what does that experience do for you? No, I don't think that everybody has to go back to an African art in order to get it. We just have to look at ourselves very carefully and try to figure out where we are coming from.

Today there is a generational gap between the young Black people who are coming to power, who are infinitely more individualistic in their approaches, and who don't feel that they have relied on that communal continuum. And who in fact feel like they can look to a white world that is interested in eating the other to sustain them in the way that those of us who have lived longer know how often that world will betray you and let you down and how often you have to come home.

We also represent a cultural threat because of what you were saying about our profound creativity.

If you think about jazz being a cultural threat to the composers of this country who realize they have never really offered a distinctive music to the United States. The only distinctive music that has ever come out of this country has been influenced by Blacks, so that's threatening. I remember when Charles Mingus died, they tried to set up a chair at Juilliard to honor him and it was refused.

What we don't have as African American people is access. White people have access to profit from our culture. We do not have access to profit from their culture. We do not write books about them. It is not a matter of whether my work is Black or not, what I want is access to all of the things that white males have. I want the freedom to choose, to go, to experience, to move, and to profit from and enjoy. So contrary to what the Time magazine article said, rather than African American artists being truly free at last, African American artists' are still struggling for the freedom to choose.

Visual Artist

Interviewer Camille Billops

December 6, 1974

Part II

Emma, where were you born?

In Atlanta. My family has lived in Georgia for a long time. I was born in 1938 and went through elementary and high school in Atlanta; then I went away to college.

I see that you studied at Antioch College. Did you go from Atlanta?

Yes, with a stopover at Hampton Institute for one summer.

Were either of your parents interested in the arts or were artists themselves?

My father is a pharmacist, though he could draw, and his brother could draw very well, but neither one of them were artists. They did recognize when I was very young that I was talented and that I could draw extremely well, so from the age of six on I was considered a prodigy and was given everything in the way of materials.

Did you have brothers and sisters?

I have one brother. My brother liked to draw airplanes when he was young.

You attended public school. Were the schools segregated?

They were good, Black public schools.

They were good schools?

Well, maybe not good, but we came from a very bright, well-read family, so it was balanced. The school can't teach you everything; you have to learn it at home also.

What did your mother do?

My mother is a Fisk graduate, where she majored in anthropology. When she got out of school, she went right into working in the drugstore that had belonged to my father. Moses Amos, the first Black pharmacist in the state of Georgia, had been a friend of Booker T. Washington. They used to go raccoon hunting together. We lived an enriched childhood and were given all kinds of things to do and took many trips. When I was six, my father brought us to New York, and we went to see Paul Robeson in "Othello." We saw "Oklahoma!" and "Carmen Jones" on Broadway. We stayed at the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street. We entertained Dr. W. E.B. Du Bois. He had come to our house many times when he was in Atlanta. When I was about nine, Hale Woodruff was in Atlanta and my parents were friends with him. My mother had gone to school with him, I think, and they tried their best to get him to tutor me, to help me expand what I was doing. I really didn't have any real art classes. Nothing ever came of it, and Hale left Atlanta, and my mother's mouth was poked out because he never paid any attention to me. When I was eleven, they enrolled me in an art class at the Morris Brown College, and I was put in with first-year college art majors. That didn't help very much. What they were really into in that class was rudimentary

oil painting, which I didn't know anything about, but I didn't have sense enough to know that it wasn't important not to know about oil painting at that time. What I could have used was some figure drawing and some design. There were no classes that I could get into in Atlanta at the time that were like that, so that when I went to Antioch I immediately signed up as an art major, and there I got fundamental painting and drawing.

I sort of taught myself as a child to draw from magazines. I had that hand flexibility that I think sets you apart as an artist, but I copied New Yorker magazines, all the line illustrations and also the wash drawings.

Having been brought up in Atlanta, did you feel the need to continue your education at Atlanta University?

No, I don't know anybody in my age group who stayed in Atlanta. We all went away, and we all came from upper-middle-class Black families. When I go home to Atlanta now, there's nobody I knew there for me to talk to. They all went away.

But Atlanta University was such a prestigious school.

For people from out of town, but for people who had been there for several generations, we were trying to integrate the other schools and found it very easy to get into white schools in other parts of the country, because they would bend over backwards to let a Black from Georgia in, not knowing what they were getting, which was a Black kid raised just like a white kid from Scarsdale. All my friends went to Brown, Harvard, etc. My brother went to Lafayette after taking a year at Morehouse. Some kids did go to Black schools, but most wanted to go out of town.

What was Hampton like?

I was only there for a month and a half. I loved it. I thought it was beautiful. There was a special pre-college prep program for Black kids from all over the country. We had a teacher there who introduced us to the works of Black poets. I had never heard any before. In the school system in Atlanta it didn't exist. There was no emphasis on what Blacks had written other than one teacher, Mrs. L. D. Shivery, a friend of Du Bois, who taught at my school, Booker T. Washington High, for maybe fifty years. She made sure that her students knew everything that was going on in Black art, music, history, and poetry. She had retired by the time I got to high school, so I never was taught anything like that. The experience at Hampton was great because it was the first time I saw an anthology of Black poetry.

But you did know there were Black painters?

No, not really. None other than what I could see at Atlanta University, from the shows there. I entered those shows from a very tender age.

What kind of exhibitions were these?

The annual Atlanta University exhibition. I showed from before 1952, when I was fifteen. I only knew about Hale Woodruff and Aaron Douglas, but I didn't know about anybody else.

Do you have any memories of Black theater in Atlanta at that time?

There was a summer theater at Atlanta University, at Spelman College. That was a very good theater. Life around the university was very rich. There was a theater, there were the art shows, but since my parents were not on the faculty we didn't have dealings with the teachers, so we probably didn't know about symposiums, etc., unless it was a public performance.

When you had that first exhibition at Atlanta do you remember any of the artists that were in that show with you?

Jewel Simon showed every year. She was a very fine sculptor.

Did you have the conscious goal of, "I am going to be an artist?"

Oh, yes. Nobody ever said to me that being an artist is all well and good, except one can't really earn a living at being a sculptor. I didn't discover that until I got to Antioch. Then I scurried around trying to find some alternate goal to aim for.

How long did you stay there?

Antioch was a five-year school, but I took my fourth year abroad at the London Central School. The Central School gave me credit for having gone to Antioch, so that when I came back I finished in the right number of five years. Then I went back to London and finished there. So I was getting credit from both sides.

What was the London Central School?

It was a county council school, similar to a city college. It was funded by the city of London. It was a professional art school like Cooper Union and was extremely cheap, something like thirty-three dollars a year for full time for an out-of-the-country resident. I think it was free for people who lived in the city. There were two majors that you could have there in fine arts, either etching or mural painting, and I took etching.

Were there a lot of foreign artists there?

Yes, a lot of Israeli students, a lot of Indian students, but not too many Americans. It was super. Marvelous teachers. I was eighteen when I first got there, and scared because I was by myself, but I had been by myself for a long time.

That's pretty young. Do you feel that when it's your turn to let your children go, the same thing will happen?

I hope that I have the strength to do what my parents did. I hope I can kick them out of the nest, because I think there is a time from fifteen on when you do tend to want to get away from parental influence. I had a wonderful relationship with my parents because they were never on my back. I was gone, and they respected me and thought I was able to take care of myself. I tried very hard to prove that I was.

The first year I was in London I lived with two other Antiochlans, but they decided to go to Paris after a few months and they left me. I became very ill, and I'm sure it was emotional. I could hardly take care of myself. I had a very lovely landlady who fed me chicken soup until I was better, but I lost a lot of weight. I felt left, and was in a strange country all by myself, and was scared to death.

Were there other Black Americans or Black English people studying there?

Yes, there were Black kids there that I knew. Preston King was an Alabama boy. David Lewis ["King Colen, A critical biography," 1970] was an Atlanta friend of mine whose father had been the president of Morris Brown College. David is a very literary soul and was at the London School of Economics along with Preston. I knew them, and that made me feel good. I knew a whole bunch of Antioch people who were there and met a lot of English kids who have remained my friends.

Did you exhibit there?

Yes, there was a big exhibition called "Young Contemporaries" which was very difficult to get into, and the people who ran it seemed to prefer people from the Slade School. But I entered and I got in, which was a big thing. My teachers at the Central School have gone on to distinguish themselves. My etching teacher was Merlin Evans, a compatriot of Stanley William Hayter in Paris. His assistant, also English, was Tony Harrison (who now shows at Bertha Schaeffer Gallery in New York and teaches printmaking at Columbia). Tony came over to this country about six or seven years ago. He was the best teacher I ever had. My painting teacher was William Turnbull, a sculptor and painter who shows at Marlborough-Gerson. He was fabulous, and I occasionally see him when he comes to show in this country. They were the primary influences on how I work.

Were you painting in oils?

Yes. After art school I always painted in oils.

How long did you stay in London?

Two years. Divided by a year back at Antioch.

Then you came back to Atlanta?

Yes, because I wanted to go home and rest, and I didn't know what to do. I had a B.A. and a Diploma in Etching, and I didn't have the faintest idea about how not to be a student. So I went back to Atlanta, drew my cloak around me, and sat around for a year doing nothing, more or less. I met a very interesting white woman there through writing a reply to an article she had written in the Atlanta Constitution. Her name was Carolyn Becknell. I think I wrote a cheeky letter something to the effect, "You could rot on the vine in this goddam city." She wrote me back and said, "That's not possible." We became friends, and she introduced me to Judy Alexander, who is running New Arts Gallery was what is what called in 1960. Judy Alexander has been written up in Vogue, and a few other places. She has become a catalyst for the southern painters. She is a white woman who ran a gallery in her father's building. It then became the Alexander Gallery, and now is disbanded, but I'm sure she still represent artists.

Did she show other Black artists?

When I was there for that year I was the only one she was showing, but she went on to show more Black artists, including Nellie MacRowe. Through her I met a lot of other painters.

When did you come to New York?

I moved here in 1960. I got a job at the Dalton School. It was a nothing job at a fancy school, where I met very interesting people. Those people formed the basis of my life here in New York. I was the assistant in the first, second, and

third grades, getting paid fourteen hundred dollars a year for full-time work, plus all the faculty meetings. So my father effectively had to support me while I made this ridiculous pittance! The second-grade teacher there was Shirley King, a beautiful Englishwoman who is married to William King, the sculptor. I became friendly with them, and through Bill I met my husband, Robert Levine. Bill King has been very supportive of me all these years.

This job was from 1960 to 1961. When Dalton offered me the same job for the same pay for the following year, I said, "You've got to be kidding!" and left.

Why did you come to New York?

I felt that I wasn't going to get anywhere in Atlanta. All I could do was be a schoolteacher there, and I thought that I might as well be a schoolteacher in New York. I also had just found a boyfriend in New York, so that was another reason for coming. I had come up during the summer to visit a girlfriend, and I met him then.

Had you met other Black artists by this time?

No. I didn't really know any other Black artists in Atlanta or New York. I was pretty snotty then, because I was very full of myself and was so sure that my training was better than anybody else's. Of course, I knew I was a better painter than anybody, and there wasn't any use in talking to me. I was completely obnoxious. And I was twenty-two years old!

When did you begin to get involved with other artists? Did you show with other artists when you came to New York?

The year that I was in the Dalton School I started working with Leo Calapai. I had to keep making master prints, because I showed in group shows at this workshop on 3rd Street with white artists like Richard Florsheim and Doris Lee and saw the works of Krishna Reddy for the first time.

What was the name of the place?

It was called The Intaglio Workshop. I didn't get involved with Black artists until I decided to get my Master's degree, out of boredom. I had taken a job as a textile designer for Dorothy Liebes. Although I was a weaver, design seemed to be too far from painting and etching, so I told her that I couldn't work full-time anymore and needed at least one day to go to school. I enrolled in New York University's Master's program, and it was there I ran into Hale Woodruff again. I had never really known him in Atlanta, but he was a professor of Art there, and he helped to get me admitted. I showed him my portfolio of etchings, and I guess it was on his recommendation that I got into the program, although I'm sure that at forty-five dollars a credit they were taking almost anybody who could pay! Later in the year he called me in and asked me if I would be interested in coming over to Spiral. They needed someone, a woman, someone young and technically good. He told me about a lot of the problems that they had with some of the members of Spiral who were not really very well trained. They were lousy artists, so they were trying to change all that, and were going to look at my work and decide whether it was good, etc. They did, and invited me to join.

Reggie Gammon talks about Spiral too, and this whole feeling of the older artists showing with the younger artists. There had been complaints, and that somehow they were not deserving of membership. He said there was a

feeling that maybe they were not happy he was in it. I think Richard Mayhew got him in.

The membership was in place when I got there. I never saw anybody else come in after me.

Had they dropped any of the people?

I don't think they ever dropped anybody, though they would have loved to. They just didn't have the nerve to do it. There was a discussion about, "Why don't we have this person or that person?" and I think that they actually didn't approach somebody like Jacob Lawrence because they figured that he wouldn't have time.

Who were "they"?

I guess the leading lights of Spiral were Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis. Hale began to drop by the wayside after a year or two. He couldn't come to all the meetings, was very busy and had begun to be sick. Charles (Spinky) Alston was also a leading light. Between Spinky, Norman, and Romare there was continual verbal sparring. They pretty much set the tone for what went down there. They felt a lot of the younger members had been foisted on them by people who were marginal in some way. It was not nasty; it was what you'd expect when you get any group of people together on semiprofessional grounds. Who is going to set the standard? You don't have a board of directors for a silly club.

They were really the hierarchy of the group, the driving force. You were one of the young artists. Reggie was one of the young artists at this time, wasn't he?

I don't think he was considered young; he was considered unestablished.

How about people like Calvin Douglas, Perry Ferguson, Al Hollingsworth, Felrath Hines, William Majors, Earl Miller, James Yeargans, and Merton Simpson? What roles did they play?

All you can get is my personal opinion of them. I will make it clean. There were people whose work reflected fine craftsmanship, and what I would say was good work. Amongst those people were Bill Majors, Mayhew, Woodruff, Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, Calvin Douglas, Hollingsworth, and Feldrath Hines. I really couldn't get into the work of Charles Alston. Now, Spinky's work was classified as being very good, but I thought it was old hat.

Some people classify his work as eclectic.

That was something that disturbed me about it. Something like that about Hale's work too. I had been raised with Hale Woodruff's work. It was often that WPA-looking mural painting. Very beautiful, very Siquieros, very strong. I cannot see his work without thinking of how the Atlantic murals were so dynamic and beautiful. I don't really know how much of it was his style, and how much of it was just what was going down at that period of time.

Was he into abstract expressionism?

He had been into abstract expressionism, but I only saw one painting. So I don't know what his newer work was like. Merton Simpson was a very

interesting person who has a beautiful African sculpture gallery here. It was said to be one of the best in the city.

Where was it located?

On Madison Avenue.

Does he still have it?

Yes, I think so.

Is he the one who has a great collection of Henry Tanner's paintings?

He probably has. He lives in Paris and can put his hands on anything. Merton could do anything. He didn't seem to paint enough, as he was also a jazz musician, but I don't know how he got into the group as a painter. He was an interesting person to have around because he had such marvelous taste, knew a lot of people, and gave great parties. Earl Miller's work I didn't really know too well. I think Earl had a show while he was at Spiral, and I missed it. Jimmy Yeargans was a sentimental favorite of some of the older members. Reggie's work I thought was too much like poster art. The theme to me is never of the most import.

Did you see his latest show?

I saw the first one, and I thought that he had made many good changes. But that is because he is painting all the time. Anybody who paints all the time is going to improve. I hardly paint anymore, and my work has gone downhill because of it. I think his work has greatly improved and he is not leaning so heavily on just the ethnic.

You were the only woman in the group. Were you asked in partially because you were a woman?

Yes. I really don't know why they asked me. They really are a bunch of chauvinists, every single one of them! However, it was awfully nice of them because they didn't have to! And if they were going to get a woman, why didn't they get Vivian Browne? They probably wanted to get someone younger who they could manipulate. Anyway, I was flattered as all hell, and they flattered me at all the meetings. I was the baby, and I was the chick.

Were you the secretary?

No, I never was the secretary. I never did a bloody thing except go there and run my mouth!

Who was the secretary?

I don't know if there was a secretary. I think I tried to take notes from time to time, but I don't consider that being a secretary. Any letters that had to be written were written by Romy. I remember we got together to write a letter to Canaday about some mention he made about Black artists. I went home, wrote it, and brought a copy in. Nobody else had done it. So I think from right then they decided that I could write! I was asked to take notes, but I am kind of hazy on that.

How often were the meetings?

Once a week. We had a little storefront meeting place on Christopher Street; it was our own, and it was very nice.

What would transpire at these meetings? How many exhibitions had Spiral had?

We had several. We had a show called the "Black and White Show," in 1965, and we also had a show at Long Island University called "The Spiral." Most of the members were at a show that Romy helped organize at the Harlem Cultural Council. But it was not called "Spiral," because there were other people in it.

At the meetings we would talk about the person who wasn't there, number one. We talked about trying to rev up interest in working together. Romy was really hot for us to do a mural or something that we could work out our skills on, and that was how he got into his collage thing. He had not himself been doing collage. He had been doing painting and started collecting magazine things, bits and pieces of this and that. I think he brought them all in twice before I joined the group the first time. None of the members could decide what to do with it. They probably all felt that it was his idea, so why doesn't he go home and do it, and he did! And they are all kicking their behinds now! He had conceived the collage, I think, as a way of getting all those artists to try and see if there was some common vision that they could work together on, and just play.

Almost like developing a school, a common approach to the art.

That was actually what the Spiral was about. It was to find out if there was a common approach. We would discuss that in many ways because we were all so different, and everybody was suspicious of everybody else's work, so you would be talking about it and would be thinking in the back of your mind, "But your work stinks! I don't care what you say!"

We had European painters, we had good old Black ethnic painters, we had people who were becoming aware that there might be some Black art, like Romy. Norman and Hale had been through the WPA thing when they had worked in that school of painting, and they were familiar with that.

Don't you think that they were doing Black art then?

Not Norman. I don't know what Hale was doing. Remember, I only saw one painting of his.

What did Romare Bearden contribute to Spiral in those days?

He was kind of like the leading light. He was very kind and could be counted on to be not mean about anybody's work. If he couldn't say anything good about it, he didn't say anything at all. He didn't involve himself in any serious backbiting, which was really super. He tried to help anybody who asked him anything. Even now, if you can get him on the phone, he's very helpful. He is so nice to people that I don't know when he has time to do anything, but he does. His membership was something that probably kept everybody together. Now, Norman was the same way to me. I never had any trouble with Norman, but I can imagine some people would because he's a feisty fellow. He is very supportive of anybody who is trying to be an artist. All he asks of you is that you not lie and say that you are doing something when you are not doing it.

Were you stimulated? Did you benefit from this?

Absolutely. We used to meet at each other's houses after we lost the lease on Christopher Street, and at the time I had a studio on First Avenue. I wasn't living

there, so it was very easy for me to have the meetings there, and I did that quite a bit. My paintings were always there, and it was great because I could get all this free advice. Most of them didn't say anything, but every now and then somebody would say something, and I soaked it up like a sponge! You really do want a disinterested eye. I remember when I had my first meeting there, Hale Woodruff came in and said, "My God! You sure use a lot of white!" From that point on the white tube went away! It was an off-the-cuff remark, but I learned something from it.

I showed Norman a wax model I was working on for some bronzes, and I had never had that kind of criticism. It was such a concentrated amount of good stuff you could use. I was overwhelmed. For one, I totally trusted him.

You can go back and use that for the rest of your life, too, because you never will forget what he said.

Spiral closed its doors in 1965 with the closing of the Christopher Street place, didn't it?

No, it went on after that for at least a year and a half when it was meeting in my house. We were written up in Art News of September 1966. Jean Siegel did that article, and she had been coming to meetings. She would be an interesting person to talk to because she has a complete outsider's view. The pictures that were taken of that meeting were taken in my studio. I think it ended shortly after that article came out. Romy tried to have a meeting a year later, and we met at his studio. Almost everybody was there, and that was the last meeting.

If you were to have Spiral now, within the political context of the '70s, would you say you were doing Black art, because it was sort of that ipso facto thing that Black artists did Black art, sometimes? Especially when you were all Black artists.

What we were trying to find out was, was there any such thing as Black art, and we ended up thinking that there wasn't. Because we couldn't get together, and we figured that there couldn't really be a thread other than a kind of cheap thread. The kind of "tears on velvet" stuff. None of us wanted to admit to doing that which passes for Black art, so that every man was for himself, and that was how it turned out. There is, perhaps, some Black art; it's just that we're so involved in it we can't see it. Jacob Lawrence is doing "Black art" and it is beautiful. Romare Bearden is doing "Black art" and it is fabulous.

You mean using Black subject matter?

There is something that is basically "Black" about their work. The subject matter, the historical context, everything about it works for a category called "Black art." Now how many other artists' works fit such a category? Enough so that you could say that there is such a thing as "Black art" is a very difficult thing to say.

I have arrived at a definition that Black art is really not in intent much different from any other socially oriented art that you find in China or Egypt or some other place. If its point is to instruct the people, then it has a social aim; it's art with a socialistic base. Here, if it is within the context of Harlem, how is it socialism? But other than that I don't think there is a

Black art. We have a Black music that you know immediately.

That is exactly what we decided. That there was nothing like jazz. We just couldn't hit jazz.

But I don't know of any groups that have. We clearly know Spanish music, Indian music. But with western things, is there a clearly defined thing when you start going to the other arts? Like the theatre. Is there a Spanish literature other than that they are writing in the Spanish language?

There is English theatre. There must be.

But that's nationalistic theatre.

There may be a Black theatre too. We don't know that yet. It is like being in the eye of the hurricane. We don't know exactly what's happening.

I think if you define the American thing, which is a conglomeration, then it is part of the American theatre, and part of the American theatre is also European theatre.

And it may be also part of what's going on now is to be self-conscious, and we are so self-conscious.

So when you finally decided to end Spiral for the last real meeting, did you all do that together?

We knew when we left that it would be a while before anybody else would have a meeting. If Romy called a meeting, and we all came, then the next person to call a meeting would be somebody like Norman, and Norman didn't. He was involved in getting his studio together. I could have, but I felt that I had had all those other meetings, and somebody else should have taken a turn and they didn't. So that meant it was really officially over.

There was no more energy to it.

It just had petered out.

After Spiral, what did you do?

I was working as a designer all this time, from 1961 to 1969, and I was maintaining a studio until I got pregnant in 1966. In 1967, my son Nicholas was born, and I had to give up the studio mainly because I couldn't get there. I wasn't painting for about a year. I was still doing printmaking, but I did only one or two prints that year. By the time the show "Lamp Black" came along, I was expecting my second child, India, who was born in 1970. Barry Gaither sent a film crew to interview me for films they were doing in connection with this show. It was great fun, and an interesting interview, except I was about seven months pregnant and I looked like a cow! I never found out what they did with the interview. After the "Lamp Black" show, there was a spate of shows that we were invited to.

The "Lamp Black" show was a fairly extensive show?

There were lots of artists in it. I think it was a very good show, but I never went up to see it.

You didn't go to see it?

No. The New York Cultural Council's show, which was held up in Saratoga Springs the following year, was very nice. I don't know who saw it, but I did go up for the opening. That was in 1970. India was about three weeks old. Since

then I don't think I've been in any group shows at all because I have been inundated with children! I did a print that the National Council gave a grant to the Printmaking Workshop to make, and there is an edition of works by seven Black artists, including Norman Lewis, Eldzier Cortor, John Wilson, Benny Andrews, Vivian Browne, and me. We finished that last year. I've done at least one etching a year since then, and I have been working on a big series of paintings of seated figures, but my whole style of painting has changed because I don't get to paint everyday like I used to. It is completely different, and I am not very happy with it. When I can get some more time to work, then I am sure it will go back to the way it was, fresh painting. I'm a very fast painter and I usually can do a canvas in a day. The canvases that I am doing now are taking three and four months to do.

How long ago did you start going to the Printmaking Workshop?

I have been going to that workshop since Leo Calapai moved his workshop to Chicago. I think he left in 1963, and I started going there about that time.

You are one of the old veterans there. Has that workshop changed very much since then?

No; it is still a terrific workshop, one of the best that I've seen, because it's so free and there are such beautiful presses there. There is no one to tell you what to do. At Calapai's workshop, he was himself a master printer and was very fussy about who was using his press, and how, and he wanted certain kinds of work to be done. Of course, Bob Blackburn isn't at the workshop all the time, so he can't really supervise like that, and he wouldn't want to. He assumes that you are able to do it yourself. It's a marvelous place.

On the painting, the energy that goes into being a mother, wife, and an artist, do you think it is possible when the children are small to be able, as an artist, to divide your life into those segments and focus on major work?

I don't think so. I need all the help I can get. That's one of the reasons I find Norman's friendship so rewarding. He continues to think of me as an artist even after I've stopped thinking of myself as an artist. All day long I'm considered a Mommy or a teacher of weaving, which I am most of the time now, and very seldom am I thought of as an artist. Except for the tons of mail that I still get asking me to be in this show and that show. I don't answer it, because I don't have that much current work. The current stuff I send to my gallery, the Associated American Artists (which has been my print gallery since 1963). Printmaking Workshop puts me in group shows all the time.

Writer/Activist

Interviewer: Louis Massiah

October 9, 1994

I think of this gathering as an inquiry into culture as well as an inquiry into the possibilities of what it means to be fully human as we come to the end of this century. If the problem or the question of the twentieth century is the color line, then the question in the era we are going into is really how can we be fully human? The struggle is between forces of inhumanity that push us further into alienated states against forces that really work for humanity, work for us to gain greater understanding of each other, understanding our possibilities in the world. It's really in this context that I locate Toni as a force for humanness, helping us to try to realize our human potential. As a writer, as a teacher, as an organizer, as a media maker, Toni has made remarkable contributions to world literature, to the independent Black film movement, and also to political movements around the country. Toni's strength comes from her clarity, her ability to understand and define essential issues of our time.

I would like to start by asking Toni Cade Bambara how she came by her name.

I earned it, and I worked hard for it. I've had several names. When I was an undeclared music major in college, my name was Tonal Cadence, or occasionally Tonal Cadenza or Tonal Coda. When I was in the psychiatric community, my given name, Miltona, was changed to Miltown. At my fiftieth birthday celebration in Atlanta I was given a new name and in a very serious manner. My feet were bathed, my head was anointed with oil, and a group of young women called Sisters In Blackness gave me the name Hanifa. For the last five years I have been trying to get comfortable with that name, but whenever I look at the name there are two scenarios that unfold, neither one of which I can get with. One is Hanifa on horseback dressed as a man during the Crusades, brandishing a sword and shouting, "Death to the Infidels!" In my post-menopausal journey towards wise womanishness, this is a little bit too martial for me. The other Hanifa is Hanifa the Hidden, moving from safe house to safe house, trying to get to the waterfront in order to sneak aboard a ship and get away from the mob of mullahs who are out in the street brandishing swords yelling, "Death to the Blasphemer!," since Hanifa the health worker has been speaking publicly on the rape of the young children who wind up in her clinic. For the most part I've been living my life out loud, so I don't think I need that lesson in particular. So, for five years I have been trying to get comfortable with the name Hanifa because I take it very seriously when a sector of the community that names me "daughter, mother, sister" takes the trouble to find some other name to call out some other aspect of me that they see.

I was born with the name Miltona Mirkin Cade. My mother informs me that my father, Walter Cade II, intended to have all his children named after him. My brother became Walter Cade III, but when it came to Walter Mae or Walterina, my mother put her foot down. So my father then named me after his employee in that great plantation tradition. Those of you of my generation who grew up in

Harlem or who are older than I am can remember hundreds of people who came up on the Dixieland Express to work on Colonel Black's plantation, also known as Chock Full O' Nuts, and how those workers always named their first, or second, born after Colonel Black or his wife, Page. Every time I run across a Page I ask, "Did your folks work for Chock Full O' Nuts?" Once a season Colonel Black would have his namesakes and their families up to his estate in Tarrytown, near the Rockefellers. There would be watermelon and fried chicken and stuff. He would sometimes hand out a savings bond to his namesakes. Milton Mirkin, the person I was named after, was not forthcoming with any savings bonds or any watermelons. I didn't even know the man, except I think I met him once. It is just a shred of a memory which I will share.

Whenever I come through the garment center or whenever I see a really well-made Milano straw hat, I get this little memory. Or whenever I see the film "Klute." Whenever I am in a place with clothing racks and tailoring tables I get this memory. I am walking down the aisles between tables, and I am around four years old. I have on patent leather Mary Janes and frilly socks. I have on my navy blue swing A-line coat with brass buttons, and this most wonderful red Milano straw hat with a satin sash tied at the side. I am trying to hold my daddy's hand, but he is using his hands to talk. There is a white man way at the end of this aisle of tables wearing big pants and standing astride like he's somebody. My father's voice is not familiar to me, and as we walk to the white man my father gets smaller and smaller. So I let go of his hand and step away from him. He turns to look at me and I pretend to loosen the sash on my hat. This is just a shred of a memory, but I bring it up by way of indicating what my relationship to that given name was. At some point, around kindergarten age, I accosted my mother, who was trying to take a bath. I was leaning against the hamper, and I announced to mother that my name was Toni, and it was not short for Miltona, it was Toni, period. She was very indulgent and said, "Yes, sure, Honey." I guess like any other kid, I was always coming up with names. Whenever you get a new doll you start coming up with names, and sometimes the names are too wonderful for your dolls, so you take them for yourself. I don't know where the name Toni came from, although in those days there was Toni home permanent. In second grade I did have a Toni doll, which had legs that didn't move, it didn't do anything, but you could comb the hell out of its hair, set it with sugar and water, and the staples would hold!

My friends and my family began calling me Toni, but at school it was still Miltona, which I tried not to answer to. I tried to make people call me Toni. Years later in the fourth grade, I am in Brooklyn and there is a singing star named Toni Harper who is singing a song called "The Candy Store Blues." Once again I struggled to make this name my own. In the fifth grade we moved to New Jersey; I got possession of my school record, and with ink eradicator and a nib-point pen I did some choice forgery, but I didn't do it completely, so there were still papers and cards with the name Miltona Mirkin Cade, so I was still struggling with the name. By the time I got to college it was all over. It was Toni Cade.

The Bambara is in many ways more complicated to talk about, but I'll give the short version. It's 1970 and Mom and I are in Atlanta, which was where she

grew up, and she is trying to find her mother's grave, and I am toting around an African art book. I am also "tumbling big." For the last few months I had been trying to find a name for this child. I hit on Bene as a middle name. Jane Karina and Barumba kept giving me these complicated Harero names that I couldn't spell or pronounce or remember without calling them up. Bene, which means "child of," became a middle name. Then Karma, which was her first name, was on everybody's lips: "This is your karma, this is my karma." So I said, "Karma!" Then there was the problem of the last name. I didn't know what "Cade" meant, but I always liked Cade. It was short, but not too blunt, kind of mysterious. It wasn't "Johnson." I felt very at home in the name Toni Cade. So I am looking around for a name, but I didn't want to change the name completely because I wanted people from kindergarten to remember me.

I have always been very fond of the Chiwaras. The Chiwaras are made by the Dogon and the Bambaras. I tried out Dogon first: Karma Bene Dogon. Well, that sounds like, "Karma Bene, well doggone!" That didn't work and Toni Cade Dogon definitely did not work! Then it became Bambara. Karma Bene Bambara. That worked. Toni Cade Bambara -- the minute I said it I immediately inhabited it, felt very at home in the world. This was my name. It is not so unusual for an artist, a writer to name themselves; they are forever constructing themselves, are forever inventing themselves. That's the nature of that spiritual practice. Maya Angelou changed her name. Toni Morrison definitely changed her name -- Chloe Wofford?!! Audre Lorde changed the spelling of her first and last names. It's not all that peculiar. So that's where my name comes from.

As a very young child growing up in New York City, you did something that most of our parents told us not to do. You talked to strangers.

Yes, and I went into their houses, too.

Could you talk about what gave you the freedom to talk to strangers and who were some of those people you talked with?

We lived on 151st Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, which is a very long block, and there were thousands of families on that block. There were also thousands of families in my building. Many people kept their doors open, which I thought was wonderful because I was very nosy! There was a family up on the fifth floor, and I used to pass their door going to the roof. There were thousands of relatives in this apartment, and if you stepped in or even looked in they always said, "You want something to eat?" And I would say, "Yeah." They would feed me things I would never eat at home, like liver and onions on a biscuit made with water and lard! They were wonderful people except that they beat their children. They beat those children!

There were also some "ladies of the night." (That's what my mother used to call them.) They used to lend out their back room to Black longshoremen who were attempting to organize against Murder Incorporated. I used to hang out and listen to them. There were lots of meetings and rallies going on in that period. I was born in 1939, and the radical '30s were still spilling over in the '40s. There was still that notion that an active political life was a perfectly normal thing. People had to organize against the crackdown forces which, in those days, was the police, the FBI, Immigration, the Draft Board, and the Mob, which are pretty much the crackdown forces today, except people don't acknowledge

Mob participation too much.

I went to P.S. 186 on 145th and Broadway, and I would walk to school along Broadway. As people were cranking out the awning in the morning I would say "Hi" and stop and talk. Of course, I would be late to school, always. When I came out of school I would come around the Amsterdam Avenue way, which was very exciting. There was the Brown Bomber Bar and Grill. There was Walker's Barbecue. There were hand laundries that used to keep J. A. Roger pamphlets in the window and would sometimes stick them in your laundry and charge you for them. There were wonderful barbershops, and the men would come out and do all that male choreography, hoisting their pants and the like. They would have hats, and gold teeth, and they would talk. I would always stop and eavesdrop. Sometimes they would recognize me as the kid who turns in at 151st Street where the brewery is. Sometimes they would send me on errands. They'd say, "Hey, you little honey, when you turn in, you know that house next to the brewery? Walk up the stoop, knock on the right-hand window, and tell the lady we are going to bring the petition around." So I became this little messenger. Also on that block was this wonderful beauty parlor where everything got discussed. I mean everything! So I definitely used to lean against the window, and sometimes I would slide in and sit down and listen to stuff. That beauty parlor is not there anymore. A Dairy Queen is there now, with the most wonderful sign that says:

There Will Be No Loitering.

There Will Be No Profane Language.

There Will Be No Credit.

Curtesy of the Manglement.

I talked to people who seemed interested in me. Because we came from a tiny family (my mother was an orphan, and my father was the son of a runaway), I was always looking for grandmothers, because I didn't have any, and everybody else had some. People had grandmothers with them plus grandmothers down south to go to. This seemed extravagant to me; I wanted some. I wanted uncles and cousins, which I didn't have, so I began adopting people in the same way people adopted me. I had relatives, so to speak, that had never met my mother. They were just people in the neighborhood who thought I was interesting, who wanted to talk to me, or who recognized that I was available.

To answer your question as to what made me able to do that, I have no idea. Loneliness impelled me; curiosity keeps me doing it.

You dedicate The Salt Eaters to your mother for giving you the literal space to create. Could you talk about your mother as an influence in your artistic development?

My mother had put herself through school wanting to be a journalist with the New York Age, but instead got married and went into civil service. I always think of her as a shadow artist in the sense that that is her take on things. I have been trying her to encourage her to be a mystery writer because she really has that kind of suspicious mindset! My mother was not a house-proud woman, but she had a thing about these bookcases that she bought in Macy's basement, unfinished furniture division, and every spring she would spread the paper, get a

rag, take the books out, dust them, and then she would repaint these bookcases a sparkling white. I would look at these books, and one of the books was a little, skinny, flat, black book with a little bronze insert Bronzeville, by Miss Gwendolyn Brooks. It had pictures of children, so I kind of thought it was mine. I used to read it and take it to my room, but it wasn't my book, so I would bring it back and put it in the bookcase. I would hear the name "Gwen Brooks" because I lived in Harlem, and Harlem was a very rich, wealthy society in the sense that we had everybody. The Robesons had moved back in 1936. Camilla Williams was vocalizing up in the Harlem "Y." Everybody in the world went to the Countee Cullen Branch, and to the Arthur Schomburg Collection (which is where I met John Henry Clarke.) I would look at a poster of Gwen Brooks, and I liked her face. I like her name, Gwendolyn Brooks. It sounded very ordinary, and it sounded like it was possible to be a writer and to be ordinary.

Also in Mom's bookcase was Langston Hughes's The Big Sea. The jacket had come off, leaving only the yellow book, so I didn't see his picture, and I didn't know for years that Langston Hughes was the Mr. Langdon who used to come into the library and talk to us. When I was in the fifth grade I was going to school in the Bronx, but we lived on Morningside Ave. and though the Mount Morris library was not the closest branch, it was the most interesting because those ladies really knew books, and they were interested in making you read. If you were taking out two books, they would recommend a third. Langston Hughes lived diagonally across the street, and he would break three rules that endeared him to me forever. First of all, he would come into the library and would not take off his hat. Not because he was rude, but because he was loaded down with a briefcase, portfolio, a satchel of books; he was coming to work. He had great hats. He had a Borsalino that I would really like to have. The second violation was he would come into the children's section. As you know, in those days age borders were very strict and they were heavily patrolled. If you were little, then you went over here, and you listened to Sunday school stories; if you were a grownup, you were over there listening to the senior choir. If you were in the movies, you were in the children's section, roped off with that lady in the white dress with the flashlight to hit you with and keep you all in check. The rest of the movie house was for the grownups.

It was the same thing with the library. So, Mr. Langdon (as we thought he was called) would come into the children's library, would stroll along the window sill, looking at the sweet potato plants stuck with toothpicks hanging in the wide mouth amber jars, and he would comment on them. We would always be looking at him thinking, "Is he the stranger our parents always warned us against? Was he the pervert we had to watch out for? What was he doing in the children's library?" Then he would come and sit down with us and spread out his work. He was always very careful about space. If his book hit yours he would say, "Excuse me." I can't tell you how rare that was in those days. Nobody had respect for children or their sense of space. Well, he would be writing, reading, and pondering, and then he would look up and break the third rule -- he would talk. He would ask us what we're doing. What kind of homework we have. Do we think it is intelligent homework? What was on our minds? The man was a knockout!

So, why I dedicated The Salt Eaters to my mom: I can remember any number of times my mother, unlike other parents, would walk around us if we were daydreaming. If she was mopping she would mop around us. My mother had great respect for the life of the mind. Between working her two jobs, she would put one foot in her stocking and would go into this deep stare. She, too, had the need for daydreaming and for talking with herself. She didn't get much of an occasion with a mouthy kid like me.

I was writing stories long before I learned to spell. My father used to get the Daily Mirror (which my mother thought was an anti-labor paper), and there were very fat margins, so I would scribble in the margins. When I had someone captive, like my mother in the bathtub, I would read this scribble-scrabble to her and she would listen. Essentially, it was my mother's respect for the life of the mind. She gave us permission to be artists. After my first aptitude test I was made aware that I was a freak in some way. In those aptitude tests they would say, "If you have a half hour to spare, would you build a wagon, take apart a clock and see how it works?" etc. They never said, "Daydream, just sit in a window and stare. Conjure up characters and plot stories." They never said that. My mother made it all very casual. My brother was something of a prodigy in terms of art and music, and so her thing was to give us access. To give us access to materials, to museums, to libraries, to parks. We figured that one of her motivations was that she had been kind of shy about going to these places, but she became emboldened as a mother. We always had equipment. We had no furniture or much in the way of wardrobes, but we had drawing paper, paints, and raffia to make mats. We had books and a piano. In the fourth grade I went to the Modern School run by Miss Mildred Johnson, sister of James "Dark Manhattan" Johnson. She was very mean, very yellow, very strict, and very snooty. She would look down at me coming in there with hand-me-down clothes. I didn't come in a cab like most of the other students. The other kids would talk about going up to Martha's Vineyard for the weekend, or going to Sugarbush to ski. They went to Europe and to the Met. They were Black people, but they were not my people. It was confusing. We would take our early lessons in French, and in the afternoon we were learning about the medieval guilds of Europe. I was totally out of it. But Miss Francis, my teacher, wrote a report home and said, "She's making a very difficult social adjustment, but she evidences talent in creative writing."

Where did you learn your first political lessons? Who were you listening to?

The radical '30s were not over with in the early '40s, so there were people running around the neighborhood setting up meetings and rallies. And I lived in Harlem with Black bookstores, such as Micheaux's Liberation Memorial Bookstore -- "the home of proper propaganda" -- and with Speakers' Corner. I do not think a community is viable without a Speakers' Corner. If we can't hear Black people speak, we become captive to the media, and we disacknowledge Blackspeak. Our ears are no longer attuned to any kind of sensible talk. I knew that Speakers' Corner was valuable, because when we left Harlem most people seemed to be kind of airheads. They were not raising critical questions. There was no street culture. They were stupid compared to Harlemites who were

sharp and cynical. My kind of folks. Everybody spoke at Speakers' Corner, from center to left. You didn't have too many right-wing jerks getting up on that soap box. Who would speak were people like the women from the Sanctified Church, and they might talk about the research they were doing on the Colored People's Conventions of the Reconstruction era. Trade unionists, definitely, talking about the need for a Black coalition, which we have now -- the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. The members of the Harlem branch of the Communist party might give an analysis of candidates running on the ward level, city level, or national level. Members of the various Socialist parties would get up and talk about the state, the circumstances, conditions, and status of workers throughout the world and why there needed to be solidarity, etc. The Abbyssinians (now called Rastas) would get up and talk about African civilizations and why we needed to support Haile Selassie. Temple people (now called Muslims) would talk about how they were catching hell back in Chicago and Detroit from the government. Why stateside Black folks needed to be in solidarity with West Indians and East Indians coming into the community. West Indians would get up and speak. Folks would talk about how the Puerto Ricans were coming into the neighborhood, and we ought not be xenophobic. The U.S. government was bringing truckloads of Puerto Ricans into Harlem in 1948, which was around the time of the Nationalist party formation, which is why they were bringing in people from Puerto Rico to break that independence movement up. Speakers on the corner would explain all that. Then the Puerto Ricans would get up and speak, and people would try not to laugh at the accents.

So Speakers' Corner made it easy to raise critical questions, to be concerned about what's happening locally and internationally. It shaped the political perceptions of at least three generations. It certainly shaped mine, and I miss it today. There is no Speakers' Corner where I live. There is no outdoor forum where people can not only learn the word, hear information, hear perspective, but also learn how to present information, which is also what I learned on Speakers' Corner: how to speak and leave spaces to let people in so that you get a call and response. You also learn how to speak outdoors, which is no small feat. You also have to learn how to not be on paper, to not have anything between you and the community that names you. So I learned a great many things, and I am still grounded in orality, in call-and-response devices, and I do not deliver papers. I am frequently asked to give a paper at a conference and I refuse. I say that I don't do papers unless I am being paid to write an essay that is going to be published somewhere that I know of. But I am not doing a talk and a paper. People then ask me to give a talk. Well, I can do that. I prepare as hard as anybody else in order to be able to make eye contact with people I am talking to. One of the reasons I do that is I am very shy and I don't like being shy, so I make a point of wrestling with that, and one way is to constantly remove any kind of camouflage or any kind of barrier that exists between me and the community that names me.

My mother gave us the race thing. She also encouraged us in an interventionist style. At school we were not to sing "Old Black Joe." We were not to take any shit, and we were to report back to her any stereotypic or racist

remark. This was difficult because shit was happening all the time. For example, I had a really fascist teacher in the third grade, Miss Beaks. She did all sorts of things that were really out. I wrote a story once called "The Making of a Snitch." It was published when I was in high school, and it's about the period of the late '40's when, as Gerald Horn would say, "the National policy shifted from Blacks as inferior to Blacks as subversive." We were constantly getting pressure in that McCarthy period. When anything weird went on in school, the teacher would grab one person at a time and take him or her into the cloak room and encourage and bribe the person to rat on classmates. I wrote that story, and many years later I rewrote it when I ran into the classmate who had been made into a snitch in those early days and then turned up in the late '50s as a government agent. He was working the crowd in front of the Hotel Theresa when Malcolm (who was like our mayor) was there, certainly the appropriate person to welcome Fidel to Harlem.

In those days teachers set traps for you. There was this kid Michael who sat three rows over. We used to walk home together because he lived one block from me. He was a very quiet kid, very repressed. The teacher would always lure him into saying something so that she would be able to call his mother to school. His mother would come and strap him with a Sam Brown belt. Most parents would come and beat their children in front of the class. When I would hear at meetings or at Speakers' Corner about the brutality of slavery, I began to connect this as behavior learned and carried over, and I would hope that there would one day be a rehab camp. I still think that. What do we do with snitches like Earl Anthony, who had been a friend of mine, and now reveals himself in a new book as having been a government agent all those years when he was with the Panther party? What do we do with people like that? If you believe in transformation politics, or transformation psychology, you feel that they can change. But we don't have rehabilitation centers to send them to. When I was in Laos in the summer of 1975, in Vientiane City, at the last moment of liberation they sent the generals to the Plain of Jars, which had been carpet-bombed, to share the hardships of the peasants, to live with them and to turn the Plain of Jars into a green haven. The generals went to school six hours a week, learning Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and they shared the hardships of the peasants. I found those kinds of camps in Vietnam, in North Korea, in China, and in Cuba. It's dodgy to set up a system like that because it can get, in a split second, totalitarian and inhumane, but we very much need something because we have so many walking wounded and defectives, not only agent types, but also people who are still stumbling around from the '60s, who never were embraced quite enough, who got assigned things to do and then got left hanging, and are still walking blasted.

When did you first realize the possibility of your writing, and when did you begin to think of yourself as a writer?

I never thought of myself as a writer. I always thought of myself as a community person who writes and does a few other things. I always get a little antsy when people limit me as a writer. In terms of scribbling, I've always been writing, so long as I could find paper -- not easy during the war. My mother always had gorgeous legs, and my father had a very proprietary pride about her legs, so no

matter how bad the market was, or how bad the budget was, she always had black silk stockings. These stockings came wrapped around a rectangle of paper. I couldn't wait for my mamma to get her gorgeous legs into another pair of stockings so I could get that paper. I became something of a community scribe. People would say, "Hey, you little honey, run down to Miss Dorothy's house and help her write the letter to her nephew in the Navy." "Run up the way and tell them what happened at the meeting." "Hey, write this down." When I lived in Atlanta, I was a community scribe in the sense that people would hail me, "Excuse me, you the writin' lady?" "Yeah." "Pull in here into the gas station. The man wants to sell his Ford to this guy here. Can you write a contract?" "Sure." "Here's a paper bag and a pencil. Get to it." In return they would give me my inspection ticket stamped. People in the neighborhood would knock on my door. "You the writin' lady? Listen, the telephone company has screwed me again. Can you write a nasty letter?" Then they would pay me with Jell-o with fruit in it. Sometimes they would wrap up a dollar, which had been folded and folded and tied in a corner of a handkerchief. Take you a year to unwrap that dollar. So, I got paid as a community scribe and got trained as a community scribe very early.

When I came back from Cuba in 1973, I began to think that writing could be a way to engage in struggle, it could be a weapon, a real instrument for transformation politics. "Let me take myself a little more seriously and stop just having fun," I thought.

Let me talk about my mother as "hero." There is a scene of a woman turning a school out in the title story, Gorilla, My Love, and I once did an article for Redbook on Mother's Day which was about my mother at school. In 1946, the United Nations was established in New York and everyone was very proud. They would drive us crazy in school with these assembly programs about the goddamn United Nations. We would have to draw posters for various campaigns about the United Nations. Very generic and very dull. Children holding hands around the globe. So we're drawing one day, and the teacher falls asleep. I am drawing the children around the globe, but now I want to give them color because my children are Chinese, Indian, and African. You know those school crayons, big and fat, but no matter how hard you pressed you could never get any color out of them. I did not want my children looking streaky and mud-colored. I wanted them to look cool. So I thought that if I got the coffee grinds out of Miss Beak's coffee cup, I could maybe get the right color. So I went up to her desk and woke her up to ask if I could have the coffee. She woke up like a bear. The first thing she said was, "What are you doing out of your seat? You take yourself too seriously in general and in particular." Well, I could handle that. But then she started really blowing like a hurricane, talking about "as ugly and crummy and lousy as these crayons are they are good enough for you people because who the hell do you think you are? You are just poor colored children." Well, this was too big for me. This was a case for Mother. My mother had a turning-the-school-outfit. She had a serious Joan Crawford hat and a Persian lamb coat. She wore one of two favorite suits -- either an aquamarine suit with a cherub cameo, which I didn't like, or my favorite suit -- a da wine, red, wide, wale corduroy, and, of course, her

gorgeous legs in the silk stockings. And some I. Miller outlet opera pumps. She was bad! Now, she would stride into the class and lay out the first law: "My children are never wrong, so you cannot be right." All the children would be so delighted because here was a woman come to champion her child, not humiliate, beat, torture, and terrorize everybody and make everybody throw up. The teacher would say, "Can we talk outside?" My mother was not moving. She also had this scary pocketbook. The click on it was like the cocking of a shotgun. Mom allowed how she was a substitute teacher, and she had pull with the Board of Education, she knew everybody, so "your ass is mine." She would start working her thing. She would be working the dimple in her chin, arching one eyebrow and getting this flinty edge to her very articulate voice, and the teacher would be coming apart. The second law: "You apologize to my daughter and you apologize to the class." The teacher would look at me and finally get my name right (the name my daddy gave me). Then she would turn to the class and try to present some lame story about how the coffee gave her nightmares and she ran amuck and lost her mind. My mother would be saying, "Apologize now or I'll meet you down at 110 Livingston Street." We would laugh at the teacher. Michael would not laugh. He never laughed at any so-called authority figure. He knew what would happen, but we all laughed at her. Then my mother swiveled on her I. Miller black suede opera pumps and moved out of the classroom with the sleeves of her Persian lamb moving like regal robes. Mother was therapeutic.

When do you find your tribe?

Well, I felt very at home in Harlem as a child. I spent the first ten years of my life in Harlem. I had skates and got around a lot and met a lot of wonderful people. I met this one woman who had a tremendous influence on my writing. Dorothy McNorton lived across the street from us when we lived on Morningside. She taught me critical theory... another story for another day. In Mildred Johnson's school I did not feel at home, but it did teach me a lot about class. I think by the time I got to college I was hanging out in the Village. I began to identify my people as artist types, even though I was a biochem/pre-med major at the time, and those people were definitely not my people and that lifestyle was not mine. Like being up late at night in the stinky, smelly lab eating weird food out of a vending machine. I would try not to drop and break any test tubes because that was thirty-five cents, and we were on a really tight budget. I felt much more comfortable with art majors and hanging around the art department, so I used to model for art classes.

That lifestyle was more my thing. I liked the smell of linseed oil and turpentine, mainly because one of my spirit guides comes to me that way, namely my mother's mother; that is, her "visitations" are heralded by those odors -- she painted. I also liked the theater group. Working so seriously on these dumb plays. I loved it! So I hung out with theater folk and art folk. But these were white people at Queens College, and they were not my people either. There were a couple of political types there, like Ellie Hakim, who started Studies on the Left, a journal still around today. This was the height of the McCarthy period, from 1955 to 1959. We had quite a collection of people at Queens. The granddaughter of Robert Ingersoll, the niece of Alexander

Wollcott. But hanging out in the Village I got a little closer understanding of who my people were, as I was always looking for a job and I was underage. In the Village I would go over to Montmartre's Spaghetti House and offer to wash the pots. I would take a big soapy pot and go out in the backyard with the pots because they shared the yard with Cafe Bohemia. That way I could hear the George Wallington Quartet, who practically lived there. Then I went over to Mona's on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Macdougal, right across from Tony Pastor's. My job at Mona's was to get the exotic dancers cabs. Tango, for example, would shake dance and sit on the laps of sailors, just do her thing, then rip off the wig and bra and, of course, she's a dude. People would get really angry. So my job was to keep a cab at the curb. I would get paid two dollars a night for this.

Another place I worked a lot was the Open Door, where we used to go to hear Miles. I didn't go to hear Miles, I went to see his wardrobe, because he had gorgeous clothes. He always played into the drapes and showed complete contempt for the audience. In the Village I began to run across designers and theater people, artist types, bohemians who had a some politics and kind of knew what was happening. But it wasn't until the '60s struck that I really finally felt at home in the world. I finally reconnected with a lot of things from childhood that I had lost. I had lost an edge somewhere while doing those college years, hanging out in Flushing. I always take Harlem as my standard of a viable community: a Speakers' Corner, a place where politics are discussed and where there is critical response so that you do not become captive; a Black bookstore so you do not become captive to schools and other indoctrinating institutions; a library in case you can't get to the bookstore; a park to sit at and talk (also, the park can be where Pop Johnson and his cronies sit to create community sovereignty. They can check out who is coming up the walk); you have got to have a screening room of some kind so you can know what our cultural workers are doing with our image and our voice; you have to have a press to get the word out.

Harlem became my standard, and very few neighborhoods fit this. When we moved to South Jamaica, for example, I thought my brain would atrophy. The only thing that came close to a truth-speaking vehicle there was the movie marquee on Merrick Boulevard. The guy who would slot the letters in had a real serious thing about Black stars. So you would get Casablanca starring Dooley Wilson, Pinky starring Ethel Waters, Island in the Sun starring Dandridge and Belafonte, Spartacus starring Woodie Strode. That was about it, though. Not enough to keep the mind alive.

Going into movies, how are movies part of your development, and how do you begin to interact with them?

Growing up in Harlem, we had five movie houses in our neighborhood. There was the Dorset, where we saw Boston Blackie and the Three Stooges. That was on Broadway. On Amsterdam, it was the Washington, where we saw Sepia movies and second-string things. There was the Sunset and the Regal on 125th Street, where we saw race movies. That's where I saw Herb Jeffries in Bronze Buckeroo. On Broadway and 145th Street, there was the R.K.O. Hamilton, where we saw first-run Hollywood movies, as well as a vaudeville show, as well

as a bouncing ball sing-along with the corny songs. I was always in the movie house. I liked movies, and I would sit there and rewrite them. Most of the time the stories were stupid because none of the women ever had girlfriends. I used to think, "Well, no wonder. No wonder Barbara Stanwyck is getting thrown off the cliff, or Lana Turner is getting shot, or Bette Davis is having hysterics. They don't have any girlfriends." When the story was really dumb I would start looking at the scenic design: "I like that ashtray; I wonder where they got that color. Oh, the clothes in Mata Hari. When I first said to myself, "I'm going to make movies when I grow up," was in the Apollo. In the Apollo between shows, would be these god-awful shorts with petrochemical eye-stinging colors that blurred outside of the outlines. They were about such really fascinating subjects as the tin can industry. I used to think, "Damn, when I grow up I'm going to make really great shorts for the Apollo." I didn't understand that they were deliberately chosen to get you out of there. They are called "chasers." So you would get up, get out and the people outside on line could come in and a new show could start. I didn't know that. I just thought somebody didn't have any taste and were buying these really awful movies. That was the first conscious notion of wanting to become a filmmaker.

Then in 1964 I refused to go to work. I'm hanging down in the Village in the early morning. I walk by the Greenwich movie house and the guy is up on the ladder putting up the letters and it says, "Two African films by Ousmane Sembene." I thought, "Sembene, I've been reading Sembane." I go over and look at the glossies and they are playing Borom Sarat and La Femme Noire. I had never thought about African movies. So I went in to see them, and I stayed and saw them again. I figured I might not see them again, and also my friends haven't, so I have to memorize every shot, and then I'll play it out for buddies. Now Borom Sarat really resonated with me because I was working on a story called "Sanitary Belt," as in "Cordonne Sanitaire," about that hedgerow built as a barrier between European quarters and native quarters. I was playing around with the notion of belt in general, conveyor belt, on the line, worker in the factory, warehousing of Africans, etc.

In Sembene's film there is this Cordonne Sanitaire, and that sparked me. I came out of there very late at night. I was in there all day studying those movies. I was studying every frame because I did not think I would ever see them again. It was then I thought I might go to Africa and become a filmmaker. Then in 1970, shortly after my Black Woman book came out, and shortly after Chester H. Higgins, Jr.'s first book of photographs came out, we met each other up at the Studio Museum, and we decided to take the film course with Randy Abbott and Ngaio Killingsworth. I wanted to learn editing. Everybody else wanted to go out in the street with equipment. I knew that a film is made in the editing room, and I wanted to be in there. I studied editing under Ngaio and Randy, and we had lots of footage to play with because everybody went out in the street, shot stuff, and gave it up. I could have made fifty movies with all that footage. I was up there having a wonderful time at the Studio Museum learning editing. Of course, by 1970 we'd heard of the U.C.L.A. rebellion, the Watts films, Charlie Burnett, and that whole crew. We heard about the overturning of the school curriculum at the film school. They wanted to make films out in the streets, in

the community. I thought that was fabulous.

On the east coast there was the war to get WNET on board and for Black folks to get in the door, and there were a lot of documentaries being made. Sinclair Bourne was working as filmmaker and as editor of Chamba Notes. Pearl Bowser was doing a Black retrospective film festival at the Jewish Museum. The idea really began to take hold. Then I moved to Atlanta in 1974. Louis Bilaggi Bailey and Richard Hudlin (kin to the Hudlin brothers) were programming independent Black films, and every once in a while a filmmaker would come through and we would show films at my house because I had a big old sloppy house and I didn't care if you moved things around and dropped things. Bailey founded the Atlanta Annual Third World Film Festival, an attempt to program films from around the world. The Festival became a genuinely international event when Cheryl Chisholm took over as director.

I began programming with the notion that eventually I would get around to making movies, would back myself into it. Then I came to Philadelphia and met Louis Massiah, founder-director of the Scribe Video Center. Louis had just come back from Mali. He had done a lot of videos and was thinking about another one. I suggested he tackle the "Move Incident" as a community voice video. He called me up and invited me to come down and do the narration. I thought, "Narration... great. I sit in a booth, like Ernest Hemingway with Spanish Earth, and I watch the film, jot down notes, and then record." He didn't tell me that I had to write the script, help him devise the film, and narrate! Which was wonderful, actually. So now I am based at the Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia and helping to develop filmmakers. I work as a production facilitator for Louis's project called Community Visions, where we aid community-based organizations to explore video as an instrument for social change. I also teach script writing there, and every time I teach a workshop I write a script to make sure I know what I'm talking about. By now I've got this huge folio of scripts, which ends all excuses, so this spring I will start working on a couple of films.

We are missing the writing which is absolutely essential. Could you talk about the genesis of The Black Woman? How did that come about?

In 1968 I was teaching at City College in the SEEK program.

What was the SEEK Program?

The SEEK program was "Let's get these colored people in here, let them fail and flunk out so we don't have to be bothered with them again." But a number of us managed to get up there. The attrition rate at City College was something like fourteen percent, and in the SEEK Program it was less than nine. We were very serious. There was me, Addison Gayle, Barbara Christian, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Larry Neal. It was a heavy bunch of folk up there at that time. Three people got on my case. One was Francine Covington, a student I greatly admired, and a woman I greatly admire today. I loved her style of confrontation. She would say to me, "You've been saying this, that, and the other. Why don't you do a book, dammit?" That made me think.

Then Dan Watts, editor of the Liberator, where I did book reviews and so forth, said, "You have an interesting take on things. You ought to do a book." Then Addison Gayle would say, "I heard you deliver eight talks. Why the hell

don't you write them down and get them printed?" I thought, "Oh, a book about Black women. That would be great." I had read a piece by Ruby Doris about women and leadership and SNCC, so I talked to the women in the Panther party, women in CORE, women in SNCC. They were writing position papers and taking the brothers to task for their foolishness and shit. I wanted to get some papers out of them and put them in a book. But the women said, "No, this is in-house stuff. We are not interested in going public." I thought that was a shame and I said, "I'll wait." So, from 1968 to 1969 I am waiting for this call. Then I began looking around for an agent, and I found Cyrilly Abels, an old European-American leftist woman. We began going around to the publishing houses and I began running into a lot of people I used to go to school with, white folks. They are saying things like, "I've seen fabulous manuscripts from Black women, but they wind up on the sludge pile because there is no market for Black women's works." So then I got this idea: nevermind the papers from the Panther party women; let me do a book that will kick the door open. I know there is a market for Black women's work out there because I know 800 million Black women all by myself. Nikki Giovanni gave me a poem, Alice Childress gave me a story. I put together this anthology that I felt would open the door and prove that there was a market. Sure enough, within the second month, the book came out, it went into a new edition. That book was everywhere. There were pyramids of The Black Woman in every bookstore. All I knew in the beginning was that it had to fit in your pocket and it had to be under a dollar. I didn't know anything about publishing, but I stuck to that. After it came out a number of startling things happened. My attention at that time was on kicking the door open so that other Black women's manuscripts could get a hearing, and they certainly did. People then began calling me to do lectures and workshops on women's issues. I didn't know anything so I had to study a lot and call up a lot of people. Alice Childress was very good to me in those years. She was one of the first people who walked up to me, put her hands on my shoulders and said, "You have done something valuable. Now, watch out." That was very valuable. The Harlem Writer's Guild gave me a party and I thought that was going to be the end of it. But no, then came all these urgings to be a particular kind of person, an expert, a spokeswoman. I was having trouble being a public person.

Next, I did an anthology called Tales and Stories for Black Folks that came out in 1971. What I love about that book is that my students are in it. I was teaching at Rutgers in those days, and one of the things I always tried to make clear to students was "Do not write term papers for me. Make sure they are useful for somebody else as well." People began to write position papers for organizations in their community. A number of people were working at the story-telling library hour, so they wrote stories. I thought that the stories were great and I published them in the book. That book didn't stay in print very long. I was at the Livingston campus of Rutgers then, and everybody on campus had a copy of the book.

What was the impact of Gorilla, My Love on your life?

One of my good girlfriends in those days was Hattie Gossett. In those days we were all piecing a living together. Hattie said, "Hey, let me be your agent." She

told me about a woman up at Random House named Toni Morrison who was very interested in my work. I said, "Oh, yeah?" She said, "Put together a book and I'll sell it." So I pulled out a bunch of stuff from under the mattress, from the bottom drawer, the trunks, and I spread all this stuff around and I thought, "Ooh, a collection." I thought I would put together stories that show my different voices. It looked good, but it looked like ten people wrote this thing. I went to the library and read a bunch of collections and noticed that the voice was consistent, but it was a boring and monotonous voice. "Oh, your voice is supposed to be consistent in a collection," I figured. Then I pulled out a lot of stories that had a young protagonist narrator because that voice is kind of consistent -- a young, tough, compassionate girl. Then I changed my mind because the salesmen at the publishing house will think my book is a juvenile book for a juvenile market only. So I put some adult stuff in.

Then at that time I was writing a play called The Johnson Girls, which we performed on the Soul! show with Audreen Ballard in the role of Inez. Now it is becoming a film with Barbara O done by Iverson White. I decided to adapt the play as a story, and that became one of the stories in Gorilla, My Love. Miss Morrison didn't touch anything. She sort of floats a few ideas at you and whispers in that gentle way. Then you go home and think, "Oh, brain surgery! Let me rewrite." The book came out, and I never dreamed that such a big fuss would be made. "Oh, Gorilla, My Love, what a radical use of dialect! What a bold, political angle on linguistics!" At first I felt like a fraud. It didn't have anything to do with a political stance. I just thought people lived and moved around in this particular language system. It is also the language system I tend to remember childhood in. This is the language many of us speak. It just seemed polite to handle the characters in this mode. I never knew how to answer, so I would just let people talk about the book. I began to learn what was in that book and what was so different and distinct about it.

You have traveled extensively around the world. You have been to Cuba, Sweden, Vietnam, Laos, India, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados. You have often traveled as a delegate. What is that experience like, and why is that important to you?

When you are member of a delegation you have responsibility before you go, while you are there, and when you come back. Before you go you want to contact your constituency and find out what they want to know about that country. Also, what kind of solidarity they wish to express with the people of that country, and what sort of materials they would like to send. For example, when we went to Cuba, we took diaphragms, blood plasma, and penicillin. When folks went to Guinea-Bisseau, building materials. To Brazil, mops, because none of the maids have mops. In the spring of 1975 I was part of a delegation called The North American Academic Marxist-Leninist Anti-Imperialist Feminist Women. It used to take us ten minutes to introduce ourselves. We were invited by the Women's Union of North Vietnam to come as a delegation and to do what delegates do, like raising critical questions such as: What was the infant mortality rate before the Revolution? What it is now? What was the rate of the literacy before the Revolution? What is it now? Who were the people on the bottom strata, and what position do they hold now? What are their prospects for

the next ten years? I was always interested in the personal stories and I would ask, "Who were you then and who are you now?" We were invited in the spring to go to Vietnam, but they had the victory in the Spring which was unexpected, so the Women's Union needed to go around and visit the socialist camp and thank people for their solidarity during the struggle. So we were put on hold. Many of us had already quit our jobs, sublet our apartments, turned off our phones, etc. I sat down and wrote, and that became The Sea Birds. Most of those stories had not been published; been hanging around the house, and they were completed during that spring and summer.

In Vietnam we were also interested in bringing back things for our constituency; we would have to give a debriefing and a report of some kind and had to shape it in some palatable way. Children gave us cards to give to the children here expressing solidarity. When I got back, one of the tasks I had was to deliver this information to my constituency. I decided to do it the way I knew how to do. I wrote a short story in seven sections. I would read a section, then we would have music, somebody would get up and read the greeting cards that the children had made. Then I would read another section based on stories I had been told, then someone would show some slides and posters, then I would read another section. It went on like that. That story line became the title story in The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. Very oddly, the first time I ever heard it on radio, the person read it, and then had music, then read it, etc. I thought it must really lend itself to that kind of orchestration.

You were in Atlanta when you were writing The Salt Eaters. could you talk about that?

The Salt Eaters, like many works, started as entries in my journal. I was trying to figure out as a community worker why political folk were so distant from the spiritual community -- clairvoyants, mediums, those kind of folks, whom I was always studying with. I wondered what would happen if we could bring them together as Bookman brought them together under Toussaint, as Nan brought them together in Jamaica. Why is there that gap? Why don't we have a bridge language so that clairvoyants can talk to revolutionaries? So I began thinking about it and jotting things down in my journal. Then the entries got very long, then they threatened to turn into a story. I had hoped that the story would be a short story since I don't have staying power. It was going to be about either a Mardi Gras society or a Samba school. This society, for some kind of festival, would elect to reenact an old slave insurrection. They do so, and all hell breaks loose because of the objective conditions in that area. I thought I could pull that off in seventeen pages. I began working on it and it got to be a novel. It was very difficult sledding because I was writing quite beyond myself in a number of ways. I was writing that book in 1981 so I could kick cancer's ass in 1993. That book taught me how to get well. If I hadn't written it I'm not quite sure I'd be sitting here. I was writing beyond myself in that sense.

Also in the sense that I was stretching, reaching, trying to do justice to that realm of reality that we all live in but do not acknowledge, because the English language is for mercantile business and not for the interior life. The only time you see that realm rendered is in science fiction. I was trying to find another way to do it, and I think I did. So I was writing beyond myself in that sense.

When I look at that book now I realize I'm not there yet. I don't understand it yet. It resonates, it chimes in my bones, but I don't understand it yet. It was very hard work. It is a breathless book. When Morrison got ahold of it I thought that she would take care of it. "Ahh, she'll fix it." She didn't touch it. She said, "This is fine." I said, "Really?" She said, "Yes." I waited for her to whisper at me, I waited for her to drift some stuff across my brain pan, but she didn't, she left the book alone. Or, rather, she whispered so softly I didn't know what was prompting the rewrites.

When the book came out there was a weird reaction to it. Some reviews were very favorable but totally uninformed. Some reviews were not favorable but informed. I got wonderful mail from people who said, "Thank you for breaking this ground because I want to write like this, but I don't want to write science fiction. I like this alternative reality. Thank you." Other people wrote, 'The Yellow Wallpaper' room taught me that I needed to get well. The Salt Eaters taught me how." I got letters from various people, who are now friends, from the Asian community, the Chicana community, who picked up on the Seven Sisters -- Women of the Rice, Women of the Plantation, Women of the Corn, who said, "We must all get together and create a Seven Sisters collective. We must do an opera." I am continually haunted by the Seven Sisters. In the late '50s I wrote a story called "The Talking Stick." It was about a study group called the Seven Sisters. In The Salt Eaters the Seven Sisters are a performing troupe. In a bunch of things I am doing now, called Goddess Sightings," the Seven Sisters are a network of people in North America, South America, and Central America, and they get together to do things like reimagine America. The Salt Eaters was usable, apparently; I kept finding quotes from it everywhere. People started quoting sections of it in their speeches. I would find quotes on greeting cards -- which nobody paid me for. Carole Parks, with permission, used it to create a conference calendar with quotes for each month. Other people drew maps of the landscapes and the worlds in it and turned them into T-shirts, for which I was not paid. Then folks started teaching it. Charles Frye taught a course in ethics in the philosophy department at Mount Holyoke and this was the required text. He called me up and asked me to come speak. I am not a silly woman, so I said, "If you want to conduct an intelligent discussion you call Eleanor Traylor. I don't know nothing about the book. I'm still reading it." I am still catching up with the wisdom of that book.

In particular, and in general, how has motherhood and how has Karma, your daughter, affected your work?

It is very hard to answer. One of the things that Karma did very early in life when people would call me was to say, "She's busy. She's out of it. She's staring out the window. But she's working." They must have said, "Well, this is important." She would say, "Is it important to you or important to her?" I said, "I like this kid. I'm keeping this kid. This kid understands." Then they would probably say something she didn't like, and she would hang up and say, "Some people are so rude to children." Karma gave me permission to write, in the sense that she would not disturb me if I was in my particular chair, at my particular table. She would move around me and take care of things.

There was a period, too, when I went utterly mad in the '80s, in response to

the Atlanta missing and murdered childrens' case. That manuscript, too, started as journal entries and then developed into pieces that I did for the newspapers, and then I finally realized that I had a novel on my hands, and I didn't want it. One of the reasons I didn't want it was because I knew too much, and I thought if I could reconstruct the real case, and know the difference between this and that highly selective media-police-city-hall-fiction on which someone got convicted, how safe am I? Everybody in the world was doing research for me. People from Newsweek and 60 Minutes would call me up and ask me, "Do you have another angle on this?" I would look in my notes, I would look at something I hadn't researched yet, and I would say, "Yeah, why don't you check out this and get back to me." I didn't have to leave my house. As a result I stopped going out, I stopped bathing, I stopped washing my hair, I became this lunatic. My daughter would tap me every now and then, and say, "Ma, you look like hell." Then it was "Mother, get it together." She was thirteen at the time, and she took what little money was left and enrolled in the Barbizon Modeling School; the idea was to make money as a runway model, pay the bills and keep us going until I found myself again. She has been a tremendous support in writing. If your children give you permission to write, that's heavy. I am now in a period of recovery, and so is she, so our talk is very interesting. She was remarking the other day that she had no idea that all the skills that she had developed taking care of my sorry ass, that these were marketable skills.

It was Cheryl Chisholm down in Atlanta who hired her to do some work for the film festival that called on many of those homemade skills. She is very good at cleaning off desks, booking your trips, getting people off the phone, blocking people at the door. She is really a good caretaker. When Julie Dash sent out an s.o.s., Karma went in there and took care of Julie and helped her get the book out. People praise her and she looks at me and shrugs, "Well, it's just what I did with you."

What's the present phase, particularly in light of your bout with cancer in 1993?

For several years I had been stuck -- spiritually, financially, psychically, physically. Finally my intestines were blocked. I knew I had been blocked because I couldn't feel my spirit guides around me. I would meditate and get rocked by earthquakes and thunderstorms and all kinds of stuff that never happened before. I was not growing as a creative person. I was putting that kind of sacred practice on the back burners, wrenching my way away from a path I knew I was supposed to take. I knew that I had cancer. So when the doctor told me I had cancer I already knew.

Now I am in the process of recovery, physically, financially, psychically, spiritually. I am coming through it slowly, mainly by trying to get down to those chambers where I work when I am at my best. No matter what the work is, there is a place I can go to when I am in touch with the best of myself, and I am connected with the most powerful something or others -- spirit guides -- let's call them angels, if you like. I also have a tremendous feeling of attachment to friends all over who are the people who got me out of that bed and got me well. I was talking to my surgeon the other day who was, as usual, praising himself about his scalpel. I pointed out, once again, "Your scalpel is only a physical

manifestation of the love and affection of my friends. They got me off the table." When I was in bed, just whipped, but I had something to do, I would reach everywhere for energy and nothing would happen. But all of a sudden I would get this surge of energy, and I would be up, walking down the ward, giving away my flowers, talking to people, giving orders. Then someone would call, and I would find out that they had been at a prayer group at that moment, or two or three people had lit some candles at that moment to send me some energy. So I am in the period of recovery, and please do light candles for me because I need some help. I am trying to write things I have never written before, again writing beyond myself. I am doing a series of things called "Goddess Sightings." Some of them are stories, some of them are obviously scripts for video or film, and one of them will be an installation and performance piece as part of Miss Morrison's Atelier project at Princeton. I am going to do a garden of goddesses and film it.

Can you talk about your voice lessons?

One of the aspects of my recovery is that I am taking vocal lessons, which have enabled me to free my voice on many levels. I always thought I lived out loud, but I didn't. It also is helping me breathe on many levels. My teacher is a yoga teacher as well. I decided to take lessons after I came back from the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. I had the best time down there. I went down there for a gig, and I just stayed on. When I came home I felt, "Why can't we all feel like that all the time?" I was told that when I stopped chemo I might go into depression; it shapes your week, getting ready for it, recovering from chemo, defending the immune system, etc. So I needed to be into something before I started. Well, I was always threatening to take singing lessons. So I have been taking singing lessons. We do drills, breathing exercises, I sing, I do yoga, I do German lieder and Italian arias and Cole Porter. It is very much a part of my recovery.

Are there any questions?

Q: What does the expression you use, "Sam Brown belt," mean?

It is a thick, ugly, Texas ranger belt. It is mean and fascist, and it hurts bad. Michael's mother was a severe little woman who wore severe clothes, and she would beat that boy with that belt.

Q: I wanted to ask about your expression in dance and movement.

In reclaiming the body from the biomedical syndicate as well as from the naturopathic types I have been dealing with, the best way I know of recovering the body is movement. It is only when I am dancing that I inhabit all of my body. When I was in academia, that life would drive me up into my mouth, and all of me would be huddled behind my teeth, and I would have to remind myself that I have this space to stretch out in. When I am totally in my body I know it, because when I run into people all of me remembers them. My thigh remembers them, my mind is everywhere, and also I feel gigantic. When I walk down the street I feel very large, physically as well as spiritually. I feel like everybody is a friend of mine and everybody is just wonderful: "God, it's going to be great when we finally take over and be in charge of this yard. Kente cloth in the Oval Office, deviled eggs on the menu, peach cobbler on the lawn." I

have no idea what movement I will get into because my girlfriend Arlene said to me, "So-and-so, the African drummer, is going to be at the Center." I said, "So what?" She said, "I'll pick you up at ten o'clock and we'll go." I thought we were going to watch. Around nine-thirty she called and said, "What are you wearing?" I said, "I've got my pajamas on." She said, "We're going to the dance class." I said, "Are you serious? I am lucky I can walk." Anyway, I got into my tights, the leg warmers, and I went to the dance class.

Now, even when I had been in the best of shape and thought I was a dancer, I never could get through a class. I am flashy and have a lot of presence and style, but no technique. People put me in the front line in the beginning because I am a quick study, but after about fifteen minutes I begin to flag so they put me in the back and I start falling apart. This class was fast; they had some serious drummers. They were reaching that tempo when you get scared -- the horses are coming! The drummers kept coming up to that threshold rhythm and I kept getting nervous. Do you know what I mean? Trance drumming to summon the loa. I am trying to dance and it was awful. It was just pitiful. Miss Dunham would've shot me. I am not sure what movement I will go into now. I have done Alexander Technique, I've done Nikolai technique, I've done gymnastics. My daughter has done Tai Kwando and the like. I'm thinking maybe I'll go that route. In Philadelphia there are any number of us who are doing movement, such as Sandy Clark Smith and Denise Sneed, so I will check with them.

Q: Political concerns have always been a big part of your life. Have you felt any personal disorientation from what has happened in the world in the last few years in terms of the collapse of some of the models we looked up to? Do you still feel in terms of your own sense of what struggle has to be for us here in this country, do you feel that sense of struggle is still very much intact and has not been destabilized by any of these developments?

Yes, I "m disoriented and yes, I do think it has been destabilized, and what I have done in response to it is to close in. I don't do nearly the kind of work I used to do. My arena is very limited. I am still doing draft counseling; I work with women from the Persian Gulf thing. What I am always telling them is that they have to do a video and get their stories out. If I can't do it in video, I don't want to do it. If there is any work that people call me for, if it doesn't involve video I won't do it, because I need to focus and not get too scattered. I think it is because of a lack of courage; there is nothing noble about it, so don't clap. When I go to places or meet people I assume are still struggling and find out they are not, it is very depressing, so I just stay where I am with like-minded people. I can affect and create some value where I am.

Q: I have noticed that none of the African American films that I have seen have been taken from great American literature. How you do feel about films made by whites about Blacks?

They are ugly; we don't need them, we have our own genius. Nothing but a Man, despite the stupid title, is an exception.

Q: How do you feel about Hollywood films in general?

I don't feel anything about them. I don't have to because I am very deeply steeped in the independent sector. I don't have to go get mugged all the time. I

go to movies constantly because I am a film nut. But I go to see them to train myself in film, to look at what are the conventional practices, and what do they mean ideologically or politically, and how to avoid them. When I go to movies to enjoy and to blossom, I'm going to independent films, in particular independent Black films, but also independent Asian films, the independent films that are being conducted in that sector away from the industry, that do not take the Hollyweird model as the protocol, but rather are striking out for something else, for a socially responsible cinema. That's where I am. I don't have many expectations from Hollywood. They can tolerate certain kinds of criticism, but they do not tolerate another vision. If you have a different vision, you need to be moving in the independent sector.

Q: Are there any films that you want to recommend?

Sankofa and the Du Bois documentary called W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography In Four Voices, and also The KKK Boutique Ain't Just Rednecks.

After the Flood

It is not the same after the flood.

The light is gone from the windows though they open wide onto tulips at noon.

It all takes place underground water licking and lapping its chops in the basements of the city rolling thunderously down train tracks pausing briefly, waiting only for new pipes to open to follow lead.

I wait for it to reach the 17th floor.

I wait for a signal a sign

You, riding the crest of the waves loudly smiling, hoist your sails billowed with fear, scale the 21st floor pulling waves behind you and I see new foundations.

-- -- Marita Joyce Occomy-Stricklin

Writer

Interviewer: Leo Hamalian

March 19, 1995

There are some books that are outstanding for the way they capture the zeitgeist of the era. They manage to evoke with authenticity and vividness the sense and spirit of their time. Such a book is Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land. This account of growing up in what Brown calls, "a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet-sized section of a great city," catches the climate of post-war years in Harlem. On one hand, the winds of freedom and change were blowing down those mean streets, and the feeling of liberation was in the air. On the other hand, crime was out of control, the sexual revolution was ruining lives, and drug abuse was rampant. No one cared because it was happening to the Black community. After a career in street crime, Claude Brown graduated from Washington Irving High School, and went to college and got his degree at Howard University, continued with his education, and according to one of my sources of information, came out with a law degree.

No, I didn't graduate from law school. I went for three years before they kicked me out.

In 1965 the son of Henry Lee Brown, a railway worker, and Ossie Briggs, a domestic worker, hit the world with, Manchild in the Promised Land. It was an immediate and spectacular success and stayed on the bestseller list for weeks. It won critical acclaim as a tough, unblinking, unrelenting, brutal account of life in Harlem. It drew attention to the plight of African Americans who had come up from the south, struggling to survive in a slum ghetto. I'lld like to read you just one passage from this book to give you some flavor of its style and language. There is a crap game going on, and it is interrupted by someone who intends to take the crap players over. He pulls out a forty-five, points it at them, and Claude Brown writes:

A forty-five is a frightening thing. Not just because it's a gun, because all guns are frightening. The thing that's so terrifying about any gun is when you look into it, you're aware that there's this little black hole that at any time can spit death out at you and take your life. People who have a gun in their face will get up off money in a hurry, especially people who have been shot. Most stickup artists know that if they put a gun to somebody's face and make him look right into the barrel, it's going to have much more effect than a gun held way down low.

A forty-five has a big hole. As a matter of fact, it's the biggest hole I've ever looked into. The big holes are twice as frightening. It's as though if something were to come out of there, it would take your whole head off. This was how we all felt when we looked up into the muzzle of that forty-five pointed at us. I suppose everything seems bigger when you look up at it, and we were all kneeling down shooting craps or watching the craps roll. And all of a sudden there was this big black nigger

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standing there with death in his hand. I wanted to say, "Here, man. Here's the money; take it in a hurry. Just turn that thing away from me.

Claude, in connection with this fear, you wrote in Manchild: "As a child I remember being mortally afraid. It was a fear that was like a fever that never lets up. It was always there." Can you tell us what was that fear, and forty years later, do you think it's still there?

Oh, I think it's intensified forty years later. The fear was always that you would never make it to tomorrow. It's like growing up in inner city America. Even then it was very violent, and as I pointed out in my book people were always saying, "He will not make to sixteen." Then I made it to sixteen and they said, "Well, he won't make it to twenty-one." And I surprised everybody, I'm fifty-eight. That's most unusual. As a matter of fact, most people I grew up with are dead. Around 1975, when I was thirty-eight, I was in a bar waiting to buy some coke. A guy came out of the back office in the bar and he started squinting at me. This was a time when I had not carried any weapons for years. I didn't recognize him, and I am looking around for some kind of weapon because this was Harlem. I am thinking, "Oh, Hell, I'm about to get it. Mistaken identity because of the way this guy was squinting, and I don't even have a fingernail file on me. He started coming around the bar, then he stopped and said something, when he was six stools away from me, to the barmaid, which showed that he was either the manager or the owner. She gave him some money out of the register, he counted it and gave it back to her. He turned around and looked at me, and he said, "Hey, man, did you ever pitch ball for New York State?" And then I recognized him. I said, "Clyde Frazier!" He said, "Claude Brown!" I jumped off the stool, and we both ran and hugged like two long-lost brothers. He said, "Damn! I thought everybody I knew as a teenager was dead!" I said, "Yeah, man, I know." He said, "This calls for a celebration. Give everybody a drink on the house!" We started talking about what had happened to other people we had been in reform school with about twenty-two years before, and they were all dead, dead!

Can you tell us something about the influences on your development as a writer?

People have often asked me what's the best way to become a writer, and I have told them to just take five years, read the classics, and then start writing. It will be almost impossible to write poorly.

I think I was born with an appreciation for the written word, and the spoken word too. I am a great fan of good oratory, and in the school I went to they exposed us to all the great orators. Most of whom came from the Black Baptist church, with few exceptions like A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, and Bayard Rustin. At that time most of the people like Buck Benny, Mordecai Johnson, Adam Clayton Powell, and Martin Luther King, all came out of the Baptist church. You could listen to these people and be inspired to go and do things. Great literature did the same for me. I recall sitting down and reading an assignment for a humanities class. I had to read Emile Zola's Germinal, and I went around raving about the book. Of course, we read the English translation. I went to the head of the romance language department and I said, "Can you

read certain passages for me in French? I want to know if this guy really wrote this well." She did, and would give me a verbatim translation, and I thought this guy was fabulous! Then I read everything of Zola's. Everyone took a liking to Tom Wolfe when they were freshmen in college, you got on that kick. I also recall reading the Russian novelists. I would get on kicks from year to year in school. As I progressed, I read the more difficult and sophisticated writers. I guess everybody starts off that way. If you are a reader you start off reading comic books. You read the classics by being tricked into them because they were in comic book format. Later on I started reading the juicy novels like Erskine Caldwell's Hill Girl, and then at sixteen I heard about this guy called John O'Hara and I read A Rage To Live.

Were there any African Americans writers who influenced you?

Richard Wright became my literary idol. This was before I went to school. The way I was introduced to Richard Wright was that my older sister had gotten a novel he had written. I had never heard of him, but he had written this book called, Black Boy. My sister, who was about sixteen then had gotten this novel thinking it was about Black boys! I peeked at it, and it was so engrossing that before I knew it I had read the whole book. I started looking for things by Richard Wright. I thought he was the only Black writer in the world. As I got a little older I discovered Jimmy Baldwin, and when I was nineteen I discovered Ralph Ellison. The people I knew weren't readers. We were criminals, little hoodlums in Harlem. One day I was browsing around in the Village, looking at some books on a stand outside of a bookstore, and there was Invisible Man. I picked it up thinking it was science fiction. I paid fifty cents for it, took it home and started reading it. It was a real shocker, and I started telling everybody to check this book out. I started looking for more things by Ralph Ellison and couldn't find any.

So how did a bad dude like you go from being a street criminal to a wonderful writer? How did you make this transition?

I have always been writing. I never liked to write and still don't, but it's just less risky than killing people, so I started writing when I got angry. I used to sit down and read things, that's's how Irving Howe and I hooked up, with Dissent. I read Norman Mailer's White Negro, and I thought that was a lot of b.s. I wrote a letter to the editor, who was Irving Howe at the time, and said, "Hey, man, this is a lot of nonsense," and surprisingly enough he wrote me back. He said, "I found what you had to say interesting, perhaps you would like to write something for us. We don't usually pay our writers, but I think we can scrape up fifty if you are willing." I said, "Yes sure, for fifty dollars." This was in 1958. I did it, and then a few months later he asked me if I would like to write something else and he would pay me. Wow, that made me a writer! That's how it started. But I never considered myself a writer. I wrote something for Dissent in the summer of 1960. It was about a demonstration in front of the U.N. after the death of Patrice Lumumba. That was read by Graham Cavin, who was then a senior editor at Macmillan. He asked if they would forward a letter to me from him inviting me to lunch. He took me to this steak joint, which was located down in the Village, and plied me with liquor and a steak dinner. He talked to me about writing a book. I said, "Look man, I can't take your money. I am not a

writer. The longest thing I have ever written was a twenty page short story. I don't want to take your money." He said, "Well, writing a book is not that difficult. It's just like writing twenty of those stories and stringing them together." I said, "Yeah, well it seems it would take forever to write it. I am going to be in college full time, and working in the Post Office full time. I have just gotten married, and in effect, I am going to have three full time jobs." After about the third Scotch, I said, "Okay man, it's your money!" That's how I got the contract to write Manchild, and I hadn't written anything long before. Four months later a friend had come down from New York to visit me, and I was seeing him off at the Trailway bus terminal. I found a paperback book there on the rack by Richard Wright. I thought I had read everything he had written, and he had died by this time. This was in 1963. It was a collection of short stories called, Eight Men. I read it that night and finished it at three in the morning. When I put that book down I took out a sheet of paper, put it in the typewriter, and started writing Manchild. Of course, Manchild, that was not the original title, but when I completed the manuscript, a huge thing of 1537 pages in a grocery box, I brought it in a week late.

Now, I was still a student at Howard in August, 1961 when Martin Luther King had his civil rights march. I was locked up in my house, disconnected my phone because in two weeks I had to have money to register for my senior year. Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who were friends of mine in SNCC, said, "Hey, man, aren't you coming down to the basin so we can give Uncle a hard time?" This was not a flattering reference to Martin Luther King. I said, "No, man, I gotta do this book." Interestingly enough Rap said, "Yeah, that damn book gonna drive you crazy!" I said, "Yeah, man, just go on and let me be crazy. I'll see the march on television." Strangely enough a few years ago Rap was on "Like It Is" on television, Gil Noble asked him what he thought inspired him to become an activist or a militant. He said, "Well, a guy named Claude Brown wrote a book called, Manchild in the Promised Land."

Macmillan was one of the most conservative publishing houses in the country, if not the world. They had this huge manuscript that was replete with Black dialect, slang, and profanity. And there was no one there who knew what to do with it. Bruno Fisher was the executive editor at the time, and we had this big feud going. I would write him nasty letters, and he would write me nasty letters. I said, "Look, man, just give me the manuscript back, and I'll find a thousand dollars to give back to you guys!" He wouldn't budge. One day, as fate would have it, a young man who was a literature major, who had just graduated from Harvard, summa cum laude, came into Macmillan as a junior editor, and he ran around saying, "I want to be a Maxwell Perkins! I want to find a Thomas Wolfe and a F. Scott Fitzgerald!" He was just annoying everybody there. They labeled him, "Eager Beaver." Because of the size of my manuscript, it had facetiously been tagged, "Claude Brown's Box of Groceries," by Bruno Fisher. Somebody came up with the bright idea of how to kill two birds with one stone. They said, "Why don't we give Claude Brown's box of groceries to Eager Beaver?" His real name was Alan Renzler. Alan being a fast reader sat down and read the manuscript about three times, and then wrote me a long letter saying what great fun we were going to have publishing this book. "I feel so

fortunate that this magnum opus fell into my hands! It's a real masterpiece!" I thought he was a real nut too. I thought it might sell a hundred copies to my friends and relatives. You never know how attached you are to a work of yours until somebody starts messing with it. At every turn Alan wanted to make a change, but I would say, "Look, you can't do that," for certain reasons. He said, "Look, we can't handle all this Black dialect because nobody likes to read dialect." I said, "Let me tell you something. This is written in a literary vein of realism, and that's how the people talk." So he agreed to keep the dialect, but wanted to get rid of the slang, or put a glossary in it. I said, "No, you don't put a glossary in it because this is not an academic book. I am certain that all of the slang is explained in the context." He agreed to that, but then he wanted to get rid of the profanity because it wouldn't become a main selection for the Book-of-the-Month-Club, or wouldn't be a Reader's Digest condensation. I said that it wasn't written for the Book-of-the-Month-Club, or Reader's Digest. Well, he agreed to everything. Then I told him I had a painting that I wanted to go on the cover. So he said, "This should have a photograph on it because it is realism." I said, "Okay, but this photograph that you want me to put on the cover, you had better find those kids who are in the photograph, and get a written release from every one of them before you use it." He didn't bother to, and Macmillan got sued for that. After all of this hassling for almost two years the book was finally published, and it turned out to be the biggest book Macmillan had published since, Gone With The Wind, in 1937. And I had to twist their arms for almost two years to get them to publish it!

Did they publish the manuscript pretty much as you had written it, or did they make you cut a lot of material?

They cut a lot of material because it was too long.

So where is that material?

I still have it. I told you that I didn't like writing, and I had a friend whom I referred to in the book by the name of Ernst Papenek. I used to always write to him when I went to reform school. When Manchild was published they had a reception for me at the George Washington Hotel on 23rd Street, and Ernst was one of the people getting up and paying tribute. He said, "Well, I didn't know that Claude would become a writer, but I had my suspicions because he was always writing me these six page letters telling me how much he hated my writing.!"

Do you think your family had any influence in directing you towards a creative life?

No, my family always thought I would be a great success if I would just manage to stay alive, and not in jail until I reached twenty-one. Everything else was just a bonus for them. My father was always suspicious when I was at Howard, and he would say, "You workin' in the Post Office? You sure you ain't dealin' dope down there?"

You say in the book that you were admitted to Columbia, but you weren't able to go.

At that time Columbia was very expensive. They were only charging about twenty-three dollars a credit. Howard University charged nine dollars a credit,

and I had a scholarship from the Methodist church. So I ended up at Howard, but I was glad I went to Howard. At first I didn't want to go there. I wanted to go someplace out of the city. I was young and horny, so when I got to Howard, looked around, and saw all these beautiful women, I just fell down on my knees and said, "Thank you Jesus!"

Why didn't you apply to City College, which was free?

But it was in New York City. I wanted to get away from New York City. Just like I wanted to get away from Harlem. I don't think I would have finished evening high school had I stayed in Harlem. I moved down to the Village which wasn't far from Washington Irving evening high school. I lived at 35 Cooper Square, right down from the original Five Spot. Every time I would come uptown to Harlem there would be somebody saying, "Hey, man, you want to get high? I got some dynamite smoke here?" You couldn't get away from it. It was hard to study when you got a head full of smoke or Coke. So I didn't think City College was a good place to go to school.

George Davis, writing in the New York Times, said, "Manchild remains one of the great personal, non-ideological views of life in the rawest part of Harlem." Do you think your book is non-ideological?

Yes. This was just telling about growing up in Harlem. I took certain pains to avoid anybody misinterpreting any kind of ideology, or attributing any ideologies to what I was saying. When I was a teenager in Harlem, and a young man, the Muslims came, but they were late for me. When I susceptible to that sort of thing, it was the Coptic faith, and I subscribed to it for a while, but then I passed on through. Malcom X had just come to Harlem the year I got out of the Coptic faith. I decided to go to school and forget about how wonderful my heritage or how disadvantaged I was, etc. It's being a product of the inner city, you are not aware that you are deprived of anything. I had a ball in Harlem, getting shot, cut, and stabbed and all that. That was just part of life, but it didn't mean that I wasn't enjoying it. When people look around and say, "Hey, what about this miraculous rehabilitation?" Well, I wasn't really delinquent to begin with. To me it was just adventuresome. All the things that I did were just other adventures in Harlem. When I was eight years old I stole a bag of money, over a hundred dollars from a Whelan Drugstore, to take four friends of mine to Coney Island. We stayed for two weeks! Our parents thought we were dead, we just disappeared! If I could have gotten a job and made enough money to do that I would have done that, but nobody would give me a job so I stole it!

It's inevitable that someone is going to ask you this, so I'll ask it first: Is there any message from your experience that we can pass on to young people who are now living in Harlem and coping with the same kind of environment that you coped with?

I think the message for survival, or that the attitude that you must have for survival, is that you know there is something more out there, and you have to believe that you can get it, even though you may not know how. If you are determined, you can get it. People had been telling me all of my life that I was going to have to follow the route that everybody else took because it was a part of our "cultural legacy." I was in the street life early, by the age of five before I

was going to school. By the time I was six or seven I knew all the fences, all the prostitutes, all the dope dealers, all the card sharks, everybody in the neighborhood, people I shouldn't have known. If you get in the street life at a very early age you start going away at a very early age. By the time I was sixteen I had done five years at different reform schools. When I was eleven years old I was at Wiltwyck School for Boys, the place that Floyd Patterson made famous. At eleven we took bets on who would get to places like New York State Training School, Coxsackie, Elmira, Woodburn, Sing Sing, because we all had older brothers, cousins, uncles, and in some cases fathers, who had gone to these places, or who were there, and that was our cultural legacy. It was fortunate that I had done five years by the time I was sixteen when most kids were just coming out of the house. I had been shot, I had been stabbed in lots of gang fights. I'd tried every dope that was out there, all kinds of drugs. The one thing I hadn't tried was going to school. So I started doing this because the other way was a clear road to destruction. Strangely enough, after I completed my freshman at Howard in 1960 during the summer, I was in New York City on a bus, and heard a voice say, "Hey, Brown." The voice was familiar, but I couldn't put a face to it. When I got off the bus I waited, and the guy who called me got off, and he had been a guy I had been at Wiltwyck and Warwick with a couple of times. His name was Geechy. He said, "Damn, Brown, where you been? I just got out of Sing. I did a très on a nickel and owe two." That meant that he had five years, and he did three and owed two on parole. He said, "Everybody is up there, and they are all lookin' for you! I saved you a seat at Elmira, at Coxsackie, at Woodburn, by the time I got to Sing, I said this dude is not goin' to show!" I said, "You never know, I might make it yet!" He said, "Somebody said you got busted in Chicago. Somebody said you got shot in Philly." I said, "No, no, I have been lucky." Then he said in a very accusatory tone, "You know what somebody said about you? Somebody said that you went to college!" Without even thinking about it I said, "Man, you know how people always lying on somebody!" I think this was my Auschwitz complex, if you will. Who was I to be going to college when everybody else was going to jail?

Q I have two questions. One is can you explain the title? The second question is what is the difference that you see now among young Black men in the Black community versus when you were growing up?

The title of the book came about when I submitted the manuscript to Macmillan, and I also submitted fifty possible titles. Manchild was one of them. They didn't like any of those. They had at that time -- at Macmillan -- a title jury who selected a title which they thought would be the most saleable. Since they didn't find any of those acceptable over the next three weeks I submitted an additional hundred and fifty titles. Six months before the book was to be published this title jury selected one of the original fifty, which was Manchild in the Promised Land.

As for how things have changed in Harlem, ten years ago I did a cover story for the New York Times on adolescent crime. I did most of the research in Harlem and in prisons, and right now I am finishing up this book on the evolution of violent crime in inner city America. In doing that I did a lot of the research in inner city America, Harlem, and other Harlems across the country. Harlem is more of a culture, more so than a geographical location. If you go to Roxbury in

Boston, if you go to South Central in L.A., or West Lawndale in Chicago, you'll find that the culture is the same. They use the same slang, they do the same dances, in the soul food places they are eating the same things. So it's Harlem in all these different places.

It seems that now the main determination for behavior is this respect thing and honor, which is a code of violence, believe it or not. It is like being in jail. In jail you have the most respect given to people than in any other place, but it is a very subtle and sophisticated form of behavior. If you step on somebody's foot or bump against them accidentally, you have to say, "Excuse me," but you have to do it in a way where you don't seem like a punk. You have to convey the message that this was unintentional and, "I apologize, but I'm not afraid of you. You can accept it or we can go the death route, if you want." All this had come out into the inner cities throughout the country and it's been exaggerated more so than in prison to the extent that people who have been in prison for the last fifteen years come out in the streets of inner city America and they don't feel safe. In the prisons it was safe because you knew who the nuts were, and you knew how to avoid them, but in the streets you don't know. There was a time when in prison everybody knew that the most dangerous inmates in any prison system was the inmate who was referred to as, "The state child." The state child was someone who had grown up in foster homes and institutions all of his life, and he was the most dangerous because he had never had a family, he had never been taught any love, affection, or human compassion, and therefore he would kill quicker than any other inmate in the system. Now, the most dangerous inmate in the system is some nutty kid who comes off the street, probably for snatching pocketbooks, and wants to prove to someone that he is a killer. You have all of that out there on the street which means you are really safer in prisons today.

Q Talk about murder that's "in style."

In researching for that article ten years ago, I spent a lot of time at the Adolescent Detention and Reception Center on Riker's Island. That's a facility where they house youngsters between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one who have committed, or have been charged with committing serious crimes such as murder, rape, arson, armed robbery, etc. I was talking to these kids and asking them, "Why do you shoot people now when you mug them? It seems as though once you have gotten the money you shoot them anyway. And if they don't have any money you shoot them. It seems as though you want to shoot them." They would me telling me things like, "Well, that's what you are supposed to do. That's the way it's done." I said, "What do you mean? That's not the way it's done. That's what you did, and I'm trying to find out why." They would say things like, "Well, because that's what you are supposed to do." Suddenly it hit me, and I said, "Are you saying that because it's in style? Like wearing Nikes?" They said, "Yeah, that's what it's like, it's in style." Then I realized why it was so difficult for me to grasp this because it is so mind-boggling. That's where the culture has evolved to the culture of violence in this day and age.

When I was growing up in inner city America, in Harlem, in the '50s as a teenager, one of the older hoodlums who was a stickup artist would adopt you as an apprentice. What he did was to explain very carefully how to pull a

stickup, with a gun. He would ask you to explain a stickup. You would say, "A stickup is when you take a gun, you put it to somebody's head and you say, "Give me the money or I'm going to kill you." The master would say, "Yeah, sort of. But there is a little more to it than that. Actually, a stickup is the quickest way to get a lot of money in a very short period of time. Do you know why you carry a gun on a stickup?" You would say, "Yeah, I carry a gun in case I have to shoot somebody." He said, "No, the reason you carry a gun on a stickup is so you won't have to hurt anybody. If you do it right you'll never have to shoot anybody on a stickup. You'll never even have to hurt anybody, and there are certain dos and donts that you apply at the stickup whereby you don't have to do that." He would ask you all these different things. This was like having a job interview! You would never touch a woman in the process of a stickup. Even if you see her grab two fistfuls of a hundred dollar bills and stuff them in her bosom. So how would you get the money? He'd say he would show me when the time comes. The most important rule in any stickup -- you always get out of there in a minute and a half. Ninety seconds. This was in 1951, and he says, "Can you sing?" You would say, "No, man, I can't sing." What's your favorite song?" You'd say, `What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?' by The Orioles." He said, "Do you know the words? Sing it for me." At this time there were no twelve inch LP's or forty-five rpms. Just the breakable seventy-eights which played for three minutes exactly. He said, "Just sing it for me. I'll do the same for you afterwards." So You'd start singing, "Maybe it's much too early in the game..." He's watching his wrist watch. He says, "Okay, stop. Now, that's a minute and a half. A minute and a half is half of, `What Are You Doing New Year's Eve.' You have to remember that because your life depends on it." So you would be singing that forever! The interview went like that, showing you how to pull a stickup, and you don't kill anybody. These are things you are going to remember for the rest of your life.

This meeting took place about an hour before the stickup. If it was the first time, you would get scared and say, "Oh, God! I wish I was home with my Mama! I'm going to get killed!" But you don't, and that's how you get ensnared. If it goes right it is easy money. And of course you didn't have to kill anybody. One of the reasons in those days they taught you not to kill was because they had this chair up in Sing Sing called, "Old Smokey." Also, your mentor explained to you what felony murder was all about. The fact that if you killed someone during the commission of a felony it was automatic murder one, and there were no ifs ands, or buts about it. You were going to get the privilege of sitting in Old Smokey and being cooked. The way they described it to you was: "Hey, Man, you ever see your Mama fry a fish?" Well, you know how the fish curls up when it hits the hot grease?" Well, that's just how it is when they hit you with ten thousand volts in Old Smokey, and you start cooking from the inside out. When you see James Cagney in the movies going to the electric chair you don't see where that they stuff your ass full of cotton, they stuff your ears because all that electricity just cooks the shit out of you!" This was very graphically described! That's why you didn't want to shoot anybody on a stickup.

Why has there never been a movie based on your book?

It's in the works now. Universal and Spike Lee are to start shooting in September. Most of the stories haven't been told yet. It's like the real story of the African slave trade and the middle passages has not yet been told. It's very difficult to find somebody who wants to tell it unless it's a Black publisher who, like Third World Press, doesn't have sufficient distribution outlets in order to get it the kind of readership that it deserves. Just last year I wrote an introduction to a young woman's compilation of interviews by Black male writers. Her name is Rebecca Carol. She wrote something called, I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like, published by Crown last year. In this book were about a dozen Black women writers, and it is one of the best things I have ever read. Then she did it with Black male writers and that's called, Swing Low. This will be published by Crown in June. In the introduction I wrote why this book was so important because it reflects how the African American experience in this country has impacted on the life and thought of Black male writers in such a way that it has qualified them to write in depth about an experience that nobody else knows. And that's what's so important about this book and books like it. She's got everybody in there from people like Cecil Brown to John Edgar Wideman, Ishmael Reed, David Bradley. All the major Black male writers today. Each one is giving a unique revelation of how he became a writer and why. Yet they all have in common that one experience of coming from that middle passage, being an African American after slavery, what it's done to them, how it's made them writers, and how it has dictated their messages.

Rebecca Carol used to be Skip Gate's assistant in the African Studies Department at Harvard up until last May.

Who was the prize fighter you ran with in your book?

That was Doug Jones. How did you know?

Doug Jones, the heavyweight boxer who beat Muhammad Ali?

He and I grew up together. We were hoodlums in Harlem.

Did he really beat Ali?

They had a riot in Madison Square Garden because they gave it to Ali. He just didn't knock him down, he had him out on his feet. But because he didn't knock him down, and he was the Mob's boy, they gave the decision to Ali. The Muslims took him away from the Mob in the fight with Liston. It's like Jimmy Muhammad in Philly went into Blinky Palermo's office and told him, "Look, man, it's time for you to leave." Blinky laughed at him. He's got like eight mobsters around him and he says, "You are telling me to leave?" Jimmy says, "We are going to give you a big pay day. You are going to bet big money on Cassius Clay, not Sonny Liston, and you are going have a big payday because Clay is going to win. You are going to clean up, but then you are leaving." Blinky laughed. Muhammad raised his hand, and the place was swarming with Muslims who were ready to die at a drop of a hat. Blinky got his pay day and he left. In Philly, the Mobbies were out of boxing from then on. All these guys were gangsters except for Malcolm! He was the only one who didn't know that they were gangsters, and that cost him his life.

What is your feeling about capital punishment now? Do you think it's going to work?

It's going to work, there's no doubt about it. And it does work. I am against capital punishment, but not for any of the reasons that we have heard.

People like Cuomo who is giving a specious reason. He takes Thomas Grasso and says, "You see, they'd rather die then spend a lifetime in jail." That's nonsense. I have known a lot of people who have killed people, have gone to jail, died in the electric chair, and some who have lied and lied to their graves not to go to the electric chair. The fact of the matter is that there is only one reason that any cop is safe on the streets in Harlem, in Bedford Stuyvesant, in the South Bronx, or any place else, and that's out of fear of capital punishment. Why do you think an honest cop can walk the streets? He has his wallet, and he has a gun. All stickup men and criminals would like to have another gun plus the money in a cop's wallet, but it never happens. It's not just the fear of capital punishment, but it is the fear of the immediate and swift, no trials, bang, you are dead capital punishment. That's the only reason why nobody mugs cops. Because they will get killed. They mug little old ladies, women, and men who don't seem strong. That's because they don't want to die. It's as simple as that. So capital punishment is a deterrent with people who commit crimes again and again. In South Carolina in July 1987 a guy was put to death for killing an inmate on a contract murder, and he was serving ten consecutive life sentences. He killed this inmate while he's in jail, and it wouldn't have made any sense to give this man another life sentence. There was nothing else to do but kill him. I have interviewed a lot of judges, a lot of inmates and victims concerning the issue of capital punishment. I want to tell you about Donald Nash, a hired killer who was making a hit on a woman in mid-Manhattan, and a CBS news truck team was there. The three people on the truck saw him make the hit so he had to kill them. He couldn't leave any witnesses. He was eventually tracked down through a rented van, and he came before a friend of mine who was a Supreme Court justice in the New York State Supreme Court. This judge was up at Attica, looking out of the warden's office window over to the yard, and there was Donald Nash holding court like a king. A lot of the younger criminals were around him, and the judge could imagine that Donald Nash was there giving instructions on how to commit murder and get away with it. If he could have sentenced Donald Nash to death, Nash would have understood it because when he asked Nash why he killed the three people Nash said, "It was just business. I couldn't afford to leave any witnesses." The judge would have liked to have been able to sentence Donald Nash to death and explain to him that, "This was just business."

I've got a chapter in my book on the N.Y.P.D. It is a chapter that deals with "The Hallelujah Squad," a subunit of the Emergency Services Unit of N.Y.P.D., a group of expert marksmen with shotguns and thirty-eights; they would stake out liquor stores and places where the had a high stickup rate, and they never took any prisoners. They would be staked out in such a way that for anybody to get a shot at them, you had to turn around in a 180 degree angle. In that time you could shoot somebody twenty-five times. The way they got their nickname was that they would come in and say -- like when a stickup person came in and announced a stickup -- they would say, "Hallelujah Motherfuckers," and start

shooting. This unit was started in 1967 by Captain Arthur Hill, who ran the 28th Precinct for about twenty years, which was in the 125th Street area.

In 1972 when Patrick Murphy was Commissioner of the N.Y.P.D., Deputy Inspector Hill was going over the records, and he noticed that these guys had a high rate of kills, more so than somebody on the front lines in Vietnam. He took it to Murphy and said, "Commissioner, you should look at this." Murphy called in a lieutenant who was the head of this squad and said, "Tell me, Lieutenant, why do your men have so many kills? Don't you take any prisoners?" The lieutenant said, "Oh, Commissioner, you couldn't imagine how brave these stickup men are. We tell them to freeze and they turn around shooting." Murphy said, "Bull! We are going to disband all this." What had happened was there were no Blacks on this squad, and I asked Art, who had started it why this was. He said, "Well, it was the sixties. I needed the Black cops out on the street because of the hot summers." I wanted to know how they selected these guys. It seemed they were a bunch of homicidal maniacs with badges. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. When it was disbanded, what happened to them? They just reassimilated into the police department. In Harlem we always thought that that was a part of police corruption which was a part of life. That's the way it was supposed to be. As a kid I would see policemen would go down in the gambling joints and never brought out anybody! There was only one thing they could be doing! Corruption was a part of life, and it still is.

Letter to Catullus from a Summer Friend

Catullus I missed your doggy buns at Lupercalia this spring. You fled to Greece, leaving my muzzle buried in the culus of this Roman heat -- a dreary lust without release... Rumors late from Attica are rife that you mock your friend's estate. (At least for a time I am remembered at your table, where I once fared well.) Recall the day when Titus Lucretius sat between us, sipping Tuscany -- 'twas at your villa near Vesuvius -- you provoked the party into such arrays of laughter that incipiunt agitata tumescere! And after sobering, Titus Carus exclaimed that Pliny's poodle had leapt from the table into his lap, spilling on his tunic a vessel of milk -- which had provoked our rally, "Say, say, it's curds and whey!" (I saw him lick his paws up to his wrists, so help me Zeus!) Poor Caius --

-- 93 --

"Hostis si quis erit nobis, amet ille puellas: gaudeat in puero, si quis amicus erit."

["May my enemies love women, and my friends delight in boys."]

Oh yes, Sirius is seriously training her new puppy, cramming fistsful of paté and truffles into his maw so his greasy kiss may glide across her lips glissando. Do I care? Not a wit... Yet, she haunts me a little. I miss those tender taunts of mirth we shared at Luprical.

Fig, are you licking some pig's ear? I should've fled to Greece with thee, but that vulgaris lupus bitch -- she, her, my canicular red and receding star, had her claws fastened in my heart. I'm free now, but bleeding...

Catullus, don't lecture me. I'm not Lucretius. I've not the eyes of Zeus to see above, beyond the love of beasts to glimpse the human grandeur of decay. (My one-eyed mole digs more surely than all the philosophs of Rome). Enough. I'll wait.

You must return for Ludi Romani; then your sweet abuse "like autumn rain, will cool my tears and damp my shame." But for now, be generous: send me some new jokes -- cruel and quick as roaches -- these will I breathe into my lady's ear.

-- -- James V. Hatch

Musician

Interviewer: David Wyland

March 5, 1994

David Wyland worked for Newsweek as a senior photo editor for more than sixteen years, retired, went into business for himself, and now represents seven sports photographers. He lives in New York with his wife, Jeanie Black, the photographer. It is under Jeanie's initiative that Charles Byrd gave this interview.]

We have Charles Byrd today. A musician, composer, arranger, big band leader. Charles, you're not a native New Yorker; where are you from?

I'm from a place called Fayetteville, North Carolina. That's about nine miles from Fort Bragg. I was born there a few years ago.

When did you decide you were going to become a musician? How old were you?

When I was about eleven, I had taken about two piano lessons. I hated it and I stopped. When I was thirteen, I got a saxophone (I was in high school then), and the bandmaster told us what kind of reeds to buy. I was going to play alto sax, and I forgot the name of the reed. I remembered the tenor sax reed, so I bought that, and I went back and said that I wanted to play tenor saxophone. I liked the tenor more; in fact, I love the tenor sax. So I just practiced. I listened to people and it caught me after awhile -- I was a musician, I was stuck.

Were you in the Army?

I was in the army stationed at Fort Bragg. I was drafted in Fayetteville and sent the nine miles to Fort Bragg. I was in the Twenty-Fourth Chemical Corps, which dealt with poison gases, smoke screens, things like that. There was a Colonel Hoerder who wanted his very own band, so he took me and another guy named Roy Borrowes, a trumpet player, out of basic training and asked us to form a band. We put out a notice, and forty or fifty people showed up. We found that only two of them could play. They wanted to get out of basic training. Roy and I decided to form a drum and bugle corps -- anything to avoid finishing basic training. Roy played trumpet, so I learned to play bugle one afternoon, and we had the Twenty-fourth Drum and Bugle Corps. Then the Colonel was transferred to Korea. As soon as he left, the people who hated us, the people who were on the field, just dissolved the band. I got a job in something called S3, plans and training. I drew charts and pictures for training, and as soon as I could I transferred to the 82nd Airborne, which is also at Fort Bragg. I was in the concert band and the marching band there. I played baritone saxophone and tenor saxophone in the marching band, and baritone in the dance band. I was in two years and two days and was glad to get out.

Was the 82nd integrated then?

Yes; when I got in, I think that the order had been signed to integrate, but they hadn't done it yet. When I got to the 82nd, that was the second year, and yes, it was integrated; at least the band was.

When did you come to New York?

I came to New York in the mid-'50s. I came here to go to school and went to the Manhattan School of Music for a couple of years, and then went to Mannes College for about two and a half years and decided to stay here. I had fallen in love with New York years before that.

You'd visited here?

I had visited here a lot. I wanted to be a musician and thought this was the place to be. It still is, I suppose.

Did you join 802?

Yes, I joined shortly after I came to New York. I dropped out for a few years and recently rejoined.

What did you do when you finished school?

Well, when I finished school I worked as an arranger. I did some playing, but actually when I was in the Army, I had an accident. It had nothing to do with the war. I broke a tooth on the dashboard of a Buick. I had the tooth replaced and it gave me a lot of trouble with the embouchure, so it was a long time before I could get the sound I wanted again. I wasn't playing very much, but I was arranging.

I arranged for people like Clyde McPhatter (I was his chief arranger), Shepp and the Lime Lights, and Peaches n' Herb. Herb used to hire a new Peaches every couple of years; there were a lot of Peaches. Herb was the same guy all the time. I was working mainly in rhythm and blues. When white people play it, it's called rock `n' roll, but when Blacks play it, it's called rhythm and blues. It's pretty much the same thing.

I never thought of that.

Well, that's what I did; I was an arranger. I did a few jazz things; I did a couple of arrangements for Woody Herman; I did a few things for Howard McGhee, who everybody should know about. He's one of the great jazz trumpet players. Also a few things for Lionel Hampton.

So your initial interest was not jazz? Was it R & B ?

My initial interest was jazz. But I knew some people who were in that field, rock and rhythm and blues, and they got me gigs. That's why I was doing that. My earliest interest was jazz, my interest now is jazz, and all in between there was jazz. But I can do other things.

Why big bands? What is your fascination?

I'm a composer, I'm an arranger, and I like to hear the tonal palette that the big band offers. All the saxophones, trumpets, the low brass, the trombones. I have a bass trombone and a tuba in my band now, and I just like all these voices. I couldn't do that much with one trumpet and one saxophone and rhythm section. So that's why really I like the big band. I like writing for it. It's just that I don't think many people realize how intricate that is.

A lot of those classical pieces for big orchestras with maybe eighty strings will have a first violin part, a second violin part, the viola and cello and bass parts, and they'll have maybe twenty people playing the first violin part. That's four parts, maybe five. So, when I write for an eighteen-piece jazz band, the size of my current band, I'm writing eighteen different parts. The idea seems to be

that if it's a symphony orchestra, then people think it's very complicated. It is complicated, but relative to jazz it's not all that complicated.

You think there is a future for big bands? Are they coming back?

Well, they say that every few years, and they do come back. They do come back, and they are pretty much ignored. And you know why? It's because of the media. The media ignores jazz in general. Actually, that's what happened back in the '60s.

Do you think it's media and not simply the economics of it?

I know this is what happened. In the '60s, children, people in their early teens, fell in love with rock `n' roll. There was absolutely no diminution in interest on the part of jazz fans, but the media decided that jazz was dead and they tried to kill it by imposing an almost 100 percent blackout on information to the people about jazz and jazz musicians. In the early '70s a lot of people thought that nobody was playing jazz. They read the papers, they watched TV, and never found any jazz. Incidentally, the only place on TV you can hear jazz usually is on public television, and they're trying to cut that out. But that's what happened. I went down to my hometown in the '70s and a couple of people asked me, "What happened to jazz? Nobody's playing it any more." I said, "Sure they're playing it; you just don't hear about it." They made us invisible people. Invisible men and women.

And you don't think that free jazz had anything to do with that decline in popularity?

No. Free jazz was, for most people, a little bit harder to respond to. It wasn't as "melodic" as the other jazz. But free jazz didn't take the place of other jazz, the more traditional jazz, so it couldn't have knocked jazz out -- that's impossible. Actually, free jazz got more press than bop. When I say bop I mean bebop. (I hate that term, bebop.)

But I just wondered whether free jazz, not easily accessible, simply didn't turn a lot of people off.

I don't think so. This is what the media did also. They began to say that jazz was old and rock was new. Actually, rock was being played by Black people back in the '30s on acoustic instruments. Now it's the same thing, what is music? Music is basically melody, harmony, rhythms. The rhythms were exactly the same, which a bop musician might consider corny, old-fashioned. Some people say rock musicians use only three chords. They were playing more than three chords, but it's very simple harmony, and that's from the '40s and '30s and the melodies are the same kinds of melodies. If you get a rock piece, something that comes out next week, the phrases the piano and guitar are playing, you'll hear nothing on there that wasn't played way back. They're just rehashing, and the PR machinery keeps calling it new.

I remember back in the late '60s it had gotten fashionable to dress in jeans. You didn't dress up. I read an article in the Village Voice by this columnist and he said that "jazz fans wear cuff links." That meant that jazz fans were square. See, hip people then were for rock `n' Roll. He said that Coltrane sounded like a butcher. I never figured out what that meant. I don't know what a butcher sounds like! Billie Holliday merely reminded him of Saturday morning cartoons.

I guess she was on a sound track somewhere. They were really trashing jazz, they were attacking it, saying it was old. In the '70s I asked a lot of young people, "Do you like jazz?" The answer was usually "no." Then I'd ask if they had heard any jazz, and the answer was "no." You see, they'd been taught that they weren't supposed to like it. If they liked it they were old-fashioned. So it's not an exaggeration to say that the media did try to destroy jazz. Now, why, I'm not sure.

Too difficult.

Maybe.

But rap is starting to pick up on jazz now.

Yes, they're experimenting.

And some jazz musicians are experimenting.

Yes; Donald Byrd, the jazz trumpeter, did some things with rap. (I'm not related to Donald.) It's too early to say what's going to happen to that. I don't really know and can't comment on it. Rap is like the dozens people used to play. Like "I screwed your mama with a baseball bat. She said, `daddy I like it like that'" and then the other guy would answer with his own insult. That's primarily where rap came from.

Who was your big musical influence?

Big influence? Well, I had a few. The first one, I think, was Coleman Hawkins. I love the way he plays. Duke Ellington -- one of the first records I bought after I started playing the horn was "Chloe." I loved Duke, Coleman Hawkins, but I really hadn't decided to become a musician. Then I heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie when I was still living in North Carolina, and they didn't have those records down there. I used to buy records every time I came to New York. I heard a piece by Bird and Dizzy Gillespie and I could not figure out what Bird was doing. The main thing was the rhythms he was playing. You know that melodies have rhythms, eighth notes, two notes to a beat, and he wasn't swinging the way, say, Coleman Hawkins did. I couldn't figure out what he was doing. Dizzy, I thought, was amusing, because he'd play all those funny notes. I would listen occasionally, and then one day I listened to Bird and it dawned on me -- it was like magic, man. Bebop... I love it.

So actually Duke was a big influence in my writing, but I think probably the biggest influence was a man called Tad Dameron, from Cleveland. Tad Dameron, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, and then Bird and Dizzy. I remember I pretended I needed glasses and had my father buy me glasses. Well, my mother took me down to buy some big horn-rimmed glasses because Dizzy wore them. I didn't need the glasses.

All the musicians, geniuses like Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Dexter, Wardel Grey -- I was influenced by everything I heard, I suppose. But the things I liked best influenced me most because I never tried to sound like anyone else.

Who do you like now?

Now? Same people. I like some of the younger people, too. David Murray is a good tenor player. I don't think a musician has to suffer to play blues or to sing blues, but people today sound almost too comfortable; they don't have that fire in the belly. They have a lot of facility and they can play, but it doesn't come out

and grab you. There is a guy in my band, a young guy called Brad Leali -- he has that. I'm not sure what it is; it pulls you in. If you transcribed the music it would look very interesting -- the chords they are playing, the various sequences. To some people, if you analyze the music, it may or may not be impressive, but if you hear it, it just catches you, it grabs you, and that's what I'm missing in a lot of music. Does that make me an old fogy? I hope not.

But you don't insist on adhering to a bebop camp.

No; I think jazz is an art form. Art on the highest level. Because of that we have to look to the past, respect it. We should know what happened back then, like Mr. Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, people like that, and listen to the whole spectrum. It needs people who are experimenting, trying things. Some things you might hate, but I think it's important to do that, so I'd encourage people to be the innovators. I might not like what they're doing, but then again I might. It's important to look at the past and also have somebody who is trying for the future because it's going to change. Jazz has to change. Jazz is sort of like the human body -- it rejects things that are foreign to it. You can do something new for a little while and then you'll find no one is playing it anymore. Like when Bebop was new, there were other kinds of new music and they just faded. But what Bird and Diz did proved to be something that jazz could handle and needed. It was strong enough. The older guys are still playing great music.

Do you feel there is still room to explore in bop?

Oh yes. It might not be pure bop, but most of the new music starts from bop. They phrase like Bop. They use the notes the same way, and then they might do some more sounds that Bird didn't do. You know, various sounds and noises. I do a few things like that myself. I have some free sections in some of my big band things. Yes, there is plenty of room. If you stop experimenting, the thing will die.

Maybe it would help if you could define what jazz is and what bop is.

What is jazz? Wow! Jazz is like a culmination of gospel music, spirituals, blues, the dozens, work songs -- it all metamorphosed into jazz. Jazz has an ability to swing and that's hard to define, but it's kind of a forward propelling the music has; it makes you tap your foot in a different way from the way rock does. It's where we are now; it grew out of those other things, various kinds of Black music, and, of course, jazz is African American music. Other people have contributed greatly, but it's African American specifically.

There is a music from a certain period called "swing music," the swing era, and the word is also used meaning forward propulsion, swinging. In the swing era, eighth notes were played differently from the way the boppers did. Bop is just very, very complicated. People use pretty much standard notation. I studied classical music, and the schools I went to didn't have jazz then. Now they all do. We used that same notation, but it doesn't begin to tell you how to play it; you have to know bebop. If you wrote the subdivisions that the average bop musician plays, you probably couldn't read it; you'd have to do it with a computer, maybe. It's much more complicated than swing music rhythmically, and harmonically it's a lot different. The bop musicians used the higher partials of chords and different kinds of chords. The dominant seventh chord with diminished fifth, they call the "flatted" fifth -- that

was sort of a trademark. Bop differs harmonically and rhythmically and has different kinds of melodies because they chose to play so many notes. Some swing musicians played a lot of notes, especially clarinet players. Roy Eldridge was a swing player; he played lots of notes. But in general, bop is characterized by more notes being played than swing and different kinds of melodies, a different kind of rhythm. I can't really spell out the differences in any more detail than that.

What do you think of the scene today?

It's good and it's not so good. Today we have a lot of jazz in the newspapers. We have this thing at Lincoln Center, the jazz program, which is doing a lot of good. They're confused on certain things. I know the people over there said they're going to play Louis Armstrong, early Duke, and go back and study the history of this thing. Then one of the first things they did was try to fire all the musicians over thirty. Which is sort of a contradiction. I'm optimistic about what's going to happen now. We're getting more coverage than we did a few years ago.

Seems like you're getting more serious coverage. I mean, you have critics who actually know music.

Yes. You're right. I'm apprehensive but optimistic.

Obviously, you can't play everywhere with a big band. Do you have any plans to work with smaller groups?

Yes. Actually, I haven't worked with a smaller group because, as I've said before, I've had problems with my embouchure. To get out there I needed a big band to play my music. I thought it would look funny to conduct five pieces; it would look pretty silly. In the near future I'll be playing with smaller groups. It's easier to book smaller groups, easier to pay them.

Easier to fit them in.

Some of these jazz clubs now are little things. I'll be doing more of that, but I'm really interested in the big band. I really want people to hear my music. I have something in May at Greenwich House, and I'll be playing in the Atrium in Citicorp the end of April.

This thing I said before about the media making us invisible -- now they're promoting the younger musicians, and so we're still invisible, people my age. What I plan to do now is to cease being invisible.

But you've been playing over on the East Side.

Yes. I've had five or six gigs in the last few months, but you don't pay the rent like that. If you played a big rock gig, you'd have two or three thousand people there. Jazz is just wonderful music. It's too bad more people don't try to understand it and open themselves to it. That's part of my optimism that that's going to start happening.

How are you going to help that?

I'm going to help it by just presenting my music to them. I think it's something that will win a lot of people over. Let's cross out the apprehension. You're going to see a steady increase in interest in jazz.

Where do you go from here?

Upward and onward. Back in the '70s watching TV was like going to a rock concert. All of the shows had rock `n' roll backgrounds. Now I think they'll start to utilize jazz more.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow and the next week. I'm doing some things with the band. I received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts a few years back, and I did a piece dedicated to Duke Ellington called "Ducal Musings with Prayer." I actually think certain parts of that piece are sort of far out, but some parts are commercial. People have been brainwashed to think that they're listening to something old when they hear jazz, but they can't help it.

Back to this piece "Ducal Musings." I like what I did with that piece. Duke Ellington had written a book called Music is My Mistress, and he included a couple of poems in it. They're sort of a shopping list of poems saying that music is this, music is that. I took things from the poems, two poems, to title the four sections of this piece which was dedicated to him. In his poems he said "... Rain drumming on the roof," so I picked "Rain Drumming" for the first piece. He said, "Music... a system of ribbons," and I picked "Ribbons" for the title of the second piece. And he said, "Music can be a chant of delirium," so my third piece is "Chant of Delirium." And he also says, "You can pray with music," so the last movement is called "Prayer," and it's a setting of the Lord's Prayer. People who label jazz would probably call it "jazz gospel."

It's not programmatic music. It's not supposed to sound exactly like the title, but the words did influence what I wrote. So besides being influenced by Duke, he had another input into what I wrote. "Rain Drumming" has a drumming sound. So you'll be hearing that soon.

Are you going to record it?

Yes, soon. Incidentally, I was calling myself Charles Byrd, for a while and there's a guitar player called Charlie Byrd who lives in Washington, D.C. He called himself Charlie Byrd on his jazz recordings and Charles Byrd on his classical music. So that people would know I wasn't the same one, I began using my middle initial "M." And now I've decided to use the whole middle name, Charles Meanus Byrd. Meanus was my grandfather's name. He was a lieutenant in the Spanish-American War; he wasn't a musician.

I can't think of anything else but if anyone would like to ask questions please do.

Q: Charles, what is free jazz?

Jazz traditionally has a predetermined chord structure. Certain chords are played for a certain amount of time. Usually, there's a melody on those chords, and then the soloist will do an improvisation on those same chords.

Free jazz is what John Cage called "indeterminacy." They don't have a predetermined chord structure, and I think when Ornette Coleman started, he said that he rejected the chord structure as too inhibiting. He didn't have the preexisting chord structure, so he played whatever he thought, and if he had a piano player, he played what he wanted, so it's free in that sense.

Q: Would Miles Davis be considered as a free jazz musician?

I don't know if Miles did anything "free" in the end of his life, but he changed a lot. I don't know; I never heard anything that was "free."

Q: Why do you think the Europeans are so much more responsive to jazz?

I'm not sure why Europeans are so responsive, but I'm pretty sure I know why Americans are not so responsive. It's simply racism. It's Black music. Jazz was much more acceptable when the musicians "mugged" and rolled their eyes. Then they got serious just before bop started, and the bop musicians said they really weren't going to do that. So people were being asked to accept something the Black people were doing and had originated as serious, art and a lot of people resist that.

Q: I'm curious about arranging. Do you actually hear the instruments in your head when you are arranging music? Is that how it's done?

Yes. I know what the instruments sound like. I don't think I need it, but I usually use a piano as some sort of a crutch when I arrange. You've heard a lot of combinations of sounds and you know what they sound like. You know what various combinations of instruments sound like, and you put them together. It's hard to start; you have to have been doing it for years. The possible combinations are infinite and you pick whatever you think is most appropriate so that you are reflecting your own feelings. Of course, sometimes you're reflecting the wishes of the person for whom you are arranging, especially commercially.

Q: I'm interested in regimes and daily habits of musicians and all artists. Would you talk a little about that?

One thing that should be constant with every musician is practice. If you write music, you might get away with periods of inactivity a little bit longer without being hurt. If you are a performing musician, you must keep your coordination. Coordination is almost inhuman: it looks simple, but you have to remember when to lift a finger and put the other one down. People who play wind instruments have the embouchure to worry about. So you have to practice. I don't think that the nonmusical routine would be the same for all musicians.

Q: Is there a spiritual connection? I know that as a painter just going into the studio is very spiritual. When you are practicing, is there any spiritual or mental concept?

Some musicians are some of the most religious people. I don't mean in the organized religion sense, but in their expressing what's in their souls with music. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing anything. I spoke about this band that has done about five gigs during the last few months. You have to love it, and there is a very strong spiritual component in jazz. A lot of practice is purely mechanical, but when you play tunes, that comes from your soul, your being.

Q: You said that people like Tad Dameron and Duke were people that you knew and liked. Do you constantly see the influence of people that you like? When you are writing and producing, do you consciously see the writing of individuals?

One can try to sound like somebody else -- like Dizzy Gillespie or Charlie Parker -- but if you listen to somebody very often, even if that person is not one of your favorites, you can't help but be influenced by the music. Just like I think I've been influenced by Tad Dameron. I don't think I sound like him. I suppose when you hear music, it sometimes strikes a chord and makes a little home for itself inside you. It affects what you do.

Q: Who were the classical composers that grabbed you, and was there any influence by those composers on your music? Or do you integrate it? What do you do with it?

I primarily like twentieth-century classical music composers. Bartok is one of my favorites. A piece I just love is "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste." That just kills me. Again, I never try to sound like anyone else, but I listen, so it has to have some influence. I don't really know how it works. When I was in school, I had to write some assignments with strings and things, but I haven't written any classical music. I'm not sure how it influences me. It makes me happy when I listen to certain things.

I used to try to sound like jazz musician Lester Young, but a few bars into the piece I would start to sound like me. I like Bartok and Stravinsky. There's a guy, Ulysses Kay, who I like. And some of the older things like Beethoven's string quartets, the C sharp minor. Also Jimmy Owens, a great trumpet player.

Q: Can you tell us when you reached the high point of your career?

The high point, that's easy. I hadn't written any jazz at the high point. It was the first arrangement that I did for the Clyde McPhatter Band, and he did it at the Apollo Theater. There was a band up there and I heard it -- that was the high point. That was the first arrangement that I had done in New York.

QN What was the song?

I don't remember. I did a lot of things for Clyde. I don't remember what was first. The low point -- there's no really low point. Things might get low if you have a gig and only a few people are sitting there in the audience, that's kinda low. Music is for the most part a series of highs for me.

Q: Charlie, you are one of our most avid attenders at the Jazz Foundation jam sessions for about the last three years. You listen very avidly and seldom say anything. I wonder sometimes what you are listening for -- a new musician that may come out? I know that you use one musician.

Yes, Britta Langsjoen, a fine trombonist.

Q: What are you listening for mostly?

I'm not really seeking anything out. I'm just enjoying most of the musicians. I enjoy jazz.

Q: Do you see yourself as going into the University as a teacher at some point?

I haven't really thought about it.

Q: At one time, our jazz was closely related to dance when it was at its most popular. Do you think that relationship is over?

In that respect, I think so, but only temporarily. In the '40s or '50s you could take your girlfriend out and do the latest dance steps to jazz. And then when rock got popular, you were old-fashioned in terms of popular dancing. Most of these big bands were promoted pretty much as dance bands. A big band would come down to Fayetteville, my hometown, and people would be dancing. Maybe about ten of us would be standing up listening to the music as jazz. But when they find out they can dance to jazz now, I think it will change again.

Q: Who do you think got away from it? Was it the people or the musicians?

I think some musicians probably got very serious about their music and maybe thought that people were insulting them by dancing. But that wasn't the main thing, though it was probably a contributing factor.

Q: In your early years in North Carolina, in terms of influence were there any teachers, relatives, neighbors who did something to you, for you, that you now look back and say that that was an influence -- "I owe them something?"

My mother and father. I remember I used to listen, when I was very little, to the radio with my mother.

Q: Could you give us her full name?

Mrs. Lillian Catherine Byrd. We listened to comedians like Jack Benny and such. I remember we listened to the Bell Telephone Hour which had excerpts from classical pieces and semi-classical things. My mother would enjoy it and I would enjoy it. My father played piano. He didn't make a living at it, but he was a good pianist. Stride piano -- it's hard to do.

I worked with a barber guy when I was still a teenager, and he had a band. He called himself Dr. Pepper, professionally. I must have been about fifteen then and I learned a lot. I don't think there was anybody in the band under forty except me. I learned a lot of things about music. But there's no one person.

My father made his living as a tailor. His name was Willie Leon Byrd, Sr. He also was a semipro baseball player. People said he was of Major League caliber. They said he was ahead of his time and that's why he was never called up to the majors. But he wasn't ahead of his time; he was born when he was supposed to be born. Simply stated, the people in charge of baseball then were racists.

Q: Who did he play for?

He played around Fayetteville. I don't really know much about his baseball career. He was also in a vocal group that called themselves the "Young Men's Improvement Association."

My mother didn't play an instrument. She liked almost any music. I told her that if everyone had taste like hers, there'd be no need for music school. She just loved music, the good as well as the bad. She was a wonderful person and I got a lot of inspiraton from her. And, of course, my brother Dr. Willie Leon Byrd, Jr. Willie was a dentist, and during World War II he was a pilot. He flew a B-25 bomber, but also he was a true jazz aficionado. He was not a musician, but he taught me a lot about jazz. He was a remarkable cat.

There was a lot of love in that family, and they all encouraged me. They were very proud of me and I of them. They're all deceased. I'm the last one standing, so to speak.

Q: What don't you like?

I don't like lifeless music. Some music sounds like someone said, "I'll write this music and sell it." I like some of almost every style that I know of. A lot of rock I dislike because rock and roll is Black music, and most of the whites are imitating Black singers so it doesn't really come across to me as real. People have been taught that these are great musicians, but I don't like a lot of it. Rap gives me a hard time because I have a friend whose godson is a rapper.... so we'll see what happens if they combine it with jazz.

Q: What part of rap do you have a hard time with?

It's rhythmic speech. You're talking in meter, and that just doesn't impress me. They would have to say something that would impress me, and most of the things I've heard don't really do that. I don't want to abolish rap. If people like it they should be able to do it and listen to it. I don't find it spiritually sympathic. I should probably listen more.

Q: Is there any advice that you got as an experienced musician or would give younger musicians besides the regular advice of practice, stay in school, etc.?

I'd have to be careful what I said to them, because if I had known what the music business was like, I probably wouldn't have become a musician... so I'm glad I didn't know. You become a musician because you can't help yourself. You have to want to be, to have a drive; it's not like deciding selling insurance or something. Also, you have to be prepared for hard work. And be prepared for people to say things like, all you do is play a horn, you don't work.

So I'd say practice and be prepared for the good as well as the bad and a lot of hard work.

Q: Do you think Afro-Caribbean music has had an influence?

Any influence is good if you can make jazz out of it. I have a tune called "Caribbean Kiss." Jazz tends to reject anything that it doesn't find compatible.

Q: Over and above the difficulty of being a jazz musician in our society, where is the racial discrimination today?

All over. Do you mean where do you find racial discrimination? People still pay white musicians more than black musicians.

Q: What about the recording industry?

It's opened up a lot in the recording industry, but racism is a part of the fabric of American life, and it's in every corner, the bakery, the filling station.

It's just one thing that you just learn to live with while you're hoping that if there's something you can do to change it, you will. You can't let it get you down.

Q: Bebop do you agree with the statement that Black musicians invented bebop in order to have a jazz white musicians couldn't imitate?

I don't think so. That would be a negative reason, and it came about in a positive way. If they did they were wrong; Red Rodney could play it. I think that white people were the furthest thing away from Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's minds when they were playing.

Thank you, Charles.

Feathered breeze of love
Brushing Achilles' nude heel
The seagull's shadow

-- -- James V. Hatch

Educator/Artist

Interview: James V. Hatch May 8, 1995

Here we are with Dr. Winona Lee Fletcher who has had a long and distinguished career in the theatre. We are going to begin with why she is in New York.

I have come at the command of Kathy Perkins, who has a wonderful exhibit called "On-stage: A Century of African American Stage Designs" at Lincoln Center. I have a few designs in that exhibit

We are going to talk about these designs and about your long career in the theatre. Where were you born and when?

I was born in Hamlet, North Carolina. The fourteenth child of Mama and Papa Lee in 1926 on Thanksgiving day. My brother, I am told, had tried to put me back into the doctor's bag to send me back. There are seven of us still living, and the oldest brother was born in 1900, so we cover the whole century.

Well, you know, the last child born of a mother who is older is always bright, and often eccentric. Do you qualify?

A little of each. Some of all. As Margaret Wilkinson said in a tribute once, "A little wild sometimes."

Aside from the name of the town, how did you find your way into the theatre early? What were the influences?

I guess my father, who was a minister. Almost all of us in my family are in speaking kinds of professions. Either teachers, preachers, lawyers. Mother was a seamstress who worked at home with fourteen children. But when I started sewing I was too short to sit at the peddle machine, so she would let me stand and peddle. We made toys, and I am now into doll making which I started when I was four or five years old. I did not realize the influence at that time, but later I realised that I like to talk because of Papa, and I like to sew because of Mama.

How did you then find your way into your first college training for teachers.

When Mama died in 1942, (which was my junior year in high school,) I went to live in Greensboro, North Carolina, with an older sister. I went to Dudley High School which was segregated then. We had lots of theatre, lots of art, lots of dance and music, all on the high school level. Then I wanted to go to Hampton, but somehow my records didn't ever get straight to get me in Hampton, and my daddy insisted I had to go to college. So I ended up in Johnson C. Smith where I met Cliff Lamb. Cliff was an Iowa theatre graduate. He taught all theatre except when he was teaching Spanish. I got very involved in theatre at Johnson C. Smith in Charlotte, North Carolina. It is not "the" Smith College, but it is to me. From there, Cliff said I had to go on -- I had to do theatre. However, I did take three years off before I went to the University of Iowa in 1951 to pursue a degree in speech pathology. I was assigned to a group of four to eight year-olds who were stutterers, and then I started stuttering. They said, "No, you have to get out of there and go do something that you don't feel as strongly about, so that you can't get emotionally involved". So I found theatre, and I found E.C. Mabie. I don't have to tell you, once you have found E.C. Mabie, he takes over your life.

And so my life was taken over by E.C. Mabie at the University of Iowa in theatre in 1951.

Now let's take a small detour. The number of the Southern schools, the colleges in Atlanta and so on, developed speech and drama eventually as part of the curriculum. Most of the Eastern schools did not have theatre departments, but they had extra curriculur theatre. What was the motivation for African Americans to put theatre into their schools? How did this come about?

I guess we could start with Sheppherd Randall Edmonds who was really the motivator. Howard University had had what Shep called the "individualistic approach" to putting theatre into the educational system in Black colleges. He did not like that; he liked the organizational approach. There weren't too many ways for Black colleges to come together. He thought the athletic teams do this all the time with intercollegiate sports. Why can't we have intercollegiate drama? And so out of that came IDA, which was the Intercollegiate Drama Association in 1930. Of course, after that came the Southern Association of Dramatic and Speech Arts, which was SADSA. Then came NADSA, which was the National Association. I am just returning from Miami from the 59th anniversary - it's the oldest living continuing organization. NADSA really is the oldest organization of educational theatre in the country. It struggled during the days of integration. But when it was in existence, Shep went from one school to another; he set up groups with each of the states when he was there. He was a playwright, so he started courses. Like all of the theatre departments, it had evolved from the English department to the speech department, and then eventually to the theatre department. There aren't many theatre departments in Black colleges now. They're called communication arts. That came in the '60s and '70s. Well, they grew out of necessity to give these students an opportunity to do something in the arts. I am sure Shep's days at Morgan had a great deal to do with that. His days with the Krigwa Players, his days in the '30s and the Depression years. So, you have to really credit Shep with most of that.

These organizations came about, in part, because of segregation in the beginning?

Almost solely because of that. Because none of the organizations like the South Eastern Theatre Conference and ATA, and the other organizations were integrated. We were not a part of it intimately. Though we became a part in the late '40s and '50s, and many of us joined them. But we still could not be an integral part of it. I think Shep and Tom Pogue, who was at Tennessee State, were presidents of the South Eastern Theatre Conference. Of course, a lot of us did move up to the ranks in the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s, into the integrated organizations.

The conference you just came from, NADSA, is fifty-nine years old. What is its reason for still being? Segregation has broken down mostly now.

It is one of the few organizations that is very much student oriented. Black Theatre Network and NCAAT, those have other purposes and other focuses. Tom Pogue came up with the summer theatre idea, at Jefferson City. Our students really had no place to go to learn theatre - to practice it, so NADSA

provides opportunities for students from, (at one time we had so many as 50,) the Black colleges, who would come to NADSA. They would always bring short plays, or they brought readings and duo acting. It was a chance for students to see other students. That is what I saw mostly in Miami this year. A young man who has just taken a job at Kentucky State drove seventeen hours without stopping, with a load of students. He looked like a zombie when he got to Miami, but he did that because of commitment to his students. I think that is what has kept NADSA alive. An no other organisation really does that.

Let me take you back to Iowa, 1950. You have come there to work on your Master's in Theatre under E.C. Mabie. Were there any African Americans there?

You know, it is interesting, most of us had to go to school in the summer because we could not afford to go year-round. There were a lot of people who came up from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, most of the Southern states that were right under the Midwest. But a few of us strayed over from the coast. There were three of us, as I remember - there may have been more; this is real hazy. But Fannin Belcher's sister-in-law was there. Fannin Belcher, whose 1945 dissertation we all treasure.

His brother married one of my very good friends who was there at the time. She (Eloise Usher) was in tech-theatre, I think. Neither one of us was really interested in acting. And Rhoda Jordan, whom I've lost track of, was there. The state of North Carolina sent me there because they would not let me in to the school in North Carolina. At the time I decided to go back to Iowa I had been working with my brother who had set up a radio and electronics institute for returning veterans at the end of the '40s and the beginning of the '50s. I came out of Johnson C. Smith in 1947, and I had no job, so I went to work with my brother, a laywer, and somebody else who was in radio and electronics, to set up a school. I worked with them for three years, and I was getting bored to death because I was not doing theatre. So I decided to go back to theatre. I found out the state of North Carolina, because it would not permit me to attend the schools in North Carolina, would pay most of the tuition and travel and everything else to send me anywhere I wanted to go.

I joke about it now because I should have chosen the University of Hawaii, because it was the furthest away and they had to pay to send me back and forth twice a year. But I didn't, I chose Iowa because that is what I knew. The twist in the story is that my brother decided to sue the state of North Carolina to get into Law school. He started sueing while I was still collecting from North Carolina. So we had this little juggling, "Can't you wait a few more months until I finish my tuition payment?" But, that is how I got to Iowa.

He won that law suit?

He won the law suit. Kenneth was a Civil Rights lawyer, and one of the top ones in North Carolina. He has retired now.

Did you do any acting in Iowa?

You don't want to hear that story. You see, that is Tom Pawley's story.

Of course we want to hear that story.

Well, E.C. Mabie is gone, and Tom's not here, so I can tell it in the way I want to

tell it. The story is that the two Black women who were not interested in acting at all received calls at eleven o'clock one night from E.C. Mabie. E.C. Mabie was the head of everything in theatre at the time and pretty much responsible for starting educational theatre at the university level. We received calls saying, "Report to the theatre at eight o'clock." The next morning we were trembling in our boots; we did not sleep that night. When E.C. Mabie called, you went. You did not know what you had done; it did not matter, you were scared to death because he called. When we got there he told us we were going to be cast in the show he was directing, which was Eugene O'Neill's Hairy Ape. We were cast as prostitutes because we were only two Black students in the Theatre Department. Actually, when you read "Hairy Ape," you would read they were "streetwalkers" (people walking in the street). That is my version of the story. But he told us to act like streetwalkers. At any rate, we decided if that's what we had to do, we were going to be the best prostitutes Mabie had ever seen. So we did, and Mabie had a heart attack on the stage. Tom Pawley's story is that the prostitutes gave him the heart attack, but I know differently. So the show never took place. They cancelled the show. He did not die at that time, but died later. So, my acting stint ended before it started.

A few years later, Bill Reardon did direct Emperor Jones on Iowa stage and J.P. Cochran played the lead. Did you know J.P.?

I knew J.P. through NASDA. My association started as a student at Johnson C. Smith with NASDA. That is when I met all these people from Tennessee State like Alfonso Sherwood, and Cox, who was the technical director there for many years. They were students at the same time. It seems to me Cochran came out of... I don't remember which school he came out of...

Alabama?

Was it Alabama?

Somewhere down there.

But, yes I knew him. I did not go to school with him in Iowa, though.

He must have come just after you.

One of us missed each other by a year.

This is were you began your career in costuming at Iowa?

Yes, which is another interesting story about E.C. Mabie, because I was not going to do costuming. I did not think I could do it. I knew I had a year to do my degree, and I did not think I could do something in technical theatre in a year because I knew how much practical work was involved. Iowa demanded that you would learn all the parts of theatre. I ended up doing a lot of lighting, set design, and other things as well. I was doing my thesis on the Waterloo Theatre, the oldest theatre in that area. I had done all the research and was writing. E.C. Mabie decided I could not do it because a friend of his was doing a book on it and he did not want anything to come out ahead of that.

So I had to stash that away. Somewhere in all my files there is that half-done thesis on Waterloo. Then this wonderful woman there, Dorothy, said, "Come to costuming, you've been doing that anyway." So I spent that last part of that last semester doing handpaintings. We had no Xerox machine, so all the designs had to be done individually. I really kind of backed into costuming.

Are you glad?

I don't know what I would have done if they had not let me back into it.

You took your M.A. in 1951, and went off to a job in Lexington, Kentucky?

Frankfort, Kentucky. The University of Kentucky is in Lexington. Kentucky State College was then the one Black college in Kentucky.

Is this where George Wolfe was from?

George Wolfe's mother taught with me at Kentucky State. That is why I say I knew George before he was born. George is from Frankfort, Kentucky. He is quite a celebrity in his town.

And you met your husband there?

Oh, a wonderful story. My husband just died a couple of years ago; we were married for forty-some years. His name was Joseph Grant Fletcher. All the men in his family were named after some president. Joe was basketballcoach and English professor, a rare combination. But not a Bobby Knight kind of coach. Very retiring and very English professor. He was acting head of the department at the time when they were searching for somebody to come in. His story is that he took one look at my picture and decided he was not going to look for anybody else. Not only was he not going to hire anybody else, but he also was going to marry me when I got there. He told me the story after about the first month. I said, "How dare you make such an assumption." And he said, "That's alright, I'll wait until you decide." He only had to wait about eight or nine months. We were married before the end of that year.

Do you have children.

One child. My major production.

And her name?

Her name is Betty Ann Fletcher. Betty is now clinical psychologist at Towson University in Maryland, and about to get married on June 3, finally.

And you're producing that?

I'm producing that. Actually, there is a connection to the summer theatre in that too, because this illustrates the kind of husband that I had, which was a wonderful husband and was responsible for much of what I have done since then. That first summer was the summer of 1952 that Tom Pawley decided I should come to Lincoln. I got pregnant almost instantly and went to Lincoln, carrying Joe's child. Tom watched, and guarded, and followed me around. He said, "Oh God, Joe Fletcher will kill me if anything happens to this baby." So, I had full protection from Tom that summer. It was a wonderful summer.

Let's talk about the summer theatre at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Tom Pawley was head there and had established the summer theatre for what reason?

Because he had worked, as I had, at Kentucky State. We both came out of an ideal situation in Iowa, and we went into a far less of an ideal situation at the small Black colleges. Tom and I used to joke about having to get to know the custodian, the physics department, the industrial arts, and home economics department instantly, because they were the sources from which we were going to get our help. We used to build lights out of tin cans, and get the help from the

physics department. We shared things early in the '40s. Tom came up with the idea that Jefferson City should be the home for the next summer theatre. He just made it happen. He did it through Lincoln University without aid from the Federal Government or NADSA or anybody else for the first few years. Then he invited me to come there. I know that Owen Dodson came the first summer, also Bill Brown, James Butcher, who we called Beanie, and John "Mac" Ross from Arkansas. These became really important figures to me in later years. I had the opportunity, in my early twenties, to work with these really outstanding people. It was tremendous for me as a young costumer/director. I had to do a lot of things, but I was primarily the costumer. We did four shows in eight weeks. The early ones were Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. We had not gotten around to doing Ted Shine and the Black plays until later. So we were doing Death of a Salesman, and A Streetcar Named Desire.

With an intergrated cast?

In white Catholic territory with an integrated cast. The whole business of color blind casting came about in in the '70s. What was the big deal about that? We did Death of a Salesman with two Black sons, and a white mother and father, and nobody ever noticed. Even the newspaper people didn't notice, or they didn't make a comment about it. Maybe they were smart enough not to do that. But we had a few whites in the company with us, and there are wonderful stories coming out of that.

One of my favorite ones to remember was doing Hat Full of Rain, and the guy who throws the young woman down on the bed, jumps over her, and carries on, was a big husky Black guy. The young white woman who played Cat was supposed to be nude, so we had her in a bikini with a fur coat, which was all she could get away with. We had no idea that this was the chief of the police's daughter. Later we discovered she loved the part because she liked to show off and tell her daddy what she was doing. She was one of those who broke the tradition. He came to see the show maybe several times, and was delighted. So we made a lot of changes in Jefferson City, long before color blind casting came into being.

In the regular part of the year, when you were not directing, you were back at the university working very hard teaching all kinds of classes, in speech and English and directing. And also going part-time to school picking up credits. Where did you do that?

Well, at that time it was Kentucky State College. It became a university somewhere in the '60s, but it was Kentucky State College, very small, several hundred students at the time I went there. My version of why I went back to school, (and I must have started in '56,) was because I was an ambitious, eager, young person on every committee, getting every job. I was teaching four classes, coordinating the Department, and running all the extra things that happen in theatre. Incidently, we worked in a quonset hut. Then suddenly one day I realized that every time I'd complete one job, I'd get two others. I decided that the only way to keep from doing that was to "not to be available". The University of Kentucky was twenty-five miles away, and I just went over one day and enrolled in a class, so I would be absent for two hours three times a week. Suddenly I looked up and I had thirty hours; I had philosophy, religion and all

those things I never had a chance to take when I was formally in school. One day I saw on the bulletin board that Jeff Auer from Indiana University was there making a speech. I said, "I think I'll go and see what he has to say". In the midst of the speech he said, "I have a full fellowship that I want to give to somebody. Anybody interested in coming to Indiana University to study?" I said to myself that I may as well go up there and say "yes." He said, "Are you serious?" I said, "Yes, I've been working for ten years, so now it's time to go back." The next year he offered me a full fellowship, and I said, "I'm not interested in teaching, I don't want to work for you guys. I have a full-time job."

So they assigned me to Hubert Heffner -- that was the glory day of my life. Hubert was the great scholar along with Jeff and Gunderson and some of the others. Hubert is no longer alive, Gunderson and Auer were in the speech area. Most of my work at Indiana was in rhetoric and public address because I had carried these seventy-nine or so hours with me from Iowa and University of Kentucky. So those were my three universities.

In 1966 you come back to Indiana?

Well, the degree was completed in '68, and that was completed because I was running all over the country, doing research on Andrew Jackson Allen, who said he was the first American costumer. He was the costumer for Edwin Forrest. I was having a wonderful time back working, and then Heffner called me up one day and said, "I'm retiring this year". I stopped everything and said, "No way is he going to get away from me". So I rushed back and completed the degree in 1968. That was when Black students were locking deans and presidents in their offices, and chaining the doors. It was the midst of the Black revolution. Herman Hudson, who had been made the big Black father-figure at Indiana University was there. He was a recent PhD in linguistics from Michigan, and they made him head of Afro-American Studies. Herman's story is that once he saw what I had done, he was determined to get me from Kentucky State.

In 1971 the Afro-American Studies Department was established and brought me back on a temporary basis. Herman said he brought me back on a permanent basis then, but he didn't. I went and set up the sequence courses, taught them for two years on a leave from Kentucky State. I went back to Kentucky State where I had committments to students. Then in 1978 Joe retired, and he said, "Now, if you are ever going to go, this is it." So I went back to Indiana in 1978, on a permanent basis. I just retired last May.

From 1968 to roughly 1974 there were literally hundreds of Black theatres found at universities and colleges across the country. We counted 600. Many of them survived, many of them have not survived.

Tennessee State, Hampton, Howard, and a few others had departments. We never got a department at Kentucky State. We got a lot of other things, one of which I am very proud of is a building that I helped to design. It was beautifully staffed during the years when I was studying in Indiana. That building is still being used, but it's not all theatre anymore. It's an auditorium and music department, and other departments are in it. When I designed it, I thought I was going to get that department at that time because I had the facilities. But then I went to Indiana, so I never set up the department. Those students used to joke with me at Indiana about all of my students who graduated from Kentucky State,

who were interested in theatre and were the best of the actors, (and acting has always been the thing in the Black colleges, not technical theatre unfortunately.) These students would come to Indiana, follow me to go into theatre, and then they would go to law school. They used to say to me, "Why did all your students end up in law school and not in theatre in Indiana?" I don't know what the answer to that is, except maybe the Indiana theatre was not as gracious as law school.

Well, law is a performing art.

All of them perform, believe me, they are truly performing. They are national figures now - lawyers, who were my best theatre students, not majors, but minors. The English department did permit us to have minors. But that is not true of some of the other schools. Howard has famous graduates out of the Department of Theatre. So does Hampton.

Let's talk about the Kennedy Center.

The Kennedy Center became one of the areas that somehow I got involved with outside the campus. It came through the American Theatre Association primarily, which was sponsoring the American College Theatre Festival. My connection there grew from the top down or the bottom up, I don't know which way. But at some point I became the president of the University and College Theatre Association; the same Association which was running the American College Theatre Festival. My connection with the Kennedy Center that was running the Festival was completed.

Then the Kennedy Center realized that there were an inordinate number of non-Blacks in that theatre, and it was supposed to be a theatre for the whole country. Suddenly there were no minorities, only one or two of us around. So they came up with the idea, "Let's do something to increase minority participation." They started by naming Archie Bufkins as one of the coordinators in order to get to know the rest of us out in the hinterland. It started through playwrights. There were two projects that they had sponsored that I was connected with: the first was to find the theatres that were not just in the educational system, but theatres that were community based, semi professional. We did a directory that first year and we had 250 theatres that responded to our request. The request was to find a new playwright, then select a play, and produce it in that particular theatre. Then out of that, if they were good enough, they would be brought to the Kennedy Center. We chose them, and then there was a task force that went all across the country and looked at these plays. There were six theatres selected out of that first one. I was on the task force with Ted Shine, but I was not coordinating that project. At the end of the project we had theatres like C. Bernard Jackson had.

Anyway, there were six theatres selected. One in Philadelphia, two in New York, one in New Orleans, one in Los Angeles, and Karamu Theatre in Cleveland. Those were given $ 15.000. At the time half of it went to the new playwright, half to the company producing the play. It was an exhilerating experience for me, because I had not had a chance to visit these theatres before, and the team visited all the theatres.

In the end Ted Shine and I sat and looked, and there were no Black college theatres in that final group at all. I said to Ted one day, "Something has to be

done about that. Why aren't they competetive enough to be in this group?" So we kind of joked about it, and I said to the executive director of ATA at the Kennedy Center, "You guys have to do another project now for Black colleges." It was a joke, really. They said, "That's a good idea, write a proposal for us". We did, and the first grant was for fifty or sixty thousand dollars. Then, of course, I got talked into being the coordinator. The reason we came up with this was because the acting and directing was always so good in Black colleges, but there is absolute disaster in the technical areas. So we had been concerned about this for a long time and decided that maybe this project should put emphasize on the technical aspects. It became known as something with a long name that ended up with "Black College Technical Theatre Project." I was named coordinator. It coincided, unfortunately, with my one stint in administration at the university level. I had just been named associate dean in the College of Arts and Sciences in Indiana. How and why, I don't know, and I don't even want to tell that story. But anyway, I did it three years, and it coincided with the job I had already committed myself to at the Kennedy Center. Indiana was beautiful. They said, "Do it, do both of them, do it whatever way you want, go out and serve; just as long as you do the job, we don't care what hours you keep."

So I traveled all around isolated Black colleges. Oh, I should tell you that we connected them with the American College of Theatre Festival because there was only Howard and Gremlin occasionally getting into it, and they wanted more Black colleges. My job was to stimulate interest, and hire consultants who were professional lighting designers and costume designers, and take them out to these colleges, and just redo whatever needed to be done to get them ready to compete. That first year, I'm happy to say that, with the weekend of solid working at Prairie View' we did Don't Bother Me I Can't Cope, and it made it to the Kennedy Center. They had about five hundred colleges competing, so it was quite an honor. We did it by flying people in. Myrna flew in to do costumes over from New York. Prairie View was out in the hinterlands of Texas, and we all flew and spend the weekend rebuilding the set so it could travel. After that, A&T in North Carolina won a slot at the national level. I encountered all kinds of administrative problems in traveling, and I talked to more presidents of colleges than I did to theatre department chairs. Because that seemed to have been where the problem was. They just did not have an understanding of theatre.

One of the most pleasant memories of this experience was seeing the president of A&T cross the stage at the Kennedy Center. He almost danced across the stage, he was so happy when A&T came and made it to the Kennedy Center. It seemed to me that one of these plays was Zooman and the Sign. That was a very controversial play at the time, and to be done for that very sedate audience at the Kennedy Center. We were all frightened to death after the first speech with all the four-letter words, and the violence, and all of that. Well, I have to tell you a wonderful story that connects to that. In the lobby of the theater suddenly there appeared all these men in uniform with guns and just scared us to death. I said to somebody, "Are they afraid of Zooman and the Sign starting a riot? Why are all these white, dressed-up people coming up here?" Well, what we found was that the president was in one of the theaters in

the Kennedy Center, and these were all his guards. We were in the Terrace Theatre at that time, near the roof, and they were coming through the lobby to go up. We had a big joke about how they were going to put us out of the Kennedy Center the first time we go in there.

All this was the same thing that Tom and I started to do in the '40s and '50s. That was to give students great exposure, and suddenly, here we were in the '80s, and we were doing the same thing. Maybe we hadn't made much progress, but I guess we need to keep doing it. The sad part of that story is that as soon as that project ended, and it must have run by three years, the anticipation has dropped again, and we are all trying to understand why it didn't get picked up on the same impetus that it should have been picked up on. Part of it is, is because we still don't have technical people in Black colleges. We had a few, like Cox at Tennessee State. Of course, Beamy and Butcher, and others were at Howard for years. Bill Brown is in Maryland, but he's head of the department now, so I doubt that he's doing technical theatre. I didn't do costuming after those first few years because I was doing all those other things. So we kind of lost the impetus that started in technical theatre. That is the weakness.

That is really what is so important about Kathy Perkins' show at Lincoln Center now in the Amsterdam Gallery. It does show the accomplishment in Afro-American technical theatre. It will encourage, we hope, young people to pursue it.

We hope so. We needed stepping stones, we need somebody there to encourage them like Clifton and all the others who encouraged me to go to Iowa. But I really did not have the stepping stones to go into costuming. If it hadn't been for Mama who taught me how to sew and the love of sewing, I probably wouldn't have gone into the technical theatre. When we look at all fourteen of the children in my family, there were no scientists, no medical doctors. We stepped on my daddy's shoulders into speaking professions. But it's the same thing. Our kids had no scene designers to say, "This is what I do, and look at me do it, and then you go do it".

I don't know where the answer is. A lot of us who did this then went on off in other directions. Like Whitney Leblanc, who is one of the best lighting and scene designers I know, is out in Hollywood, trying to direct for television. He left educational theatre and went into television. So I don't know what the answer is to that. But I sure like to be able to help. We don't have the maths and science backgrounds, and we are not lead in that direction early enough. So we become actors, which we have been good at all our lives.

There is another fact, perhaps, of your training in the technical theatre, that is your ability to get people to work. Those two things are the very skills which an administrator must have. Technical theatre has to be so organised in order to get the curtain up, and there are so many details to take care of. I wonder if that training in technical theatre also made you the excellent administrator that you complain about being.

True. There was one other thing. I remember one of my co-workers, who came up for tenure and promotion, was not only in theatre and technical theatre, but off into something that was way out-on-the-edge kind of technical theatre. He

presented this absolutely beautiful portfolio that stayed under the desk of my co-worker, who was head of the tenure committee at the time. I saw it collecting dust in the dean's office one day, and I said to her, "When is the tenure committee going to have a look at his portfolio?" She said to me, "Who can understand it?" I said to myself, "Well, you don't understand chemistry, and you do tenure and promotion for chemists." She said, "You get it out and explain it to me one day, and then I can take it to the tenure committee." Well, the end of that story was obviously he got tenured, but I still don't think anybody on the committee understood what was in that portfolio, because we had very few people from the arts who went into administrative work.

After my tenure in the dean's office, it did motivate others; we had a fine arts dean, and a speech and theatre dean who came in behind me. So I guess I did some good over there. But mainly, my dean was a geneticist who was very much interested in theatre and who made great contributions to the theatre department, both financially and otherwise, so I was lucky the years I was there. He was very understanding, so I made it through those sixty department curriculum meetings every week. It was an experience.

To wind up this interview, I have here in my hand your resume, your life, your vita. All the pages and pages of it. I just wanted to point out a couple of things here under grants and awards, that the Black Theatre Network has given you an Award for Excellence. That you were honored at a number of banquets - your wall must be filled with plaques. You are a Fellow in the College of American Theatre, and a very honored one. You received the Theatre in Higher Education Lifetime Career Achievement Award in 1993, which was an attempt to embrace all the things you have told us, and many many more things you haven't had time to talk about. Have you succeeded in really finding time for yourself after all these years of giving to others?

Actually, I have been pretty good about it until my daughter announced she was getting married, and then I went full-time into that production. But the first semester and last summer I actually went fishing in North Carolina. Then one of my students gave me a wrought iron sign to hang on the outside of my mailbox, for the benefit of my mailman, that says "Gone Fishing". It's so funny now, because he delivers my mail to my neighbour most of the time. He never knows when it's for real. Occasionally I stop and yell at him, "I'm here", and he says, "I thought you had gone fishing!" I'm in exercise programs, I'm still answering the phone, I don't have an answering machine. I'm not on the e-mail. But I knew I wouldn't take off completely. And it's been good, I can't complain. It has been one of the most wonderful years in my life, and I'm back in Kentucky in the house that we never gave up when I moved to Indiana. I'm enjoying planting flowers, even.

Recently, I was out in the garage, replanting a plant. My husband was in a nursing home the last few years, and I kept in contact with his roommate until he died about a month ago. I had taken one of Joe's plants from the funeral to leave in his room. One day I went down there to visit, and it was dying, and I said, "I'm going to take it home and replant it for you". I was in the garage, planting this plant for him, when the phone rang. I ran in with dirt all over my hands, and it was a woman from one of the schools in the South who needed

something or the other that I needed to go through papers to find. I said to her, "You'll have to wait while I wash the dirt off my hands." When I came back to the phone she said, "Please, before I ask you what I want, why did you have dirt on your hands?" I explained to her why, and she said in such a wistful manner, "Oh God, will I ever live to see the day when I can have dirt on my hands?" That was a wonderful moment in my retirement.

That is a wonderful conclusion for our story today. Thank you very much Winona.

Thanks Jim, we finally did it, after twenty years.

USED TO WUZ

I sit here on the curb Listenin' to you Scream me into a Used To Wuz. Your African robe from the Kaybee store

Your gold-brass soul Drumming 'bout somethin' You ain't and ain't never Gon' be.

How dare you scream me Into a Used To Be? Me who bled in Selma and Broke stones on chain gangs Because I was arrogant.

Me, who got whipped For trying to vote Me who said yes-sir So you could eat, How dare you scream me Into a used to be? Spent half your life in school And ain't lurnt nothin. You don't drink That ain't hip. You puff and wheeze on What you call a joint Laffin' at me The Used To Be.

I ain't no Used To Be! I'm what you're working Hard to become, no used to be; me. How dare you scream me into A Used To Be?

-- 119 --

You Seminole Afro-American Black, sometimes Spanish Heritage M.F.

I am a man with nothing To hope for Never had a dream come true.

Fought for my country And went to jail when I got home 'cause I Couldn't say sir no more. Where were you when I Defied the Klan and died A little piece at a time? Check yourself out, You're wearing clothes from Three different countries.

Besides I remember when You don't like Africans. Naw you don't remember that Well check it out Your Black woman's hair Is dyed blonde. Don't you scream me into A Used To Was. A black woman wit' blonde hair, hell! We're going backwards. We hell; you're goin' backwards.

I'm sittin' heah on the curb Drunk being me. I ain't nobody's Used To Be.

-- -- Cliff Chandler

Mother's Language:

I am born from the language of my mother. If she tells me during my life, to speak another language, how can I, having heard only one?

Daughter's Language:

The word that best describes it is saturated -- saturated in my mum's honey. Sometimes, I'm lighter than it, and I can float. And when I'm heavy, sinking into it, it's smoother than sugar -- deeper. Warm, amber saturation.

Mother's Language:

I want to be honey when I grow up. I want to smother and saturate, and be the language teacher.

-- -- Lili Barsha

Lighting Designer

Interviewer: James V. Hatch

May 8, 1995

We are very lucky to have Kathy Perkins who is in New York for the last program of On-Stage, an exhibition on African American designers.

Kathy, the technical theatre has been much neglected in African-American education and colleges. How did you find your way to technical theatre?

I went to Howard University in 1972 thinking I wanted to be an actress. And, you know, like most theatre programs, you have to take your basic tech-courses. I had a very good friend who felt that I had some potential in the area of lighting. He said, "Why don't you pursue lighting, as a career?" I did not even know that this existed as a career. He said to me in 1973, "What are you going to do with a degree in acting? Be realistic! You can always work if you have some skills." I worked over at Crampton Auditorium, which was our road house on campus, and I worked all the time as an electrician and designer. It was something I realized that I enjoyed.

Who was this mentor?

His name is Douglas Farnum. And I'm glad to say that Douglas now works as a lighting director at NBC in Washington D.C., and we are still very good friends. He was a year ahead of me at Howard. I had encouragement also from Ralph Dines, who was one of the I.A. members in Washington D.C., and who managed Crampton Auditorium. So I had a lot of people who encouraged me to do that. They persuaded me to go to grad school.

Did you meet any opposition about being a woman?

Not in D.C., because it never dawned on was a field that there were not many Black people in. Because I was in Washington doing the height of the Black Theatre Movement; we had D.C. Black Rep, and there were many women who worked on the crew with me at Howard. So, being a woman wasn't an issue at Howard. I did not realize it was a problem until I left Washington D.C.

What kind of problems did you meet then?

I started my research the very first day of graduate school at Michigan. I ran into a young white male and asked him, "Can you tell me where the designers M.F.A. orientation is?" He immediately pointed me to the M.F.A. actors. I said, "No, I'm looking for the designers." He replied, "Oh, I did not know Black people could do design. You never read about Black designers or anything like that." That evening I went to the library to say, "This guy is really lying." but he was right -- we just did not exist in the history books. This was in 1976 when I went to Michigan for an M.F.A.

So you started your research then?

Well, the idea was planted then, but I did not formally start until I was at Smith College. I received a grant through the Ford Foundation in 1981, to really pursue it formally.

It took you maybe twelve years to assemble your research for the exhibition. What is the earliest date you were able to establish for a light designer and costumer?

In terms of documentation I would say Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, who is known primarily as a sculptor. Fuller designed costume, sets, make-up, and lighting. She is probably the earliest professional designer, because she did have some training and the quality of her work was very professional. In terms of lighting, in the Washington D.C. area, a lot of the early stage hands did lighting. They came here to New York up to the Apollo in the early twenties. So, I can maybe say as early as the Twenties. But in terms of Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, she goes back to 1908, 1909[260] designing in the Boston area.

So in cases like the ragtime shows -- Bert Williams -- obviously they did design their costumes.

They did. But a lot of programs did not have names of people. So that has been difficult. But I interviewed several elderly people from that period and they would say, "a lot of the fashion designers would also do the costumes". But you know, I have no names.

The exhibition has been seen by a lot of people. Have you gotten any reactions to it? What did the newspapers say?

The reviews have been very favorable. And I think, a lot of reviews were surprised at the range and the number of designers. The only criticism we had was they wished it could have been much larger. They were aware that because of the space size, the show was very limited. And I think people wanted to see more. I mean, I would have loved to put more in it. But again, I was limited by space.

Are you going to travel with this show.

We have received a few requests to travel with the show, but it is just a matter of working out the logistics in terms of security and shipping.

I know that many people have given you objects, or costumes or shoes or designs. Where are you keeping all these?

I keep them at home, which is becoming a problem, because I'm running out of space.

Are you going to formalize your design collection?

I think I will probably end up donating it to someone. I'm not sure. Because some objects need temperature control. I don't have the facilities to do that.

Do you find that African Americans now are turning to technical design in the colleges?

Not as much as they should; it's still a problem. I'm always trying to recruit students. I have been succesful, but the numbers are still very low. Again, I think part of it has to do with exposure. A lot of young people aren't aware that these opportunities are out there, that these roles exist. I'm finding that more people are going into film than theatre. I think a lot of it has to do maybe with Spike Lee and this whole new group of filmmakers. But there are a lot of people going into film and television, more so than in theatre.

The technical aspects of film are creating a lot of jobs. And now that the unions are beginning to allow people of color to enter them. Have you yourself had any union problems?

I can only speak for the theatrical unions on this question. Yes, getting into the union is difficult, but I haven't had any major problems since becoming a member. The main issue is that as an African American, white theaters tend to call us only for Black shows, which I enjoy, but every now and then I'd like to design an opera or a Greek classic. But, this problem is true with many Black designers; we tend to be pigeonholed. We call February, "Black Hysterial Month" because everybody's phone is ringing in January and December to come and do the February show. It has gotten to the point, at least in my case, that a company will call me and say, "If you can do our show in February..." and I may have gotten five calls from somebody else about their February show. Now I say, "I'm booked for February, but I can do something else. I can design for Chekov, and I can do Shakespeare, so please keep me in mind." There are a few of us who are beginning to branch out and do other things. I just did Hello Dolly not too long ago, and Toni Leslie-James is an example; she designed the costumes for Angels in America, so she is beginnning to do a range of productions now. The whole thing is just trying to break out of being Black designers who can "only" do Black shows. That has been one of the biggest problems.

Is there special knowledge that you need for color in terms of light and costumes for Black people versus white.

I just did a workshop at Massachusetts about that. Yes, there is a lot that you have to consider. But usually I tell my students, if you can light a Black cast, you can light anybody. Because as Black people we run the gamut from light-light to dark-dark. But I have a story to tell which is funny. When I went to grad school in Michigan, I just knew I would have a problem lighting a white cast because I had been lighting Black people all my life. With this show, which was a production of Desire Under The Elms, I could not figure out why the lighting was so horrible on some of the white characters. And my professor said, "Just watch for a while, it'll come to you what's wrong". I was so used to using very saturated colors for back lighting, and I had never had to light a blond before. So I had these four blondes, and their hair was like glowing amber and blue from the staurated back light reflecting off their hair. You have to take a variety of things into consideration. Not only just skin color, but haircolor and costume is also a concern. I have started teaching a class at Illinois, it's more or less designing for people of color or for a variety of cultures. The reason for the course was because I found myself working on a lot of shows where I may have been the only Black designer. And a lot of white designers are not trained to deal with a Black cast. So one production I did was of The Piano Lesson. The set designer gave us a set that was primarily all brown. We had a very dark cast, the costume designer gave them very dark clothes. So you had these Black people just blending into this brown set and into the woodwork. So they eventually had to put on lighter colors and at least put something on the set to break up all this darkness. You know, those are things that you have to be concerned with.

Are light designers learning about how to do these things?

They should! It all boils down to research. Just like anybody else you have to do research on a show. But in terms of color, they just need to be aware of it; from all areas of design as a lighting designer. It's the lighting that brings the visuals together.

What is your dream of the next ten years of your life? What do you want to do now that you have done very well. You are an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Champaign.

Yes, my biggest goal right now is, I would love to do an opera on Ida B. Wells, and call it Ida.

What a wonderful idea.

So few people, (particularly young people) know about her and I think she would be a wonderful person to put on the stage. I know it has nothing to do with lighting or technical theatre. There are no great Black operas except for Scott Jolin's Treemonisha. Well, some people would argue that in terms of Porgy and Bess, but I would love to see an opera done on Ida B. Wells.

Well, if there is a musician listening, this is Professor Kathy Perkins at Champaign. Thank you very much.

My Royal Heritage

I can now give new thought to old blood I can now render unto my father that which remains part of me The remains of a dead war hero celebrating me home

I have his emblems, his insignia, his tool box, smoking tobacco, his flag and the sound of his whistle giving me the signal to remember him after the fatal sound of the last bullet buried in that foreign soil

My history now reads like a blood transfusion unwounded at gun point

-- -- Glenngo Allen King

-- 125 --

Custom

I kissed your cheek lightly. Remember? You had made dinner, and probably took it as courtesy which you wished to return, calling me back from the elevator to kiss me on both cheeks and remind me that such was friendship according to an older custom.

You couldn't have known how much held breath there was in my kiss's slight hesitation, or guessed what more was withheld out of shyness. Or did you, and were saying "No, friend" politely, according to custom, so that each kiss hurt doubly?

-- -- Stuart Miller

A Kiss

What is a kiss? Not the kind that blends into the next, moving from yes to depth in a slow legato that forks the legs, but the kind we have, the one that ends our visits like a punctuation point.

It is a quest: for as our lips collide in that billionth of a second buss like particles accelerated in a beam, we seek the irreducible first form of love. I track it across your face: now, then was.

-- -- Suzanne Noguere

A word before you go

One green laurel day the heart in my throat will fly out bloody and red upon the page twitching, panting, then sagely point itself erect into a cobra whose coils of artery and vein will caress your cerebal sun into eclipse -- a Medusa mass of sassafrass without a tongue

-- -- James V. Hatch

Actor, Singer, Teacher

Interviewer: Delilah Jackson

April 30, 1995

Isabel Powell started performing as a teenager when her name was Isabel Washington. She was the sister of the beautiful Fredi Washington. During the 1920s the two sisters came to 135th Street in New York to live with their grandmother whom they called "Big Mama." At that time, 135th Street and 8th Avenue was known as the block "where everything is at." Ms. Powell's career has been long and renowned -- she worked on Broadway, she sang the blues, danced the Bamboula, and also played in the movie St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith, which we all see every year during Black History month. Ms. Powell was beautiful in that movie, and she is still a beautiful woman. Today we are going to find all about the early Harlem days when this talented teenager came to live with her grandmother. Isabel, what is your full name?

My whole name is Isabel Maron Mary Rosemary Theodore Washington Powell. My sister's full name was Frederika. She had to make it short for the movies.

When did you come to New York?

Oh my God, there we go with dates.

It was in the 20s, right?

Yes, I was in a Catholic boarding school before I came here. I was born in Georgia. The other night when I was flying over Georgia the pilot said, "And now we are flying over historic Savannah." I jumped up and said, "Even they know I'm here"!

How many sisters and brothers did you have?

Now, there is Rosebud, Fredi, Juanita, and myself. Four girls.

Four girls. And one boy?

No, there were four boys and four girls.

Tell me your mother's name.

My mother was Hetty Washington.

Was she talented?

Yes. As a matter of fact, I really believe that is where my sister Fredi got her dancing ability. When the circuses used to come to town, mother would do the cakewalk and always win the cakes. So we say that Fredi got her talent from mother. She did not go around the world and teach the Prince of Wales to do the Black Bottom, like Fredi did.

Fredi did that?

Yes, she did. She also danced for Josephine Baker in Paris.

But your sister was primarily a dramatic actress.

Oh sure, she was an actress. But mostly she danced. She danced at the Club Alabama. Then she went off and began acting. In 1926, she performed with Paul Robeson in Black Boy, and then again with Robeson in the film, The Emperor Jones. And then she got this dancer... Moiret. Moiret and Washington! They danced all over Europe. Then she came back. I think it was after that that she made the film, Imitation of Life.

We will get to that. I just want to get to your mother because that was such a devastating blow to lose your mother at a young age.

Yes. Really. Of course, the bonding had sort of loosened up because she had to go away every summer. She died when she was thirty-nine years old. I don't know what she died from, but I remember that every summer mother went away up to the country for her health. When she died we were sent to a convent in Philadelphia.

You were a little child?

I was about seven years old.

And Fredi was about twelve?

Twelve or thirteen.

Did Fredi act motherly towards you?

Always. Very protective. She rode a bycicle, and if any of the kids in school bothered me, Fredi would jump off that bike in such a way you just never saw! She was really our little mother. I miss her so much now. Especially this morning. And I do not know why; maybe it was because I was going to come down here and talk about these things.

Did all your sisters go to the convent?

No no. Only Fredi and I. Fredi went ahead of me and got ready for my coming because I was always a cry baby. My grandmother always used to say my bladder was next to my eyelids!

Was this an Indian convent or just a regular convent?

No. They took Indian and Black children.

Because I saw a picture of you and Fredi in Indian outfits.

Oh no, that was at Christmas -- we were the three little Indians.

Who decided for you to come to New York with Big Mama?

Let me see now. Daddy was still in Savannah, Georgia and I went up to Washington to stay with Uncle Jim and Aunt Min. Big Mama thought that she should have me. Well, they always figured they had to hold me down. So Big Mama was the one to get me.

Tell me about Big Mama and the stories she would tell.

Oh, Big Mama was a wonderful old lady. I remember when Adam [Clayton Powell] and I were going to be divorced my uncle Gid came up to New York. He had never been out of Georgia. He had never even heard of a Congressman. We had to tell him what a Congressman was. I said to my grandmother, Big Mama, "Who is Uncle Gid? You told me that Uncle Bud was your second husband's son." She said, "Oh, Uncle Gid was my husband's child." So I said: "How many husbands did you have?" She answered: "Oh child, I had three." I said: "What did you do?" They did not have divorce in those days. She said: "Child, I just prayed to God to remove my stumbling block, and I just kept on." She was that type of person, always full of fun and a lot of jokes -- a very good grandma.

A good grandma.

I loved her to death.

How did you get to Pace-Handy's Black Swan Record Company?

Well, Fredi and I were kids at that time and my father was the head packer for shipping the records. While I was licking envelopes and sending them out, I would sing. Fletcher Henderson heard me and said, "Hey, you can sing! If I write a number for you, would you sing it for for me?" And I did. I sang "I Want to Go," and "That's Why I'm Loving You." That was 1923. I had a very, very beautiful voice then. I don't know whether my Tommy has that record. I must ask him -- that's my grandson. That's what Fredi and I were doing after school. Then Fredi went to the theater. Of course, I hung around the theatre door. What was that team...?

Miller and Lyles

Miller and Lyles! I wanted to get into show business so badly. But Fredi did not think it was appropriate for me to get in show business. She thought it was too hard. Why I do not know. She could go [box and diamond symbols] why not me? But anyhow, I got my big break when one day Revella Hughes, who used to sing in the quartet in Shuffle Along (1932) -- a very beautiful voice -- came down with laryngitis. I knew all the music, and Mr. Miller called me and said: "Do you know that song?" And I said: "Indeed, I do." I got up on the stage, and I sang like a bird. He says: "You're in!" So that is how I got into show business.

That was wonderful.

Harlem was the first show I did.

Wallace Thurman, did you meet him?

Did I meet him? Of course I did. He was the author of the book. Edward Blatt was the producer. Very wonderful, wonderful person.

That was a big play.

Oh yes, oh yes.

And you got great reviews.

Fredi was very angry when I left the stage. She did not want me to leave.

She did not want you to get in, and now she did not want you to leave?

No. Now, at this time, Adam [Clayton Powell] wanted to marry me, and I could not stay in the theatre and have one foot in the church. You know how we Baptists are. I was sent for an audition by old Ziegfeld. He had seen me in Harlem. He did not know I could sing, because I did not sing in Harlem. It was strictly drama. I went over to the Ziegfeld Theatre, and I sang for him. And he says: "You're in. You got the part of Julie." The show was going out for two years on the road and Adam says, "No, no, no, if you go out on the road, we will never get married." So that is when I got out of show business.

When you were offered Julie in Showboat, that was the first time an African American would have played the part of Julie.

That is right.

That was the revival in 1933?

That's right.

Was Ziegfeld was a nice man?

Oh, he was a little man and he wore a ten gallon hat. I will never forget the day I walked into the Ziegfeld Theatre to sing for him and he was on the other side of

this huge stage next to a grand piano. I was frightened to death. I looked around and I heard his little voice say:"Don't be frightened, don't be frightened, just come over here and get right in the bow of the piano here. Now you sing for me." I got over there and I leaned on the piano. And so God would have it, he loved me. But I could not take it because Adam said we could not get married, which was true.

Was there a lot of opposition from the church?

Yes, they took it before the deacons' board.

They did?

Oh, they did. They asked, "Is this a showgirl?"

You had been a Cotton Club girl.

I was a showgirl. You know, a dancer, but it did not make any difference. I was on the stage. See how things are changed today? Thank God so many things have changed for the best.

In 1937, the Duke of Windsor said:"I can not go on without marrying the woman I love". And Adam said the same thing:"I will not go on."

Well, he went before the deacons' board and he said, "If I can not have Bunny, I will give up the pulpit." He told the deacons that. They stood up, and they said, "No, no, no, we will have her come here." And I did a yeoman's job there because I had a choir of one hundred boys, little tiny tots, from the ages of two to twelve. I had a junior choir from twelve to sixteen. Diahann Carroll was in that choir.

How did you meet Adam? Was he a student?

No. The girl who played the part of my aunt in Harlem, her son was a friend of Adam's, and he danced at the Cotton Club. I spent the night at her apartment, and we were getting ready to go to the Theatre, to perform the matinee, when the doorbell rang, and in comes this gaunt, tall Yankee. He looked like he had been in a concentration camp. She introduced me to him. Adam had come to see his friend. She told him that we were going down to the theatre for the matinee. Adam ran in the bedroom and spoke to his friend; then he came back into the room as we were finishing our breakfast. We had to get a cab to come down to the theatre at 42nd Street where the show was. He says, "Can I just ride with you to 138th Street?" We were at 140th Street. He was riding for two blocks? But in those two blocks he got a chance to say, "When I go back to Colgate University, I'll write you." And I said, "Sure." I looked him up and down and I said, "You look as though you need a good meal." He was so gaunt and skinny. Anyhow, that is how we met. He wrote me and asked if he could call me Bunnygirl and I said to him, "If I can call you Bunnyboy."

Did you fall in love then?

Well, no, of course not. But you know the funny part about this was that my grandmother, my father's mother, was a member of that Abyssinian Baptist Church, and she used to come home and always say, "My boy came in from college. My boy!" (Talking about Adam.) Well, I did not know anything about Adam, you see. But this was the young man she was talking about. So I began to think about this thing, and I said, "Well, let's give it a try." So when his family realised that we were serious about getting married when he graduated from

Colgate, they packed him off to Europe for three months to try to get rid of me.

They did try to get rid of you?

I tore up all those gorgeous love letters. You know, as you grow older you really get some sense. When you're young you're crazy. Believe me when I tell you that I would have never torn up those letters. And he sent me twelve vials (he went to the holy land) of oil from the flowers there. Now, mind you, any one of those little vials, I later learned, would have made me a quart of perfume. And I just took them and gave them around to my girlfriends. "Here, this is for you, this is for you." Then when I learned what I had done, I said, "Oh my God, I could have set up a perfume barn." I could have sold them, rather than give them away.

How did you get in the picture St. Louis Blues with Bessie Smith?

Now that, I really do not remember. I had been a Cotton Club girl, I was a soubrette there. Through this in some sort of way, you know how....

But they said they wanted a darker woman, so how did you do that?

What do you mean?

Well, they said they wanted a brown-skinned woman in St. Louis Blues.

You told them that you could be "dipped."

Now, you're talking about Fredi. They "dipped" Fredi when she did The Emperor Jones with Paul Robeson. Don't you remember that?

They have it also in the magazine that you told them, "I can be dipped."

Yes, I think I did. That is right. They put you in a bath and you come out a little bit browner than you were. And they wanted me. I was in this scene with this guy who played a gambling man.

Jimmy Mordecai.

Jimmy Mordecai. Is it not a shame that they had to show us in such deregatory scenes? I look at some of these things now and I wish they had not done them. Everybody did those things, but they only pointed out Black people.

But they wanted to show that Black was South, to make you look bad.

That was not in the South.

But they showed it in the South, and they showed it in New York also.

I don't care where they wanted to show it. That's why poor Fredi got out of show business -- because she could never show her great potential. Because she was so fair they would not give her parts to do. You can do anything, whether you are white or you are Black, unless it just called for a blond. She had blue eyes. You know, they did not show her pictures in the South. And she really became very, very disenfranchised by showbusiness. She got out of it. You could not pay her to do it.

But she was heartbroken.

She was very heartbroken. She had always been a fighter for her people, but many of the Black people thought that Fredi, because she was fair, really wanted to be white. But that was not true.

Yes, but they all were light -- Adam Clayton Powell - there should be a statue for him for what he did. There should be a statue for Fredi

Washington. Because they were light, people don't remember them.

But I am going to tell you that I am working right now with Adam's son, Adam IV, who's in the City Council, to get a stamp printed with Adam Clayton on it. He did so much for minorities. He passed sixty pieces of legislature under Presidents Johnson and Kennedy. Elvis Presley can have a stamp, and Nixon, and birds and bees and bridges and walls. I spoke to the people in my post office one day, and I said, "What should I do about this? There should be a stamp." They told me what to do. I spoke to Adam's son about getting a stamp, and I am going to jump on him again. He has been very busy now with other things, but he thought it was a good idea. And by the way, did you know that he and Hazel's [Scott's] son is sueing the government for Adam's backpay? Yes they are. It has been in the papers. Isn't that an idea? I wonder where I could fit in there?

You know, when you married Adam, he was going to be a doctor.

Oh, yes.

Then he changed over to be a minister.

No, he was going to be a laywer, and he changed over to be a minister. I'm very glad he did. Adam was called back to Colgate for a class reunion and I sang for them. A famous singer had just been there the week before, and these young men -- I will never forget -- they jumped up and they grabbed me and said, "Gladys has a magnificent voice, but she can't move us like you moved us."

Really?

Yes, they did. One time at Abyssinian Baptist Church I sang when Adam preached to accept Jesus, and eighty people walked down the aisle joining the church.

Eighty people?

Eighty people! Yes, ma'am.

Adam said that he got home relief for those people in the 1930s. The Abyssinian Church gave them money.

Oh yes, soul kitchen!

And he said that those are the same people that helped him when he ran for office. They stayed with him. So you never know how people will remember you.

After church on Sunday morning, I would be all dressed up and Adam would be in his striped pants and a cut-away coat, and we would walk to 125th Street. This was before he ran for City Council. As we walked on the street there would be people standing back at their doorways just sort of looking. Adam would break away from me, run to them, throw his arms around them, and say, "Hi there, my friends" Those were the people that put him in office and sent him back to Congress time after time.

Did he know he was going to run then?

He was getting ready to, but I did not understand why he was doing this.

My mother used to say that Abyssinian was the top church in Harlem.

It was the greatest. They have fifteen thousand members. There is not a tourist group that comes from Europe that does not go by the Abyssinian Baptist

Church. And now they have Adam's room there with all his pictures and his scrapbook and all that. They've put an elevator in the church for the old people.

Adam was so active on 125th Street -- "Don't buy where you can't work." My mother, who hadn't been long from the South, said, "We were afraid to talk because we were Southern. Adam showed us we had a tongue. Your money is buying, you talk to those white people. Let Blumstein's [Harlem's largest department store] hire Blacks, let Woolworth's hire Blacks."

I walked the picket lines with him, so I ought to know.

You did?

Yes I did. A picket sign on my back.

Did the rich people in Harlem, the Sugarhill people support him?

No!

Or just the people around his congregration?

I did not see anybody there from Sugarhill walking when I had a sandwich board on me.

But you won?

Sure. He was a dynamic man. A lot of people will say to me, even now, "How can you speak in such glowing terms of Adam?" I say, "I want to tell you something. I have known people who have been married to one man for fifty years and never had the joy and the pleasure and the love of a man that I was married to for twelve years. He was a man. He did so much for the people which had nothing to do with my personal life with him."

When it is over, it's over?

But why should I take away from him the things that he did? I just did not do it, and I never will do it. I was doing a book with the fellow who wrote the Jackie Robinson Story, but he died [Alfred Duckett]. And I have been to Simon and Schuster, and to Jackie Onassis when she was an editor. I have got the letter she wrote me when she sent my material back to me and told me it was very nice; she liked what was in it, but the other editors thought there was not enough in it. They wanted me to talk about Adam as a womanizer, and I don't intend to do it. I wouldn't do it. Why? The good this man has done? Not me.

When Bell Telephone wouldn't hire Blacks what did Adam tell them?

Oh, he told his audiences and his congregation, "Now, everybody, when you try to get a number, don't dial that number, but call and ask the operator. The operator will say, "Well, that number is in the book." Then you say, "Well, I am blind and I can't see." Can you imagine fifteen thousand people? That's exactly what he did.

And Con Edison, what did he do to force them to hire Blacks?

Oh yes, pay in pennies. When you go to pay your bill, if it is forty dollars, give them forty thousand pennies. They'll have to count the pennies.

Thousands and thousands of pennies.

Oh sure.

And the pennies would be flying all over the floor. Con Edison had said they would never hire blacks.

Oh yes, but they did. Going to the Bandung Conference. He wanted to go to the Bandung Conference [1954], and he went to the powers that be and asked them there in Washington to send him. They said:"No, no, no." So he took his own money and went to represent the United States. When he came back, the Senators and the Congressmen stood up and applauded him because he created good will at the Bandung conference. So I have no feelings at all, talking about the fine things that Adam did. People would say, "All the gifts God gave Adam, why did he have to be goodlooking too?"

That's kind of true.

When he would go before Congress those white crackers thought he would be Uncle Tom, "How are you doing, how are you doing?" He would talk to them and sometimes walk by them. When he saw a maid scrubbing the floor, he would say, "Baby, how are you feeling? Do you know you are looking good today?" When he first went down to Congress, Senator Bilbo [Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi] would get up and move so not to be near him. Adam would sit down besides Bilbo and Bilbo would get up and move. When Bilbo moved, Adam would move, just antagonizing him. Adam opened positions for Blacks to work at the lunch counters and the barbershops in the Capitol.

He turned that around too?

Oh yes, he did.

That was a hard struggle, but Adam was not poor.

No, he was born with a gold spoon in his mouth.

And the congregation used to spoil him?

Oh, he was their little Jesus. Adam started a thing with the ushers in the church. One weekend tailors came with a beautiful white linen suit for Adam. He put it on, and I looked at him and said to myself, "Oh my God, aren't you handsome!" I would not tell him. The next Sunday every usher in that church had a white linen suit. And weren't they handsome! He really was something.

He knew how to look good, and he liked white linen suits. He always looked good, but that was when Seventh Avenue was Seventh Avenue.

Oh yes, the ladies would walk down Seventh Avenue. Oh well, it is a different place now.

But you can remember?

They weren't ladies, they were "laaidies" in those days and would walk down the street wearing beautiful hats and beautiful clothes. It was just very charming. The other day I saw three kids coming toward me, and their pants were way down to here, just hanging down. I stopped and I said, "Why?" I would not put my money on a child's back to look like that. Where's the self-esteem? Where are you going, walking along, with your drawers hanging down on your knees? That is what it looks like." Then they stopped and pulled them up. They had no belts so they fell right down again!

Ms. Washington, did your father re-marry?

I am not Ms. Washington.

I mean Ms. Powell.

Yes darling.

Did your father re-marry?

My daddy was married three times.

And had children from each marriage?

Yes, that is why there were so many of us. Not with all of the wives. With the first wife the baby died. There was the second wife's children and my mother's children. You know we are a very close family. If one of us has a headache, all of us have headaches.

Tell me about how he sued the postoffice.

No, he did not sue the postoffice. I found a letter the other day my father had written when we were in Savannah, Georgia. My father worked in the postoffice, and it was about something my dad did not like. He wrote the President of the United States. I found this letter in my belongings, and I took it out and put it with my other things. That is why I write letters. I write the President of the United States. I am in the process now, and I have five letters from my president, because I write him.

And he says, "Dear Isabel?"

No, he calls me "Ms. Powell", "Dear Ms. Powell." When he was running the first time, I was at Martha's Vineyard. I woke up and I thought this man has got to win, because I saw a documentary on him. And what a life he had as a child coming up. I liked him. I got up the next morning, and I drafted a letter. I have a girlfriend down the road from me who writes for Hollywood. I said to her, "Listen, help me with this and let's send it off." I wrote to him, "Dear Mr. President", and I prefaced my remark by saying, "Mr. President, (because I know you are going to win.) I am sitting on my porch, rocking in my rocking chair. I am so happy that you are running. I know you are going to win, and I am praying for you because we need to get rid of all these old rascals down there in Washington. But be sure some time to come and rock on my frontporch with me. In two weeks time I had sent it to the mansion, I got an answer and he thanked me. He said how he wished he could be up there with me. Since that time, don't you know, he has spent his vacation on my island. I think he is buying property up there.

What island is this?

Martha's Vineyard.

How long have you been there?

About fifty-five years.

Adam was there too?

Sure. I was there with Adam. We bought our house together.

Is that Oakbluff?

Oakbluff is a township on Martha's Vineyard. We have five townships.

Bobby Short was Fredi's good friend.

As a matter of fact, on Mother's day, Bobby Short was to bring Fredi the most exquisite orchid plant you have ever seen in your life. She was in the nursing home up in Stanford, Connecticut where she lived. But the night before Mother's day I got a call that Fredi had had a massive stroke. They rushed her to the hospital, and we all went to the hospital to see her. Bobby took her the orchard plant, and I took the blossoms as they fell off and pressed them.

Bobby was so devoted to her; he was a good friend. How did Fredi get into motion pictures?

Now you're asking me something I don't know. I know she was an actress, and I know they were looking. There were nine hundred girls for that part [Imitation of Life], and she got it.

Her scenes still hold up today and look beautiful. That is her picture.

That part in the film of her telling her mother, "Aren't I white? Look at me". She is saying, "Look at you, you are black. I love you, but I must go." Do you remember that scene? That movie was a tearjerker. It made everybody cry. Everybody had a handkerchief.

Then some people had an attitude -- like my mother's mother, who was Black. My mother was light, her sister was Black, her brother was Black. People would say, "What is done in the dark comes out in the light." They would make all these kinds of remarks. People felt the same thing like Peola. In the old history of Harlem, everybody light was a Peola.

Oh yes, I will never forget one time on Martha's Vineyard, I was with Adam and we used to go to this little place where they would drink beer. I didn't drink beer. He was smoking cigarettes in those days, and I wanted to light his cigarette, and he would not let me. So I got angry and I walked out. At twelve o'clock at night. I had to walk beside the water going to my house. There were some Indian guys sitting in the place with us, and they followed me out. When I was walking around those dirt roads going up to my house there was a big bush. A wagon came around the corner and pushed me up into the bush. I jumped back and one little guy said, "Oh, don't worry Peola, we are not going to hurt you". There were Indians on the island because the island was founded by the Indians and the Portuguese.

Adam published a newspaper; The People's Voice. Your sister worked in that paper?

She worked in that paper. She was a good person. She organised the Negro Actors Guild by herself.

Actors Equity did not want Blacks in their union.

So they organised. When Duke Ellington's Band went out on the road they were not allowed to go in certain hotels or allowed to go into certain restaurants. Fredi would go and get their food and bring it to them. She fought for them to get in these hotelrooms. I learned more about my sister since she died than I knew about her when she was alive. I knew she was a beautiful, wonderful, sweet sister, but there were so many of things I never knew about her.

Fighting for peoples's rights... she was really heartbroken about the way her people treated her.

Oh yes, she was terribly heartbroken. Many a time, long before she got Alzheimers, I would go visit her, and I would see letters on the table, and I would read them. Many young college kids would write her. I would say, "Sister, do you answer them?" She'd say, "Oh, I don't have time for that," but she was not doing anything. She did not want to talk about show business. She was really hurt because she knew she was a fabulous actress. She should have been able to do any part that she could do, but they would not let her because she had to do

Black parts. Like in school -- you know I still teach in in the system, believe it or not; I teach phonics. One of my little children said, "Ms Powell, you're white!" So I said to him, "No, I am not white, I am colored". I picked up my black dress and said, "What color is this?" "It is black." I said, "When have you ever seen a person like that?" There was white paper and I said, "What is this?" He said, "It's white." I said, "Have you ever seen anybody like this? Because it's a ghost if you have." "No, ma'am, I have never seen anybody coming by like that." I said, "God made the most beautiful flower garden in the world when he created the colored people. They are from alabaster white to ebony black and all colors in between. All of us put our hands on the table. Look at the different shades." Children know how to understand these things. So Fredi had a lot of anger; she really was an angry person.

Did Adam's father ever like you?

Oh sure, aren't I likable?

At first, he could not stand me when he was trying to get me away from Adam, but my goodness, I used to go out fishing with him.

Yes, but he did not want you for his son.

No, but he could not help himself, because the deacons said, "Let him marry her." Adam said, "if I can't have Bunny, I don't want the church." And he walked out.

So who married you?

The old man and Reverend Lloyd Imes. Did you know him?

No.

From the Presbyterian Church up there. He's gone South now, I don't know maybe he is dead, but they married me, I had two ministers. I must tell you that after the deacons told Adam that it was quite all right, then the old man had to baptise me. All the girls from the Cotton Club came and sat up in the balcony. I was never so frightened in my life. This big man in this gorgeous church made from all that marble that came from Italy. He was standing in the baptism water. I looked up at the size of him, and then he put his hand on me and said, "In the name of our Father and in the name of our Son..." And then he threw me back, and I just knew he was trying to drown me! All I could think of was that this man, who could not get rid of me any other way, now is going to drown me. But he found out afterwards that I was a good gal, and I did a lot for the church and raised a lot of money. I used to have fairs up there and collect in one day a thousand or two thousand dollars. I paid my dues.

Was Adam's sister Blanche alive when you got married?

Oh no, I did not know Blanche at all. She was long gone.

He loved her.

He only had one sister. Adam was born ten, twenty years after his mother and father were married. That is why he was so...

So spoilt?

He was spoilt, but he had such a good brain. And he was greedy.

Adam was greedy?

Adam was greedy, and his old man was greedy too. To build that church! That

is an edifice that will go down in history. That church now, I think it is about one hundred and forty-six years old.

A beautiful church.

Oh, it is. Those stained glass windows!

I was there Easter, and I could not get in.

If you are not there by a certain time every Sunday morning, you can't get in.

They have tourists, the German tourists and the Japanese tourists.

Oh sure, they always come.

Ms. Powell at age eighty seven is a teacher of little kids at PS 92.

You know, I was telling Jim [Hatch] how the children sent me all kinds of letters, flowers, paintings, drawings, poems, and this and that when they realized I wasn't coming back that soon. One little boy drew a picture of me. You fold it over and it said, "Please hurry up and come back." The little ones, four and five year old, they could not even spell my name, but they could all spell "love."

Are you going back to teaching?

No, I am not going back. I found out I really can't. My legs are still too bad.

So you are going to write your book now?

Well, I still don't have a press who will work with me, but I am trying to get Toni Morrison.

You're shooting high; you should shoot a little lower.

What do you mean? My story is high.

Did you ever see Adam again?

Sure, I told you when he came from the Bandung Conference.

Do you ever regret giving up your career?

No, I became so happy working with the children, so I don't have any regrets. My sister wrote me a letter when I was on my way to Reno, and she said to me, "When the train pulls out, read this letter." When I opened it the first thing she said to me was, "Dear Belle," (everybody calls me "Belle) "You are embarking on a new life now. The future is in front of you, the past is behind you. Never turn your head and look over your shoulder." And I have never done it.

But you were devastated, though.

Well, of course I was devastated, I loved him. I have never denied that I loved him. And I really believe he loved me more than any of the other women. I want to tell you something. These women make these men like they are. You know what I'm saying? There were so many things that happened with Adam. He would come home and tell me. He tried to do the right thing.

All the women?

Yes, women. W-O-M-E-N, women.

Well, a handsome man like that....

This is what I am saying. Sometimes these men don't mind their own business. Throw a lobster on a plate for me and I am going to eat it because I love lobster.

When you were performing in the clubs, can you describe the costumes and the kind of dances you did?

I worked at Connie's Inn. I used to dance with Louise Cook who came from Chicago. She had the most beautiful body. In those days I had a beautiful body, a twenty-one inch waist line. We danced under a blue veil with this little [G-string]. The women who lay on the beach today, you say, "For God's sake!" They don't hide anything. That's the way I was under the blue veil with the blue light dancing. In those days, that would knock you out. This particular night, Immerman, the owner of the place, came in running into the dressingroom and said, "The police are here." I said, "For what?" He said, "They have been sitting in the audience and been watching you and Louise do your dance. You got to go around to that police station over on 131st Street." We got into Mr.Immerman's car and we went to the precinct. When we got over there Immerman said, "Don't give your real name! Give a fictitious name." Well, they just said that we were not supposed to be doing those kinds of dances. And man, we were under age so we didn't. If I die in my sleep tonight I would not have missed anything. I have had an excellent life.

Louise Cooke, she was something. Was that who you were dancing with?

That was my partner, but she died years ago. She died of dope or something.

She was beautiful they said.

We were both beautiful!

Everybody talks about you and Louise Cook. Tell us about Connie Immerman.

Connie Immerman and his brother George were the owners of Connie's Inn.

Was that as beautiful as the Cotton Club?

Well, you know, the Cotton Club was upstairs. Black people at one time could not go there.

But Adam went there.

I don't know. I think we just had to meet around there, but it was upstairs and Black people were really not wanted at the Cotton Club.

They could not afford to go in.

Well, that was another thing. But these highriders would come in, and there were occasions you would see some Black people there, but they did not really want them.

What was a soubrette?

A Soubrette is a person who leads the numbers. I came out with the chorus and I danced in front and would do special dances. That is a soubrette.

Where did you learn your dances and what kind of dances where they?

When you hear people say, "I've got to go to acting school" - Fredi and I never went to any acting school. Nobody ever taught me a note. I just had a good voice. We were naturals.

Fredi never went to acting school?

No, never to an acting school.

Well, how did she learn to dance?

Didn't I tell you my mother was a cakewalker? Like all dancers who can dance they have to make up routines, and they work on the special routines that they do.

She looked beautiful in those outfits.

Oh, she wore hot costumes.

I saw you at the Hy Curtis's when I was at Clarence Robinson's wake, and you and Fredi were in the kitchen. We were in the other room and you never came out of the kitchen. You would call her "sister," and she would call you "sister." She loved you and you loved her.

She was such an angel. Now I'm just thinking of the Mother's day that is coming, and this is just a real hard time for me. Thinking of how this is the day she had the stroke a year ago.

She had Alzheimer's, but she understood you?

Yes, she had Alzheimer's, but she understood everything. But at the end she got this horrible stroke.

She was ninety, wasn't she?

Yes, she died last June 28th.

Was your voice a soprano voice? Sing a song!

Oh no, I can't sing now.

I did not see a TV at your house. You have all these books you are reading.

I have never been a real TV person. I just got a little TV here about six years ago. I put it on my dresser and my table in my bedroom. And I lay in my bedroom on my bed and I watch very few things. Oprah is one of my specialities. I tell all my doctors when I go to see them, "Now, if you are ready to give me any kind of drug, just remember one thing, I work with difficult children. When I come home I have two Bloody Marys, and I get in my bed and watch Oprah."

You worked at the Cotton Club with Hy Curtiss. Did she live in your house?

No, she did not work with me at the Cotton Club.

Oh, but Maud Russell did?

No.

Who worked with you?

I was married to Adam then. I was off the stage when she was there. I did not dance with Hy, but Hy did dance at the Cotton Club.

At her husband's...

No, he did not put her in the shows. He did put her in the shows down at Connie's Inn. Then there was another place downtown, the Zanzibar.

Did you work there?

No, I never worked there.

They tried to open up the Plantation...

The Plantation! One of the gangsters was shot there.

Well, they told him not to open. They gave him another day, and then the next day they killed him. And then they closed.

That is why I have a little fear for my mayor [Guiliani], who is messing with those gangsters now at the fishmarket. That was his business, taking care of gangsters. He knows how to handle them. But it is getting a little hot there on

him now. And you know what they do when they want to shut you up. I just hope they won't.

They tried to buy Adam out when he was a watcher on 125th Street. But he said, "Uncle Tom is dead. Harlem is on the march." They did kill Sufi, that man who wore a turban.

What was his name?

Sufi. He did the same thing like Adam, but he disappeared; gangsters killed him. What did you call that place Adam used to travel to?

Bimini

You see, everybody forgot him when he went there in the Caribbean. That is rather sad.

The police were still trying to get him. Adam would come in over the weekend when he knew they could not come to the church. They could not touch him over the weekend.

But that woman, Esther, the baglady... she was a baglady?

She was baglady. She put the police department on him.

Were you in the show with Whitney and Tutt, called Bamboula? Bumbuola, not Bamboula.

Do you know Whitney and Tutt? Do you remember them at all, because they were a couple of famous old performers.

No, I did not even remember the names of the guys that wrote it.

Jack Carter... tell me about Jack Carter.

Oh, Jack Carter, I remember him. Tall Jack. Jack Carter played a part in...

Singing the Blues, with Estralita, Dick Campbell, Isabel Washington, Fredi Washington, Maud Russell. Who else?

I remember the Four Flash Devils.

Do you remember Hazel Cole, and Lucia Moses?

Yes, I remember Lucia and Julia Moses. They were in the chorus. We had a big chorus. The costumes and the girls were so beautiful. As I said, they were really "laaidies" in those days. They carried their clothes in a certain manner.

Where was the play Harlem done?

It was at Apollo Theatre on 42nd Street, and it still stands.

Can you tell us something about your speciality dances?

This young man was a friend of Adam's, and we danced as a ballroom dancing team. If I weren't on the cane I would get up and show you. They were all routines that we made up, but I can't remember those routines.

Here are your songs: "Rub'a dub' Your Rabbit's Foot", "Somebody Like Me", "African Whoopy", "Song of Harlem." Do you remember any of these songs?

I don't know.

How did you rehearse?

We were just told what days to come to rehearsal and we went to the theatre. Those who were late -- like one day I will never forget -- what was that girl's name? We had gone out on the road to Atlantic City with the show and Mr.

Freedly, a fabulous man, a millionaire said to this girl who came walking down the isle late, "I want to let you know you can't walk in here any time you want. So now you don't have a job." Just like that. So you made it on time, believe me. I wish there would be some institution which would teach my people today to come on time.

How long have you been in the school system?

I have been with the school system for about twenty-eight years.

Hy says, "Isabel loves the school system."

I love the children, I don't love the system.

You remind me so much of the family of Adam Clayton. How did you and your grandmother get along?

She was never against our marriage. Of course, she had to stay in the background like women in those days did. When I went to prayer meeting on Friday night she would come in when Adam was preaching. She put her hand up, and if he did not recognize her, she would say, "Adam, I want to tell you something." He folded his arms and looked like, "All right grandma, so what do you want to say?" "I know God is up there, you hear me". And he would say, "Yes, I know He is up there, too." Then she said, "I was just coming across Lexington Avenue now, and a taxi just knocked me down, rolled over me. I got up, and straightened my skirt and dusted myself off. Here I am to testify that God is there. Adam says, "Yes, I know, Grandma."

Ms. Powell, we thank you very much!

Thank you, you were a wonderful audience.

Before the Winter Solstice

(for Sarah Mae King)

The December moon hung and hid its true healing in the house of sorrows after the speechless, siren colored night with all her wails and hollows my mother entered her air, in an arthritic after ballet of blood arabesques, high dive pain and the crooked body choreography.

("White gulls, it must mean snow," my mother said with a kind of finality.)

With the blossoming of this new numbness a shudder before the first frost taking the alternative route to the manger

The mermaids, those crippling maiden voyagers, have frosted winter's fire with the soft fragrance of ghostly pearls and harmonic mystery.

The daughters of the depths have now beckoned to my mother: "Come in, come in," they sing, gently as the years unhinged her heart and dust from the hereafter: my mother sings sings with the sisters sings with the sisters of the high seas above the dawn of this dark ceremony and gathering of tears.

My mother sings a melody a melody as radiant as revelations not for minutes, not for hours but now for everlasting blazing hours, steeple stung tongue ripened in flames

-- -- Glenngo Allen King

Arts Administrator, The Caribbean Cultural Center

Interviewer: Lowery Simms

May 21, 1995

I'm not sure how I can adequately introduce Marta Moreno Vega. She's my colleague, my sister, fellow warrior on the cultural wars. We're now twin doctors. We both got our Ph.D.'s this year. So we call each other "Dr. Vega, Dr. Simms". Martha was director of Museo and really brought the museum up to its maturity, then left there and came to the Metropolitan Museum for a while where we cemented our relationship as a senior Rockefeller Fellow where she did research on Caribbean collections in the United States which became the seed for the organization now known as the Caribbean Cultural Center, but was once called Visual Arts Resource & Research Center Related to the Caribbean. We used to call it VAC-RAC. We were very happy when she changed the name. I've been on and off the board, more on, with her during this venture. She has bought her own building on W. 58th Street. The Center is now, how old?

It'll be twenty years old in 1996.

It has it's own building and she will talk about the programming that we've done. I think that in addition to being an institution that Martha has been an important force just in terms of funding, curriculum and fighting the battle for inclusion, for cultural equity. Many of the offshoots of her organization include organizations that bring together consortia. She's been an incredible force, and it's my privilege to interview her today. We'll start off from the beginning. Where were you born, where did you grow up, where did you go to school, who were the most influential persons in your young life?

I was born in East Harlem of Puerto Rican parents. My father was born in San Juan and my mother in Cagua. They met in New York and married. I have an older brother, Alberto, a sister whose now deceased, Socorro, and myself. I went to P.S. 121 at 102nd Street in East Harlem, and then went on to Junior High School 99 also in East Harlem. My first trip out of East Harlem was to Music And Art High School when I was accepted as a visual art student.

When did you first become aware that you were interested in art and had a talent for art?

I maybe never realized that I had a talent for art. I just used to like to draw and used to draw everything. I used to like fashion, I used to like scarfs, colors and so on, so I was always doodling and always painting, on any piece of paper. It was in junior high school that one of the teachers -- I'll always remember Mrs. Segal -- talked to me about Music and Art, and I had never heard of Music and Art. I didn't know what that was. She talked to me about the possibility of an arts career, when that was not even a notion in my family's thoughts or mind; my mother wanted me to be a secretary or a nurse because she was a nurse. You trained to be a nurse and then got married, and in Puerto Rican housewives can't get married and work. So she chose to get married, and so her dream was that I would become a nurse and that way I would always have a job. She was right. Then Mrs. Segal talked to her about my going to art school, and my

mother said "No, she's going to be like those hippies in the street, in the village, all dirty! No, no, no." Then my father intervened and said "Well, she's going to get married anyway. She's going to stay home and raise kids. So what's the difference? Let her go to art school, let her go wherever she wants." So that's how I got to Music and Art because my father intervened and felt that I would get married, and that would be the end of it. Mrs. Segal helped me put together a portfolio. I didn't even know what a portfolio was; she just said, "Do this, draw this," and I drew it. "Do that," and did it, and I got accepted.

So what was Music and Art like?

I entered in 1955 and left in 1959. There might of been nine of us of African descent in Music and Art at that time. It was like being in a private school. All of the students either had doctors or teachers as parents -- very professional people. The nine of us that were there sort of hung out together. Three of us were Puerto Rican. The others were African-American. We played wist in between study hall. In order to survive Music and Art we came together as a group.

Music and Art was really very hard for me because I was an A student all along. Then when I got to Music and Art, I realized that the education I had gotten in East Harlem was totally inferior. That there were two systems. I failed everything except lunch. I mean, that's the truth. They put me on remedial English. I had remedial math. I had remedial history. I had remedial everything because we were not prepared, none of us. We were not prepared to compete with the other students. The guidance counselor, again a very wonderful woman, Katherine O'Sheridan, assigned students to tutor us so that we would get through, and I think maybe about six of us made it through Music and Art High School. Everyone else dropped out or went on to other schools cause it was very difficult. That first semester my mother wanted me to leave because she couldn't understand why if I was an A student, I was failing the first semester. It had to have something to do with this "art thing" that was driving me crazy, and I wasn't paying attention. She wasn't getting the fact that there was really two systems in operation and entering Music and Art was going into a whole other system.

The social end was really peculiar for us, because all of us came out of East Harlem or the South Bronx or communities that nurtured our experience. Being in Music and Art was very different for us, because people were doing things that for us were things that happened on TV -- going ice skating and away for the weekend. What is this "going away for the weekend?" We'd go to Orchard Beach. People would ask us "Where are you going for the weekend?" and we were like "UMM?" All of those kinds of things, and they were very painful at the time. It was like seeing the families on TV coming to real-life. People doing things that we were never exposed to.

All the time that you were going to Music and Art, were you conscious of the fact that there might have been Puerto Ricans and African-Americans who were in the arts? What kinds of images were you drawing on as you were developing your talents?

Gauguin was my artist. Everything I painted was a counterfeit of Gauguin because he had people of color in his works. Gauguin was always my influence.

I discovered the work of Wilfredo Lam in my senior year. Then he became my ideal. It wasn't until I got to NYU that I started focusing on African American artists. I didn't even know that Puerto Rican artists existed. I knew they had to exist, but I had never been to Puerto Rico. I was going from Gauguin, to Wilfredo Lam, to Picasso. When I got into NYU for my undergraduate work I decided to start studying African-American art.

When you went to NYU, was the idea to be an art major, to become an artist or to become a teacher? Who did you study with there?

I went to NYU by accident because my thinking was that I would go to New Paltz and become an arts teacher. O'Sheridan was telling me that to go into the fashion field was very racist.

Is that what you wanted to do originally?

Originally I wanted to be a fashion designer. She said that it was very racist. That I should do something practical like either be a guidance teacher or an arts teacher. I said "Well, OK. I'll be an arts teacher. I'll go to New Paltz and get away from my family," because my family were very strict. So mother allowed me to register for New Paltz. I sent a deposit for a room. So when it got time to leave my mother said "Where do you think you're going?" I said, "I'm going to New Paltz." She says, "Oh no, you're not. A Puerto Rican young lady doesn't go off on her own." So then I went to O'Sheridan and I said "I'm not going to college because my mother said I can't -- after I've registered and it's too late to do anything else." She says, "Do you wanna go?" I said, "Yeah." So she say's "Give me a week." And then she came back, and I was in NYU. It wasn't a desire to go to NYU. It was really a very wonderful woman that made it happen.

Who did you study with there?

Hale Woodruff who I love.

So talk about him.

Anybody who knew Hale Woodruff knows that he was like a father. He was so soft and so loving and so caring. He took us under his wing. Tom Vega, who was my former husband and myself were the only two people of color in the whole department. He just took us under his wing and regardless of who we were with, he would always look out for us. His door was always open to us, so that he was like a father throughout the four years. I started painting like him, of course, because I just adored him. He was very influential. There was Angie Churchill who was dealing a lot with curriculum development in the arts. She was very influential in terms of the work that I wanted to do as a teacher. Then there was also Capellis (sp?) who was a nut but he was very wonderful in terms of making sure that we were exposed to other things. We noticed that we were very representative, representational in our work. And everyone was very abstract in their work. I never quite understood everybody was saying "Self Express yourself," and I'd express myself and it came out looking like something. And everybody else expressed themselves and it came out looking like... you know. And I was like I don't understand this. They were trying to explain to me that "No, you have to self express." And I said, "But I'm expressing myself." It was this constant ongoing dialogue because Tom and I were very representational in our work. We felt that our work had to represent our

community, had to speak to something. And I didn't understand this sort of self-expression that spoke to nothing. I'd say "but what does it mean?" "Oh I'm self expressing." The students would get up and talk about the hardship and the this and the that. Meanwhile they had rocks on their fingers and walking around in dirty sneakers. To me it was so ridiculous because we were there with alot of struggle economically. We were there coming from parents who were working in factories. In the case of Tom, his mother was single and working in a garment factory. My father was an auto mechanic. So for us to buy books, it was always the used books, it was always a struggle to even just get the material. And you know art material is very expensive. And these students were like suffering and talking about this emotional turmoil. It made absolutely no sense to me. So anyway I got through NYU with pretty good grades considering that I was very representational in my work and just refused to move from that kind of stuff.

Did you and Tom go to any of the galleries at the time. I know Soho wasn't really built up but Tenth St. had galleries.

Yeah, the hang out became all the art galleries, because of school work we had to. Then we got into the swing of things, of being arty, and running around with portfolio's and the whole thing. But it still didn't make any sense to me. De Koonings work, Motherwell's work, and all of it to me was like why? And I read and I read and I read, and it just still didn't make sense to me.

So what did your mother think of all this stuff while it was going on?

My mother thought that I was wild. She absolutely thought that I was wild because the first semester I got an interior design class and at that time the in colors were gray, charcoal, and dark. And if you've been to Latin or Caribbean home you know that the walls are magenta. The living room is aqua blue with silver spotted all over it. The curtains are flowers and there's the mirror with the swans. So when you walked into my house there was a splash of light and all of sudden the corner room which was my room became charcoal gray. And my mother thought I was insane. She would bring everybody from the neighborhood and say, "Look at, Look at, Look at this! Come and see her room!" So it was that kind of thing. My mother thought I was totally insane but behind everything was "Oh she's gonna get married, anyway. She's gonna marry Tom, so it doesn't make any difference. He'll straighten her out." She thought it was totally insane. And then when I started doing nudes, well forget that. "Are you sure you're in school? What kind of school is this?" For my parents that was a totally foreign notion that you would be painting male nudes and female nudes. They were very supportive. Once I went in they said, "Well if that's what you want, we'll help." And they did.

Now I remember you telling me this hilarious story of your first trip to Puerto Rico. Now was this around that time, and what was it like to go back and see your family in Puerto Rico?

Well what happened was when I graduated from NYU I decided that here I was, grown up, liberated and I could do anything I wanted. So with my first paycheck I went and I bought two tickets to Puerto Rico. I told my parents, "I'm going to Puerto Rico. Whoever wants to accompany me," because at that time my sister went with me everywhere, or somebody in the family had to go with me. I said

"Well, I'm going to Puerto Rico. I don't care who goes. If nobody goes, I going." I was acting all big and I had just gotten my BA. So then my sister had just had twins. Laura had just had Melody. So nobody in the family, my sister and sister-in-law couldn't go with me, so then it was on my mother to go. My mother hadn't gone to Puerto Rico in thirty years. So then my father told her, cause she wouldn't go anywhere without my father, "Well, you have to go." So then my mother was like, "What! I can go by myself." She was just so excited about going. So we went. It was really interesting because here I thought I was so Puerto Rican. I spoke Spanish. And I go to Puerto Rico and my cousins are saying "Oh my little American cousin. How nice to meet you?" I'm saying "Wait a minute I'm Puerto Rican." And they're saying "No, No. You're American. We're Puerto Rican. You're American." And then every way that I dressed in New York in Puerto Rico still had not become the fad. Wearing dungarees around was just something wore on the beach or something you wore in the house. It wasn't the style on the streets. And here we were all into that. So my cousin who probably looks more like me than anybody else in the family, cause we're built the same, have the same eyes and so on, she started dressing like me. So we started saying that we were twins and we would go everywhere and we'd be the twins. We would go out dancing and so on. And then one time we decided to go out dancing and we bought these very low cut black dresses. We put our hair up. Cause we were now grown. We were both twenty-one. We go to this dance club and we dance and we dance and then we said "Lets go to another one. We're grown." And little did we know that my uncle had a car following us. So we go to San Juan, then we go to Cagua, then we go to Fajardo. We crossed the island that night and we didn't get home until about four o'clock in the morning. Six o'clock in the morning there's a knock on the door. It's my uncle. He says, "Well, you have a choice, you either go back to New York or come back and you stay with me and you do what I say because your father gave me instructions to take care of you and you may not go out. Hang out, because you're not allowed to it at home you're not allowed to do it here. So you've got a choice you either be still or you go home." I said, "Wait, a minute, I just left that. I wanna go home." My mother was so embarrassed because I had totally disgraced the family. Hanging out one night and having my uncle follow me. So they sent me home.

Well, so much for going home. You're home. You're in New York. You're married?

Yeah. When I came back from Puerto Rico I got married.

And then you start teaching, right?

Yeah. I started teaching at Junior High School 60. What I remember about Junior High School 60 was when I walked in the first thing the principal said to me was not to speak Spanish to the children. And I said, "OK." You know, cause I didn't know any better. He's the principal, he gave me instructions. So I go in and I try teaching to young people that looked like you and I. and it was horrible. It was terrible because first of all at that time, that was I think 1963, any teacher of color got the worst classes automatically, what were considered the worst classes. Students who had behavior problems, or whatever. They'd put people in six-eighteen, six-twenty. Six-one being the highest class. So as a

beginning teacher I get this class that's like seven-sixteen or something. And the kids are bigger than me taller than me, rougher. I'm trying to communicate and it was impossible because most of the children spoke in Spanish. So about after two weeks my mother was like "What's wrong with you?" I feel like I'm a lousy teacher. I'm doing very poorly because students are not understanding me. I'm not getting anywhere with the students. And she says, "Well, what is it that you're teaching, what is it that you're saying." And we started talking it through. And she says, "Why don't you speak in Spanish. If the students don't understand you what's the sense of trying teach in a language that the students are not understanding. it makes you look like you want to be somebody else." So she says, "Speak in Spanish." "No, the principal said I couldn't, no Ma'." So she says, "Lock the door. Do you have a door in your room?" She says, "Lock the door. Put a curtain on the window. And then when somebody knocks you have the kids look and then you switch to English." So that's what I did. Locked the door. I would speak in Spanish and I told the kids, "We have a contract. You don't tell anybody I'm speaking to you in Spanish and we'll do it this way." And it worked. And the students thought they were part of this massive conspiracy. So it was so cool. They would would say "OK we won't tell anybody that we're speaking in Spanish." And then the African-American kids say, "Well we're gonna learn Spanish." "Yeah you're going to learn Spanish too." And so that's the way it worked. And the class was absolutely wonderful. And then what would happen is that they would go down the hall and would break loose with everybody else because they were having such a wonderful experience in the classroom. And then we broke up the class room into students that would take care of different sections of the room so I would say, "I'm not going to treat as children because you're no longer children." Many of the children were taking care of families. While their mother was working or their father was working. They were the ones doing the shopping. You know what I mean, these were young adults, already, in Junior High School. So we ran it that way and it worked very well. And then what happened was that I would get complaints from all of the teachers that my kids were disruptive because they didn't want to be treated as they were being treated in other classrooms after they experienced my classroom. It was a constant battle with the administration.

So how did you approach teaching them? Were you teaching them just art or were you their homeroom teacher?

I was their homeroom teacher as well as the art teacher because then they had art. Also I did some English teaching. Some history, some social studies and so on, depending on whatever was needed at the time cause I was a new teacher, so that was rotated alot, but mostly and primarily art.

What was the curriculum like at that time? Was there anything that was relative to their experience?

Absolutely nothing. What we did was develop our own. And that was alot of the influence of Angie Churchill. She used to teach at Ethical Culture. So her whole notion was having the young people use the city as a learning experience. I used that same kind of technique with our students and I said, "Well go into your neighborhood, look at the Bodegas, interview your parents. So we did alot of

interviews cause the students couldn't write. I had never learned how to teach writing or reading and so on. But the way we started was with tape recorders and I bought the students the tape recorders because of course the school wouldn't. So then I'd send them out on interviews and they would come back and we would try to tell the stories in the classroom. And that was sort of the process. So what we did was use the neighborhood. And then what we did was a book of the neighborhood where students who were the best illustrators would illustrate different parts of the neighborhood and then other students would put the story to it and so on and so forth. That was always the approach.

Did you follow up on all those students later and see how that had impact on their lives in terms showing them another way?

They followed up with me mostly. Cause then when I went to Washington Irving I let all the students know where I was going. So periodically I would have students coming through to let me know how they were doing. One of the students in my first class is Ishmael Miranda who is a very popular Puerto Rican singer. And everytime he comes in he takes me to lunch and comes to see his teacher. And then one time I saw him in Puerto Rico. I was at one end of the street and he was at other, and he yells out, "Maestra, Mi maestra! - My teacher, my teacher. And then you see this big man coming at you. So, a couple of them have. When I was teaching at Washington Irving, which then was an all girls school alot of students followed up with me as well.

So was it after this period that you start getting involved with El Museo Del Barrio?

No I didn't get involved with El Museo. Then I went to Washington Irving which was primarily a girl school. And that was a very similar experience to the Junior High School. And there's where the whole reality of what I had gone through as a student started coming into focus when I went into the Junior High School because I saw the same pattern of an inferior education being perpetrated on our young. That's when I started really getting into curriculum development and trying to work with students differently because I didn't want them to go through what I had gone through. But I realize that being one teacher in one classroom bucking a whole school which is very racist because of the amount of teachers that were there and how they were taught, primarily being of western European background. But that's not even the issue because our own teachers are taught incorrectly. There was this whole racist attitude that young people couldn't learn. That they were little animals. They even articulated it so that I was constantly in battle with the teachers so I said, after three years, "High School has to be better." So I went to Washington Irving. Little did I know. It was a trip. Washington Irving at the time was an all-girl school. The teachers had been there for one hundred and one years. They felt that they owned the school. Three of us were of color on the whole faculty at Washington Irving. I hung out with the Jewish and Italian teachers. We were students together at NYU. Each one of us was very creative in our look. I'll just leave it at that. So when we were going to the lunch room, the teachers lunch room, everybody would look at us and they would start talking about us, right in our faces. "Did you see what she was wearing?" So then the three of us decided "Look lets go into our classrooms and eat. We don't have to do this. We don't have to go to lunch."

Then I became pregnant with Sergio, my eldest who is now twenty-five. At that time students weren't able to go to school when they were pregnant and when I would go into the ladies room, because at the beginning it was like "You don't belong here." And then I'd say, I'm a teacher." And they'd say "Oh right, you're the teacher. OK" So I said "OK," but alot of the students looked like me. But then when I was pregnant and I knew no one else at the school was pregnant. You could say was different from the rest of the faculty. I went into the ladies room and this woman chewed me out for using the teachers bathroom, because students were not allowed to use teachers bathroom. So I cussed her out. So then the next episode was that I was eight months pregnant and you were supposed to leave teaching when you were seven months pregnant. So I lied cause I wanted to see my students graduate and I wanted to help them with their portfolios. So I said that I was six months or something. And I would always call my sister to let her know that I was OK. That I had no pains and that everything was fine. And I'm calling my sister and all of a sudden I feel this hand grab me by the neck and pull me out of the phone. And I turn around and this woman is dragging me so I pushed her against the wall. And then I was brought up on charges for pushing her. And I'm like "Excuse me, I'm not apologizing. And if I have to do it again she would go through the wall because no teacher has the right to put their hands on any child." And I no longer looked like a child. I witnessed alot of young women being suspended from school simply because they were beautiful young women. One teacher decided that one students dress was too short, so she was suspended. Or she decided that one student was too sexy. So she was suspended. I was constantly fighting this situation. At the end of that semester, as a matter of fact, before I left to have Sergio, one of the teachers who was so bizzare she would lock her door and she would punish students by putting them in the closet. She would bring down the shades in her room. I mean really bizzare behavior. I took it to my chairman, who was Louis Kines (sp?). I took it to the principal who hated me by this time because I was constantly in trouble. This woman one day locked the students out of her classroom, didn't allow them to come in and jumped out the window. That told me leave public school teaching. And I didn't return after that.

I was a very dear friend of Reggie Butts who was working at the Urban Coalition and wanted me to work as his assistant as deputy of education because they were developing an educational program in Brooklyn, East Harlem, and The Bronx. He wanted me to handle the East Harlem end. I went to the New York Urban Coalition. That was a whole learning experience. That involved me with institutions that are supposed to help our people and don't. It made me understand that poverty and our people could be a business where corporations would provide money so that nothing would happen in a very real sense because when we started really moving the program and training parents my job was to train parents on the issue of decentralization and community control. When we started being effective on that the UFT went bonkers. You can't tell me that Sandra Feldman cares about our kids. She was one of the first ones that said the program had to be iced because it was not the Urban Coalitions job to be training parents to hold the school system and teachers

accountable for the education of their children. That was an experience onto itself. That was from the other end. Seeing how here there was a possibility of helping our community, changing things in our community and they absolutely would not change. And then I went to El Museo. How did I get to El Museo? I was reading the New York Times one Sunday and I said "I've got to get out of the Urban Coalition." Then I saw an advertisement that district four was looking for a director of El Museo Del Barrio. So I applied. I didn't know anything about El Museo Del Barrio I just knew that it said El Museo Del Barrio, Puerto Rican Museum and they're looking for a director. So I went and I interviewed. As a matter of fact, in the interview the first director Ralph Ortiz was at the interview with me. And I didn't even know he was the director. We're talking and he says "What are you here for?" And I said "I'm interviewing for El Museo Del Barrio." He says, "Oh, I'm interviewing for El Museo Del Barrio but you may as well leave." And I ask "Why?" And he says, "I'm really hired, I'm the director and I'm hired. This is just a formality the Board Of Ed has to go through to cover themselves for not playing favoritism." And I'm like "Really? But I'm here I'll stay." I was so upset. Why would they do this, here I am so stupid and naive, why would they ask me to come in and interview if they already have a director. So I went through the process with the parents and the superintendent of that district and I was interviewed and everything and I got the job. That was great.

Did they have a building and a set up there?

No you see because I never asked the question. It's very interesting because sometimes when you don't know things it's good. I didn't know what El Museo was. It never occurred to me throughout the interviewing process to ask let me see this building. Let me see what El Museo is. I just said, "There has to be a building." I assumed that there was a building. I assumed that there was a program. I assumed that there was everything. When I report to work the first day it's a classroom on 123rd St and there's ten boxes, corrugated boxes, stuffed in a closet. And I'm saying "OK, so where's the Museum?" He says "There it is." And I'm like "What!" I was so upset. It was inconceivable to me. The people are advertising and El Museo Del Barrio is not even a place. I walked into this classroom and I look through the boxes. I was just saying "I can't do this. They fooled me." But then I thought, "Well, I don't have a job." So I said, "OK, let me see what I can do." And I went through all the boxes and looked at what had happened before me and El Museo actually started in Community School District # Five. It was started by parents. This is information that most people don't have on El Museo Del Barrio and it's very important that people understand and our community understand that we can make a difference and we can change and we can build. Because Puerto Rican parents got together and said they wanted a program that addressed the history and the culture of their children. And they fought the Board Of Education until they got it. And it started in Community School District #5, in West Harlem, because remember at that time West Harlem encompassed East Harlem as well. So that meant that Puerto Rican and Black parents were working together and when the reason the parents asked for it was because they saw Studio Museum in Harlem, and they wanted the counterpart for East Harlem. So that's where the parents got the idea to develop El Museo Del Barrio. And they did it. They got

state monies to develop this project. Ralphael Ortiz, who was a performance, conceptual artist, was the Director for the first six months. And then it was without a director for six months. And then I was hired. They were sort of displeased with Ralph, because he was a conceptual artist. He saw things artistically. He didn't see things as curriculum for children or programs. He was evolving El Museo and an artist studio concept as opposed to a school program. So when I came in my mandate was to develop El Museo as a museum for children. Then because of decentralization District Five was broken up into District Four & Five and East Harlem became District Four and West Harlem stayed primarily African-American. So when I got the job it had just moved to East Harlem. The school that El Museo was in 123rd Street and East Side Drive. It was in a Junior High School in this room. Then I go back to looking through the boxes and through the boxes I met alot of the people that had worked for El Museo although I didn't know them. Hiram Marestany (sp?), all his photographs were there. Hiram Marestany was in the Young Lords party and was working with El Museo Del Barrio. Talle Boricua. Alot of the material of El Talle Boricua was there. Carlos Josorio. Andrian Garcia. Jorge Soto. And so on. Alot of this work was in the boxes. What I did was collect all the names and all the work of the people that were in these boxes and started visiting them. And that was an experience because apparently Ralph Ortiz had had alot of static with alot of the artists that I didn't know about. I don't know how many of you know El Talle Boricua but this is like a collective of Puerto Rican artists that came together, very Independentista, revolutionary, culturalists and I walked to the door and say "Hi, I'm Marta Vega director of El Museo Del Barrio" Carlos Josorio comes out and says "I don't want no motherfucking thing to do with El Museo Del Barrio! Are you connected to Ralph Ortiz. You better leave now because we're gonna burn your ass." Then I met with Hiram Marestany who I said was part of the Young Lords. Hiram says "Well, I'll meet with you in this coffee shop at this time and you wait for me there." So I go to this coffee shop and wait for Hiram. I wait an hour he's not there. I wait an hour and a half he shows up. We sit down and we talk for about three hours. "If you have anything to do with Ralph, I ain't working with you." And he just interrogated me Young Lords style for about two hours. So he decided that I had nothing to do with Ralph. He says, "I'll get back to you." Then I met with some of the parents and so on. And while I was going through this process Carmen Puldojel (sp?), who is a Puerto Rican anthropologist, also culturalist and independentista. She was hired by the state education to evaluate the work of El Museo Del Barrio. She comes to me. "I'm here to evaluate you." I say, "Wait a minute, I was just hired. I haven't even been here for a month. This is what El Museo is. She says, "Well, according to the state, you have six months to turn it around. If not there's no Museo Del Barrio. It'll be defunded." So I say "Let me put the boxes aside and start doing stuff." I ask, "How do we save it?" She says, "Do exhibitions, do anything, do projects, do anything that I can report on. As soon as you do something call me." So she was wonderful because she really took me through it because I didn't know anything about funding programs what was required. And she just said "Do exhibitions, give me a catalog, give me an evaluation and a report, and I'll come and evaluate you and we'll work it out." And that's exactly

what happened. In six months we mounted two exhibitions. The first one was El Arte Del Aguja, as a matter of fact, and I just remembered, cause I was speaking with Hiram and he told me that was the first exhibition cause I don't even remember. And El Arte Del Aguja was that Puerto Rican women had or still have but not as much, because Woolworths has made it into plastic, crocheting art that you dip in sugar and it gets very hard so you can make center pieces and you can sculpt the crocheting thing into any shape you want. We went around talking to parents and talking to the community. Finding out who were the best at this craft. We selected an incredible amount of women and then did research tracing it to the Taino's where the knotting affect of the fishermen's nets was very similar to the crocheting and so on. And then we also went into, I think in English it's called, Barbed Lace(?) where you have all of these spools and then there was a whole other art that was developed in Puerto Rico around Barbed Lace (?). We did an exhibition with community women and community participants as the artists. It was just wonderful because since everybody was friends with somebody else it was jammed it was wonderful.

Didn't you have the place on Third Avenue at this point.

No, it was in the school. The first exhibitions under my directorship were in the school at 123rd Street. We did three exhibitions in the school in that room. Then they were evaluated. Eugene Caldero who was the deputy superintendent said that there was consulting money that wasn't used and he told me if I wanted to modify it for rent I could go out and look for a space. And what we did was find the space at the brownstone at 116th Street. That's how we got to the brownstone. So we rented the brownstone. That's when El Museo moved to the brownstone.

So tell us about, developing El Museo from there and the kind of vision you had for it. Leading up basically to when we met, when you worked on the exhibition of The History Puerto Rican art with the Metropolitan.

First of all to me El Museo was always a program that primarily had children at the center. But we understood that to have children at the center you also have to have the parents. So what we did was develop exhibitions and activities that would focus on children but would be broader so that parents would come in and children would come in. We were very clear that the exhibitions should be comfortable so that people could come in with their baby carriages, could come in with their food shopping carts. We were not looking to do a Met. We were not looking to do a Guggenheim. We were looking to do a place that people felt comfortable walking through and whatever made that happened was where we were going. We were not looking at models of other exhibitions. We were looking at what do we do that our people will respond to. We did nay number of exhibitions and then we did the Taino exhibition because we knew that alot of the parents were sort of wanting to look at the native roots of Puerto Rico. We went to The Museum Of Natural History and that's were the idea of the project I did later came from. All of the Indian objects were in the basement. Piled on top of each other miscataloged. Nobody knew what they were. When I asked a woman, "What is this piece?" She says, "Oh I don't know." So I said, "Can we borrow it?" "Oh no, you can't borrow it. These are priceless objects." I go, "Well, if they're priceless objects why are they in somebody's basement and nobody

knows what they are. Why are they dusty and not cataloged." So they said, "Well they being safely kept." I said, "No they're not because they're on top of each other." Then I went to the American Indian Museum and went through the same process. People had things on top of each other. They didn't know what it was. And then what they would say to me was, "Well, you know, that the Mexicans were far more developed then the natives of Puerto Rico." or "The natives of the U.S. were far more developed than the natives of the Caribbean so there isn't really much of worth in Puerto Rico that you want to see." I said, "Well, let me see it anyway." I would go look it was again mislabeled, piled up on top of each other. And then I said if we would like to borrow it can we. "No." "Why?" "Cause these are priceless objects." So I went to Puerto Rico and got alot of information, especially from, Ricardo Allegria. I worked very heavily with Ricardo Allegria, Irving Rals (?), from Yale University, and Fred Allson. I really delved into the native presence of Puerto Rico. And then I decided that we were going to do an exhibition on the native population. That's where I think my activism began in the sense of what people refer to me now as being off the wall or whatever. I went to The Natural History and I said if you don't lend us some objects we will bring the community to your doorsteps because you don't own these objects. And they said "Well you can't do that. They belong to us." I said, "No, you stole them. I will write letters to that affect." And what happened was that The Natural History lent us about ten objects. And The American Indian lent us about ten objects. Objects that they obviously considered insignificant, broken, and not the better ones that I would have wanted but that was the first battle El Museo had with other Museums. And then of course we learned about getting insurance, getting fire protection, and getting all of these things that we had not thought about. That's when our relationship started with other museums.

We got tremendous press when we opened El Museo in the brownstone on 116th Street. The Times covered us. It was covered by everybody. And that to us was a wonder because rmemeber I was under a school line as the executive director, I was under a teacher line, and my staff were all para-professionals so there were no professionals, so called museum professionals on the staff. We brought in Nitza Tufiño as a para-professional. We had at least three parents from the neighborhood and that was it. And Hiram who was sometimes on a consultant line, sometimes on a para-professional line. Wherever we could find money and that's how we mounted those first exhibitions. Then I started hearing about funding, I started hearing about these things called grants and I said, "Well, what is a grant? And how do you get one?" Everybody said "You have to go the New York State Council of The Arts and find out and the Parks and Recreation Department." I think that's where I first met Joan Sandler. And when the people started mentioning grants and you can go to the Recreation Department of the city and so on, so I started discovering. I met Joan and she talked to me. I think that's where I met Gordon Brathwaite. And before I got to the state council, Lucy Castellanes and Allan Showner got to me. They came to El Museo. And they said, "Well we here that you're doing wonderful work and wonderful exhibition work and we are not funding any latino programs as yet and we're looking for latino to fund so we would like you to

apply to us. And I said, "OK. How do I apply?" They said "Well, you need a non-profit organization. Do you have one?" I said "No, but we'll get one. It's alright. Don't worry about it." I got all the guidelines and I ran across the street and Herman Badillo was then councilman of East Harlem and I said "I need a non-profit corporation, quick." And that's when we developed the not-for-profit that now runs El Museo Del Barrio, which is Amigos Del Museo Del Barrio.

I was the sole incorporator simply because I went and said I'll sign, I'll do whatever just get me a not-for-profit so I can apply for state funds. And he did and I signed off and we had it and as long as I had whatever the registration form or that we were in the process, the state council used some else as a conduit to get money to El Museo and that's how Amigos Del Museo developed. After 116th Street El Museo moved to a series of storefronts at 106th Street and Third Avenue because the program just started blossoming. We were filling such a gap in our community that we were getting young people from all over the city and when you think of a brownstone and you think of young people coming from The Bronx, Brooklyn, when we hit the papers we had people at our doorsteps constantly and the building literally started caving in. There was so much traffic in the brownstone and it wasn't designed to do that. The Board of Ed came by to see us one time sent some inspectors and said "The program has to be closed yesterday. This is dangerous." Although the building was very beautiful as a brownstone literally the weight was a problem. So then here again Eugene Calderon was very significant because he said, "We have a program that's moving out of these series of storefronts. The program for some reason was moving someplace else they had already paid the rent for that whole year. He says, "So move in there." I said, "When can we move?" he said, "You can move whenever you want." So I told the staff "We've got to move like by tomorrow. Because we don't want somebody else to getting these storefronts." There were five storefronts and then later on we acquired a sixth and then seventh. So we rented this truck. None of us knew how to drive a truck. And we hired people in the area and we got all of the stuff from El Museo into all of those five storefronts like the next day. We put things in each room so that nobody would take any of the rooms.

That's how we got to 106th Street. It was wonderful because we had space. We were at the ground level. We were at the storefront people could just walk in. The exhibitions we did, again as I said, were designed to sort of have people come in with shopping carts, baby carts and so on and people did. That was about the time of Harlem On My Mind. I went to see Harlem on My Mind and I thought it was a wonderful show. Then I find out that Allan Showner had been the curator. I thought that very curious why was a black show and has a curator that's not of color. But at any rate I liked the idea that there was a Harlem show. I said, "Why can't we do a Puerto Rican show?" So that's sort of when I met you and Irv. I first met Harry Parker III. I did my homework and I sort of said, "Who pulls the strings at the Met?" And I found out that Harry Parker, was instrumental on the Harlem On My Mind show so I went to meet with him. And I said, "Well, you know if you have an African-American show, a Black show at the time, you need a Puerto Rican show. And If you don't do a Puerto Rican show, we'll have the community at your steps." That was the seventies line,

"The community will come and take over the Met." So actually he said, "Let's explore it. What do you want to do?" And I said, "The Art of Puerto Rico." I didn't know how much I wanted to do. I just knew I wanted to do the Art of Puerto Rico. I said, "We have wonderful silk screens. We have tremendous artists and you have a population here that demands your doing a Latino show, a Puerto Rican show. He kind of bought into the idea. I think I met with the community advisory board. Arnold Johnson was on it and he was wonderful and so sweet. I think he's Afro-Cuban, right?

Yeah.

And he would be saying, "Be calm. Don't be so excited. You'll get it." And I said, "Yeah, but I want it in my life time." Then I met Lowery and I met Irv MacManus that went with me to Puerto Rico when we started identifying the objects. We did this show with the Metropolitan Museum that represented five hundred years of Puerto Rican art. And it was a wonderful show. And it taught me a great deal. Because we went in with the whole attitude like it's our show and we'll pull out whenever we want because it's our show. Now we didn't have a dime. In addition to that, which very few people know the Board of Ed had stopped funding us because the parents got into a fight. When they got into this fight we were the casualty. So that what happened was we went in one day and had jobs and the following day we had no jobs. But we had the rent paid on these storefronts. When the Met said we will do this show. I told the staff "Look, hang in for a year. Let's do whatever we can do to make El Museo run until this Met show hits because if this Met show happens we have it made." So we met with our husbands, our significant others, people went on welfare. None of us earned a salary for a year. Amigos Del Museo had brought in something like $70,000 to do workshops so those on the staff who had no husbands or significant others to help them were the only ones that got money out of that $70,000 to run workshops. And the rest of us depended on our spouses and so on. And for a year we negotiated with the Met.

And it was true negotiations. They said, "We have an architect.." "A Puerto Rican, architect?" "Well we don't know any Puerto Rican architects." "Well, find one. And we'll find one." So we did our homework. I didn't know any Puerto Rican architects. We went around looking for Puerto Rican architects. We found Lee Borrero. Then we said, "Photographer for the catalog." They said, "Oh, well, we have our standards and we have our photographer." "Oh no. We have Hiram. is the photographer." They said, "Well we don't know his quality." We said, "We do." So Hiram became the photographer for the catalog. Curator. It was Maria Samosa. Because we wanted a Puerto Rican curator. And she had all the credentials and everything so they accepted Maria Samosa. And Irv sort of negotiated between her and me. And kept me calm because she was off the wall. She wanted a Met show. I went by myself first to Puerto Rico to talk about the show. Because here I am trying to develop some strong ties with Puerto Rico and El Museo Del Barrio. I meet with the hierarchy of Puerto Rico, I'll never forget. Ricardo Allegria tells me, "Well, I don't know that we want to deal with El Mueso Del Barrio." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because all the Puerto Ricans that are in New York are Puerto Ricans that failed. And we do not want to form ties. The Institute Of Puerto Rican Culture is THE Institute. And we can't be dealing

with El Museo Del Barrio. I said, "OK." Went around and got the same message. So then when I came back I had to go with Irv and a representative from the Met. And that was very telling to me. Because it said that we were developing ties, that we had a love for those of us who had been born in New York or Puerto Rico, very much what we have in Africa for those of us of African descent. But we had an imaginary image of what home was. And when we had to deal with the institutions that we thought represented us and cared for us we realized that that wasn't the case. That it was as supremacist, as hierarchal, as oppressive to the masses of people in Puerto Rico as the hierarchy is here. So it's not because you're Puerto Rican, it has to do with race, and it has to do with class. That's when we understood it. Here we were building this institution we weren't getting paid. It was the times also. It was movement times. I had just had Omar. Nitze (?) just had her baby, Rachel. We were sharing a crib at the museum because we couldn't afford a baby sitter, so there was a crib at the museum. We used to buy a box of Similac and then we would share it because we couldn't afford anything.

It was very different from the Met.

Absolutely. I had the crib next to my desk and then when a funding source was coming, we would roll the crib to the back so they wouldn't see it. We were doing all these things and we would break night putting up the exhibitions. That's how we got through that year. With that $70,000. And then we kept negotiating with the Met and then we went to Puerto Rico. Then the Met said, "Well you know we need security." I said, "Yes you do." They put all their guards. They designed the storefronts. They did all these things but we kept acting like "You're not doing any big thing. You owe it to us."

We were all sworn to secrecy. Nobody is to know that we're in trouble. Because my momma always use to say, "When somebody comes to visit you if you have a piece of steak you give it to the visitor and then you eat farina. But you don't act like you need." So I told the staff whenever anybody comes through we're fine. We don't have it right now but we'll have it later. When the Met show hit, El Museo Del Barrio show, it was incredible. People from Puerto Rico that had as the kids say "dissed" us, were calling me and saying "Marta for the sake of Puerto Rico, for the love of Puerto Rico open the show at the Met because you know what that would mean for Puerto Rico to have that show open at the Met." I said, "No." Instead we opened at El Museo Del Barrio in East Harlem for three months, and then went to the Met for three months. I had any number of people trying to convince us that the show should happen and open at the Met for the sake of Puerto Rico. It was phenomenal. It hit the papers internationally. El Museo Del Barrio became an institution over night. Over night. The state council came to us and said, "Are you going to apply to us? We have $250,000 for you." Over night. Then the Board of Ed came back and said, "Excuse me, all of this furniture is ours, all of this is ours." I'll never forget it. Alfredo Alvarado, who was the Chancellor of Schools, was just hired to District Four, so he comes to me and says, "The community school board wants El Museo back." So I said, "Noooo." And he said, "Yes we want it back because it's ours." So I ran to a lawyer and said, "Look, we've been on our own for a year. We haven't been getting paid. What's the deal?" They said, "No, they only own

the furniture. You have to give the furniture back and whatever they purchased." They asked, "Who's paying the rent?" I said, "We are." So they said, "No." They said, "Who's paying you salaries?" I said, "We are." We weren't paying anybody salaries but I wasn't going to tell them that. So they said, "They don't own anything but the furniture." So they tried to bring us up on charges that we had taken over El Museo. It was really ugly. All of a sudden because there we were in the papers, and people thought we were doing so well and so wonderful, there was money. All of sudden everybody wanted it. And we said no. We had a wonderful lawyer, Leonard Beim, who was on the community school board of District 12 in the Bronx. Amigos Del Museo Del Barrio then became the administrators of El Museo. We didn't even have to change the name because it had already been independent for a year.

So, when and why did you leave El Museo?

The truth? The truth was that success is very interesting. Our people are so used to failure, that when success hits people don't know how to handle it. We worked our butts off for a year. Then when money hit, everybody said, "Well, we worked for a year. We don't have to take orders from anybody. This is a collective." I said, "No. When we worked without pay for a year, I was the director. Everybody had their assignments, and that's the way it is." "No, no, no. If we all sacrificed, we all sacrificed the same."

The Quimbamba came out, the magazine, I wrote and put a staff name to it, so it didn't look like I was doing all the work. Exhibitions and everything that was done, I had to do it. And then put another staff name. Because we didn't want to show the outside that one person was running the show. We wanted to show that there was a curator, that there was an editor, that there was the workshop coordinator. So we put different peoples names on things to put a smokescreen outside that it was a collective effort, and not to say that everybody didn't work because everybody worked, and everybody sacrificed. When money came in, everybody was "No. We don't take orders from nobody. We're on our own. I said, "Who can put up an exhibition? Who on the staff can put up an exhibition? That would not embarrass us after this Met show leaves." They said, "That doesn't make any difference; we did it before the way we were doing it." I said, "No,no. If we have the Met in-house now, people are going to expect this and more. We got to prepare to do it, including me because I was not trained as a curator, not trained as an administrator. I was trained as a public school teacher. So that we all have learn, and we all have to understand that as we're doing the job, we have have to fit the job, because we did that for the outside." At that time, my son was a year old, and we celebrated his birthday in my house, on a Saturday and all my staff came. All the staff of El Museo came. The next day I had a lawsuit by one of the people that was in my house, celebrating my child's birthday, the next day, broke my heart. That's why I left.

So, then you came to the Met. It was at this point you got the senior Rockefeller Fellowship?

Well, that was because of Irv MacManus, who was working at the Met. He came about five months before this whole thing hit and said, "You should apply for Senior Rockefeller Fellowship at the Met." I said, "I don't want to be at the Met."

He said, "No, no, no. It'll give you time to research, it'll give you time to plan, it'll give you time to think about something you want to do for El Museo, and maybe you'll get money to do it; then it'll free you to go do it, and it'll help El Museo." When he put it that way, I said, "Okay, I'll do it." I applied and that was where the name came from called the Caribbean Cultural Center because I made it this long, very research sounding name: Visual Arts Research Center Relating To The Caribbean. It got funded for six months at $10,000.

There are spirits and there are Orishas, when this law suit hit my thing was "Because it wasn't about an institution it was about heart; it was about feeling, so I said, "I'm not negotiating. The place could fall apart, or we could give it to somebody else to nurture." Because I even refused to have anybody who worked on the staff stay on the board. As a matter of fact, we went to open court because I was accused of misappropriation. I was accused of any number of things that kept our lawyer constantly busy. When it went to court my lawyer -- I thank Leonard Beim always -- said "We go to open court." I said, "But, I can't go to courta because that means we've done something wrong." The judge was an African-American. He was such a wonderful man. He said, "How can a young group of people build and do so much and then destroy it? Then you don't love it." He was the deciding thing in my heart to say, "I don't want it." Because it's not something I was fighting for to have a building or have a Museo. It was the whole feeling that we were doing something for our people and our community. So I said "I don't want it." The judge said, "Well, its yours. You're the sole incorporator." I said, "Well, I don't want it. What we will do is get another board. They can run it; wherever it goes, it goes. I don't want to have anything to do it." So that's how that happened.

So then the fellowship kicked in just when I had made that decision. I was able to go to Trinidad. As a matter of fact, I was in Trinidad on a Caribbean exchange program through the Phelps-Stokes Fund that was a parent organization, and I received the news that I had gotten the fellowship to do the research; that is the research that led to the creation of the Caribbean Cultural Center.

So then after the fellowship you went to AHA? I remember 86th Street used to be the hangout.

That's when all of the sort of Art Activism started hitting within our communities. Black Theater Alliance had been developed. Miriam Colon with Cybil Simon from Arts and Business Council were at this meeting. I don't know if you remember Joan Sandler, or if you were there at this Arts & Business Council meeting that apparently somehow the notion came up that there should be a Latino arts service agency because Black Theater Alliance existed. It was something like that. Miriam Colon was saying, "There's a Black Theater Alliance protecting the interests of Blacks; we need something to protect the interests of Latinos." Under the auspices of the Arts & Business Council, that first meeting had about maybe twelve or eleven of us there, and then we all said, "That sounds like a good idea. Let's form as an alliance." That's how the Association of Hispanic Arts came into being. Miriam gave it its name because you know how dramatic Miriam is. So she says, "If we call it that everybody will have to say, AHA!" She acted it all out. I said, "We don't want Hispanic." She said, "Look Marta,

everybody will say AHA!" So that's the name it got. But we didn't have a clue as to what this thing should be. We just knew that service agencies were developing all over the place, and we should have one. I was without a job so everybody says, "Well Marta, why don't you do this for a while until we sort of get our foot in." Almost simultaneously while I was working on the research project, I started developing AHA. So I was one of the founders. I think there were twelve of us. Then I became its first director. I met with Joan Sandler and the Black Theater Alliance to learn what we were supposed to do. That put me in line with a lot funding sources who were interested in what the world should look like. If you didn't fit that, then you probably would not get funded. We fought. We fought the Endowment, we fought the State Council for the Arts. We fought everybody and ended up with some money for our institutions.

Was that the time you did that conference?

The Stabilization Conference we did after that when the Center was already open. We did all of these advocacy pieces, developed a newsletter articulating issues, and so on. That was also very revealing to me. Because we sort of said "Latino," we sort of said "African American," like if all of us think alike, if all of us believe the same things, all us have the same direction.

If anything AHA showed me that there was a whole spectrum of thinking within our communities. Some people wanted to be Joe Papp. Some people wanted to be the Met. Then some of us felt that we were building different kinds of institutions that were bringing a different message and a different structure. I decided not to continue with it because there was that constant internal argument going on between what we were fighting for. Sort of similar to almost what happened, but not as drastic, as what happened at El Museo. We had a meeting with Kitty Carlisle Hart [Chiarman of the New York State Council on the Arts]. She had invited us to her home. I had told the members that were going to meet with her. I said, "Nobody is to go into that house before anybody else. We all go in together. These are the rules. We're going in for this amount of money, we're going in for this, that and the other." I walked in and found three of our folk were busy tea-totaling with Miss Kitty Carlisle Hart. I said, "Mmmmmmm. AHA! I think it's time to leave this." Because after telling them totally off, I realized that that was going to be a constant. That some people were going to use the organization to open a door for them that they couldn't open on their own. Once they thought they were at the table, as Malcolm said, they thought they were going to eat. I said, "There's no point in me doing this because they're not going to change." The experience before had taught me that. So I said, "Okay, time for me to leave." By then it was already an organization. We had already kicked some butt. It was respected, and it is respected. I moved on to do the Caribbean Cultural Center.

So what was the concept of the Caribbean Cultural Center?

It emerged from sitting at the Schomburg and reading Nicola Guillen's letters, and Langston Hughes's letters, and Arturo Schomburg's letters. He would say to Nicola Guillen, "Langston Hughes is coming. Make sure you watch out for him," or "Write to Eusebia Cosme. If you won't be here, make sure you touch base with so and so." So through his letters he had a whole network of the African Diaspora going. He was in communication with everybody. In

Martinique, in Trinidad, and that whole thing was built on his letter writing. I said, "How beautiful! That a person cares enough about himself and about his people to sort of bring us together." That was the concept. So I looked around and said, "Is there an organization that does this?" I looked at the Schomburg, and what the Schomburg is now doing, but at the time was not doing. It was primarily a library. I looked at Studio Museum. It wasn't doing it. I looked at all of our institutions that existed, and there wasn't any connection between the Latino, English, French, Diaspora communities. I started developing forums, just having people talk to each other.

We were housed at 10E. 87th Street, which is the Phelps-Stokes Fund, and since Ambassador Franklin Williams had met me when I was on this exchange program, I asked him if he would be the conduit for the Center. He said, "Yes." When we got our first grant, which was a $10,000 grant from the NEA, we began to do photographic exhibitions, historical exhibitions, showing how our people looked in all of the different areas. That was really important because if you saw an African in Guadalope, and you saw an African in Puerto in the 1800's, and you saw an African in Africa, we looked the same. So that if you didn't read the label, you couldn't tell who was from where. So that's how we started giving people a visual notion that we all look alike. Then it started getting deeper -- there things that we do alike. The first thing that we did was also around the native American experience of the Caribbean islands. The Taino's, the Arawak's and so on. We showed that it was very possible that a pot was started in Puerto Rico and finished in Santo Domingo. So what do you say, "It's Puerto Rican. It's Domincan." You couldn't. So there was that line that constantly blurred us. That was that place where we could join. So that's how the work of the Center started.

So how did you begin to sort of explore? What kind of forums did you use to explore these ideas?

That's when I personally started studying about African religions and reading Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham. About the same time, I was researching Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. I started doing a lot of forums on African religions or Santeria, Voudoo primarily and then later on we got into Candomble and other religions.

That just became the annual cultural expressions, and then you did the Orisha conference.

It was very interesting because of Greg Millard, an African-American brother, really wonderful, from the New York Department of Cultural Affairs. He saw the work that we were doing, and he called one day and he said, "You can use the Joe Papp Theatre in Central Park if you want to." I'm saying, "Why would I want to?" So he says, "I'm concerned because people think that he owns that. He doesn't. It's in Central Park. It's a public theater. It's accessible to everyone, but none of our people use it."

By then I had developed the reputation of bucking everybody. He says, "I want you to ask for it. Would you do that for me?" I said, "Sure." So I went and I said, "I want to use the Delcorte Theater." They said, "No, you can't." I said, "Why not?" They said, "Well it's for the Shakespeare Festival." I said, "It's on city property," and I went through that whole thing. So then they gave us a day for

whatever we wanted to do. I came up with, "Why don't we do a performance that shows what we've been doing in the conferences in dance, music and performing arts?" DCA funded it. We had Marie Brooks, Julito Collazo, Bata the drummer. We brought the Roaring Tiger from Trinidad. I believe we had Luis Celestin. We had about twelve groups. AHA had done performances in Lincoln Center and so on with the groups from AHA, but I had never put together a production. So that was our first attempt at mass publicity, mass promotion and so on. And we did it. We expected 1,000 people, but we got about 3,000. The people could not fit into the Delacorte. And that was amazing, because we brought all these people together. It was a wonderful event. We knew that it was filling a void, because until that the Center's activities were more scholarly; this was our first massive, public event. And after that we just kept doing it. It kept growing from one day to two to a month.

Part of this kind of performance element is a very important part of what you've done.

What we realized from that first event was that the exhibitions we had done, attracted a particular audience. But it wasn't reaching everybody. Having gotten very political by that time, I realized, that the city was predominately us. My notion was if we have a way of bringing our communities together, understand that we experience a similar history, racial, cultural context, then we need to use that power to get what we want for our communities. That's when it began to move from research and limited kinds of activities, which we didn't abandon, because that's still there, to Yemaya festival, Shango festival. We did the International Orisha conferences in Nigeria and Brazil and in New York. Carnival is very much that because we said all of our communities have carnivals so let's do a carnival. We didn't want to do it patterned after the West Indian Day Carnival. We wanted it to really be a celebration of our different expressions and creativity and traditions, but we didn't want liquor; we didn't want cigarettes; we didn't want any of that because the other thing that we were saying with Carnival is that a family could come out and feel whole. That our communities didn't have to have items that were destructive to our communities to celebrate who they are. So we didn't want it to be like the Harlem Festival that you see, with all kinds of liquor banners all over the place. The Carnival is not that. It's a celebration of the creativity and the art and the traditions, but without all of those other elements.

So twenty years later, how would you evaluate the effect of your programming at the Center, on the cultural community as a whole nationally and internationally?

I think it's been significant for a small staff and small institution. I think that we've had an incredible amount of impact. How to evaluate it is difficult.

How do you feel about it personally?

Personally I'm shocked! Because people come up to me and talk about acitivites that we've done. I'll go to England or I'll go someplace and everybody says, "I know about the Caribbean Cultural Center." And pull out a poster. Especially the International Cultural Diversity Conference that we've been doing. In linking up with similar institutions world-wide, we are dealing with cultural

groundedness, building institutions with a different paradigmn, with purpose and meaning. I don't want to offend anybody else, but I don't understand art for art's sake. I don't understand that. I think that our art or the work that we do at the Center has meaning and purpose, and I know that some of the staff wants to strangle me because many of them have been trained in different places, but I think that after a while everybody kind of understands that there needs to be a place that speaks clearly to the issues and the work that has to be done. Increasingly because of the Cultural Diversity Conferences, I've developed with Native American and Asian and Caribbean and African-American organizations a round table, a local round table that's very much like the Cultural Diversity International network where a group of us have come together and are challenging the city, state policies and issues. Developing language on what is a civil society. The fact that there is a move to destroy that middle group that stands between government and the marketplace. It's no news in our communities that there's the wealthy. The New York Times brought it out the other day, that one percent of the people own forty percent of the wealth. That in fact the move to destroy not-for profits or those institutions that hold government accountable for their actions and hold the marketplace accountable for their actions are to be destroyed. That's religious institutions, social service institutions, educational institutions, that would give people the skills and the language to combat the conditions of their communities are being decimated. It's our responsibility as a cultural center if not at the Cultural Center, to develop those offspring that will deal with those issues. So that, I see myself doing more of that kind of advocacy.

In terms of the roundtable and international organizing, the staff at the Center is very capable. When I was working on my dissertation, Melody Capote was acting director, and she did very well. We have a wonderful special projects director Moray Byrd. Danny was there previously as special projects director and did some very wonderful things. Part of me is saying that advocacy work is very important, and I understand that because of it the Center suffers because funders see my advocacy and see the work that I'm doing and then take it out on the Center so that at some point I think that I'm going to have sort of step back. I don't know when that is, but it's soon. The Center is twenty years old, and after that anniversary, and if it's healthy given all these cuts, I think that there's another level of organizing that has to be done.

I think that's a good point to stop.

Writer/Journalist

Interviewer: James Hatch

October 14, 1994

Beginning at the beginning, please tell us the names of your parents.

Katie and Pittman Watkins. My father was actually called "Tennessee," since he lived most of his life in Memphis.

Were there any writers or artists in this family?

No, nary a one. My father was a laborer, and my mother did housework.

You grew up in Youngstown, Ohio?

Yes, I was born in Memphis, but my parents moved when I was less than a year old.

Think back to the early days and teachers or relatives or friends. Who influenced your life?

Well, an old friend. I grew up two doors away from a friend who is now an artist and a teacher at Youngstown State University. We talked about a lot of things, encouraged each other, and at an early age we started to study the dictionary together. That was my first attempt to change my life -- improve a home environment in which there were no books. I think I was the first person to seriously get into reading in my family. My friend and I started memorizing the dictionary as children. We got up to "H" and then gave up. He and I used to sit around and talk about our lives, the racial situation, etc. He was visually inclined, and I was more into writing. I remember putting together a mock newspaper when I was in the third grade. I did the whole thing, wrote the headlines and the articles, and my friend drew some pictures. My father got very angry. Remember that novel by Louise Merriweather, My Father Was a Numbers Runner? Well, so was mine. I wrote a short piece about how parents who play the numbers do their children a disservice. Often there wasn't that much to eat around if the numbers weren't going well. On the other hand, my father bought his first home after he had hit the numbers.

Why did you and your friend memorize the dictionary?

It started with certain words that we felt had negative racial meanings. We talked about how words like "dark" and "black" had very negative racial connotations. That started it. So we started thinking about the origin of words.

You and Malcolm X.

I guess so. After that we just began to memorize other words in the dictionary.

Were schools segregated?

No, in Ohio they weren't segregated. In fact, there was a surface cordiality, a sense of everything being the way it should be. It was almost like a Kafka story in the sense that everyone accepted this strange reality. Everyone was polite as long as you stayed in your place. Even though there were no "White Only" signs, there were restaurants that didn't serve Blacks. You weren't allowed into any motels. Blacks could swim in the swimming pools only on Mondays. At the end of the day they would drain the pool and replace the water. For the next six days only whites were allowed in. I avoided the pools and never learned how to swim. It was a very strange situation.

Do you have happy memories of high school?

Yes, despite all this, most of my childhood was happy. Youngstown is a small town, but at that time it was a thriving steel town, and I grew up very near one of the largest urban parks in the United States. There were lakes, waterfalls, tennis and basketball courts, and baseball diamonds. I have very fond memories of that time, and I was treated well because I was an athlete. I was an All-State basketball player and a very good baseball player. In a small town that almost assures special treatment.

How did you find your way to Colgate University?

I had a number of basketball scholarships. I had about twenty choices for colleges, and I narrowed it down to Dartmouth, Colgate, and the University of Pittsburgh. I eliminated Dartmouth because it was too far. The University of Pittsburgh was only sixty miles away, and I didn't want to be that close to home. Colgate was somewhere in the middle. Also, I wanted an academic school, not just a basketball school.

What position did you play?

Forward.

Were you a high scorer?

In high school, not in college. In college I played with a guy who was a "gun." We kid him because he shot every time he got the ball. He went on to play for the Knicks for two years, and for the Detroit Pistons for a year. His name is Bob Duffy. He was a good guy, intent on getting into the pros, and he realized our team was a little better than mediocre. We were not able to compete with the really good teams so we had some problems and he had a career to prepare for.

You majored in fine arts history?

Yes. They didn't have a writing major. When I got to Colgate I wanted to major in writing and it wasn't available, so I was looking for other options. I tried philosophy, and finally I discovered that fine arts history did two things: it gave me a historical background so I could determine something about the past, but it also dealt with the arts in a way that normal history did not.

That is a very wise kind of major for a young man to do. It is almost from the beginning of your life that you have some feeling for words, and somehow words are going to be important to you in history and culture.

I had that sense. I also had this dream of playing professional sports at that time, and it was baseball I hoped to play. I had turned down an offer to play for the Detroit Tigers when I was a senior in high school. It would have been in the lowest minor leagues, so I accepted a full scholarship to Colgate. I had hoped that after my college years I might try to play baseball again.

What position did you play in baseball?

I played the outfield and first base. Ironically, my interest in books affected my athletic career. As I read more my eyes started to change. I had perfect vision until I was sixteen, and suddenly my eyes started to go bad, so my hitting ability deteriorated. That influenced my decision to accept the Colgate scholarship.

Were there many Black students at Colgate?

In my class there were four, maybe twelve in the entire school. Adam Clayton Powell had gone to Colgate fifteen years before me. Colgate was basically an Ivy League-type school. A lot of rich kids. They really didn't give athletic scholarships. I had what was called a War Memorial Scholarship, which was based on academics and extracurricular activities. I became good friends with George Davis, who is also a writer now and someone I have kept in touch with. He and I are working on some projects now.

Colgate is in Hamilton, New York. And one of my most vivid memories is that I would arrive there in September and it would snow in October. You didn't see the ground again until March. It was also an all-male school at that time, so it put other pressures on you. It was a strange environment, but it forced you to study. I think had I gone to a coed school I may not have developed or evolved the same way that I did. You were almost forced to become interested in books at Colgate; there was nothing else to do. There were trips to Skidmore or Syracuse if you could find a ride, but there were often weekends when you couldn't leave the campus.

About how many students in the college then?

1300 students. Now it has doubled and is a coed school. It has one of the most beautiful campuses in America. Overall, I enjoyed going to school there.

Did you do any writing there at all?

Yes, I did. There were no writing courses, but when I first got to Colgate I won the freshman writing award. I wrote an essay on Jean-Paul Sartre. I had spent the year between the eleventh and twelfth grades reading Being and Nothingness. I probably understood a third of it, but I did have a grasp of Sartre's overall philosophy. Sartre's writings were important to me in illuminating what racism was about because of his concepts of being yourself - of what he called "the other" and "the gaze." That is, you have a choice -- either people can determine who you are by their perception of you, or you can determine who they are by your perception of them. It becomes a sense of projecting and understanding that you determine who you are yourself. You make yourself. That phrase was very important to me, and it came from reading Sartre and Camus.

Maybe late high school and college was a time you were determining your "Blackness," your racialness?

There was some confusion about that for me and most other Blacks who grew up in the Midwest with my kind of background. I was always treated as if I was different, special in some way. Being an athlete in a small town, you are in the newspapers all the time and you have a certain kind of limited celebrity, so I didn't have to deal with many obvious instances of racism. But when I got to high school, I really did have to figure out who I was.

How did you move from Colgate to the next step?

I had taken a couple of special writing courses, and one of the professors at Colgate was very important to my life. A professor named Atley Sproul, who is deceased now. And also a painter and art teacher named Alfred Krakusin, who committed suicide shortly after I graduated. They were very intense people who had a great deal of influence over me. Sproul convinced me that, since I wanted

to write, I should get an unrelated job. When I first left Colgate I took a job with the federal government. Even though I had come from Colgate and graduated with honors, initially I could not get a job in New York City. It was the early '60s and equal opportunity was a myth. Finally I took this clerical job and spent a year bored out of my mind. I couldn't believe what was going on in government offices. The amount of work they asked you to do is possibly one-third of what you might have been able to do, had you worked at a leisurely pace. I spent most days at that job with a folder in front me, reading a magazine hidden behind the folder, having completed what I was supposed to do in the first hour. I spent a year there, quit, and went to the New York Times as a copy boy. I took a cut in pay but decided that Professor Sproul was wrong. I needed a job that involved writing.

To become a copy boy at the Times, did you walk up there and announce that you wanted the position? Did somebody help you?

When I was in Colgate, I had worked one summer at the Daily News as a copy boy, and the people who got me the job at the Daily News were Colgate graduates. They helped me to get the job at the Times. When I first started at the Times, Lester Markel was the editor. He was a legendary newspaperman in the sense that he started the New York Times Magazine, but he was also a notorious segregationist and blunt about it. At that