Saturday, August 15, 2015


Momma Jones (Mme. Willi Posey) Faith's mother, my grandmother on the right with a bevy of her models, including Anne Porter and Aunt Barbara (Barbara Knight) in a photo op for the Amsterdam News after visiting patients at Harlem Hospital circa 1960.

Mother, Faith Ringgold, in photo layout photographed at our apartment in the Bronx, 1960. Behind her are two of her paintings.



Michele and Faith in the streets of the Bronx. 1961.




Michele on the beach with Burdette the summer of 1962 at Sunken Meadow.

Faith, Michele, Burdette and Frankie at Sunken Meadows Photo by Barbara Wallace. 1962.

Faith, Michele and Aunt Barbara at Sunken Meadow 1962.


Barbara and Michele in the Bronx at St. Mary's.



In the fall of 1959, my sister and I, and my mom moved together to our first apartment.  It was in the Bronx, just across the 149th Street Bridge, walking distance from Edgecombe Avenue and my grandmothers' houses. And many times we walked it, my sister and I.  It was an adventure in those days. Third Avenue, its department stores, movie theaters (saw Psycho in one of them with my sister one Saturday afternoon, couldn't take a shower alone for a year) and pizza places, the Grand Concourse, which was then really grand, the bridge itself, followed by Lenox, 7th, 8th Avenue, Bradhurst, Colonial Park, the hill and Edgecombe.
Our new apartment complex was called St. Mary's, Mitchell Lama, so called middle class housing although we always called it the projects when mother wasn't around, at 665 Westchester Avenue, spacious, green, benign at least at first. Madam Posey. Momma Jones until then was like a mother to me, my mother less so. With Momma jones we had lived on Edgecombe Avenue, across from Colonial Park and Yankee Stadium in the distance.
At the time my mother was 29 years old, stunningly beautiful, funny, fun and lighthearted. She had completed her Master's and graduated at Lewisohn Stadium at the City College of New York. Her degree says February so perhaps it happened in the winter and at night. I know I had a wonderful time. There's a set of pictures in which my sister and I are included. I remember a lot of running and racing that evening. Perhaps there were other children we played with.
   
I think I may have witnessed her undergrad degree as well in 1955. Where we lived on Edgecombe AVenue was walking distance from the campus of the City College of New York. I was 3. By that time she had separated from my father who lived next door on Edgecombe Avenue. He was a brilliant musician, a jazz and classical pianist I was told by everyone who had the power of speech. He had prescribed that the only kind of music we would hear from birth would be classical and jazz and other suitably musically complex compositions, which he played for me while I was in my cradle. But the one thing I wasn't told by anyone until then was that he was afflicted with drug addiction, a powerful and secret illness, which needless to say I was incapable of comprehending at 5, 6 or even 7. It may have been some time between 1957 and 1959 that I was told because I knew who he was and I was becoming more insistent in my desire to spend time in his presence, which was strictly forbidden. I needed a reason and it was given me. At the time I was just recovering from an ear infection resulting from a bout of the measles.
 My distinct recollection is walking from the subway on St Nicholas place rounding the corner of the Bailey estate (still a historic site in Harlem at this same address) and her telling me, finding the words to tell me that my father was sick with an incurable disease, something that made him more untouchable than pitiable. This was my first inkling of how unreasonable and cruel the world was, how nothing would ever really make sense if something I wanted so badly, my father, was never to be mine. and if people i knew and loved couldn't be trusted not to keep such secrets. only my mother could and would tell me. she was my mother. was this 1957, 58 or 59. my sense was she told me not a moment too soon. was i 5, 6 or 7?
Living with Momma Jones, who was deeply gregarious and kept a flock of young women around, some of whom were her mentees, others her models, babysitting was built in to the situation. My mother whose annulment had been finalized in 1956 by her attorney Flo Kennedy, a family friend, often dated or went out in the evenings all dressed up and smelling delicious. The women then wore tight, waist fitting clothes, sheer stockings and high heels sometimes with open toes regardless of the severity of the weather. Mom had gorgeous feet with fabulous legs and a high instep.

During this period Mom and Aunt Barbara as well as my sister and I frequently participated in fashion shows so there are photographs of us in the shows wearing the clothes our grand mother made for us. I can identify the time period of other photographs taken then by the clothes my sister and I are wearing because the clothes we wore in the fashion shows were the basis of our wardrobe for the year. In the beginning a particular dress and a pair of shoes would be for Sunday school and weddings. In time, the same garment would grow snug and devolve to everyday status, I can tell what part of the year it is sometimes by how the dress fits, because we were in that period of our lives during which we were out growing things. We didn't have a lot of clothes but we had beautiful clothes made to last, and everything we wore was of some special significance. If it wasn't made by Momma Jones then it was purchased lovingly at Best & Company's, the store Mom designated as ours.
 
The pictures I have of this period I believe were taking by my sister Barbara who had developed a passion for taking pictures of me and mom with her brownie. In one of these pictures Barbara sports the signature plaid coat of the period with her brownie slung around her neck. Perhaps I had a brownie too and took this one. I remember mostly being frustrated by my brownie. It took so long get the picturesfrom the drugstore, I was always forgetful that way, and the results Were not impressive in my view.

So then in 1959 we moved to the Bronx, St. Mary's with the help of Burdette Ringgold, my mother's on and off boyfriend. I can recall the day we went to see the apartment. Barbara and I were left to play the only time I can remember with a gang of children who lived in the house, including a little boy who had lost his arm in an extractor. We ran up and down the stairs and had a wild time but never again. Not sure why.

We moved as well to a new school, our Savior Lutheran School, Williamsbridge Road in a very white neighborhood then remotely located from St. Mary's, which was in the East Bronx, walkable distance from our previous neighborhood across the 149th Street bridge. There was a person mother knew, a sweet angelic person named Julie who taught at Our Savior and had a son named Nickey who went there, who recommended the school as some place small that would educate us and keep track of us while she was at work. Nickey, her son, who was also a student there and about three or four years older, was our babysitter, would take us or run us home from school.
Unfortunately his mother soon died of cancer and Nickey basically ran wild but that was later.
We became Lutherans and joined a church near our home called Bethany Lutheran Church. Barbara and I could walk there on Sundays morning, which we sometimes did. We were passionately religious and set up an altar in our bedroom so that we could worship when we couldn't get to church.  At school, the first question on Monday was whether or not we had attended church on Sunday. Barbara and I always told the truth.  I loved the Lutheran thing because of the music and getting a chance to sing in the choir. I loved the German music, in particular Bach. This was the period during which I was a singer, and often performed for an audience of my family and family friends. And sang in choirs in both school and church.

While we lived in the Bronx, our lives with my grandmother in Harlem continued in the following manner. We often went to church with her at Abyssinian Baptist Church to hear Adam Clayton Powell. Whenever we were sick, we stayed with her where she fed us fabulous concoctions such as hot milk with butter and sugar, and we were pampered. Also, our private school year was shorter than our mother's public school schedule. In the days when we were off and our mother wasn't, we were at Momma Jones' house on Edgecombe Avenue. The rules of life on Edgecombe Avenue were different. From one thing, we were allowed to play with the local children across the street where my grandmother could view our activities. We had known these children all our lives. Also, since our other grandmother, our father's mother, lived in the building next door, we were frequent visitors there. She had the same view of the street on the third floor that Momma Jones had from the fourth floor front. These were also the times when we got to see our father, Earl, whom we weren't allowed to see by my mother but Momma Jones did not observe these rules and seemed quite friendly with Momma T.

At some point, I am thinking it must have been during perhaps the second or third year of our life in the Bronx (maybe I was nine) I became very angry and disenchanted with my mother's household. Also, I had been reading books in my classroom in which little white boys would gather all their belongings in a handkerchief and tie it on a stick and run away.  So I decided that I should run away to go to live with my grandmother, Momma Jones, whose household I much preferred to our own.

 I had figured out how to travel to my grandmother's house in Harlem from school on Williamsbridge Road. Barbara and I parted tearfully and I journeyed to Edgecombe Avenue. When I got there, something happened that I hadn't anticipated. Momma Jones was not home.  Although she sometimes worked in the garment factories downtown, I hadn't anticipated that she wouldn't be there. Immediately I knew I was going to be in trouble because now I could think of no other alternative but to go to my other grandmother's house, Momma T, my father's mother, whom my mother didn't much like. Somehow it dawned on me that this wasn't going to be good. She called my mother. When Momma Jones returned from work, the two of them accompanied me back to the Bronx. I can remember a lot of crying as they begged my mother not to beat me all to no avail. My reasons for running away were of no interest to her whatsoever and were entirely overshadowed by her anger and her determination to prevent me from ever doing such a thing again.

We had a customary beating scenario. I am not entirely sure how I know this since this is actually the only beating I can clearly remember. There was an ironing cord. You had to take off all your clothes. You were beaten in the bathroom, which was a small room without a window, so that you couldn't get away.  She took me in the bathroom and beat me, not sure how long, while Momma Jones and Momma T stood outside waiting for it to be ended.


Monday, January 5, 2015

Notes on the 60s and the 70s


 

NOTES ON THE 60S AND THE 70S
Michele Wallace  
      I am a black woman of 62, whose life currently orbits around the privileges, pleasures and obligations of being the daughter of Faith Ringgold, a famous and prolific black artist who is now 84 years old.  I have always been her daughter and she has been my mother all my life but our relationship has not always been so intimate and supportive, as anyone who has read my first book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, will know.   In it, I said that I never wanted to grow up to be like the “women in my family,” which was, of course, deeply hurtful to my mother.  Much more so than I could possibly understand at the age I was then—27 years old.
    Moreover, with no conscious intention of malice on my part, I wrote not a word about her daily struggle to be recognized as a visual artist, a field in which men reign supreme, and white men reigned alone, and without much question then.   Nor did I write a word in this first book about my close observations throughout my childhood of the profound impact the process of her art making and her pursuing of a career in visual art had already had upon my formation as a young woman and as a feminist.  I would submit in my defense that this first book, which has embarrassed and plagued me for years, was a polemic, and not sincerely autobiographical.   For instance, it included far too many half truths and untruths about my life, including the cover story I had been telling about my father’s death since I was 14(as per our instructions by our parents at the time) that he had died in a car accident, rather than the truth, which was that he had died of a drug overdose one hot night in July in the summer of 1966.
       It has complicated my life endlessly that my mother interpreted my slight to her career as an artist as an aggressive, hostile and pre-meditated act of rejection, although it is also difficult to imagine how things might have gone otherwise.  She wrote soon after its publication in 1980 a nearly 100 page manuscript in the form of a “Letter to my Daughter” cataloguing the many mistakes I had made in writing the book, in its representation of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power struggle, and most particularly in its lack of representation of her contribution to my life and feminist thought. 
       Since the publication of Black Macho in 1979, it has taken all these many years and a great many missteps for me to begin to have some success in presenting myself as an authority on my mother’s work, and to forge an enduring relationship with Faith despite our many disagreements and disaffections.  It also took many decades before I was irresistibly called to the necessity of doing so because given the ongoing disagreements over the legacy of my first book, I knew it would not be easy. 
      But I have continued to be struck by the inability of the art world to fully concede her importance and pre-eminence in her field.  Despite the many advances in the participation and representation of African Americans in a variety of fields in American culture, visual art continues to be a hard nut to crack. Part of the problem is that African-Americans, themselves, remain unconvinced of the centrality and necessity for visual culture.  They don’t know the history, and they regard whatever history they do know as marginal to the core issues of African American history.  At the same time, critical and economic practices in the art world seem highly fractured and slow moving so far as their acceptance of a black female superstar in their midst.  Compare to examples of music and sports.
      Critical discourses in the visual arts take place in three disparate arenas—academic publishing and presses, museums and the mainstream press.  Economic practices are generated by the market, the operation of auction houses on the one hand, and galleries on the other.  Despite the apparent separation of the two arenas—criticism and economics--they are inextricably bound. The results are best observed in major exhibitions at a small circuit of major museums.  The exhibitions are underwritten by corporate sponsors and donors, who are also collectors and purchasers of the work. Without galleries and museums, in which financial concerns are absolutely central, there would be no art history worthy of the name. 
     As such, critical discourses have little choice but to follow the market rather than any intellectual impulse.  Of course, the best case is when profit follows intellect.  In the art world however, it is more likely that intellect and criticism follows profit. The work sells to monied collectors. Art criticism then explains why that work is worthy of attention and praise.  This isn’t to say that this system doesn’t support some very fine art.  It is just that there really isn’t any room for anything else.
  Youth and inexperience are favored in newcomers. It is crucial to have newcomers because of the high prices of artwork already within the circle of high profits.  They are highly priced but rarely will an already high price go higher.  And capitalism favors profits, rather than a steady and precipitous increase in value.  This is why the art world generates a continuous flow of new names.  The situation favors the inexperienced novice whose work is not yet highly priced.  That the work also be bland and without political predilections of any kind (which might give collectors offense) is also preferable.  The work and the artist both function as a tabula rasa for the collectors and the critics.  Add a dash of controversy of a vague sort and you arrive at the perfect confection. 
       Anybody who has ever gotten involved in trying to retrieve and promote the reputation of an artist who has no cache in the marketplace knows the truth of this situation.  Change is possible—that is the insertion of a new name (generally a single name) in the annals of the artists who matter—but it comes very slowly.  The insertion of a new school of art, such as for instance, African American artists generally, poses much greater difficulties and impediments.

1967    As early as 1967, when I was 15, as I recall I could already plainly see the intrinsic importance and significance of my mother’s art.  As I watched American People and Black Light unfold, I thought of it as the most important event in contemporary American art.  Of course I was not a writer yet and would have had no idea how to put my conviction into words.  As the decades of Faith’s art making unfolded, I became more and more convinced but it has not always been true that I knew how to write about it.  It is a delicate matter it seems to me still to write honestly about one’s own mother as a great artist.   Very early in my career as a writer, I tried to write about her work as though I was any other critic but the objectivity of a daughter would always be questionable.  So these days, with the wisdom I hope that comes with age, I try to write from the unique perspective of someone who has spent 62 years (off and on) at the side of the artist, with a very special opportunity to see the work emerging.  What has that been like and what can that experience tell us about who I am and what she has wrought?
     The recent successful tour of “American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s,” which brought together in a touring museum exhibition for the first time in 50 years all her masterful oil paintings of the 1960s, has been heartening.  Real world success has been so very important and helpful for me, so that the discussion of this work between Faith and myself is no longer just between us.  Writing the catalogue essay for the exhibition stretched my capacity for putting my mother’s work first and myself second to the limit.  The demands of the ego seem to me now a childish thing, to be put aside with childhood.

1960              
      The story of Faith’s life as an artist begins for me in 1959 when I was 7 years old and Faith had just completed her M.A. in Art Education at the City College of New York.  Her marriage in 1950 to my father Earl Wallace, who was a jazz and classical pianist, was annulled in 1956 because of his drug addiction.  We were then living on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem with my grandmother, whom I knew as Momma Jones, and who pursued a career as a fashion designer and seamstress under her maiden name as Mme. Willi Posey.  Momma Jones gave fashion shows featuring her own original designs, which my sister, and I, my mother and her sister Aunt Barbara all participated in at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem, or at the Waldorf Astoria, or other similar establishments. She belonged to a variety of black female clubs, including NAFAD (National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers), which included black men as well as black women in a time when Harlem was full of self-employed seamstresses, shoemakers and tailors.   This industrial productivity on the part of the race was probably a dual effect of segregation in fashion on the one hand, and the fact that fashion and textile production were then centered in New York.  When my grandmother wasn’t doing fashion shows, she was downtown on 7th Avenue working as a highly skilled dressmaker in one of the factories. She worked only when she chose to work and often quit her job if she felt the least bit slighted by her white bosses.   She was five feet tall, always wore high heels and short skirts, and was one of the cutest women you’ve ever seen.  Her personality was warm, gracious and a little bit Southern (she was born in Palatka, Florida). Most people loved her immediately. Meanwhile Faith had completed her B.A. in Art Education in 1955, when I was three years old and Barbara was two, and her M.A. in 1959.
        My Uncle Andrew, Faith’s only brother, [1]who was then about 36 was also a drug addict like my father, was just getting out of jail and was coming to live with my grandmother, which meant it was time for us to move.  With the help of a neighborhood friend, Burdette Ringgold (who subsequently married Faith in 1962), Faith found an apartment for us in the Bronx in a complex of Mitchell Lama buildings called St. Mary’s at 663 Westchester Avenue.  She was then 29 years old. In this 2-bedroom apartment, Faith made a space for her self to paint in the dining area.  At that age, I can’t remember much in detail about how she pursued her craft but photographs taken of our apartment show evidence of her paintings (some of which I now own) on all the walls. 
       Some of the summers of my childhood were spent in Provincetown, an artists’ resort, where Faith produced oil paintings of the boats and beaches.  Other summers Barbara and I went to an all black camp called Camp Craigmeade located in an old country house with an outhouse and no running water in the Catskills, until the summer of 1962 when Helen Meade, the camp’s founder, whom we called Aunt Helen, died while at camp.  When Faith came to visit on family weekends, she brought her watercolors to paint the gorgeous countryside.   
      It was in 1961 that Faith and Momma Jones, Barbara and I made our first trip to Europe together to see the masterpieces of European art.  This was a trip that would change all of our lives and would make Europe a place to which we would return again and again mostly in search of the art.  Faith was helped in her conviction to become an artist by this first trip. My grandmother subsequently made several trips on her own to Europe to see the collections of the various couturiers in Paris and Rome, and then to West Africa to study their textile and fashion production.  It was during this first summer in Europe that our trip was cut short because of Uncle Andrew’s death from a drug overdose.  Momma Jones was deeply heartbroken and never really recovered from his death. 
      In the early 60s during the school year we lived happily in the Bronx until 1963, when we moved back to Harlem, under the auspices of our new father Burdette Ringgold to the lovely 3-bedroom apartment formerly occupied by the great singer Dinah Washington, at 345 West 145th Street.   Our move back to Harlem brought us within walking distance of the apartment of Momma Jones. Barbara and I left the Lutheran School we had attended in the Bronx for the past five years (because of a racist incident involving my 6th grade teacher[2]) and switched to the more expensive and progressive New Lincoln School at 110th Street and Central Park North.  Our location both at school and at home gave us a front row seat on the unfurling drama of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement.

1962-1967
    His comparatively rare presence had always been turbulent and disruptive in the years of my childhood.  Even though he worked nights at General Motors in Tarrytown, and therefore left the house every weekday while we were still at school and didn’t return until long after our bedtime around 3 a.m., his tantrums and housecleaning fits on Saturday mornings were enough to leave my head spinning the entire weekend. 
     After his ritual tirades, he would carefully dress in the quiet that followed the storm and leave, not to return until some time the next morning or later on Sunday afternoon.  In his absence, Faith would focus on her painting until late in the little room that had been her studio, and which subsequently became Barbara’s bedroom after the split in 1967.  I think sometimes she was also sad and embarrassed about the way he was treating her but I know as an adult from many of my friends that their fathers often behaved in a similar manner on weekends.  On the weekends, something gets into family men, who work all week on jobs they don’t particular like, and they have a need to try to out run it. 
     Where he went I didn’t care then and dreaded the sound of his key in the lock on the front door, whenever he finally arrived.   In retrospect, having learned a great deal more about him then I knew or cared to know then, I think he may have gone to see one or both of his mothers and his various father figures.   He had had a difficult upbringing, a father who walked off and left his mother, a mother who left him at the hospital, Columbia Presbyterian, because she couldn’t pay the bill.  His Aunt Maude raised him in a household rendered chaotic by her drinking and erratic behavior toward her husband, whom everyone called Mr. Smith, and her daughter Gloria.  Mr. Smith served as a father figure, along with Mr. Reed who married his mother Mable.  By the time Faith had married Burdette, Mr. Smith had left Maude who lived at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, easily the most famous building in Harlem, and was living at the 135th Street YMCA, another famous and time-honored Harlem building and institution. There was at least one other father figure that I knew about, someone called Yummy, who was Chinese, spoke broken English, and had been Maude’s boyfriend for a time.  On occasion, the men visited our house, which is how I met them all.  Mabel I met as a child perhaps a few times when Burdette took me there.  For reasons I still don’t understand, Mabel was never welcome in our house.  I don’t think she approved of the idea of Burdette marrying Faith.  Faith has sometimes mentioned a story about how the women in his family held a meeting about what to do in order to prevent his marrying her.  “Ready-made family” was the way we were negatively described. No man should want one of those. On the other hand, Burdette had no desire to have children of his own.  He soon made it clear that Barbara and I were all the children he ever desired to have.
       Before Faith married him, Burdette had been a family fixture, a great friend of Faith, my grandmother and my father Earl, for as long as I could remember.  He has subsequently told me that sometimes when he would get home from work in the early morning, Earl would meet him in the street where his ride left him (Burdette never bought a car), and the two of them would walk up the hill to Broadway to have coffee at the automat, or maybe they had a beer together at a local bar.  He would ask about my sister and I.  Until Earl died in 1966, I would see him from time to time since his mother, whom I knew as Momma T, lived in the next building over from Momma Jones also on Edgecombe Avenue, and my sister and I were frequent visitors of both of our grandmothers.  Barbara remembers playing cards with him. I remember his playing the piano.  He was classically trained and a jazz pianist, albeit entirely unsuccessful and as far as we know, unrecorded.  Nonetheless, Faith had officially banned him from our lives.  When she parted from him, their marriage was annulled in 1956 on the grounds that she had not realized that he was addicted to drugs when they married in 1950.  Their agreement was that he would have no responsibility for the care or support of his two daughters but he also would be denied visitation rights. }
         The summer before we moved back to Harlem, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing in the South.  Medgar Evers was murdered on June 12th on the porch of his own home in Jackson, Mississippi, making him the first really crucial leadership figure to be murdered in the Civil Rights Movement.  He had been the president of the local NAACP chapter and a major figure in the struggle in Jackson for years.  Meanwhile my sister, my mother and I spent our summer at the Goldsberry summer house in Martha’s Vineyard where Faith executed the first five paintings of her first major series of work—American People.  Faith was determined that Barbara and I would learn how to ride bicycles that summer, since she never had, with the somewhat irritable assistance of the pre-adolescent Braithe, the Goldsberry grandson.  
     Burdette was temporarily not in the house as of the summer of 1967, although we all knew where to find him, just up the block in a small room over a grocery store owned by a longtime friend and associate.  Barbara and I returned from our summer in Europe with Momma Jones in 1967 to find him no longer living in our apartment.  Faith went so far as to re-allocate the rooms--Barbara and I each now had our own bedrooms, with the largest room and half bath becoming her combination bedroom and studio—giving me the false hope, as it turned out, that his absence would be permanent.
    I began my senior year in high school taking ballet classes at the newly minted Dance Theatre of Harlem founded by Arthur Mitchell and Karl Shook.  I was placed in the company class, which meant two rigorous classes with Mitchell and then Shook every day of the week.  After dropping out of that, I got involved with the National Black Theatre, which was more to my taste politically, under the leadership of the flamboyant and charismatic Barbara Anne Teer. 
     It was deeply pleasurable and amusing as well since our classes took place in the studio of the Last Poets, who were entertaining and attractive and charming.  NBT offered quite a scene, every Saturday afternoon with parties and lots of social events to follow.  Living in Harlem, I had a front row seat for all the major artistic events of the times, the concerts at the Apollo Theatre, the plays at the New Lafayette Theatre, the Jazz Mobil Concerts and various other Black Cultural Nationalist events.  But then one of the young men who participated in NBT was heard by my mother in the teacher’s lounge at P.S. 100 where she then ran an art program bragging about all the pussy he was able to get at the National Black Theatre, and Faith threatened Teer with police action if she let me in the place again.  It is true there was a free love ethic about the place.  Sex, along with marijuana, was very much on everybody’s menu, uptown, downtown and around town from this time until well through the 70s.
     That spring I started a black and Puerto Rican students organization at New Lincoln, a bloody waste of time I am thinking now but it was very much the fashion to do such things and in those days I was always fashionable, if nothing else.  The only college I applied to was Howard University.  My high school advisor, Verne Oliver, put in an application in my name to the City College of New York, without my knowledge, to which I was also accepted before open admissions.  But I didn’t find this out until some time later.

1969
       I mention this because this incident provided a central episode in “The Myth of the Superwoman” portion of Black Macho.  In the book I credit this experience as central to my coming to feminist consciousness.  I spent a portion of the summer of 1969 with my younger sister Barbara in a commune located just outside of Mexico City a few miles on the road to Toluca, a disastrous summer from a historical point of view but also one of the most pleasurable experiences of my entire life.
       I was 17 and the trip was a graduation gift from my mother to attend the summer session at the University of Mexico, to take classes in Spanish and Flamingo Dancing but the trip was only possible if I was accompanied by my 16- year old sister who also spoke Spanish fairly well.  As it turned out, my sister’s presence was the plan’s fatal flaw. If somehow my mother had let me travel on my own (although I don’t know that I would have still wanted to go), I might have actually taken the classes at the University, stayed at the little boarding house where I had rented a room and had a relatively boring but conventionally educational time.  It was the combination of Barbara’s inclinations and my own that caused the trouble that ensued.  Perhaps this is unfair. I guess I would have found trouble or trouble would have found me no matter what. I was simply too young and too immature to be so far away from home on such a lengthy mission (2 months). After having spent every summer of my life on well balanced and educational experiences, this summer without adult supervision in a foreign country was bound to be otherwise.
     When we landed by plane in Mexico City, the first discovery I made was that my luggage had been lost, which threw me immediately into an absolute panic.  As I recall, however, after much agonizing, the luggage was safely delivered to the hotel where we stayed the first two days in order to get our bearings.  Using the then popular editions of Mexico on $5 a day, we located a boarding house where we could rent a room cheaply by the week near the campus of the university.  Everything had been precisely planned before we had left New York with the help of Alex, , a friend of my mother’s,who spoke Spanish fluently.  Nonetheless, in those days largely before credit cards, and definitely before computers, cell phones and the worldwide web, some transactions could only be executed in person and with cash.  To this purpose, I was carrying a large sum of cash in a money belt around my waist, by which I felt unduly oppressed.  I wouldn’t even want to fathom the amount, but perhaps it was about $600 or so. I can’t imagine that it could have been much more. But just to think that $600 could support both of us for an entire summer in Mexico is unfathomable today. 
      Now firmly ensconced in the boarding house, on the first day on campus, which was a mammoth, uninviting construction, Barbara managed to meet up with two or three members of a commune in the student cafeteria and obtain an invitation to dinner at their house together with a plan for them to pick us up at our boarding house that evening. They came to pick us up in a struggle buggy. We were driven to the little house in the magnificently beautiful and lush tropical countryside, prepared to see the real Mexico that we would never see in our rented rooms. 
        The house had a curious construction which I had never seen before, but which I would subsequently see many times in California.  We entered the house on the top floor, which was shaped as a kind of balcony off of which there was a bathroom and several bedrooms.  There was below this deck via a delicate but beautifully designed circular staircase a spacious living room with the centerpiece of a large, black leather wraparound couch and a Mexican tile kitchen.  These rooms opened onto a series of glass doors and a patio with a view.  There was a record player.  Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Otis Reddings albums were playing.[3]  We drank tequila and smoked the most superb marijuana, which they grew themselves. Never had had marijuana like that before or since.
      Meanwhile, I, myself, unlike my sister had never smoked marijuana or drunk tequila.  I am ashamed to say, even though I was doubtless quite intoxicated and functioning with an obviously much impaired 17-year old brain, I went off to bed with Conrado, the oldest and the darkest person in the commune at 27 and a Guatemalan political refugee.   He was diminutive, of similar height and weight to myself, which was then about 125 pounds, and his brownness raised my comfort level since although I had had casual and infrequent sex with a few different males by then starting a few months after my sixteenth birthday (January 4, 1968), none of them had been white.  Yet however sweet and harmless he may have seemed to me at the time, he was still a rank stranger, and my knowledge of danger in human form was limited and abstract at best.  In my own defense, I have to say that it was 1969, afterall, the summer of love and the Sharon Tate murders, the summer of the moon shot, which I witnessed in a public square on a large movie screen in Mexico City.  Free love and sexual revolution was very much in the air even in Mexico, and I suspect, if my taste of the rising temperature of youth culture in Paris and London in the summer of 1967 was any indication, all over the world. 
      Conrado and I retreated into the darkness outside the main house to a charming little rustic room built into the side of a hill separate from the main house.  Barbara went off to bed with Mauricio, the mastermind of the commune and the only one who actually spoke English, in one of the bedrooms upstairs in the house.  Soon after Conrado and I had completed intercourse, which was a brief affair in any case, he went to sleep and I became violently ill as I then began my always painful period, alternately throwing up and shitting in their somewhat overwhelmed toilet in the main building on the second, entrance level.  I had been eating very little since I had arrived in Mexico perhaps a week before, and now I was sick with the dysentery that I had been warned would be the inevitable result of an encounter with Mexican water.  But it is almost impossible to avoid the water especially in a place like Mexico where the fruit, the watermelon, pineapple and mangos are so juicy and irresistible. 
     The fragile Mexican toilet soon became hopelessly stopped up and refused to flush.  Despite my mortification, my survival instincts necessitated that I wake up this man whom I barely knew although we had just had sex, to help me to get this toilet going amidst the overflow of vomit and shit.  To me it seemed at the time the ultimate nightmare, one that I could not imagine the males I knew back in the states being able to cope with.  It made a profound impression on me how simply and effectively Conrado took care of me in my illness despite his non-existent English, and our endeavors to communicate in my never really strong French. He did so ably until I finally collapsed some time that morning in sheer exhaustion.  My memory is of going in and out of consciousness, and having a fever.  It may be that this was my first bout of the lupus that I would be diagnosed with finally in 1993. 
    In any case, back in Mexico, when I got sick, a doctor appeared to tend me. He wore jeans, was tall, good-looking, blond and bare foot, but a real doctor nevertheless.  He gave me some medicine and ordered that I stay in bed, which I did I am not sure how long, until I was well again.  I was later told that he had also questioned the others in the commune about my age. When he was told that Barbara and I were 16 and 17, he strongly recommended that we be removed from the house, for obvious reasons. This was discussed but not acted upon.
    All these many years later, I have no idea how long I was sick.  And I have little memory of the discussions that led us to move all our things from the boarding house into the house of the small commune of three guys and two women.  We were dispensed birth control pills to prevent pregnancy and I was on birth control pills that entire month for the first and only time in my life.  I can say a small prayer of thanks for that because getting pregnant would have needlessly complicated an already very complicated situation.   
       Barbara did not wish to stay in the commune once the novelty wore off and I refused to leave and so I put Barbara on a plane for home and sent her with the message to my mother that I wanted to remain in Mexico.  I thought I was in love with Conrado.  I also sent the message that we would marry, if this would make her feel more comfortable.  Faith exploded via telephone.  The end result was that I was shipped home immediately.  Since I was 17, I had only been able to travel to Mexico with her special permission, which she then rescinded.
      When I got home in early August, as I recall, things were not good.  Barbara was much antagonized and restless now stuck in the city.  I was dispatched to the Sisters of the Good Sheppard Residence[4] on 16th Street for safekeeping, which turned out to be a life altering experience. Indeed, the entire summer was deeply life changing.  The wildness of it eventually rendered me much more cautious with my affections and slower to move or commit to drastic action.  This emergence of my true temperament would take some time, decades actually. 
        Shortly before the start of the fall semester, Faith took me shopping for clothing, packed me up and accompanied me to the start of freshman week at Howard University where I had been admitted.  My college application process had been deeply flawed, which is to say virtually non-existent.  I can’t figure out nor can I recall why this was so except that it was a doozy of a year in Harlem.   My SAT scores were decent—600 and 650 as I recall. Although my grade average was far from magnificent, I was the product of a well regarded private school where everyone graduated and went to college and my application fell within the magical year of 1969, the year in which more blacks were accepted to top tier universities and colleges than ever before.  Surely many of those schools would have been glad to have me. Whether I would have been able to stick it is another matter entirely. 
      One of the things I have noticed in my follow up with all my contemporaries at New Lincoln was that I can’t think of one person who went to a college and stayed there for four years and graduated. Everybody who went to New Lincoln with me seems to have had transfer-itis, which is poison to a smooth and successful undergraduate college career.  So many of my former classmates at New Lincoln are like me in that their experience of going to New Lincoln was the most memorable period in their education. The thing about New Lincoln is that it was then distinctively countercultural and decidedly not college prep.  I wouldn’t say it was anti-college prep. Who would pay private school tuition for kids who weren’t going to college?  So of course, it was college prep but somehow that aspect of it didn’t seem to have much impact on me. It may have been the fact that we were in the midst of a black cultural revolution in Harlem, which was all around us.  It may have been that I was among the many students on half scholarships.
    There wasn’t that obsession within the structure of the school, itself, to program kids toward college entry and success at the highest level. I suppose that it was assumed that the parents would take the lead in this regard.  Faith did not take up this lead. To this day she insists that I said I did not want to go to college, which is when she decided she would not pay for college as she had paid for elementary and high school.  She claims Burdette sat on the side of his bed and cried. Since he wasn’t in the house from 1967 through my graduation, not sure when this could have been.  In 1967 I was 15.  Can’t say for sure we never had such a conversation when I was 15. I might have said anything then just to get on my mother’s nerves, which I enjoyed doing as much as most teenagers, although the consequences could be dire. I have no recollection of such a conversation, only that we often argued.  As I recall these arguments were usually about the way I was dressed. 
    I know I had some doubts about pursuing a college that would be a repeat of my experience at New Lincoln.   I don’t know where I got the idea that college would be a lot like New Lincoln.  Such thinking contributed to my choice to apply to Howard. I wanted very much to be around black people my own age.  I thought perhaps I would fit in better there although that turned out not to be true.  So many things hindered that possibility, including the fact that I did not like to play bid whist and I refused to even consider pledging a sorority.
   1970
       So in January of 1970, at the age of 18, I had just completed a semester at Howard University. Momma Jones had paid my tuition. I had loved my time in D.C., and was looking forward to continuing there with a switch to a Theatre major in the new School of the Arts.  However, the decision was made on high that I was not going to be allowed to return.  Apparently this decision was based upon the word of my stepfather Burdette, who had come to visit me at my dorm on the weekend where he found Howard students in the full swing of their weekend ritual of seeing and being seen.  I lived in the Quad, which was the central meeting place of the students on campus.  Also, he came at a time when the college had just recently implemented a relaxation of the former policy of no boys in the girls dorm at any time. Boys were now allowed to visit rooms in the Quad perhaps for a few hours on Saturdays or something of that sort. Can’t recall exactly what the regulations were but whatever they were, it was not the everyday occurrence. Burdette was shocked and appalled to find so many boys in my dorm, didn’t listen to whatever explanation I tried to provide. With him anything you say that involves more than a sentence or two is immediately labeled as bullshit and ignored. He want back and told Faith that I was at Howard partying and not doing my school work and that I should be brought home immediately.
      Of course did he ask me anything about my schoolwork, or would he have understood if I had tried to talk to him about it? Probably not.  He wanted me back home and that was that.  In January of 1970, I was 18 years old finally after an extremely rough transition from high school graduation to college.





[1] Poor Uncle Andrew, who was a leader of a black gang called the Commanches, was beaten within an inch of his life when he was 16 by the members of an Irish Gang, as the police stood by and did nothing.  When my grandmother tried to take him to the hospital around the corner from her apartment on Edgecombe Avenue, they refused to treat him because he was black, even though he was so badly wounded his skull was visible.  He was finally treated at a hospital further away, perhaps Harlem Hospital.  In any case, they say he was never the same after that.
[2] “6th Grade” by Michele Wallace 974.
[3] Interestingly, Otis Redding died at 26 in 1967. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix both died in 1970 and both were 27.
[4] As it turns out the Sisters of the Good Sheppard was an order that was founded to assist “wayward” underaged girls.  The building where their order was housed on 16th Street is no longer a part of their property and the organization no longer exists in New York. Check this.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

In 1950 much happened in our lives





In 1950 much happened.

Charlie Parker with strings headlined at the Apollo in Harlem with Stan Getz' big band and Shirley Horne as the singer. 

I wasn't born yet which must have been kind of nice for everybody concerned. 

Charlie Parker was already a big big star much admired by the budding jazz stars on Edgecombe Avenue. Parker played strings at the Apollo regularly for a radio broadcast, as well as lots of other place.  How did he ever do it with all his psychological and medical problems, including depression and a massive heroine addiction.

In any case, many musicians used heroine in a vain attempt to be as good as he was.  Some of them almost made it.  

Both Faith and Barbara were married for the first time.

Aunt Barbara's wedding was big and fancy with elaborate dresses made by Momma Jones (Mme. Willi Posey, Faith and Barbara's mother).  My father Earl Wallace, Author Taylor, Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean all played at her wedding although pictures of this performance have disappeared.  Mom says Birdie (stepdad) lost them showing them to friends.

Faith eloped with Earl.

Faith and Earl in 1946 on Edgecombe. Girlfriend and Boyfriend.
Aunt Barbara and JoJo getting married in 1950. Annulment soon to follow.
Wedding Party for Aunt Barbara in1950.  Faith on the right in the shadows. Early siting crosslegged down front.


They timed it to the availability of Momma T's apartment.  Theodora Grant left for Guam with her second husband, Henry Grant, known to us as Chiefie.  Faith and Earl married and took up their married life at 365 Edgecombe Avenue.

Meanwhile, Aunt Barbara's husband who everybody says was very sweet and called Jo Jo was actually married to another woman at the time.  Her marriage was annulled, not sure when but she carried the name Knight for the rest of her life. 

Also in 1950, Charlie Parker, who was a hero to them all was a big star, and according to Phil Schaap also playing at the Apollo with strings.