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.
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