Every girl who walked into the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre received the same first instruction: “Chin up, make me believe you’re ten feet tall.” Some frowned, some walked particularly upright, some rose on tiptoes; every girl failed that first-day-of-class test. And Ziggy told them. He never withheld a useful truth. In 1962, on the first day of summer dance camp, a just-over-three-feet-tall three-year-old in black leotard and beige tights, calling herself Colored Girl, chirped “No one can do that!” Ziggy, five-foot nothing, standing tall in a silk knit golf shirt and summer wool slacks, challenged back: “I’ve known someone who could do that since I was smaller than you are now, the Natchez Belle.”
A church-sanctioned campaign to canonize Augustus Tolton began in 2010, one hundred years after the Natchez Belle began her unsanctioned campaign. Colored Girl joined the campaign in 2012. The prayer for Tolton’s canonization includes words that apply equally to Tolton, to the Natchez Belle herself, and even to Ziggy, “who labored among us in times of contradiction, times that were both beautiful and paradoxical.”
Nancy Elizabeth Johnson
PATRON SAINT OF: Mothers, Migration, and Black Belles
Nancy Elizabeth Alexander Johnson—my mother—was born on February 18, 1887, in Natchez, Mississippi. I always refer to her as the Natchez Belle. Natchez was important to the lady.
The taproot of her connection to that Old South city was the Catholic Church, specifically Holy Family Catholic Church, the first congregation of Black Catholics in Mississippi. Holy Family, then called St. Francis, was founded shortly after my mother was born. She said walking up the hill to Holy Family, and then walking through the doors to see only brown faces in all the pews—even the first rows, even the center seats, even if there was a white face in the pulpit—was a first and vivid memory. Mother liked to boast that she and Holy Family shared a childhood, and that Holy Family was not just the best church in Natchez—it was the best church in the whole world.
Her allegiance shifted as she matured and as the first colored Mississippians ventured north to Chicago and wrote letters home to Natchez. Mother learned there were colored Catholics in Chicago, that there was a colored Catholic church, St. Monica’s, at the corner of 36th and Dearborn Streets, and most stunningly that in Chicago there had even been a colored priest, Father Tolton! The glinting possibility of Black in the pulpit and Black in the pews tugged my mother north.
For the Natchez Belle, migrating to Chicago was a religious pilgrimage.
It tickled my mother, who understood the holy family—Mary, Joseph, and Jesus—to be white, that there was a Catholic church named for Monica, whom she understood to be the colored mother of the colored St. Augustine. The public celebration of colored motherhood delighted Mama. That Monica was the patron saint for women whose husbands and sons had gone astray, she considered a strange curse. Mama accepted that the same person provoked delight as well as dilemma. I suspect she learned that by loving my father, but that is not something we spoke about directly.
She told me her parents had met in the big integrated Natchez cathedral, while sitting beneath the arching blue triangles of the vaulted gothic ceiling ornamented with 24-carat gold. It was a place where, in Mother’s memory, fathers reeked of lavender water and orange and Mothers of the dishwater and shirt starch. It was a place where the Black folk sat in the back and off to the side, unless they were holding a white baby. The first official Black members of the church were the descendants of the white members of the church. Eventually this became too uncomfortable for both white wives and Black husbands. In 1894, Catholic Negro Natchez went its separate way. I always wondered if some of my yellow tone was a blend of lavender and shirt starch. All of it reminds me of incense and satsuma oranges.
My mother was a second-generation free woman, because her mother had been born free.
She grew up hearing the voices of the freeborn along with stories of the various struggles and delights of liberation, including the existence of Father Tolton, who was born a slave but lived to become an ordained priest, serving under the Bishop of Rome.
In 1913, when I was born, there were about seven million African-Americans. Two hundred thousand of us were Catholics. For Mama, being Catholic was a connection to Natchez and to the South. For me, being Catholic was a connection to a world beyond America; to a world where Blackness mattered differently, and where Augustine and Monica were saints; to a whispered world where the Apostle Phillip converted an Ethiopian—a eunuch of great authority—and baptized him, then rose up, and was rewarded by God for doing good work.
Catholicism promised a bigger net, hauling in a more motley catch of dappled fish. From my early days I was swept up in the promise of variety beyond established borders. Eventually, the stage promised a bigger and Blacker world, but I first learned the power of the dark sitting beside the Natchez Belle in a pew at a midnight service.
The power of that dark, the power of Mama’s church, was not God. It was the address to all five senses. Church was my first place where the sight of beauty, the sound of beauty, the taste of beauty, the touch of beauty, and the scent of beauty all enveloped me at once. Eventually, I would translate the sight of stained-glass windows, the sound of choir songs, the taste of communion wafers, the touch of chasuble silk, and the scent of frankincense to the symmetric line of high-lifted legs, bent-note torch singing, aged Scotch, tie silk, and Arpège mixed with exhaled smoke from Winston cigarettes. Mama didn’t anticipate getting translated. Mama taught me to savor the cocoon of the beauty that church provided. She taught me to trust five-sense pleasures as a promised balm in Gilead.
Then, when I was in high school, my mother got down on her knees and prayed to Saint Monica for me to be a priest. She believed her prayers were beginning to be answered when my older brothers left school to go to work full-time. With Frank landing a job as a shipping clerk after his junior year, and Charles landing a high-paying factory job after his sophomore year, I got to finish high school. Finishing high school meant I could go to seminary.
Over and over my mother had told me Tolton’s story. How he had been born a slave. How, after all the places to study to be a priest in America turned him down, he studied in Rome at the Vatican. How he expected to go to Africa, but they sent him to America instead. How the white priests in Chicago tried to shame him and the Negro congregants tried to blame him. She never told me for what. He was walking home from the train one hot summer day in July 1897. He collapsed. Heatstroke got him. He was forty-three. My mother always ended the story with the same words: “And when he’s dead a hundred years we will make him a saint—the first colored American saint.”
Those words stayed with me for a good long while. Back when I was turning from a boy to a man, haunted and harangued by Mama’s words, “And when he’s dead a hundred years we will make him a saint,” I started imagining things. I imagined a colored man dropping dead in the street at forty-three. I imagined a too-bright, too-bold, too-red sun. I imagined Tolton twitching as his life burned out. I didn’t have to imagine being mad at God for making the sun too hot that day.
What I heard from my mother’s wish for me to be a priest was permission not to make money and permission to wear extravagant costumes. I heard what I needed to hear.
Mama didn’t talk much about Daddy. He was a there-and-then-gone man. Mama talked about God. She told me God was my father and he was always “home.” And then she took me to church and told me to get comfortable. Later, I confused stages with churches and never wanted a house. Eventually, the Gotham Hotel became my stage and my church. That is over and I am returned to my beginnings.
My beginning: A Catholic faith that embraced Mary as the go-between, buffering men and women from their Father and Creator, as well as a love of smells, bells, ritual, and rosary, is what my mother carried north from Natchez—and what separated her from many of the Black women in Chicago, who were much more likely to attend Baptist or African-Methodist Episcopal, A.M.E., churches than Catholic. But her Catholicism connected her to the New Orleans folk, as well as to Mobile, Alabama, folk, and to brown folk from other northern cities who prayed the rosary and had landed in Chicago. It connected her to her past. I was hungry for the future.
LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF NANCY ELIZABETH JOHNSON:
The Natchez Belle
1 jigger of bourbon
1 sugar cube
1 jigger of soda water
3 sprigs of mint
Orange slice
Luxardo cherry
In a tall glass place mint, then muddle. Add sugar and soda water. Muddle a bit more, then stir till sugar is dissolved. Add bourbon, then ice cubes. Garnish with an orange slice and a Luxardo cherry.