In 1904, five years after Sadye Pryor was born, the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs was incorporated with Mary Church Terrell as its first president and Mrs. Booker T. Washington and Harriet Tubman as early members.
Clubwomen . . . They have been dismissed as overconcerned with trivialities, including home economics and the “respectability” of the race.
Colored Girl saw the club women another way: as warrior women who fought the battle of making everyday and earnest Black living visible; as women working in the company of women, prizing the company of women, fighting Jim Crow with to-do lists and club meetings. Club Women were the DC mothers who reminded Colored Girl the most of Detroit mothers.
Ziggy had stock phrases that he repeated, classic lines that worked, so he recycled them year after year to different classes. One was “When I go, I’m not leaving you anything in my will, but that don’t mean I don’t love you! With warm hands I give you my sister Sadye!” She was in the center of the story passed down from class to class about the one time any students at the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre had ever seen Ziggy cry. He was telling the Tuesday ballet ladies about Sadye hanging her head and letting her voice quiver to win lifesaving lifeguards for the Black beach in Pensacola, Florida.
Ziggy said, “She played low not because she feared white men; but because she loved Black children.” Ziggy added, “The Uncle Tom-Tap can be a powerful thing. Perfectly performed, it distracts ofays. When you get them distracted, you can steal them blind. But it’s a costly show. Don’t put it up unless you can steal something you need, not something you want.”
When Colored Girl joined the Links in 1990, she was following in Sadye’s footsteps. When she brought her passionate Black poet daughter in as a fourth generation Link, in 2015 she thought, “I am initiating my daughter into a secret cell, committing to lifting as we climb, waiting to be activated.” She thanked Ziggy right out loud for sharing his father’s siddity sister.
Sadye E. Pryor
PATRON SAINT OF: Teachers, Principals, and Librarians
Sadye Pryor has been my secret weapon. More than one president of the PTA and more than one doctor’s wife has encouraged a mother to send her daughter to a fancier, more formal dance school, a school where only the daughters of teachers and preachers were welcome, not the “riff-raff” that the PTA president spat out that “came through the Ziggy Johnson door.” I scared more than one bougie mama halfway to death when I told her my aunt was the actual Sadye Pryor. In the clubwomen world, Aunt Sadye was a queen.
Another place I love to drop her name? Around the pool at the Sir John Hotel in Miami. I started going there in 1957 when Bodywork Bennett treated me to the first vacation of my adult life. I was forty-four years old. Sadye was going on sixty. I was standing on a pool deck crowded with singers, models, colored baseball players, Black doctors, Black dentists, and Black lawyers and their wives when someone asked if I knew anyone in Florida. I answered humbly, “My aunt Sadye Pryor.” The pool crowd parted like the sea before Moses. A silk-swathed matron in a turban approached, cooing, “Please beg your Aunt Sadye to run over for a visit.”
Sadye does what Sadye chooses to do. Usually that’s stay in Pensacola unless she’s running to some national meeting. But once I drop her name, I am popular with the talented-tenth Negroes who typically sneer when they call my name. If I’m related to Sadye, they know I come from good stock.
What I know? We come from stern stuff. If Mississippi and Alabama are the belly of the beast that is Jim Crow, Florida is the beast’s second stomach. Aunt Sadye taught me that. Born in 1899, she was raised around family who remembered being enslaved in Florida and was raised with even more family who remembered slavery’s immediate aftermath.
The Pensacola of her family memory and childhood was both a city racked with race hate, yellow fever, and hunger and a cradle of political and economic opportunity for newly free men, women, and children.
Aunt Sadye has long said my father, her brother, moved north to Illinois hoping to land somewhere less contradictory than Florida. Aunt Sadye decided to embrace the contradictions—then find respite from them on visits to the heaven she found in Detroit. Sadye loved Black Bottom.
Some people can’t believe it till they see how much Sadye loves me. Why? We seem so different. From the outside Aunt Sadye and I could not be more different.
Sadye Pryor is a pillar of the Pensacola Mt. Zion Baptist Church. I myself see the inside of a church only when there’s a funeral. Aunt Sadye wears glasses and frumpy sack dresses and looks studious. I was born dapper and will die dapper; I don’t wear the reading spectacles I need. She is a librarian who’s known for raising her eyebrows to get students to quiet down. I am a show producer known for raising my eyebrows to get kids to project louder. Yes, presidents of Motown PTAs have been known to question whether I am a fit example for our young ones, because I consort with show folk and gamblers and others associated with nightlife. Sadye Pryor maintains perfectly proper associates (fellow board members of the YWCA, members of the Eastern Star lodge she leads, fellow Sunday School teachers) and is lauded as an example of PTA-praiseworthy deportment. In Pensacola, indeed across Florida, and all around these United States. Sadye was born a virgin and by choice will likely die a virgin. Some folks call me the old reprobate.
But all that is from the outside. If I look at our goals from the inside, if I understand my business to be raising our small fry to be fully enfranchised citizens, Sadye and I share a common cause.
I have said that I have been jealous of Sammy Davis for having his father and his uncle making a way for him in his chosen profession. What keeps me from going completely green with envy? Sadye. I was born in 1913, Sadye in 1899. She was always just ahead of me, leading the way. My aunt began teaching in 1926. See it, be it. It was Sadye who showed me that teaching could be quietly political. Without Sadye I don’t open my dance school.
Sadye, though she has been a classroom teacher as well as a principal, knows that the classroom, the schoolhouse, isn’t the best place to catch a kid if you wanted to make the biggest impact. Church, dancing schools, and libraries were all better places to create high impact. She migrated to the library. I opened my dancing school. It might not have looked like it to anyone but us, but we were working in cahoots with each other.
People have often wondered how it came to be that I wasn’t intimidated by Shirley McNeil. Sadye is the reason. Shirley had a PhD, but my aunt studied in the Ivy League, at Columbia University. Before she stopped collecting degrees, she had studied at the University of Iowa, University of Illinois, Columbia University, Bethune Cookman College, and St. Louis University.
For a time, I wasn’t sure Sadye got me. In fact, I was rather sure she didn’t. When she saw me down in Florida, on those rare occasions when I successfully persuaded her to join me poolside at the Sir John, promising to take her to see Nat King Cole or some other big Miami show she couldn’t and wouldn’t have gone to without me, I usually had a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and some bikini-clad brown girl on my lap rubbing my shoulders trying to get cast in a show. This did little to raise me in Sadye’s esteem.
Then she came up to visit Detroit in 1962. She saw me in action. Met some of my students. One night I took her to a bar where she had three cocktails and smoked a cigarette. I was stunned.
“They don’t see it.”
“What?”
“When they focus on our social climbing, they don’t see the children we are lifting over the wall—hard, hungry, and able children prepared by us to make the Bible promise an earthly reality: the last shall be first.”
“To the last being first!”
We clinked glasses and toasted to being complicit in each other’s successful creation of cradles of sepian excellence. We were not coordinated but we were complicit. That night was the first and only time we got drunk together. She on three glasses, me on five. We saved the best toast for last.
This book was born in the aftermath of that toast. Sadye took a second sip, looked at the crowd, which included Massey, Bodywork, Shirley, Maxine, and Scatterbrain, and said, “They are not your friends, Nephew. They are your Black Bottom Saints. The way you talk about them inspires me to proceed.”
Christmastime, three years ago. 1964. There was Sadye E. Pryor Night in Pensacola. I should have been there. But I was working, and had I attended she wouldn’t have known what to do with me in one of my light-colored silk suits.
She was president of the PTA. She was the principal of Spencer Bibbs Elementary. She helped found a Black YWCA and the C. B. Nelson Daniels Chapter #172 of the Eastern Star and was installed as a worthy matron. She was a national leader of Girl Scouts. If I sound proud, it is because I am, and she always played humble. Sadye knew Black girls made miracles—because she had been a Black girl making miracles. Every day, in every club, she worked alongside Black women who had been, but not acknowledged as being, shamans. Some came from hoodoo, some from conjure, some from vodun, but they stood on the shores of colored girl “mistery,” that shrouded territory where misery is converted to mystery and power.
Watching Sadye work with her clubwomen sisters to finally win, in 1953, a beach that welcomed Black kids to swim, without also winning lifeguards that the white beaches had, started me on a road of discovery. Watching her continue to work against well-monied, elected, racist men eager to invite Black bodies into danger took me further down that discovery road as I heard about her grinding city commissioners down with silly questions, administrative technicalities, and treacle-sweet pleasantness. She had mother wit. It took mother wit to finally get the lifeguards the colored kids needed and deserved.
Girls and women will be increasingly the key to maintaining Black identity as we Black folk began to enter new predominantly white spaces with new difficulties and new dangers. Integration brought evil as well as good. Sadye saw this. Told me over drinks at the Sir John Hotel, “We need the magic box of your dancing school to intensify their soul-selves—their own inner magic box.” She clutched the pearls at her neck when she said this next: “A string of pearls can be a shield. A dance school can be a lifeboat. So much gets diluted when we enter white space.”
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LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF SADYE E. PRYOR:
The Siddity Sister
1 jigger of Old Tom gin
1 pony of grenadine
½ lime, juiced
Lime zest
Mint sprigs
Place gin, grenadine, and lime juice in a cocktail shaker and shake with ice. Strain into a tall glass filled with ice cubes. Garnish with mint sprigs and lime zest.