CHAPTER ONE

FROM BIRMINGHAM TO LOS ANGELES

The black girl, large for someone in grade school, was playing in her great aunt’s backyard in Birmingham, Alabama, when the man walked up, clothed in grimy overalls, his face and hands dirty from the steel mill. She’d never seen him before, and he’d never laid eyes on her. “Is that big girl my daughter?” Ruben Holmes wondered aloud.¹ He probably meant “big” in the way a relative might compliment a young child who appears more grown up than imagined in the mind’s eye. Odetta, already insecure about her size, felt her heart sink. But before she could learn for certain who the man was, Aunt Lee, a husky woman with salt-and-pepper hair, hurried outside and stood between them like a bulwark. She told Holmes to go away and never come back, warning her grandniece that he was the boogie man. It was Odetta’s only childhood encounter with her biological father.

During the height of her fame, Odetta would never discuss the matter. When quizzed about her early life, she had a way of quickly skirting the subject of Ruben Holmes. He died before Odetta was born, according to the publicity materials issued by her manager, Albert Grossman, and interviewers didn’t press her for details. Perhaps reporters were wary, during an era of civil rights upheaval, of nosing into the struggles of a black family from the Deep South. Whatever the reason, the tidbit of familial data that Odetta offered her inquisitors constituted a little white lie, a bit of biographical subterfuge that papered over a more complicated and painful story—which began with a forced marriage.

A gorgeous, sunlit spring day greeted Birmingham on April 9, 1930, with temperatures easing into the mid-seventies. That was the setting when Ruben Holmes wedded Odetta’s mother, Flora Sanders. It’s safe to assume, however, that Flora wasn’t the image of a glowing bride. A tiny young woman of eighteen, she’d been promised to the older man by her father. Though relatively little is known about Holmes, he comes briefly into fuzzy focus with the help of census and marriage records. He was thirty. He had a sixth-grade education. He’d recently lost his wife and had a young son and namesake. Beyond those more certain details, he was more than likely a sturdy and muscled man, as befitting someone who toiled long hours in the boiling heat forging steel. In adulthood, Odetta would learn one other tantalizing detail: Holmes had once sung and played the guitar.

The Rev. G. H. Word stood in the pulpit that day, probably in a small black Baptist church, with family gathered to witness the union, including Flora’s mom, born Lizzie Randle, and her dad, Jim Sanders. Sanders worked with Holmes at the steel plant, and he knew that Ruben Jr., age two, needed a mother, so he hadn’t hesitated to offer his own little girl. “Marry Flora,” he’d told Holmes.²

That Sanders would marry away the youngest of his three children is unthinkable today, but it was fairly common at the time, especially for families like those who lived in Ensley, a poor Birmingham enclave that had sprouted, mushroomlike, in the shadows of the city’s world-famous steel mills west of downtown. Before it became a crucible in the civil rights movement, Birmingham was renowned as the South’s steel capital, its towering smokestacks a symbol of the nation’s burgeoning industrial might in the early years of the twentieth century. As Southerners tried to convert a stunted agrarian economy built on slave labor into something more modern and sustainable, Birmingham emerged as a beacon of the “New South”—the “Magic City” in the words of a giant electric sign that greeted passenger trains at Birmingham Terminal Station.

Today, little remains of the once-thriving web of steel-related industries that employed tens of thousands in and around Birmingham other than the decrepit graffiti-laden shells of some of the old mills, their floors subsumed by weeds and moss, and a skeleton or two of the stacks that once stood proud like some futuristic urban skyline. But back then, the city’s promise of steel jobs—and upward mobility—probably is what brought Jim Sanders’s family from Virginia and Lizzie Randle’s clan from Kentucky, as census records show. (Ruben Holmes’s kin were Alabama bred.)

When the Depression came, however, the nation’s manufacturing and housing sectors sputtered. Suddenly, Birmingham’s single-minded reliance on steel became an albatross. “The mills are down/The hundred stacks are shorn of their drifting fume,” the Alabama poet John Beecher—a great, great, great nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe—wrote about Ensley.

Despite his lack of education, Ruben Holmes had seniority at the Ensley steelworks, and Jim Sanders considered him “a very good risk,” someone who at least stood a chance of weathering the economic storm. For Jim and Lizzie, marrying off their daughter had the added advantage of having one less mouth to feed.³

Still, that doesn’t mitigate the shock of going from naive teenager to dutiful wife overnight without so much as a courtship. On the marriage certificate, Flora’s age was nudged up a couple of years, to twenty, no doubt to make the union seem slightly more respectable. “So they got married,” Odetta would later recount. “My mother knew nothing about anything. . . . She thought if a boy’s elbow touched your elbow, you get pregnant. That’s how out of it she was. And I can’t begin to imagine the terror of her on their wedding night.”⁴

Flora was soon with child. It was clear that she didn’t want the baby, and who could blame her? Ruben kept the door locked during the day when he trudged off to the steel mill, so pregnant Flora, who had Ruben Jr. to care for and the cooking and cleaning to do, couldn’t escape. This was not the recipe for a loving relationship. Finally, with the help of another aunt named Tea, Flora managed to flee the shackles of forced matrimony. Safely out of Ruben’s reach, Tea prepared a home-brewed concoction that was supposed to abort Flora’s pregnancy, but it failed to do the job, though it made her sick. “Lord, girl, I’m glad your momma didn’t get rid of you!” Aunt Tea would tell Odetta years later—after Odetta became famous.⁵

Flora went to live with her uncle Bud, an Ensley grade-school principal. At his home on December 31, 1930, Odetta Holmes came into the world, an unwanted child. She was a big girl compared to her “little maw” and “the ugliest BLACK baby ever born,” Flora said. Again, given the circumstances, who could blame her? ⁶

Though she didn’t know her father until much later in life, Odetta, like most poor blacks from the South, was nurtured by a large extended family. There was a network of aunts, uncles, and cousins in Ensley, along with her grandparents, Papa Jim and Mama Lizzie, who must have seen fit to forgive Flora for running out on Ruben. Odetta was close to her grandmother, but at some point Papa Jim went away, perhaps after losing his job at the mill as so many other men in Ensley would, leaving Odetta without a grandfather.

She had strong women in her life, though, including Aunt Lee, who had sought to protect her from her father. Lee had light skin and was forever powdering her face to lighten it even more, telling the girls that she was white and they were black—one of the first times Odetta would have heard that blackness was something inferior that needed correcting.

Her ill-fated marriage behind her, Flora soon met a more compatible mate, Zadock Felious, another Ensley steelworker, originally from Opelika in eastern Alabama near the Georgia border. In September 1933, she bore him a daughter, Jimmie Lee—Odetta’s half-sister and lifelong confidante. They didn’t marry until nine months later, on June 28, 1934. Flora was twenty-two, and the groom, twenty-seven. On the marriage certificate, she listed her status as single, an effort most likely to expunge the bitter past.

To Odetta, Zadock became “Daddy.” Remembered as kind and gentle by his family, he “was the closest to . . . an angel I’ve ever been around, just a splendid man,” Odetta recalled. Zadock would later adopt Odetta, and she took the name Felious. From the start, however, his extended family made it clear that they preferred Jimmie Lee, a true-blooded Felious granddaughter. “If you weren’t a Felious,” Odetta once said, “you barely made it on the human charts.”⁷

By the time Odetta was six, Zadock, who had worked in the coal mines as well as the steel mills, had developed black lung disease and was at risk for tuberculosis. The city had the second-highest death rate from TB in the nation (behind Denver), and doctors suggested a drier climate might do some good. Zadock and Flora decided to uproot their young family and move to Los Angeles.

Health considerations aside, they had plenty of other reasons for taking flight. As the Depression sucked the life out of the economy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration declared Birmingham, so dependent on steel production, as “the worst hit city in the nation.” Many thousands of jobs disappeared and families became destitute. The district’s congressman, George Huddleston, summed up the city’s dire situation to a Senate subcommittee: “Any thought that there has been no starvation, that no man has starved, and no man will starve, is the rankest nonsense. Men are actually starving by the thousands today.”⁸

Even in the best of times, Birmingham’s Negroes knew they were second-class citizens with few rights and little power in the grip of Jim Crow. And it was more than clear that anyone daring to challenge the status quo was going to be dealt with harshly. Just a few months before Odetta’s birth, twenty-five hundred members of the Ku Klux Klan had staged a rally in Birmingham, dressed “in full regalia of sheets and pillowcases,” a black newspaper reported, to protest the planned visit of a black congressman from Chicago. A few years later, during the infamous Scottsboro Boys case, when nine black youths were condemned to die in the electric chair for the alleged rape of some white Alabama girls, the Klan sent a notice to newspapers, warning of the “Communists” trying to defend the boys, who were almost certainly innocent: “Alabama is a good place for good Negroes, but it is a bad place for bad Negroes who believe in SOCIAL EQUALITY. THE KU KLUX KLAN IS WATCHING YOU—TAKE HEED.” Only a toddler, Odetta was probably spared the particulars of these kinds of threats, but she later remembered the colored drinking fountains, colored toilets, and colored balcony at the movie theater—early slaps at her dignity that dug deep.⁹

She couldn’t have felt any more sanguine about the two-tiered municipal bus system. Odetta’s longtime friend, the poet Sonia Sanchez (née Wilsonia Driver), who was born in Ensley in 1934, remembered going with her aunt Pauline to work on the bus as a young girl and being ordered to move to the back and then to get off when more whites got on needing seats. Her aunt became one of the many unheralded Rosa Parkses in the long struggle for equality. “The bus driver told her to get off and she said . . . I’m not gonna get off the bus,” Sanchez recalled. “And the bus driver stopped and walked towards her, you know, like he was gonna put her off. And she spit in his face. We were arrested. . . . And by that night, Pauline was sent out of town by the family.”¹⁰

For the Feliouses, California promised to be much more welcoming. Indeed, to the nation at large, it allured as a kind of dreamland in waiting, a place of adventure and wish fulfillment, where the “Eureka” on the state seal evoked the possibility of riches and sudden transformation, whether as a result of finding gold flakes sifted from a nineteenth-century river mill or, later, by dint of a different kind of discovery—by a Hollywood producer.

The city of Los Angeles, founded in the late 1700s by Spanish, black, biracial, and American Indian settlers, boasted romantic Spanish architecture, purple mountains, wide-open spaces, and a soultickling climate. “To many a newcomer, Los Angeles is a modern Promised Land,” proclaimed a guidebook compiled by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s. “There is a heady fragrance in the air, and a spaciousness of sky and land and sea that give him a new sense of freedom.”¹¹

To Southern blacks, the city had long been portrayed as racially tolerant and a land of opportunity, and perhaps it was, if you were grading on a curve. “Los Angeles was wonderful,” the black educator W. E. B. Du Bois declared after an early twentieth-century visit. “The air was scented with orange blossoms and the beautiful homes lay low crouching on the earth as though they loved its scents and flowers. Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed.” Du Bois, however, also noted that “the color line is there and sharply drawn.” In reality, blacks did face discrimination in hotels, restaurants, and other accommodations, and white neighborhoods would later get sanction from the California Supreme Court to legally exclude blacks.¹²

By the end of 1936, Zadock Felious and his younger brother Otto set off for Los Angeles in a Model T Ford, finding jobs as janitors and getting a place to live before sending for the Felious clan. On March 28, 1937, Easter morning, Flora, six-year-old Odetta, and three-year-old Jimmie Lee boarded a train in Birmingham for a cross-country trek that would likely have taken them first to New Orleans, to connect with the Southern Pacific railroad to the West Coast on one of the favored routes of the Great Migration. (Mama Lizzie, who for better or worse considered Birmingham her home, stayed behind and never left.)

The girls wore starched dresses. Flora packed food enough for an army, knowing that for a black family, getting served en route would be difficult and dangerous. Along the way, she woke the girls to point out bunnies hopping through the fields. However, any notion that the trip would be a fun adventure for the Felious daughters ended when a conductor came through at one of the stations and told them that all Negroes had to move to a segregated “Jim Crow” car. Flora didn’t raise a fuss, leaving Odetta scared and confused. “I cannot tell you the depth of how that affected me,” she recalled. That little girl silently pondered a question that wrenched her gut and ate at her soul: “Is there something wrong with me?” It was the first of what she would later call her “wounds,” and it was so devastating that for most of her life riding trains made her sick to her stomach.¹³

Zadock had rented the smaller side of a tiny stucco duplex home at 1244 North Virgil Avenue in East Hollywood, where he, Flora, Jimmie Lee, Odetta, and Otto would live for the better part of a decade amid the grumble and screech of the streetcars ambling by their front door. The apartment had room for a stove, icebox, and beds, but no table, so the family ate standing up, laughing at the absurdity of it. Zadock had found work as a drugstore janitor, and Flora would earn what she could cleaning houses.

They had plenty of company, including some of the extended family. In the slightly larger duplex apartment lived Zadock’s other younger brother, Chester, and his wife and daughter. Another brother, Austin, and sisters Emma and Ella would also live nearby. The neighborhood was ethnically very mixed, including other black families from Alabama and elsewhere in the South and immigrants from Japan, Puerto Rico, Mexico, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe, mainly Russia.

Los Angeles in the 1930s, in fact, was a city of newcomers, including migrants from the Midwest and points east, who’d escaped failed farms and factories during the Depression looking for jobs in the tire, aircraft, automobile, garment, and movie industries. In Odetta’s working-class neighborhood, it was easy enough to make out two rungs of economic opportunity: the blacks worked as janitors, maids, laborers, elevator operators, and Pullman porters, while the whites and Japanese became teachers, carpenters, salesmen, tailors, and gardeners.

Some of what the Feliouses heard about Los Angeles seemed true at first. Racial violence was minimal compared with other big cities, even in the North. And unlike northern urban centers, LA was a sprawling metropolis with plenty of room to spare, so blacks who arrived during the first wave of the Great Migration before World War II didn’t have to stuff themselves into dense ghettos as they would in places like Chicago or New York. Many blacks lived in mixed-race neighborhoods, which helped keep feelings of isolation somewhat at bay and, for a time, masked racial tensions.

“Everybody co-existed with each other,” Odetta recalled. “And if somebody was sick and my mother had only said hello to them [once], she would immediately go over to their house, find out what they needed—if there’s washing or the cleaning or the shopping or whatever. And when we got up to age, we would be sent to do those chores. It was community.”¹⁴

Odetta attended Lockwood grammar school with the other neighborhood kids. Once Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy came through to entertain the pupils, and Odetta enjoyed it, unaware that a puppet show would play an important role in her future. It was in grade school, however, that she first got a taste, she said, of the warped way in which the lives of African Americans were portrayed in the popular culture. In class, she learned about the serfs in Europe and the unfairness of the feudal system. “And then we got to the place in the history book where they said that we, slaves, were happy and singing all the time,” Odetta said. “I was at the age then when if it was in the book it was true. And I felt disgraced, shamed.”¹⁵ That was wound number two, she often said.

It was an example of the kind of racism that often gets overlooked in the history of the African American struggle. By escaping the South, Odetta never witnessed a lynching or had her life threatened for trying to register to vote, but her emotional scars from the distorted view of her people’s history—or even simply the omission of any history of achievement—was palpable. Civil rights groups and black educators such as Carter G. Woodson were already well aware of the toll that a white-centric historical narrative was taking, not only on the psyches of black children but also on the racial views of impressionable white kids. In 1939, the NAACP published a pamphlet entitled Anti-Negro Propaganda in School Textbooks, in which it argued that blacks weren’t portrayed as having a respectable past. “These American authors would have us believe that there was nothing wrong with slavery, that it was not only economically necessary, but was enjoyed by the slaves themselves,” the pamphlet said. It continued, “Prejudiced authors have set themselves up as authorities in spreading the vicious propaganda that Negro American citizens have contributed nothing to the great movements of labor, suffrage, industrialization, invention, health, education and legislation in our land.”¹⁶

One of the more widely used textbooks in American grammar schools in that period, and very possibly the one Odetta’s class read at Lockwood, was American History by Gertrude Van Duyn Southworth and John Van Duyn Southworth, a mother and son from Syracuse, New York. The book promised “the complete history of our country, from the discovery of America to the present day.”¹⁷

In discussing the antebellum period, the book noted that “plantation life in the South was very pleasant. The master of the house spent his time in overseeing the labor of the slaves, in hunting, in taking long rides through the country on his fine, thoroughbred horses, or in entertaining at his home.” It went on:

The slaves, too, usually led a happy life. Although they were educated only in the work they had to do, almost never traveled beyond the home plantation, and seldom developed into anything but mere working machines, they were usually treated humanely and often with great consideration. They had good food and warm clothing. When their daily work was done they were allowed to go to their cabins, which were built in a group not far from the plantation house of their master. There they could sing, and dance, and enjoy themselves in other ways.¹⁸

The book’s treatment of Reconstruction is equally cringe-worthy, though it was pretty mainstream at the time, a reflection of how far the South’s “Lost Cause” ideology of the war and its aftermath had seeped into the national consciousness; it discussed how “the ignorant Negro vote” was manipulated by Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags to bear “unpleasant fruit” in the South. It described how Southern white men, facing “oppression,” fought back unsuccessfully with their minority voting rights and in the “far more practical” rise of the Ku Klux Klan, which targeted “Negroes who were abusing their power.” As far as the book was concerned, Negroes had done nothing since Reconstruction to warrant inclusion in later chapters.¹⁹

Part of the problem was that, decades before the advent of black studies departments in colleges, unbiased research that textbook writers could draw upon wasn’t in wide circulation and many libraries simply didn’t bother to include it in their collections, although scholars like Woodson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson were trying to document the real history and accomplishments of African Americans. It would be through her study of folk music that Odetta would get what she would call her true education “about a history that was not projected in the schools”—one she would later deliver to her audiences.²⁰

Given the lack of positive reinforcement about their race, it’s not surprising that most American blacks in the late 1930s and early 1940s calculated that it was best to try to blend in to win acceptance from whites, to prove they deserved the freedoms and opportunities they sought. Flora ran a strict household and thought the road to success was paved with refined tastes. Like the vast majority of Negro women and girls, she straightened their naturally kinky hair with hot combs (and, later, chemical straighteners) to more closely mimic Caucasian hair. Flora made sure Odetta learned precise and proper diction. On Saturdays, they cleaned house together. But when the Metropolitan Opera came on KECA on the AM dial, Flora, Jimmie Lee, and Odetta stopped everything and perched in front of the console radio, ears to the speakers. When it was over, they resumed their washing, ironing, and dusting. “I was into classical music,” Odetta said, “and I had swallowed this whole pill that society had given us: that if it was classical and from Europe it was legitimate.”²¹

Her stepfather favored less lofty music, much to Odetta’s chagrin. Zadock took the girls to the Paramount Theater, where the colored swing bands performed: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, Nat King Cole’s trio. On Saturday nights Zadock tuned to KFI for the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. “I listened to the Grand Ole Opry with my eyebrows raised,” Odetta recalled with a laugh. “I mean, really, I was supposedly sophisticated and all that arrogant stuff.” Yet Zadock’s eclectic tastes rubbed off, even if she didn’t know it at the time. ²²

Despite the drier climate in Los Angeles, Zadock’s lung condition worsened, and within a few years, he wound up at a sanitarium. He spent most of his days there, coming home for a week at a time to see his family. When a census worker showed up in 1940, Zadock had been unable to work for at least a year. His brother Chester had earned $950 the previous year as a janitor, while Otto, still living with Zadock’s family and presumably chipping in, had his own janitorial business. Flora took on more domestic work, visited Zadock daily, and accepted welfare assistance to help pay for his care. The extended family was always ready to help with rent or money to put food on the table.

But the Feliouses lived day to day. To afford a movie ticket, the girls had to trade in Coca-Cola bottles and save the deposits. Even a Christmas gift was something Odetta’s mother couldn’t afford to give them. “Maybe it would have been better if I’d have gotten one skate for Christmas and the other for my birthday but I didn’t,” Odetta remembered. “And I didn’t notice how much it bothered me until I grew up.”²³

Flora did, however, scrape together some quarters so that Odetta could have music lessons. At age eleven, Odetta began taking piano along with a neighborhood friend, a black girl named Janie Craddock. One day as they waited for their teacher to arrive, the girls were singing scales. “The teacher walked up, I guess, when I was hitting something like a C above a high C and it was really just a screech but she was very impressed,” Odetta said.²⁴ She told Flora, who found a voice teacher for her daughter. But after a few lessons during which Odetta trilled like a soprano, the teacher said her body was still developing and she should wait until she turned thirteen to resume her studies.

After the United States entered World War II, the sense of community Odetta had felt in her neighborhood was shattered. On February 20, 1942, President Roosevelt issued executive order 9066 to evacuate more than a hundred thousand Japanese civilians from “combat zones” near the West Coast, including more than sixty thousand in California. With the attack on Pearl Harbor a few months earlier, hysteria about a land invasion by Japan had reached a crescendo, as did concerns that Japanese living near the Pacific would assist the invaders with acts of sabotage. “Don’t kid yourselves and don’t let someone tell you there are good Japs,” California congressman A. J. Elliott told the House of Representatives. “Perhaps one out of 1,000.”²⁵

Most of the affected were American citizens who took pains to affirm their allegiance to the United States. They relinquished their freedoms with stoicism, holding fire sales to liquidate their businesses, abandoning their homes and farms, and packing up a few belongings by the time the buses and trains arrived for the mass evacuations barely a month later. Some white real estate agents took advantage of the panic by buying homes at cut-rate prices after warning the Japanese that the future was unpredictable.

Odetta began hearing at school that people were destroying dishes and other goods with “made in Japan” labels. Then her neighbors, including an elderly Japanese couple on the block, prepared to leave. “All of a sudden, we’re seeing that our neighbors and friends are putting their refrigerators out to sell, their beds out to sell, and they’re getting rid of as much as possible, so they could be ready when the buses came to take them to the concentration camp. . . . I knew through that how dastardly those representing the government [could be] and how low they could sink. They did not arrest Italians, and they did not arrest Germans.”²⁶

Around this time, Odetta had begun attending the progressive Mt. Hollywood Church on New Hampshire Avenue in Los Feliz, where she would sing in the choir. The charismatic minister, Allan Hunter, served as a counterweight to the prevailing winds of segregation that were by then blowing through Los Angeles. Mt. Hollywood was one of the earliest churches in the city to integrate, in the 1930s, and Hunter preached a universal love in words and deeds. “Reverend Allen [sic] . . . had his Sunday school teachers take us as kids to other churches, to mosques, and to synagogues,” Odetta recalled.²⁷

After Roosevelt issued the order for the internment camps, Hunter had seen to it that church members sprang into action, taking care of Japanese-owned homes and a nearby Japanese church, Hollywood Independent, until the war’s end. The folk singer Frank Hamilton, who attended Mt. Hollywood Church later on, said that Hunter had a profound impact on Odetta and her political views. “Odetta was undoubtedly impressed by his humanity and peaceful way,” he recalled. “There was a consistent pattern of the goals of natural Christianity—turning the other cheek—and its antiwar implications.”²⁸

Racial lines in Los Angeles had begun to harden as the black population multiplied. More and more restaurants started denying service to Negroes, and segregation became common in everything from bowling alleys to dance halls to pet cemeteries. Even public swimming pools were off-limits, except during the one day a week when blacks could swim by themselves, after which the pools were drained and refilled for whites. The Ku Klux Klan resurfaced and marched by city hall. “Everywhere there were borders, as dangerous to breach as if they were electrified,” a historian of the era noted. Odetta corroborated the account. “They didn’t have any signs, but my sister and I knew where we shouldn’t go,” she said.²⁹

To make matters worse, the Feliouses lived just a few miles from Hollywood, where few blacks were employed, other than in menial jobs, and where the studios depicted Negroes as shiftless ne’er-do-wells, bug-eyed coons, obsequious Uncle Toms, and faithful mammies. If Hattie McDaniel, one of the most successful black stars of the 1930s and 1940s, had managed to win recognition for her acting talents and comedic timing, she’d had little choice but to accept the stereotypical roles as maids and servants that came her way if she wanted a career in the movies. (Her character in Gone with the Wind, which brought her the first-ever Oscar for an African American, was notably called “Mammy.”)

That such a warped view of black Americans was being perpetuated by studios so close to home only seemed to magnify the impact on young Odetta, who long recalled the anger and hurt she felt as a child at the lack of any honorable roles for people of her race. Add to it Hollywood’s fixation on superficial beauty, which was hard for any girl to measure up to. “The mode of beauty was not my color, not my shape, not my people,” she said. “For a long time,” she added on another occasion, “Negro kids were growing up in this country, feeling . . . that they were only seen in the movies and on TV in derogatory roles. But a pride is necessary. . . . No one can dub you a valid human being. You have to feel you are a valid human being.”³⁰

At the age of thirteen, Odetta was still searching for that validity, unable to escape the feeling of being an outsider. As a young Negro, she had concluded that “society’s foot is on your throat, [and] every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot.”³¹ She kept her anger well hidden, but her lack of pride and sense of worthlessness were evident. On her first day of seventh grade at Thomas Starr King Junior High School, she met Jo Mapes (born Joanne Shanas), a white foster kid from Chicago who shared her sense of alienation and, like Odetta, watched as the other students all made their way inside the imposing concrete edifice. It didn’t take long for the two outcasts to spot one another.

“She was large for her age, much too big for her age, very aware of it,” Mapes recalled. “We were the only two left on the grounds and I walked over to her because she was alone on one side, I was alone on the other side of the yard, and everyone else had gone in. . . . She is clutching her notebook and her schoolbook, whatever she had, she is clutching them against her large body, her head is bowed over, and she’s not looking at anyplace but looking down at her feet, which are toes inward.”³²

Mapes figured it was her only chance to make a friend that day. “I’m new too and I’m Jewish,” she told Odetta. As Mapes later recalled, “I was pimply, fat, shy, and white. She was pimply, fat, shy, and black. We hit it off immediately.”³³

Mapes was the child of a schizophrenic, unwed Jewish mother, and she’d gone through a series of foster homes in Chicago, suffered abuse as a toddler, and eventually reconnected with her mother and ended up in Los Angeles by age thirteen, living at what she described as a “crumb bum” transient hotel above a liquor store overlooking Sunset Boulevard.³⁴

King Junior High was less than a mile from both the girls’ homes, in Los Feliz. Although it was only a short walk in geographic terms from East Hollywood, it was a great socioeconomic leap from the run-down streets, vacant lots, auto repair garages, and currency exchanges that Mapes saw out her window, and from the no-frills, tightly grouped homes on North Virgil Avenue where the Feliouses still lived, a few doors down from their original apartment. In Los Feliz, there were nice white Spanish-style houses with picket fences, green lawns, flower gardens, driveways, dogs, and two-parent families.

The school was largely white. Mapes sardonically remembered her female classmates as the “Hollywood Golden girls in their soft pastel colors of short sleeve cashmere or angora sweaters and matching bobby sox.” In the cafeteria, Jo, Odetta, and another girl, Ondine, who lived in the hotel with Jo, sat apart from the in-crowd, not far from the tough Latino kids, the other outliers in the building. Their dreams kept them from succumbing to their present reality. “’Detta was going to find a way to be proud, to be looked at as proud,” Mapes recalled. “We both felt that way.”³⁵

With Odetta having begun voice lessons again and Jo aspiring to a career as a singing actress like Jane Powell, the girls joined the glee club at school, where the teacher, Miss Taves, had false teeth that rattled when she talked. The girls sang songs from Gilbert and Sullivan and from the operetta The Student Prince. Jo, however, was soon booted from the squad for pretending she could read music.

Odetta was apparently a no-show for the glee club yearbook photo in seventh grade, something she often did, probably out of shame for the way she stood out. The photo that year captured a group of forty-six girls, all white except for two named Chung, dressed in dark skirts and white blouses with jaunty neck bows. Despite whatever misgivings Odetta had, at some point the school informed Flora that “Odetta needed a better opportunity in training, better than the school could provide her,” Mapes recalled. “So obviously they had discovered that they had a serious singer on their floor.”³⁶ And Mapes’s memory of their outcast status notwithstanding, Odetta also seems to have made a good impression on homeroom 106, which elected her vice president in the fall of 1944.

After school, the girls retreated to the Feliouses’ apartment. Odetta, Jo, and Jimmie Lee spent many afternoons jitterbugging to records. One day, Jimmie Lee brought home a stack of used 78s, and they popped one on the record player and heard, instead of dance music, the sound of a loud guitar going blangety-blang and an old black singer. “Yek, pooh, phooey!” they said, and yanked the needle off. It was their first taste of Lead Belly.³⁷

Flora, slim and dainty and usually attired in a housecoat or simple dress, kept busy in the kitchen. She snuck extra food to Jo to take home for dinner. Although Mapes remembered Flora as “lovely, giving, smiling,” Flora had a complicated relationship with her own daughter, who hadn’t been a child conceived in love. The folk singer Lynn Gold Chaiken, who knew Odetta much later, recalled Odetta saying that when she was a little girl, Flora had told her, “You were a mistake” or “I wasn’t supposed to have you”—a declaration that could only have added to Odetta’s sense of alienation.³⁸

By late 1944, Odetta’s stepfather was in bad shape. Doctors had recently diagnosed full-blown tuberculosis, and Zadock Felious was admitted to Los Angeles County General Hospital. A month later, on January 4, 1945, he died at the age of thirty-seven. For Odetta, it was another big blow; the only real father she’d ever known was gone. It wasn’t something she discussed, however, even with her closest friends. She would usually keep her deepest thoughts and feelings to herself. “I knew that something was going on with ’Detta and her family,” Mapes recalled. “It was obvious. I’d been through the same thing, but we never talked about it.”³⁹

It’s impossible, of course, to know how much of the anger Odetta felt growing up arose from family dynamics and how much stemmed from her lowly status in society, the denial of her race’s history, the cartoonish portrayals of black Americans in Hollywood, and an education system that seemed oblivious to her self-worth. But there’s no doubting how angry she was. Looking back many decades later, Odetta said that, as a teenager, “I was furious and I was angry and I hated . . . everything, everybody, including myself.”⁴⁰