John Irvin sang in a St. Luke quartet and played guitar with his father; Lucille, Carrol, Harold, and Dorothy sang in the church choir, but even before their baby sister could walk, they realized she had more musical talent than all of them. “When she was eight months old, my daughter hummed ‘Down by the Riverside’ and ‘Jesus Loves Me,’” Kate said. “I had a quilt that I had on the floor for her, and she wanted to look at magazines. Every time she saw a musical note, she tried to sing.”
Parishioners at St. Luke commented, when they saw little Eunice at church, that she clapped in time to the hymns. She must be blessed, they told her parents. By the time she was two and a half, Eunice could hoist herself onto the stool in front of the organ, sit at the keyboard, and make sounds come out, and not just any sounds. One time she played her mother’s favorite hymn, “God Be with You Till We Meet Again,” without a mistake.
“We knew she was a genius by the time she was three,” her brother Carrol declared, and it is a tribute to her parents that Eunice’s brothers and sisters did not begrudge the attention and opportunities that came her way. “She was preserved,” Dorothy remembered, exempted from the typical chores, washing dishes and the like. “Her fingers were protected. She was always special in that way. Nobody was jealous,” Dorothy added. “We adored her.”
Eunice took this special status in stride because her parents insisted on it. She didn’t dare get a swelled head. Yes, she had talent, her parents told her, but the talent was God-given, and she should be grateful. Eunice didn’t know what a “prodigy” was when people called her that, and no one at home explained it to her either. All she knew was that she absorbed the music she heard, especially the religious songs her mother sang around the house, “I’ll Fly Away” and “If You Pray Right (Heaven Belongs to You).” Kate sang when she cleaned and when she baked, and Eunice loved it when her mother, rarely missing a beat, sat her on the countertop, gave her an empty jam jar, and let her cut out shapes from the biscuit dough about to go in the oven.
As a full-fledged minister now, Kate traveled through the surrounding counties preaching and leading services. When Eunice turned four, Kate took her out on the road to open her events. Most of the time Eunice could barely reach the pedals on the church piano, which made the sight of this little girl dressed in her Sunday best even more arresting. The audience was primed to be impressed before she struck the first note, and Eunice didn’t disappoint. Though it might have seemed inappropriate, even cruel, to put a toddler to work, even the Lord’s work, Eunice liked the adventure of seeing new places and visiting new churches. If she was tired at the end of these services, she slept in the back seat of the car on the way back to Tryon, undisturbed by the occasional jostling on the bumpy rural roads.
J.D.’S JOB in the federal recovery program ended just as Kate’s preaching duties began to consume more of her time. At some point in this period, probably 1935 or 1936, he also closed the dry cleaning shop and took a new job cooking at a Boy Scout camp on Lake Lanier, the large man-made lake just south of town. Created in 1924 by damming one of the creeks, the lake now served the dual purposes of recreation for well-heeled white residents and a reservoir for the surrounding area. An ad to induce the sale of lots promised “They Rise Together—Land Values—Water Values,” with a barometer for illustration. The fringe benefits of J.D.’s new job included the extra food he brought home from camp and the chance to take his oldest son with him.
No matter how busy the week had been in the Waymon household, Kate insisted that Sunday be devoted to church, so every Saturday night the children had to shine their shoes, which they’d learned to do with a professional’s touch from their father, who had started a little shoeshine business, too. “We’d leave there [the house] on Sunday morning, and didn’t get back till Monday morning,” John Irvin explained. “We’d have the children’s service, then go right in the main service, and then stand up and sing.” The family might walk back to the house for a sandwich, and then it was back to church for the late afternoon and evening services. If one of the children had the temerity to ask, “Mama, why can’t we go home?” the answer was always the same: “Be quiet.”
When the family finally returned home, often at midnight, “Mama would walk out of the kitchen to get a chicken, wring its neck, and while that chicken was dyin’ out there, kickin’ and goin’ on, she would put water on the stove, make a fire, clean that chicken,” John Irvin explained. “We’d have chicken and gravy at one in the morning. Mama would say, ‘All right, wake up if you want to eat. Now come on.’ We used to do that all the time.”
SOMETIME EARLY IN 1937 things changed dramatically in the Waymon household. The children noticed that J.D. was not working anymore. Instead he stayed at home because he hadn’t been feeling well. Most days he just tended the garden. One night he took ill and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors diagnosed an intestinal blockage. John Irvin and Carrol remembered that their father had some kind of complicated operation, though they were unaware of the details. In her memoir, Eunice described it as “one of the first type in the world.” As she understood it, his stomach was washed and the wound left open to heal in the sun-drenched fresh air.
Kate spent weeks going back and forth to the hospital, and John Irvin and Lucille had to care for their siblings until J.D. was strong enough to come home. His illness also meant that Kate had to find work beyond her preaching. Options for black women were limited, even in Tryon, which considered itself progressive about race. A few women taught at the black school, but most did domestic work, either in the hotels or in the homes of their more affluent white neighbors. One of Kate’s first jobs was washing windows at a building on Trade Street. She took Carrol to help, and it proved to be a rude awakening for a boy who had been sheltered in the relative comfort of east Tryon and as the child of respected parents—“My daddy and mama’s name was all around Tryon,” John Irvin proudly recalled. Carrying a wash bucket and a mop behind his mother and then seeing her struggle at this manual labor made Carrol aware of the discrepancy between black and white. “It was the first time I felt humiliated and ashamed of the fact that we were poor,” he said. He was certain the family had suddenly tumbled down from its exalted perch to some lowly station, and it made him cry.
If Eunice was too young to appreciate all that was going on around her, she was delighted that her father had finally returned from the hospital. Though she was barely five, it fell to her to become J.D.’s nurse. Kate had to work; Lucille, Carrol, Harold, and Dorothy were in school; and John Irvin had a part-time job at a lumberyard, too. But this new arrangement suited father and daughter just fine. “She was the apple of his eye,” Carrol remembered.
Eunice went about her nursing duties with the utmost seriousness. Every day, weather permitting, she helped J.D. settle on a cot out in the yard just across from the Lyleses’ tennis court, so he could take in the sunshine as the doctors ordered. Strolling down Livingston to her family’s house, Ruth King would often see Eunice sitting attentively by J.D.’s side.
“The wound from his operation was a big ugly thing with a tube coming out of it, which drained fluid from his stomach,” Eunice wrote years later in near-cinematic detail. “I kept washing him, more than ten times a day, trying to keep that wound clean.” J.D. couldn’t eat solid food, so he made up a lunch of liquid ingredients every day, his favorite a combination of “raw eggs beaten with a little sugar and vanilla, mixed with Carnation milk,” Eunice recalled. She liked the taste of it, too, but she took only a sip now and then “because I knew we had to make him better.”
At first J.D. could only lie down. As he got stronger, he took walks around the yard and then in the neighborhood, one of the children at his side. “Hey, J.D.,” a friend might holler, and ask how he was doing. And J.D., with one hand on his child’s shoulder for support, raised his cane with the other in salute.
Eager to do some kind of work again, J.D. rigged up a little barbershop at the back of the house and taught John Irvin, who was now fifteen, how to give a proper shave. All the children marveled at their father’s ingenuity—he repaired worn-out shoes with a little leather and fine wire, he was a mechanic, and of course he made his own shaving soap from a special recipe. When his strength permitted, J.D., oldest son in tow, went to his customers’ homes to cut their hair and give them a shave. Though he couldn’t reestablish a full-fledged dry cleaning operation, J.D. occasionally took in sewing and laundry, mostly menswear. It was a cumbersome operation at home that nonetheless fascinated Eunice and her siblings as they watched this new ritual. First J.D. washed the clothes in a big tub in the kitchen, with special care given to the men’s pants. He would turn each pair inside out and hang them up so the water would drain. He explained that it kept them from “drawing up” or shrinking. He heated the iron, which was the extra-long heavy industrial model, on the stove to press the pants. But first he grabbed a few pine needles from a tree in the yard and ran the iron over them so it wouldn’t stick. Finally he put a damp cloth over the clothes and started the pressing. Because he was the oldest, John was allowed to participate as long as he followed directions and ironed the pants in proper sequence: first the apron and then each leg, carefully handled to avoid wrinkling and to keep the seams crisp.
DESPITE J.D. AND KATE’S best efforts to stay afloat, they couldn’t maintain the house on Livingston Street, and sometime after J.D. was strong enough, the family moved to a smaller house about a half mile north. They were barely there a year when a fire broke out in the middle of the night. Eunice remembered that the treasured pump organ was the first piece of furniture to be rescued. It was understandable that the Waymons might feel hexed. This was the second fire that had taken their home in six years, but they refused to lose faith, reminding themselves that no one had been hurt either time.
After this latest fire the Waymons settled on the second floor of the Episcopal Center, a building that was part of the Good Shepherd Church, which, along with its small school, served the black community. But the cramped, noisy lodgings hampered J.D.’s recovery. He and Kate realized they had to move, and the only place they could afford was a small house in Lynn, a hamlet roughly three miles north of Tryon on the road to Columbus, the Polk County seat.
Lynn was so primitive some families didn’t have outhouses, but when one turned away from the shacks and toward the woods the beauty was unsurpassed. Eunice loved the family’s new garden, and she delighted in following J.D. up and down the rows, pulling the weeds that he pointed out. “When we got tired, we’d sit down and play patty cake or just talk,” she wrote later.
J.D. had always had some kind of car, and now that the family was in the country, they needed his Model-A Ford. The children loved the way their father could maneuver up and down the hills, knowing precisely when to shut off the engine and let the car coast to save gas. They thought it was natural to peer through the floorboards and see the ground below, and they giggled when J.D., concerned for his wife’s safety, would instruct her to sit in the front seat and then take a piece of rope to tie her in because the passenger door was so flimsy.
On winter nights J.D. backed the Model A up the hill near the house and stopped it at just the right angle so he could drain the radiator. The next morning he took the water he had collected, heated it for a few minutes on the stove to get the chill off, and then put the water back in the radiator, got in, and started the car. “We didn’t know nothin’ about antifreeze,” John Irvin chuckled years later, reminded of his father’s creativity.
A bus was supposed to pick up the black children in Lynn and take them into town for school. On the days it didn’t come, the kids had to walk. Sometimes it felt like thirty miles instead of three, and when it was cold, parents came up with clever ways to keep their children warm. Ruth Hannon, who was between Eunice and Dorothy in age, recalled her father heating stones on the fireplace hearth at night. The next morning, he would wrap up a few and put them in the pockets of her jacket and her twin sister Rachel’s before they headed into town.
SHORTLY AFTER THE FAMILY settled in Lynn, John, now seventeen, went to work at the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Spindale about forty miles east of Tryon. Everyone called it the “Three C,” and as one of the federal programs created to get the country out of the Depression, the camp offered men a way to make money by doing work on public land. John was a truck driver who ferried other “Three C’ers” through the countryside to lay sod on the side of highways, fix fences, and occasionally fight fires. His camp mates called him “Pee Wee” because he was smaller than most of them, but he proudly held his own. He was paid $30 a month and sent $22 home as required by program regulations. He insisted that his parents use one of the payments to buy the family’s first piano, an upright that their neighbor Martha Brown wanted to sell.
Mrs. Brown, who worked for one of the white doctors in town, and Kate shared the same belief about music. They disdained anything that wasn’t religious—blues, jazz, Tin Pan Alley. Kate referred to this as “real music,” and she never forgot the time her own mother chastised her for singing “Everybody’s Doing It,” which Kate had heard at a minstrel show. But J.D. still had a taste for “real” music, and when he sat down at the keyboard and played “real” songs for Eunice, she picked them up by ear, and the two had a grand time. Periodically J.D. went to the window to watch for Kate, and if he saw her, he signaled Eunice with a whistle to make a fast segue into one of her mother’s favorite hymns.
When John returned from the Three-C camp, he liked a turn at the piano, too. “I’d be playing ‘Coonshine’ or ‘Love Oh Careless Love,’” he said, and then he’d hear Kate’s voice.
“Hey boy!”
“What’s a matter, Mama?”
“That don’t sound right.” And John Irvin knew he’d been caught.
Every now and then John teased his baby sister by hogging the piano—at least that’s how Eunice saw it. He would sit down on the bench and prop his feet on the keyboard so she couldn’t play.
“Mama,” she wailed, “John Irvin is on the piano. He won’t let me have it.” After a stern warning from Kate and a few tears from Eunice, John relented, and Eunice had the piano all to herself.
SOMETIME IN 1940 the Waymons moved back to Tryon. Carrol and Dorothy remembered that first year as a blur of two temporary stops before the family resettled on the east side. This last house was less than a mile from the Livingston Street place, but it felt much farther because the streets wound back and forth up the hills. By this time, Lucille had moved out—she had married Isaac Waddell, one of the family’s neighbors. Not long after, John left, too, prompted by an argument with his father that made him realize that at nineteen he was old enough to be on his own. In 1941 Kate and J.D. had their fourth daughter, Frances, and three years later Samuel—instantly known as Sam—was born, the last of the Waymon children.
Always on the lookout for the next opportunity, J.D. put a small extension on the house and bought an assortment of provisions to outfit the room as a store. He sold candy and food and then realized he could earn extra money making sandwiches in the morning and taking them later to construction sites to sell to the men along with drinks. You could even order ahead if you wanted. “John imagined up his own career,” according to Holland Brady, who would go from the observant teenager at Missildine’s to one of Tryon’s respected white architects. “I always say he invented the ten a.m. coffee break.”
Eunice was so accomplished at the keyboard now that the congregation at St. Luke designated her the regular Sunday pianist even though she had just turned ten. It was often an all-day affair that began with a morning service, continued through Sunday school, and finished with the six o’clock evening prayers. She also played Wednesday nights at a prayer meeting and Friday nights at choir practice. Her perfect pitch allowed her to identify any note, and she could play something back after a single hearing.
Eunice had almost no formal training to supplement her natural talent, which was influenced by what she heard and felt intuitively. And though these early years were also shaped by her mother’s insistence that she stay away from popular music, it didn’t take much listening to realize that the rhythm, the beat, and the melody that she loved in that forbidden music could be found in church music, too. She’d heard it herself, at the evangelical Holiness Church tucked away on one of the streets south of St. Luke. “Their prayer meetings were one great commotion,” Eunice remembered, “with people testifying and shouting all night.” The music sounded as though it came straight out of Africa, or at least how Eunice imagined Africa would sound. She loved hearing the revival drums beating while the congregation rose up in song. Dorothy, who sometimes went, too, was fascinated by the woman who beat the drums, tapping out one rhythm with her hands while her stomping feet were doing something entirely different.
Revival time at St. Luke, when parishioners rededicated themselves to God, ran a close second to the Holiness Church. Out-of-t own preachers came in for the two-week stints of nightly prayer meetings. Congregants who felt the spirit stood up to testify, shouting and speaking in tongues with such intensity that it spread to other worshippers who started their own testimony. Pretty soon people ran up and down the aisles under the practiced watch of the Saints, the church women in their crisp white dresses, white stockings, and white shoes who stepped in to administer the necessary aid if one of the testifiers was overcome. Occasionally, a testifier had to be taken to the hospital.
Eunice’s job was to keep playing regardless of the commotion. She realized that if she repeated the distinctive gospel chords she knew so well, she could get the congregation back on track. But with all the frenzy around her, it was hard to pay attention, and it took all of her concentration not to leap up from the keyboard and run down the aisle, too.
Most evenings Eunice was tired when the prayer meeting ended, but she woke up excited the next morning, knowing she would do it all over again. She might not be able to explain or describe what was happening, but she understood already that the keyboard gave her power. With soft, slow chords she calmed the congregation. When the chords crescendoed faster and faster, she lifted them up, and in those moments she could think of no more thrilling place to be.
LIKE THE OTHER black children in town, Eunice attended Tryon Colored School. It was a wooden building whose few rooms served all the classes, which encompassed elementary, secondary, and high school through the eleventh grade. It had no central heat or running water. To keep down the dust, boys from the upper grades were recruited to spread creosote, a mixture of chemicals used as a preservative, over the floors every day after school. The enrollment was usually about two hundred, and longtime principal LeRoy Wells supervised a staff of five who divided up the grades among themselves.
As was the custom in the South, the black schools received hand-me-down materials from the white schools. Textbooks were often in tatters, their back covers a roll call of the white youngsters who had thumbed their pages when the books were new. Biology and chemistry experiments were difficult if not impossible because the school had so little equipment. But the dedicated teachers insisted that substandard materials would not interfere with their mission to give Tryon’s black children the best education possible. The teachers routinely supplemented the textbooks with other books or pamphlets, usually from their own collections and at their own expense. Parents, too, made sure their children understood the importance of education. “I always had aimed to learn,” Kate told hers. “I even stayed in at recess because I wanted to make a hundred if I had to stay in school all day.” She brought home old copies of Reader’s Digest and Look magazine from her housecleaning jobs so her children could keep their reading skills sharp and keep up on current events.
Of all the teachers, Orine B. Wiggins was considered the strictest. Stern and demanding, she nonetheless earned her students’ grudging respect. If she complimented you, you knew you deserved it. If she chastised you, you knew you deserved that, too. “Give me your hand,” she would say to someone who had misbehaved. And when the guilty party complied, she rapped the child’s knuckles with a ruler to make her point. “She wouldn’t pass you if you didn’t deserve it,” recalled Artie Hamilton. “If you got through, you were high school equivalent. She taught you more than what was in the text. She taught the ways of life.”
For all the intellectual effort inside its walls, Tryon Colored School made a mockery of “separate but equal,” the standard of the Jim Crow South. Principal Wells had been lobbying for a new building for some time to no avail, and at the end of the school year in the spring of 1940, his patience gave out. Sometime during the first week of June, Wells contacted a local man, Arthur Suber, and gave him $25 to burn down the school. Suber recruited two other people, Cleveland Rice and Hattie White, and told them they could make “easy money” on a “small job.”
On June 9, the three of them went to the school, pried open a door, and doused the floors with kerosene. They lit a match, and the place went up in flames, fueled by all the creosote that had built up during the school year. The fire department came, but the firemen didn’t have enough water to douse the blaze. No part of the building could be saved. Five days later the police arrested Suber, Rice, and White, and on June 19, ten days after the fire, Wells was arrested as well. Suber told authorities that Wells had furnished the money for the arson “so that they could have a nice brick building like other schools.”
(The four were convicted on arson charges in August and sentenced to prison. Wells appealed his conviction, won a new trial, was convicted again, and eventually served a prison sentence that began in 1942.)
The school burning tore a hole in the town’s fabric, reminding black and white alike of the inequalities that lay beneath Tryon’s amiable surface. In more personal terms, Wells’s action—dramatic, intemperate, foolish, however one described it—proved that anyone could succumb to the pressures of the moment. The entire episode hit close to home for J. D. Waymon. He knew Wells as more than the principal at his children’s school. They were friends and cooks together during the summer at the Boy Scout camp at Lake Lanier, and he could only guess at what finally drove Wells to strike out.
Eight-year-old Eunice Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina
(Courtesy of Frances Fox)
With Tryon Colored in ashes, the black students moved to the school building at Good Shepherd, the Episcopal church that had once employed Reverend Scotland Harris. The church had closed its school operation in 1936, but fortunately the building was still there to accommodate the public school students until Tryon Colored could be rebuilt. (The new school opened in December 1942, and Polk County officials applauded its “modern” plan.)
Eunice was only seven when Tryon Colored went up in flames and too young to understand. She was simply happy to go to school, and she took to her studies the way she took to the piano. On those occasions that the Tryon Daily Bulletin published the honor roll from the colored school, at least two or three Waymons made the list, including Eunice. A photo of Eunice a year later shows a serious girl whose bright eyes cast a knowing look at the camera. Her immaculate appearance suggests the great care that was taken before she left the house.
Eunice’s chum Fred Counts considered himself her competition; they vied to see who could be the star of the class. “We were one and two in the class,” he said. “Of course she was number one.”