Sterling A. Brown’s: A Negro Looks at the South

The morning after the songfest, Willis James and I sat out on the lawn of President Bond’s home, under a large, shady water oak. Barely a current of air was stirring; it was quiet and drowsy. A farm truck might cough and splutter down the red road beyond the hedge, or a mule wagon might poke along, but there wasn’t much else active. Willis gave out with good talk. He was justly pleased at the showing his boys had made the night before. He wanted me to be sure to tell Kemper Harreld and Tic Tillman, his colleagues at Morehouse, and Florence Read, his boss at Spelman, just what he was doing. “I had made out all right with the fellows,” he said. “They took to you O.K. Probably talking about you now over in Macon.”

As we were talking, a couple of men in work clothes yelled at each other across the road. “Ssh,” said Willis. “Listen.”

Willis explained that “the bear” was the sun; the first man had meant, “The sun will get you, grab you, knock you flat.” The second one meant, “How come he gonna get me, if he ain’t got you? I’m as good a man as you.”

The peaches had all been picked, were gone from this section, which was famous for them. Pickers followed them in both northeasterly and southwesterly directions. Pickers’ wages depended on the market; sometimes they were paid by the bushel, sometimes by the day. “It all depends on the white folks,” said Willis. “They’re so smart they don’t standardize. The more money peaches are bringing, the more leniency they show. Only natural.”

THE DUKE COMES TO ATLANTA

There are not many first-rate jazz bands in the South. As the musicians develop, scouts from New York and Chicago discover them and put them on big time. A group of college boys at Alabama State, with a few pick-up musicians from the vicinity, were whisked away to New York as Erskine Hawkins’s band; Doc Wheeler’s band, famous in southern Florida, is one of the latest to take to the national road. Negro and white jazz musicians, like many Negro and white writers, artists, professors, and scientists, are drawn away from the South to the better paying North. A few white Southern hotels may have middle-of-the-road jazz orchestras, but for most whites and Negroes, jazz comes back to its native home on radios, phonographs, juke-boxes, and one-night stands. A few years ago, I heard Duke Ellington’s band play a one-night stand at the Atlanta Municipal Auditorium. The city had been agog for weeks over the Duke’s appearance. The vast auditorium was packed. Half of the seats from stage right to the rear of the hall were set aside for whites; the opposite half for Negroes. The Negroes who sat there were upper and middle class: teachers, college professors, students, professional men, all of those whose compunctions about segregation or jazz let them attend. Down on the floor swarmed the Negro hoi polloi. Their garb was of all sorts: full dress, street clothing, work clothing, sweaters, and slacks. Some were cutting up frantically. On the side near the white folks, couples would put on the dog while the whites cheered their foolery and tossed down coins to them. One black Amazon, larger than her sweating partner, was clad in a low-cut, cerise silk gown, bulging and threatening to split at the seams, a cast-off from her employer, probably, who called her by name and offered advice like a fan to a baseball player. “Go to it, Marthy; oh do it!” she screamed almost hysterically, as Marthy billowed and shimmied and spun like a barge in a storm. On the side near the disapproving Negro “dicties,” the showoffs checked their antics, but they resumed them when they danced back to the white folks’ side and the shower of silver. No whites, of course, stepped on the dance floor, and few, if any, of the Negro middle class.

I looked at the Duke and his men, sleekly groomed, perfectly tailored. I wondered what was going on behind those impassive fronts. I looked at the fellows whose names I knew best then: Hodges, Barney Bigard, Rex Stewart, Cootie Williams, Otto Hardwicke, and Sonny Greer. Here were sophisticates, some of them expatriates from the South, who had seen the boom years of Harlem, had played before the fashionable world of the continent and even before crowned heads. I wondered if I was wrong in reading a cold disdain in their faces. And I wondered also what whites looking at these men were thinking. The whole range of complexions was there: from Juan Tizol, looking like a white man, through the more numerous light browns, to the darker Tricky Sam Nanton, Rex, and Cootie; some looked like Latins, some like Orientals. Finished artists, at the top of their bracket, suave world travelers, they seemed detached and bored, watching the show unsmiling and unfrowning, with only an occasional nod or whisper.

They gave out with good music. Even the clowning of the dancers could not stand against it, and as the musicians warmed to their job, more and more spectators banked around the footlights. When Lawrence Brown or Johnny Hodges or Tricky Sam or Cootie took their solo spots, cries of rapture rose to the girders. Ivie Anderson was the crowd’s darling. She flaunted on the stage brown and slim and impudent, her body seemingly poured in a sequin-glittering sheath. I heard gasps from the high-toned folks around me. She had as much class as many of the visitors on the other side of the hall from Druid Hills or Peachtree or North Shore Drive. As she sang “It Don’t Mean a Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing,” the Duke’s pagan challenge to an unhepped world, she swung her body slightly and the lights picked out the shimmering spangles on her gown; this and a few slightly risqué lines and gestures, archly interpolated, brought down the house. They wanted encores, but she gave only two. “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street” and “When he kisses me I sure stay kissed,” she sang, and her listeners believed her. Her last number was “Solitude.” Many listeners would gladly have done something for that sorrow she sang about.

The band took a long time out between numbers. Maybe it was because the bus ride had been tough, and many miles lay ahead before New York again, and that “A Train” for Harlem. Maybe they just didn’t care for the high jinks on the floor. But the audience was unresentful.

Hank and I wandered backstage at the long intermission. The Duke remembered me; the old Washington home-boy stuff stood me in good stead. He had to talk to some white fans on the other side of backstage, but he promised to get that over soon. Hank and I watched the whites, especially the womenfolk, swarm all over Duke. He seemed to need protection, but was hardly likely to get the right sort from the hefty cop, who stood nearby, glowering, ill at ease. Finally we caught Duke’s eye and set out into the forbidden territory for the rescue. As we came up, a smartly dressed woman was gushing: “Oh, Mister Deyook I think youah playing is just mahvelous! Couldn’t you play tomorrow night for just a small party aout at my haouse? It would be wonderful, it really would. Just a few chosen friends?” Duke explained carefully, a bit tiredly it seemed, that he was on contract, that he was leaving Atlanta that night, that he just couldn’t. But the hostess was persistent, until Duke tore himself away; he was very sorry but he was under contract, and now he really had to leave as he wanted to talk to some old friends. As we walked off with him, the large gathering of whites stared at us.

“Man, I sure was glad you came over,” he said. But the intermission was about ended, so he told us to wait backstage, and he could see us when he took time out again. That plan didn’t work well. The Atlanta cop came over to the wings and asked all of the Negroes what they were doing there. I told him that we were waiting to talk with Duke. He let that pass and sent all the others away. Then, after he had been on the white side of backstage he came back. “What are you all doing back here?”

“I told you, officer, we were waiting for Mr. Ellington. He told us to wait.”

“Well, Duke ain’t got nothing to do with this,” he growled. “I got orders from the manager to clear all of you out of here.”

I started to say something, but I looked at Hank, and we both looked at the cop, who had a mean glint in his narrowed eyes. So we walked offstage. We had to go through the whites crowded in the opposite wings, still oohing and ahing at the fine jazz. Some of them, however, did stop to stare at us as we picked our way through their ranks.

The cops didn’t quite know how to handle this sort of turnout. I believe that they were jumpy. There was a lot of liquor flowing, and many Negroes were loudly on the loose. I saw a cop slap a colored woman who was arguing with him, and as she was pulled away from him, I saw him kick her solidly. There were many Negro men around, but they did nothing about it. The woman, swearing and crying, jerked against those trying to keep her from more trouble. I saw no cops in evidence, however, at one dangerous point. The crowd of dancers suddenly opened; one woman backed off swiftly; another slowly, almost majestically, followed her with a razor in her hand, her arm going up methodically, in long graceful curves. Men rushed toward the furious woman, then stepped back from those sweeping arcs. After the pursued had safely got out of the hall, and the steady pursuer was about at the door, I saw two cops suddenly dart through the crowd.

Toward the end of the evening, when the autograph hunt was on, the cops had to see many interracial taboos ignored. Hepcats, thrill seekers, autograph hounds, male and female, upper and lower class, white and Negro, stormed about the platform. What the cops should do when the whites left their safe perches and joined the press was not clear. They just hovered about, as protectively as they could. But they couldn’t stop whites from being jostled about, their shins barked, their ribs elbowed, their toes stepped on. The whites didn’t seem to mind: “It don’t mean a thing; all you got to do is swing!” The Duke and his musicians had to sign slips of paper, cards, notebooks, handkerchiefs, pieces of clothing. It was like a madhouse, with the Duke and the bandsmen the only cool and sane ones as they signed their names with flourishes.

FAREWELL TO BASIN STREET

On my last trip to New Orleans, a sergeant got on the train at Anniston and squeezed his bulk into the seat beside me. He was a friendly sort. I learned much of his business, his chance to go to officers’ training camp, his football career at Xavier University, his various jobs before Pearl Harbor. He ran over with praise of his native New Orleans. My tourist’s curiosity about the Creole cuisine fired his language; he described the culinary marvels of all the various gumbos, of Jambalaya (Creole cousin of Hopping-John), of Gombo Zhèbes (a mixture of all the greens on God’s earth), and of the sea foods, until the woman in front threw amused glances at us. He was hastening home on furlough; one of the jobs he anticipated was cooking up some of those fine Creole dishes. I begged off from his hymns of adoration. I had not eaten since above Spartanburg, and we were nearly in Birmingham.

I asked him about New Orleans jazz. This was another street that he walked familiarly. His brother, a clarinet player, was a friend of Barney Bigard, and had been in France with Noble Sissle when Barney was there with Duke Ellington. Yes, he knew Sidney Bechet, King Oliver, Kid Ory, Satchmo’, all of them. He looked with greater favor on me; I was a bit more than a traveling schoolteacher now in his eyes. When I spoke of Kid Rena, he corrected my pronunciation but beamed. Maybe I could find Kid Raynyay. I should go to the Fern Dance Hall, on Iberville between Rampart and Burgundy, anytime late at night. Sure I could get in. Just go on in. I’d find plenty my color there, if not my race. If I didn’t find him there, and Rena was known to be irregular, I might have to seek Big Eye Louie, the historic clarinetist. On Derbigny between Columbus and Kelerec, everybody would tell you where Big Eye was; not a soul in that neighborhood but would look out for Big Eye. The sergeant also named his nephew, a hot jazz cat, who could help me find Rena and Louie if these leads failed.

I could not find Kid Rena and Big Eye Louie; I did not exhaust all the sergeant’s leads, though I tried some new ones. Standing across from the high school on Rampart Street, I was accosted mysteriously by a young fellow who told me, “Yes, it is true. He’s dead now”; and I remembered meeting him at Paul Robeson’s concert and that he was a music teacher. He had then promised that he’d help me find those remaining New Orleans jazzmen. I did not know, the school bell summoning the teacher away, whether it was Kid Rena’s trumpet or Big Eye Louie’s clarinet that death had finally quieted; from other people I heard that it was Big Eye. There was much more than jazz, however, that I wanted to learn about New Orleans, and after a reasonable effort I gave up the search for those musicians who stayed behind, after their compères, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, and Zutty Singleton had gone up the Mississippi to Chicago and Kansas City.

Missing these pioneers, I tried to obtain the album in which Heywood Hale Broun recorded the New Orleans jazz of Kid Rena, Big Eye, Alphonse Picou, James Robinson, and other oldsters. It came late, almost too late in their lives, this putting on wax what was probably closest to the fine old source stuff of jazz. Five music stores, including the largest in New Orleans, not only did not have the album, but had not heard of it (New York would be the place to get that, they cracked); and they looked quizzically at me when I asked if they knew of Rena. I should not have been surprised; my first day in New Orleans I noticed that Frankie Masters (a sweet “name-band”) was playing the Hotel Roosevelt. And at a prom at Southern University up country, I had heard a Negro band from New Orleans play sweet jazz to which the collegians danced sedately, with only a bit of genteel jitterbugging. The vocalist was a chit of a girl. I could not help thinking, when she ventured a diluted blues, how Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith would have snorted at this child being sent to do a woman’s work. The record shops catering to Negroes were doing a booming business in blues (Big Maceo, Yank Rachal, Bea Booze, and Lil Green) and gutter smut (She Want to Sell My Monkey and Let Me Play with Your Poodle), but they didn’t stock albums, especially an album by somebody named Rena. Never heard of him.

Basin Street was another disappointment. I knew that at the very time when the famous blues came out, Basin Street already belonged to the lost past:

That’s where the light and the dark folks meet

Heaven on earth, they call it Basin Street.

Even in its glory, it was a short street to have spread so much joy and jazz abroad. But I was not ready for its change of name to North Saratoga Street; after Canal and Rampart, what New Orleans street could be more widely known than Basin? Only a stone’s throw away from the notorious section it magnetized is now the Lafitte Housing Project, trim and model. Across the iron picket fence, the Southern Railroad trains rumble “down the line,” but the street itself is quiet, with warehouses and commercial buildings where the bordellos and gaudy saloons flourished. Sole memento of the vanished era of plush and lace, mahogany furniture, long mirrors, and costly paintings, is a semi-pretentious white house, graying in the railroad soot.

Behind these long arched elegant windows, boarded now, reigned that internationally known purveyor of octoroon and quadroon beauties, Lulu White, whose diamonds and other gems made her resemble “the electrical display of the Cascade at the late St. Louis exposition.” This had been a show-place of Storyville, the redlight district, where over a hundred musicians, white and black, were regularly employed in the restaurants and cabarets. Many of the bandsmen later became drawing cards in the cities of America and Europe. In the “palaces,” however, the piano was the favored instrument, and the pianists, so frequently Negro, were called “professors.” “Professor” Tony Jackson was legendary, famed for his version of the “Naked Dance”; he is dead now, and so, more recently, is Jelly Roll Morton, who started as a mere “winin’ ” boy and whose memoirs recapture much of the lost resplendence and ribaldry. A third “professor,” Spencer Williams, composed Mahogany Hall Stomp to celebrate Lulu White’s place, Shim-Me-She-Wabble to celebrate one of the entertainments provided there, and Basin Street Blues to celebrate the whole region. The last blues was elegiac even then (thirty years ago):

Don’t you want to go with me

Down the Mississippi . . .

Rampart Street: and I thought of Ida Cox’s plangent blues of the old times:

I want to go down to Rampart Street.

I want to hear those colored jazz bands play . . .

Across Canal to South Rampart, where Louis Armstrong, before finding harbor at the Waif’s home, had sat on a coal cart scatting out his wares in what he hoped was a bass voice, where he and Sidney Bechet later played on the same advertising wagon, where Clarence Williams, backed by some of the best young musicians, played piano at the Red Onion Café, and laid up memories for Red Onion Blues, Gravier Street Blues, and Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home. Gravier Street was still ramshackly enough to stir a blues feeling, but the jazz bands weren’t around. Rampart was a busy street, lined with offices, perfume stands, beer-joints, clothes stores, groceries, and record stores. But it wasn’t the Rampart Street of hot jazz. In one juke-joint, packed and jammed on Saturday night, the favored records were schmaltzy; one souse put nickel on top of nickel in order to hear:

When the lights go on again, all over the world . . .

The sentiment was fine, but I am afraid that it was the falsetto that got him. And it was on Rampart Street that I ran into a tall white man selling a song of his composing, a hymn of which, as unbelievable as it may sound, the second line of the chorus ran, “And we shall all be as white as snow.” Dr. Livingston, I presume.

On the scrap piles of the record shops, however, there were some finds: the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s Livery Stable Blues, a few of Clarence Williams’s Red Onion Fives, and Jelly Roll’s Oh Didn’t He Ramble, that good-natured cartoon of the old funeral processions. I took this record to the house of some New Orleans friends and it quickened their memories. Chummy remembered how instead of Home Sweet Home, Papa Celestine would send the dancers away with Old Man Mose Is Dead, and Kid Rena would play Get Out of Here. He remembered Kid Ory’s “tail-gate” trombone and Bechet’s wild, free clarinet. Before Bechet would have you in his band, he told me, you would have to play High Society to his taste. And his taste was the way Picou had played it. Among the Creoles, Picou was remembered better than some of these others, but Perez and Robichaux were recalled, and a few light Creoles, Dave Perkins especially, who played with both colored and white bands. Everybody remembered the river steamboats, where Fate Marable assembled noted crews of jazzmen.

Both Chummy and Ferd told of the great appeal of the funeral bands. Chummy said that he would never miss a funeral; he and two others of the “second lines,” the New Orleans kids who, just as kids anywhere, would stream behind the band, but who, unlike the others, had better bands to mimic. Ferd said that he would wait at Bienville and North Claiborne, and then fall in; whites and blacks and inbetweens, there was no segregation then with jazz leveling the low barriers. They remembered how after the slow funeral marches of the graveyard, on the way back the band would kick out on I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You! Mrs. Chummy recalled the tale of the funeral of a big shot, a bon vivant, whose respectable cortège was suddenly swelled when the girls from the crib houses filed out to take their mourning places.

Bring out your rubber-tired hearses, bring out your rubber-tired hacks They’re taking old Johnnie to the graveyard, and they ain’t gonna bring him back.

Most of the memories were of the funeral parades, as my informants could go to these but not to the honky-tonk dances, or Storyville maisons de joie, or to Antoine’s, world famous restaurant, where Picou had a high class orchestra. Those funerals must have been grand experiences: the stalwart horses, plumed and decked out in nets and feathers (I learned from Mr. Geddes, one of the city’s most prosperous undertakers, that his father’s livery stable was famous for its fine horses). After the slow, doleful music, there was shrill or muted weeping at the tomb. And then the return: a roll of the drums, a few quick blasts on trumpet, and then the band kicking, jamming, definitely not dead. They tell me those dressed up horses pranced to the music, throwing their hooves high. I should like to have been one of that “second line” of kids.

But that too was a lost custom. At Geddes’ Funeral Parlor, limousines had replaced the noble horses. Out of deep sentiment, Mr. Geddes had kept some of the stalls of the old livery stable, and his doorway was lighted by heavy carriage lamps (he was the first to use these in New Orleans, he said proudly, wistfully). I attended two wakes at his parlors. He told me that one of the deceased, a World War veteran, was to have a band at his funeral, but it would not be like the bands of old, it was a military band instead. I did not go to hear it.

There were a few good jazz combinations in town, I learned, but most of them were playing in white places where I could have gone only at the cost of problems. I found later that Bunk Johnson had recently come to town from New Iberia, and had been driven down Rampart Street between sidewalks crowded with yelling people. This was in 1942. Since then Bunk Johnson has come back to the recording studios. Jazz lovers over the nation bought him a new set of teeth; Sidney Bechet’s dentist brother made them for him: “I’m glad you got your chops back, man.”

Charles Smith’s essay, “Land of Dreams,” rebuilds his fascinating and lucky journey in search of lost New Orleans jazzmen. Better sleuths than I have discovered in contemporary New Orleans creators of jazz in the primary manner, like the clarinetist George Lewis and the trombonist Jim Robinson, and have recorded them for the Climax, Jazzman, and Jazz Information labels. Harry Lim, the cat from Java, has explored white New Orleans and has come up with a group that continues the tradition of the Original Dixielanders and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. Stacked beside these, my search was a failure. But though my stay in New Orleans was prolonged, there was too much other than jazz that I needed to learn about. The pioneer clarinetist, Picou, I understand, is weaving his lovely melodies now at Dutches restaurant. As Dutches would be forbidden to me today, so the places where Picou played in 1942 were forbidden too, unless I was willing to passa blanc, which on that sojourn would have jeopardized some of my standing. In spite of the resurrection of more persistent researchers, however, I think that there still is truth in what I sensed in 1942: that in New Orleans the feeling for jazz was nostalgic, commemorative, quite different from the force that sustained the young Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Jimmy Noone, and Johnny Dodds. Bunk Johnson had to go to the coast for a real hearing. New Orleans gave jazz to the world; the world parceled bits of it back over the turntable and the airwaves.

A friend took me to see a colored Creole family in the housing project that is fringed by Basin Street. But it was far from Basin Street in a sense, for they gave us gorgeous coconut cake and ginger ale, and the music from Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra swelled dulcetly from the radio.

I left New Orleans shortly after on the Southern. As the train picked up speed rumbling “down the line,” I saw Lulu White’s famed house glimmering there in the dusk, a pale ghost of a place. I found myself wondering if octoroon wraiths were walking elegantly through those dusty halls, and to what delicate piano-playing . . .

PO’ WANDERIN’ PILDOM, MISERUS CHILE

When Horace Mann Bond and Willis James regaled me with a report on their 1942 Summer Festival of Folk Music at Fort Valley, I was struck with envy. W. C. Handy, an honored guest, had played “St. Louis Blues” on his cornet, backed by a Georgia jam band of harmonica, guitar, and washboard. Buster Ezelle had sung “Salt Water Blues” to his own guitar playing, and then had played a oneman duet on guitar and a harmonica harnessed around his neck. The prize-winner for originality had played “John Henry” on a strand of haywire strung between two bricks on a plank. An inventor, this fellow certainly was going to have his music. But these were curiosities, Willis assured me: the real musical value of the festival lay in the guitar playing and singing.

My unconcealed envy touched the sympathies of my informants, who put their heads together, invited me down to Fort Valley State College to give a talk, and managed to raise traveling expenses so that the two prize-winning quartets of the Festival could again drive over from Macon.

They came in uniforms. “The Middle Georgia Singers,” runners-up in the Festival, wore dark blue silk shirts, with MIDDLE GA running diagonally across, and a large S over the heart. All had on blue and white polka dot bow ties and spick and span white trousers. “The Silver Moons,” the Festival winners, wore lighter blue silk shirts with a silver crescent over their hearts, silver bow ties, white sashes, and white trousers. The Middle Ga’s had a fifth member of their quartet, not at all a fifth wheel because their tenor was accustomed to knocking himself out. In spite of his weak heart, I was told, he sang with such fervor that he often came near dying. The quartets tried to be good sports; but like a baseball team one had out-bid the other for a star performer. Moreover, the recent contest had been very close. Their applause for each other was at first polite, but it came hard, I could see. Then as each quartet warmed up, the applause of the other got colder and finally the applauders stopped clapping and just looked at each other.

The nine fellows were keen for the cutting contest (cutting in the musical sense). Each quartet was introduced by substantially the same rite; the spokesman stepped forward, and to rhythmic humming in the background, named his team: “The fourth to my left is Mr. C. E. Smith, my second bass; give him a cheer.” The audience of Fort Valley summer school students came on with this come-on: “Mr. C. L. Bell, third from my left, is my first bass; give him a cheer . . . Mr. J. W. Walker, second from my left, is first tenor; give him a cheer . . . and last but not least, yours truly, H. P. Purnell, your announcer, second tenor and manager.” He omitted the “Give him a cheer,” but he got a good warm one anyway.

I had never heard singing exactly like this. Once or twice they imitated the Golden Gates, but their best style (and both quartets were as close in style as in quality) was a new type of harmonizing. Willis James denied indignantly that it had any kinship to barbershop quartets, and I should have had more sense and a better ear than to have used the term. He was so irritated that I missed getting exactly his characterization of the type of singing. And, of course, words have always been weak in conveying musical qualities. There was a great deal of swinging all around the melody, or ringing changes, of all sorts of weird chords. The range of voices was extreme; the tenor reaching high and grasping the note, the bass sinking lower and lower—playing with his hearers—“Will he reach it?”—then reaching that one easily, smiling faintly, and then, after a quick breath, submerging again. It was, of course, virtuosity. But after playing around, back to the melody the quartet would come, seriously and movingly, pumping bass and leaping tenor fused again as a driving unit.

It was a sad music they sang, replete with minors, less plaintive, however, than tragic. And though we knew these young fellows were having a good time at their singing, we could also see that they understood what they were singing about; and they drove it with power into the hearts of their listeners. They were good artists.

The Middle Georgia quartet started a prayer song, “Though I walk all night long, til I find the Lord.” But this mounted from prayer to a weird yelling; the singers were tense and frowning, except for their leader who took it easy, and held the reins on them:

The soul couldn’t rest contented

Until I find my-my-my-my-Lord . . . (Hold it, boy!)

Then they sang “What a Time,” repeated with about as many melodic changes as they could work out:

Well, what a time, Lord, Lord,

Oh, what a time, Lord, Lord,

I mean what a time, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord,

Great God A’mighty

What a time!

When they blasted this in the recording mike later the record arm jumped about and furrowed the shellac.

But they sang with restraint, too: “Please Don’t Drive Yo’ Children Away”:

Before dis time another year

I might be dead; I’ll let you know

Before I go . . .

Sometimes my heart go leakin’

And tears come streamin’ down . . .

I’m bowin’ on my knees . . .

Before this time another year I might be dead . . .

Please don’t drive yo’ children away . . .

The Silver Moons had one of the best versions of “Tone the Bell Easy” that I have heard:

Tone the bell, I’m done made it over

Done made it over at last . . .

I’m gonna talk with the Father, chat with the Son,

Tell him about the worl’ that I come from

I’m gonna see Joshua wave to the sun

Don’t move, sun (roared out the bass)

Tone the bell, I’m done made it over . . .

“Lord, take my hand,” they sang, and “I saw dat train a-comin’, She was a-movin’ through de land,” and “I’m goin’ home wid de spirit in Jesus’ name.” Most of their numbers told about the promise of the other world under the protection of Jesus, and the trouble of this one. “I’m des a po’ wanderin’ pildom, miserus chile,” was a line often repeated.

The Silver Moons did a brown-skin version of “Old McDonald Had a Farm,” putting on a good show with the sound effects of the hog grunting, the calf bleating, and the flivver rattling. Not to be outdone, the Middle Ga.’s did the old minstrel favorite, “Watermelon on the Vine,” and made it convincing, in the Land of the Georgia rattlesnake melon. Then they swung into “Ain’t It a Shame.” Little Bits, the second tenor, showed that he was quite an actor, bringing the house down:

Ain’t it a shame

To whip yo’ wife on Sunday.

And the quartet went into the motions of beating a wife, tossing off a dram of liquor, big-mouthed gossiping and telling lies, dancing the boogie, and shooting crap. All of those shames for Sunday were done in grand pantomime. The audience was led up skillfully to a seventh sin and shame, and then disappointed. That Little Bits was a mess.

After the first shyness wore off, and after they had seen that I was a friend of Willis James, they talked with me easily. Their dialect was difficult; I asked them to repeat for me the line that was running through my head:

I’m des a po’ wanderin’ pildom, miserus chile.

I finally made the words out to be pilgrim and misery’s. That’s just what they had been saying all along, they told me. I learned that they were Macon and middle Georgia boys, drawn together by a love for harmonizing, for playing around with chords and melodic breaks and rhythms. They hadn’t gone far in school; all of them knew what it was to work at hard manual labor. One of them had done a little time in jail; another had been mixed up in trouble with some ornery white men. If singing was not their business, it at least was one of the most important things in their lives. They watched in fascination while the apparatus was set up to record their voices; when they sang into it the ease of their platform manner suddenly tautened. They posed readily for photographs, but the pictures, when they came out, showed their faces set morosely, their mouths grim, their eyes intent. It wasn’t all the fault of the flash bulb, I am certain. Even Little Bits, a grand comedian if there ever was one, has only the shy beginning of a smile. I guess that the photographs, as much as anything else, helped me to understand the line that they had sung with so much feeling:

I’m des a po’ wanderin’ pildom, miserus chile.

JITTERBUGS’ JOY

Before the war ban on bus traveling, Atlanta was a good city for one-night stands. Several Negro businessmen formed an entertainment company to sponsor Negro name-bands at the municipal auditorium. Under all-Negro management the affairs had only a comparative sprinkling of whites. But they weren’t missed; the Negroes came in droves. As Al Moron, the manager of the housing project, complained to me, “Atlanta Negroes will turn out in crowds for only two things: a free revival in church and a pay dance at the auditorium.”

The crowds that I saw at those dances were composed largely of high school youngsters, of teen age, or in the early twenties: the boys in polo shirts and full draped trousers; the girls in flowered print dresses, or snuggling sweaters, dark skirts, bright colored socks, and low-heeled shoes. The place belonged to them those nights, and they took the lid off.

Between numbers they screamed and chased each other about, but when the music started, they either went silently into their pirouetting, stamping routine, or pressed around the footlights, staring hungrily at the famous jazzmen, anticipating time-honored riffs, applauding triumphantly at some startling improvisation, more often taut and concentrating, slaves to the harmony and the rhythm.

They knew some of the songs by heart, those the juke-boxes had plugged, and they watched for the familiar breaks and solos. Often the bandleader had only to announce the number, as Louis Jordan did with “I’m Going to Move to the Outskirts of Town,” and the wild welcome pealed. Jordan’s sinuous alto sax could barely be heard over the roar of recognition. And so it was with Lionel Hampton’s “Flying Home.” Lionel had a band of youngsters, many from the West Coast who were on their first Southern trip. The band and the crowd rivaled each other in fervor; the cheering and the brilliant brass section seemed to be on a “cutting contest,” until finally the lanky young trumpeter went into a screaming spiral that shocked the noisy kids into quiet. Lionel, grinning widely, knocked the crowd out with his dexterous pommelling on the vibraphone, and nearly knocked himself out in that heat. Sweat was pouring off his face when he came backstage; the handkerchief he was mopping with was soaking. But it was worth it. “Man, that bunch out there is a killer!” And he rushed back to give them that perennial favorite “On the Sunny Side of the Street”:

“Rich as Rockefeller . . . Gold dust at my feet, On the sunny side of the street . . .”

His hoarse, engaging jive voice caught their mood and held it. They loved Lionel, no doubt of that. And he was solidly in the groove that night.

I heard Louis Armstrong on one of his infrequent trips back South. He wasn’t as roly-poly as I had seen him in New York; he was reducing, he said, getting shed of some of that old avoirdupois, but he looked tired and drawn as well. As he delicately wrapped the large handkerchief around that famous trumpet and took a couple of brilliant solos, the crowd cheered him. But he wasn’t a jukebox favorite, and only the elder generation of listeners recognized and honored him as king. His scat-singing was old stuff now, part of the idiom of the high school kids themselves. And a lot of Harry James had come to them over the airwaves. Louis sang “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South” in that gravelly voice that has so much warmth in it; then he and his sidemen joshed the words a bit, but it didn’t quite click. “Folks down there live a life of ease”: that wasn’t the way these kids had heard it.

The night that Louis Armstrong played was a grand patriotic occasion. Attorney Walden urged the need for buying bonds; his clipped, dry speaking could barely be heard in the huge auditorium and was in contrast to the floridity and extravaganza that it interrupted. Graham Jackson, home-boy of Atlanta, a good pianist and accordion player, now recruiting officer for the Navy, appeared in the gleaming white uniform of a petty officer and gave a canned recruiting spiel. Then he turned and pumped old Satchmo’s hand, exchanged a bit of jive talk, went over to the piano stool that Louis Russell gladly gave over to him, and showed his virtuosity on the keyboard. He was more enthusiastic here than while making his speech, and so was the crowd.

More whites were backstage to hear Louis Armstrong than on the other nights. There were soldiers and sailors with their girlfriends, hepcats all, some of them old friends of Louie’s. You could hear his rasping voice all over the place: “What do you say, Gate!” “Well, if it ain’t old so-and-so himself!” “Man, where you been all this time?” There was much shaking of hands and real camaraderie. Cliff McKay and I got to talking about how jazz tore down the walls. Some walls, anyway. We saw a white youngster stand back from the water fountain and say to a Negro, “You go ahead.” Then he took his drink after the Negro. “You see that?” Cliff said. By themselves, or maybe in twos, they’ll act O.K. When there are more than two they’re scared of being called “nigger lovers.”

I butted into an argument with two Negroes who were deciding who was the greatest clarinetist in the world. I learned later how foolish I was, as these were old cronies, one a garageman, the other an electrician, who enjoyed nothing more than making fools and liars out of each other. They both had a desire to play in jazz bands, and they both collected records. Their argument concerned Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. I asked them about other clarinetists but they had never heard of Jimmy Noone and Sidney Bechet, and they knew little of Barney Bigard’s solo work. Their argument ran that if these men I named were good, they would have been heard of, they would be in the big money, wouldn’t they? When I admitted that Noone and Bechet, and even Bigard, were not in the big money as Shaw and Goodman were, they looked triumphant. “They just couldn’t dig me, man.”

A young white fellow eavesdropped on our talk, and followed me away. He was a real hepcat from way back. He had played alto saxophone with a couple of the lesser known bands. Yes, he knew Noone’s and Bechet’s work, very well. He was a native of Atlanta but had been all over the country. Now he was home, getting ready to go in the Coast Guard. He told over and over his experiences in the jazz world, naming with bushleaguer’s wistfulness the top men he had met there. He stopped Louie and told him where and when he had heard him play. Louie was bluff and cordial, and gladly gave the boy an autograph. Then the boy asked him to play a number and dedicate it to him; he was going in the Coast Guard soon and it would be something to remember. Louie promised, “Sure thing, man,” and rushed onstage. He didn’t get around to playing the number, though, and the white boy hovered in the wings, melancholy and lost, on the edge of a world that once he had had great hope of entering.

I heard the Earl Hines concert from out front up in the gallery. That night Earl was in good form, truly Father Hines, spanking the keys with all sorts of tricky rhythms and chord sequences. Finally, his white smile and his patent leather hair gleaming, he walked to the footlights, and held out his hand. The crowd knew what was coming before he announced it. It was “Skylark,” their greatest jukebox favorite. Billy Eckstine, in his rich throaty voice, called “Skylark!” And hysteria broke loose.

I knew the words, straight out of the romantic books: I had wondered how they ever managed the voyage from England to Broadway, those phrases about “someone waiting to be kissed” in “some meadow in the mist,” some “valley green with spring where my heart can go ajourneying;” “shadows in the rain,” “blossom covered lane,” “wonderful music, vague as a will-o-the-wisp, crazy as a loon, sad as a gypsy serenading the moon.” The skylark is told that the lover’s heart is riding on its wings: if the skylark sees those beloved things anywhere—

“Won’t you take me there?”

I knew that Eckstine’s deep mellow singing, coupled with a fluent saxophone solo, did much to make the song popular. At first I wondered what these kids in their zoot suit drapes, their jitterbugging costumes almost as uniform as athletic suits, had to do with valleys green with spring, or meadows in the mist, or with Keats and Shelley, even disguised in Tin Pan Alley garb. What did these kids, lost in the cramped tenements of Atlanta’s Darktown, have to do with skylarks? I wondered what twist “crazy as a loon” could have for them. But as Eckstine repeated his chorus on demand, I caught what I felt to be the simple, deeper meaning. The will-of-the-wisp and “the gypsy serenading the moon,” business might be foreign, but the “lonely flight,” “the wonderful music in the night,” those phrases were their language, and something deep in these young ones answered.

After the sentimental “Skylark,” Earl Hines knocked out some jump numbers. The dancing was almost weird. The kids were seriously intent. Some of the girls were chewing gum, but all kept their faces expressionless. The wilder the gyrations, the more casual were the masks. The couples were perfect teams, apparently unconscious of anybody else on the floor. But there were no collisions, though the whirling and pirouetting were constant. A couple would embrace, swing off, the girl would be thrown away, then she would prance back, they would turn from each other, then without looking their hands would meet, clasp, and back their bodies would come into momentary embrace—all in perfect timing, a swift, clean-cut beautiful work of art. She was always there, he was always there; each anticipating the other, each knowing the other’s improvising. It all seemed so effortless and easy, but I knew better. These perfectly coordinated pairs had mastered their skill, their sixth sense of each other, only after hours of practice at home to phonograph records, I knew. Many couples did not ever split up, the same boy continuing to dance with the same girl all evening long. Supple and strong, the boys still would have been awkward fielding a baseball; the girls surely had had little chance in Atlanta for swimming or tennis; this was a cheaper, more available sport, and they were winners at it. It was far from the hugging dances of the early jazz age; it was impersonal, a parade of coordinated rhythms. Each couple strove for perfection, but they seemed oblivious of attention: they seemed rather lost to the world. I saw little of the acrobatics for which entertainers are paid at New York’s Savoy; it was a much simpler, but still accomplished routine that satisfied these kids. Many of the boys kept their caps on their heads; this was dancing too important for etiquette. I looked down on the dance floor from the gallery. It was a heaving sea of heads, shoulders, arms, bodies, legs and feet sweeping in irregular regular waves. I passed a white policeman who was fascinated at the spectacle; his face was a study. He was seeing frenzy, true enough, but it had discipline in it and strength. I wondered what he was thinking.

There were only a few exhibitionists. Two of these couples were pansies, with long hair and loud-colored sateen shirts, wide open at the neck, and ringed with sweat. They wanted everybody to see them and they jitterbugged with grotesque exaggerations. But most of the kids were too busy to pay them attention. As long as the music lasted, they would swing their own time.

But when the music ended, the tense preoccupation snapped, the escape was done. Back the youngsters came to high-pitched talking and laughing and quarrelling, or sullen walking about. There were some fights; knives were drawn in a few. At “Home, Sweet Home,” some couples, exhausted from dancing, stupefied with drink, had to be routed out of their gallery seats. As we came down the long tunnel-like passages from the gallery, we saw liquor bottles everywhere. Drunks lurched against us. Leaving the hall, we drew in deep breaths of the cool morning air. We knew the spell was over for these kids. Just in front of us we heard raised voices, then a smack, and we saw a girl slide to the ground and a policeman forcing his way roughly in the crowd. Girlfriends and boyfriends rode in the Black Maria that night.

We got to Frank’s car just a bit ahead of the pansies, who in their soprano voices were cursing each other and threatening knife play. Safe in the car, Frank wondered why I never got scared attending such affairs. “Anything could happen,” he told me. “Some of these Negroes would cut you as quick as they’d look at you.” Frank had been one of the most courageous athletes Morehouse had ever had and I knew he didn’t scare easily. He was right. Once the music ended, these crowds could be ugly and dangerous.

Frank was wrong in implying that I wasn’t scared. I was, somewhat, but it was gloom rather than fear that I felt most deeply. I thought how often I had resented the charges against my people that they were merely happy, carefree dancers. This dancing had been skillful, certainly. But it wasn’t free of care, the way I saw it; it was defiant of care instead. It was a potent drug, a reefer smoke, a painkiller shot in the arm.

Tomorrow was coming for these kids with a sick thud. On their way back to their slum homes in Darktown, Ward 4, “Pittsburgh,” some of them packed in jalopies, many more trudging the unlighted, unpaved streets; they knew what to look for tomorrow. The jazz and jitterbugging had warmed the damp and the darkness this night, but tomorrow had already set in: a tomorrow of crowded homes, poor food, dull work, little play and that snatched on the fly, and nothing to look forward to with any zest. Many of the boys would be in the Army soon; what they had heard of that left them cold; and who knows what the hell comes next? The girls would grow up, they’d have their babies and bring them up in the same rickety shacks with the same worries about rent and food and clothing; and then they’d get to be like their mothers whose bitter scoldings and curses were soon to greet them. They were not alone: many white kids of America, Depression’s children too, knew the same hopelessness and uncertainty; they often sought the same escape. They swooned over Sinatra as these had raved over Billy Eckstine.

But these Atlanta kids weren’t aware of that, and even if they had been, it wouldn’t have altered their feelings. They had to grab their joy where they found it and hold on frenziedly, today. Tomorrow was another day, and from all they could see, was likely to be a hell.

FROM MONTMARTRE TO BEAVER SLIDE

The Writers’ Project Guide to Atlanta tags on to its list of artists the name of Hale Woodruff, as the city’s exponent of Negro Art. He is, of course, nothing of the kind: he is the best and best known artist in the state, and incidentally a Negro. Years ago Ralph McGill, of the Atlanta Constitution, spoke of Woodruff as a recent discovery only in Atlanta. It is likely that much of dominant Atlanta still is ignorant of his fine work. This is not likely to bother Hale much, in a city whose chief art treasures are the Diorama of the Battle of Atlanta, and such statues as Tom Watson pitching horseshoes in front of the State Capitol or Henry Grady reaching for something at Grady Square.

Hale isn’t easily bothered anyway. When I talked with him in the dilapidated library building on Morris Brown’s campus, he didn’t seem abashed by the bare wreck of a place but explained to me how the dome provided ideal light for working.

Later his department was moved back to the Spelman College campus. There I found him in a makeshift studio kidding with Smitty, the superintendent of buildings, wheedling him and counterblasting. Smitty is unimpressed by Hale’s international reputation, but I could see that Hale would get his walls fixed right.

Hale is a modernist painter, a careful student first of French techniques, later of Diego Rivera’s. Instead of artistic jargon, however, he talks with good Midwestern and Southern pungency: “Man, I saw this gal walking down the railroad track in a red fuzzy sweater. She must have weighed about 185 or 190 lbs. She had a form-fitting sweater on those mountains and hips. Doggone if she didn’t look like the back-end of a freight train.”

Without “hi-falutin” language, Hale clarifies some of the difficulties of his paintings to the layman.

“Look at this arm and hand. I wanted them to suggest inner qualities of those women. I didn’t want a photograph. I wanted a sort of primitive style in keeping with the nature of these people and their lives.”

The fellows josh Hale when he boasts of his connoisseurship in things Parisian, reminding him that he went to Paris and stayed there on a shoestring. But the joshing has respect in it for spunk and grit. No sooner did Hale win a hundred dollar Harmon Award for Negro artists, than he sailed for Paris. He spent four tough years there as an art student. President John Hope found him stranded in 1931 and hired him for the new Atlanta University system. Five years later he jumped off again, this time for Mexico where he studied with Diego Rivera.

Hale Woodruff is most widely known for his murals in the Savery Library at Talladega College in Alabama. The first set of these frescoes celebrates the centenary of the slave revolt aboard the Amistad. In vivid colors, Woodruff portrays in panel one the mutinous blacks swinging wide-bladed machetes and throttling the slavers while white crewmen flee the vessel. The second panel shows the trial at New Haven with Cinque, the Mandingo leader of the revolt, and Ruiz, the Spanish buccaneer, dominating the scene. One of the slaves, quizzically scrutinizing the proceedings behind the abolitionists Arthur Tappan and Roger Baldwin, is an unflattering likeness of Hale Woodruff himself. The third panel shows the return of the freed Mandingoes to native Africa with white and Negro missionaries. The episode of the Amistad resulted in the formation of the American Missionary Association which founded Fisk and Atlanta universities, and Straight, Tougaloo, and Talladega colleges.

The second set of frescoes celebrates the founding of Talladega College, a less blood-stirring but no less dramatic history. The first panel shows how the American Missionary Association used its good offices between the defense of the Amistad captives and the Civil War. Whites are shown advising and speeding fugitive slaves on their way to the banks of the Ohio. While old Negroes huddle, frightened, one bold Negro astride a plunging horse tears down the announcement of a runaway slave, before starting after a laden coach careening to the riverbank. Far away at the top of a hill, a slave hunter is riding his horse, hell-bent for leather, following the bloodhounds.

The second panel shows the new freedmen swarming on the campus of the newly opened college, registering with the white instructors. Behind those white columns in a mansion that had once housed aristocratic scions were secrets long withheld from the ex-slaves. At their feet are strange tuition payments: sacks of potatoes, crates of chickens, bundles of cane. One old man brought a half dollar in a handkerchief. William Savery, after whom the library was named, is one of the central Negroes in the panel. Two of Savery’s daughters became teachers, and his grandson was a recent student at Talladega.

The third panel shows black and white workers constructing Savery Library. Hale sketched these while they were laboring. He respects President Buell Gallagher for “sticking his chin out and hiring whites and Negroes to work side by side on the same pay basis.” The panel has much to say about industrial democracy.

Hale believes modestly that the murals give the students a sense of history. One Negro educator at the dedication exercises admitted that the Amistad frescoes made him discard his mild speech and “give the blood and thunder one.” These murals pack a heavy wallop, artistically and educationally. To youngsters whose history books never touched upon anything like a revolt of Negroes for freedom, who think of the Underground Railroad, if they have ever heard of it, as a sort of tunnel under the Ohio River, these panels of Negroes organizing and carrying through a mutiny, of grabbing their belongings and escaping to free land must come as shocks. It is important also that they see Negroes, not browbeaten, in a law court, being defended by white friends, and that they see spirited Negroes being aided by whites against a mob. It is also good that they see an important artist treating poor and ordinary Negroes with dignity and warmth. Finally, it is an educational step that these students learn that Cinque’s manly defiance, the fugitives’ bold determination, the ex-slaves’ eagerness for learning, the draughtman’s studiousness, could be discovered, without much searching, within the borders of their own lives.

Hale Woodruff has been a busy man, with his mural work, his teaching, and his frequent assignments. When I talked with him last, he was painting a portrait of Alonzo Herndon for the Atlanta Life Insurance Company. He has even done a puckishly fanciful fresco for the Yates and Milton Drug Store, where the collegians of the Atlanta University system foregather. I once overheard young Josephine and Joe College discuss the mural’s manifold meanings; it would have done good to Hale’s sense of humor. A social documentary small mural decorates one of Atlanta’s Housing Projects for Negroes. It is rather simple propaganda. Before: An Atlanta slum, much like Beaver Slide, with drunk, impoverished people, their children growing up like weeds. After: The Housing Project is flourishing, gardens and all; plump, clean kids are at play, grown-ups look better-fed, more self-respecting. There is a big black something in this ointment, however. Under the mural is a heavy black metal piece of sculpture, caricaturing a Negro banjo-player. It looks like an ambitious hitching post. The story goes that more money went to the white artist who messed up all that metal, than to Hale Woodruff for his murals. “Where shall we put it?” asked one of the housing authorities, in embarrassment. “Put it in the toilet,” said the Negro adviser.

Hale’s art classes are popular and productive. Several of his students, such as Wilmer Jennings, Fred Flemister, and Albert Wells, are achieving recognition. Many of his students, however, pay him the flattery of dangerously close imitation. Hale’s friends hope that his heavy teaching load and assignments will not compress too narrowly his creativeness.

Georgia opened Hale Woodruff up, as it did Jean Toomer between whose expression in prose and Woodruff’s in painting there seems to me to be important similarity. After a sojourn below Macon, Hale said, “The people in deep Georgia look like they sprung right out of the ground. Like they weren’t raised in houses.” Hale’s love of color is requited in Georgia with its clays of all shades of red, its deep green foliage, its blue and purple skies, its white massed clouds. Best known, probably, among his paintings are his heavy oil landscapes, tortuous and foreboding. Georgia shanty towns have no better interpreter. One watercolor shows shacks of all the hues of the rainbow on a red clay hillside, as colorful and troubling as sinister tropical blooms. Another shows an old woman, her arms filled with sticks of kindling, returning to her leaning box of a house, the tin porch propped by the slenderest, buckling pole. Vari-colored shacks are clustered precariously in the background. The trees are blasted, the earth eroded; in spite of the beautiful colors, the impact of barren waste and loneliness is terrifying.

Hale’s early painting “The Banjo Player” was decorative, rather than interpretative. His lithograph “Ambulant Musicians” is much more deeply rooted. “Trusty on a Mule” and “Blind Musician” catch familiar Georgia scenes faithfully but with imaginative lift. “Country Church,” with its swaying roof, its clapboard sides, its door awry, sums up the pathos of the weatherworn shacks so much a part of the Georgia landscape. On the top of a rise, Hale has painted an outhouse, propped by a sturdy pole. So many of his drawings have this bit of local architecture that some of his friends call it his hallmark, and he boasts of starting the Out House School, in distinction to the earlier ash-can school of American art. One of his most sardonic lithographs is “Relics”: a sway-backed mule on his last legs stands beside a sway-backed stable. The mule’s ribs are repeated in the ramshackle sides of the building. It tells me as much as many pages of books on the Economic Problem No. 1. A lithograph done for the anti-lynching campaign is “By Parties Unknown.” A lynched Negro, the noose still around his broken neck, has been left on the wooden steps of a country church, which may have painted windows but is otherwise falling to pieces.

Hale has a flair for urban backgrounds and people too. He has fine sketches of women whose most colorful garb sometimes clashes, sometimes harmonizes with the various shades of their brown skin. He observes the parade of life down such streets as Hunter and Mason Turner with humor and sympathy. In a recent painting he tries to get deeper into Atlanta life, trying to show real religious feeling at a foot-washing ceremony. He wants the picture “to be symbolic, not cliché, not the usual religious church painting, not a snapshot of a particular church.” I think he succeeds. While an old patriarch watches, his eyes partly closed, his hands folded, a woman in ceremonial garb, serving with a crooked peaceful smile, washes the feet of another massive sister, who is blissfully, quietly, caught by the spirit. Light, as if from heaven, shines in the center of the picture. The old mastery of colors, green, olive, yellow, brown, purple, white, is apparent. Hale is proud of the browns in the women’s faces and arms, a sort of earthy brown. “I put a lot of red in it,” he said. “I tried to give it richness and luminosity.”

Hale Woodruff has taken seriously his art and the life of his people. He is generous to his fellow Negro artists, speaking critically only when he feels that they are “sitting down on their reputation as Negro artists.” He has received honors and he deserves even more. One of his honors, however, was not an unmixed blessing.

He was invited to become a member of the Georgia Artists Association, to submit a painting and to attend the annual meeting at Athens. When Lamar Dodd, professor of art there, learned he was coming up, he invited Hale to speak to his class of thirty or forty students. Then Hale attended the meeting of the fifteen or twenty delegates. The social committee had prepared a luncheon for the out of town members. “When they were about to serve luncheon,” says Hale, “and everybody was about to walk in, I was asked if I would mind eating in the kitchen. Man, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I said, ‘No thanks. I have friends in the city who have invited me to eat dinner with them.’ I pulled out of Athens on the next train; I don’t know whether they had any afternoon meeting or not.”

The way Hale saw it, Lamar Dodd seems fair when it comes to art; he would have a Negro whom he considers a first-rate painter and lithographer lecture to his class and advise his students. Yet he would ask this same Negro to eat in the kitchen. Maybe it was fear of offending his superiors at the University. “Lecturing on art: O.K.” said Hale. “Drinking a glass of milk together: No.”

But Hale Woodruff doesn’t fret too much about this type of incident, and doesn’t need to. As he says often in quite another connection, “He’ll get them all on the back-raise.”

Pursuit of Happiness

AND HE NEVER SAID A MUMBALIN’ WORD

I

II

SONG HUNTER

I

II

THE DUKE COMES TO ATLANTA

FAREWELL TO BASIN STREET

PO’ WANDERIN’ PILDOM, MISERUS CHILE

JITTERBUGS’ JOY

FROM MONTMARTRE TO BEAVER SLIDE