Meanwhile, Nannie (whose real name was Nancy, but everybody called her Nannie, because she took care of children from the time she was a child herself) made her way to North Carolina, where, by the grace of God, a black family took her in and made sure she got an education. In 1910, at seventeen, Nannie enrolled at Spelman College (then called the Spelman Seminary for Young Women) in Atlanta, a prestigious institution named after Laura Spelman, the abolitionist wife of John D. Rockefeller, which was (and still is) considered the African-American Ivy League.
Even with an education, a Negro had very few opportunities in that era, and there was virtually no career path for an educated Negro woman like Nannie. So in 1912, when she was twenty-one, Nannie took the conventional route and found a young man to marry: a soldier named Albert Cleveland. Because he had blond-red hair, light skin, and freckles (courtesy of his Irish-Scottish blood), Albert was considered a Caucasian, though he was a quarter Cherokee.
Lady Bird, Nannie and Albert’s fifth child, was pushed off her mother’s lap at the age of ten months to make room for the sixth, my aunt Frances. From there, things only got tougher for Mom. In the Deep South, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, being black, or even Indian, meant your family could be run off their land at any time for pretty much any reason.
Everyone—from small children to old folks—was expected to fend for themselves. Nannie made shoes out of old tires, using the rubber as soles; you could almost call them an early version of today’s fancy running shoes. But they wore out quickly, because running was one of the things you had to be good at if you were black and wanted to stay alive. Every so often, the Ku Klux Klan would show up at the Cleveland house, and Nannie would have to figure out how to get rid of them. The family was on guard at all times, and as a result of living like this day in and day out, little Lady Bird, my mother, developed plenty of grit.
As a way to earn extra money, Nannie created a kind of bed and board for black circus workers who had no place to stay when the circus came to town. She made corn liquor (a Prohibition specialty) and hired piano players from New Orleans to entertain in the evening. People came from far and wide to hear the music and to listen to Nannie, seated under a single lightbulb (the first in the black section of town) tell stories from the old days, including the one about the girl named Josephine Baker who ran away to Paris because Nannie’s sister advised her to get the hell out of St. Louis. My mom slept on a nearby mattress made of straw and often fell asleep to the tunes coming out of the old roller piano and the same metal washboard on which she did the family’s laundry.
Music and art were my mom’s salvation. Nannie taught her how to draw the Indian head on a nickel, because an ad said, “If you can draw this, you can be an artist.” From there, Mom started drawing everything she saw. When she got to her one-room schoolhouse, she’d draw in the middle of her lessons, and the teacher would catch her and rap her on the knuckles. Then she’d be sent outside to pick a hickory stick that the teacher would use to give her a whipping in front of the class. Mom kept on drawing, no matter how high the price. When the teacher stepped out of the room for lunch, Mom would draw a cartoon of her, and her classmates would all laugh. Then she’d have to suffer the old hickory stick again. Oh, the perils of being an artist!
Mom grew up fast. Between school, her work sweeping floors at a local beauty parlor, and all her chores at home, she picked up quite an array of skills. She could sew clothes and grow food; make music and draw; and wash clothes and clean house. And with the KKK around the corner and her own philandering father squandering his paycheck on the town whore, Mom had witnessed enough by the time she was ten to know the lowest depths of human behavior: manhandling of women, fighting over skin color, and gambling and drinking to the point where a grown man might just kill another one for a dollar.
All the Clevelands felt the strain, especially Nannie. One day while Mom was finishing her math homework, she looked up and saw her forty-six-year-old mother take her last breath. Nannie died just like that, probably from exhaustion and putting up with her two-timing husband.
Poor Mom, left motherless at age twelve with no one to guide her besides a not much older sister, Sally, who filled in as her mother, just as Mom did for their youngest sister, Frances. Many meals of salt-and-pepper sandwiches followed, until Sally decided my mom would be better off up north in New York with their much older sister, Kitty.
It was June 1940, just weeks before Mom’s fourteenth birthday. In Europe, World War II was already raging. Mom went right to work taking care of Kitty’s four children, since Kitty was pregnant with a fifth. Mom became the nanny and the maid, changing and washing diapers, then hanging them out to dry. That September, she began attending Wadleigh High School in Harlem, where she took all the usual subjects. The teachers soon noticed her aptitude for drawing and put her in a special class with other talented students. Some played piano, some wrote poetry, but Mom was the only painter—the school didn’t even have an art teacher—so she got first dibs on any art supplies the school had. One particularly observant teacher, Mrs. Kuhn, entered Mom in a citywide art contest sponsored by Macy’s department store. Mom’s submission—Tired Woman, an oil painting of a bent-over laundress (which, like all Mom’s fine art, sent a strong social message)—won first prize: a scholarship to Pratt Institute. But Mom was too young for college. She was also unprepared: She spoke ungrammatically, with a heavy Southern accent, so she’d been moved back two grades.
By the time she turned sixteen, Mom had been joined in New York by another older sister, Helen, who was running away from an early forced marriage. Helen squeezed into Kitty’s overstuffed house and immediately got herself a job as a welder in a navy shipyard, which had plenty of openings because of the war. The first thing Auntie Helen bought with her paychecks was a red fox fur that she shared with Mom, who was becoming obsessed with fashion. Yearning for both freedom and sophistication, the sisters decided to move into their own apartment, on East 161st Street. It was barely larger than a kitchen table, but it sure beat living in the Bronx with five kids and a pee-soaked sofa for a bed. From their base, they explored the city, venturing out to the Savoy Ballroom and other pillars of Harlem nightlife. They danced and listened to the big bands with the African-American luminaries of the day—the boxers, musicians, and singers.
With a new apartment and a high school diploma, Mom was ready to take on the world with her art. Her work on store windows and billboards was beginning to get some recognition, and her income from painting the peekaboo neckties helped make ends meet. Meanwhile, Helen joined the dance troupe started by Katherine Dunham, the groundbreaking dancer and champion of African-American choreography. After a few years, Mom and Helen moved farther downtown to 100th Street, between Park and Madison. Every day Mom would sew a dress that she’d wear that night when she and Helen visited the jazz clubs all around the city. Because there weren’t many clubs for blacks, the city also came to them: The sisters’ living room became a kind of after-hours hangout where all the artists, musicians, and performers they knew would come to play. In many ways, these soirées were an urban version of the gatherings their mother, Nannie, used to host back in Georgia.
In the winter of 1947, my mom met my father, Johnny Johnston, at an uptown jazz club called Carl’s Corner. Johnny, a saxophonist who revered Charlie Parker, had come to the United States from Sweden to nurture his love of American jazz. His English was shaky but adequate, and his and my mom’s shared passion for music and art fueled their love affair.
And so it came to pass that my mother, a half-black, part-Cherokee, part-Irish fine artist, and my father, a Swedish descendant of Vikings, made beautiful music together. The two of them went to every club in Harlem and danced every night into the wee hours until, two years into their romance, my dad’s time in America was up and he had to go back to Sweden. I was conceived that autumn, a few weeks before he left.
chapter 3
A LOVE SUPREME
A day at the zoo w
ith my mom, 1955.
Looking back, I see those early years in New York with my mom as a time of enchantment. As an artist, she had a way of creating a special world around her, and if having a young daughter cramped her style, I never knew it. My aunt Helen was still in Europe when I came back to the city from Michigan, so Mom was renting out her room to a shapely light-skinned young black woman called Miss Livingston. Auntie Helen had met her only briefly and was unaware that Miss Livingston was one of the best-known call girls in Harlem. When word got out that she was staying at our house (most likely she put out the word herself), the Harlem hotshots were at our door like a pack of wolves. Among them were the notorious gangster Bumpy Johnson and the boxer/actor Coley Wallace, who defeated future heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano in 1948 when they were both still amateurs. Later, in 1953, Wallace played Joe Louis in the biopic about the pioneering boxer.
On Saturday nights, Miss Livingston would invite these men—and all their friends, and even stray guys and their girlfriends whom she picked up at Red Randolph’s bar on Seventh Avenue and 123rd Street—over to Mom’s apartment. Come Sunday they’d still be there. The place constantly reeked of cigarettes and whiskey.
There was one very nice man who came to call on my mom, the actor and comedian Mantan Moreland, who played Charlie Chan’s chauffeur in the movies. Mantan had nothing to do with Miss Livingston and was very nice to me, making me laugh with his funny faces and stories.
Then there were Timmie Rogers, the comedian and musician; James Edwards, another actor; and Noble Sissle, who wrote musical comedies and really liked my mom, but at sixty-five or thereabouts, he was too old for her. At the time, of course, I had no idea who these guys were, but all of them told me they were my uncle, so that was what I called them.
Since Mom needed the rent from Miss Livingston, she and I slept in the same room. It was wonderfully cozy, and I knew I had someone near who loved me and would never hit me. Mom sang to me, played the music from Peter and the Wolf, and read me children’s stories like “The Three Little Pigs.” That particular tale taught me some important life lessons: Don’t let the wolf in the door, and build your house out of bricks, not straw.
One night a half-dressed, clearly drunken man staggered into our bedroom instead of Miss Livingston’s. Mom had reached her limit. She felt it was no longer safe to have Miss Livingston around and asked her to leave. There went the rent money. But then, by some miracle, my aunt, who’d been working on the French Riviera as a seamstress and dancer, decided to come back to the United States.
I’ll never forget her arrival. Mom and I went over to the boat docks on the Hudson River, on Manhattan’s far west side. We looked down at the Queen Mary from the observation deck and saw this pretty lady standing on the top deck, waving up to us. When we met her at the gangplank, she was incredibly glamorous: curvaceous, wearing sunglasses, and dressed, she told us, in “a real Dior” suit. Mom and I weren’t too shabby ourselves, even though Mom had sewn everything we were wearing. She was a designer at heart and would use any excuse to dress up, so while our clothes may have been homemade, to me they looked like couture—not that I had the foggiest idea what couture was. But I did know that the three of us together made an awfully pretty picture.
With Auntie Helen reinstalled in Mom’s apartment, life became both calmer and more exciting than anything I’d ever known. The small-town code I’d gotten used to in Michigan—where not showing up for church on Sunday meant the townspeople would call you a sinner—was nowhere to be found. Though I said a prayer every night at bedtime, the three of us didn’t go to church, because Mom said God lived in our hearts, not in a building. My first Easter in New York couldn’t have been more different from the ones in Michigan: Mom sewed pastel dresses and cute little spring jackets for all three of us, and we wore them as we marched down Fifth Avenue with thousands of other stylish New Yorkers in the Easter parade. Mom and I celebrated Christmas by going to Macy’s to meet Santa Claus.
It was a time of many firsts: my first visits to the Bronx Zoo, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the beach. I was photographed for the first time by a professional and got my first ride on the carousel in Central Park. I’m not sure if New York was called the Big Apple back then, but that’s exactly what it felt like to me: a shiny apple that I was taking a delicious bite of.
The biggest first of all was that I finally felt safe.
Mom seemed her truest self when she was painting. I’d watch her every brushstroke until late in the evening, when I’d fall asleep in a big chair with a mental image of her in front of the easel and the smells of turpentine and linseed oil wafting through the air. (This environment was nothing if not stimulating to my senses.) My aunt had brought back Lanvin, an expensive French perfume, in lovely large bottles, and its fragrance mingled with the scent of my mom’s art supplies to create an extremely specific aroma that for me was the very essence of home.
Though Mom was painting a lot and indulging her love of fashion (she constantly brought home dress patterns and fabrics she found on sale), money was always scarce. So to ensure a steady paycheck and to leave her days free to be with me, she took a night job as a nurse’s aide. My aunt watched over me while Mom was at work.
That meant I spent many evenings with Aunt Helen at Katherine Dunham’s School of Dance, located in a studio on West Forty-Third Street off Broadway. I was transfixed by Dunham, who was the first person I’d ever seen dressed “African-style,” in a long skirt and a headdress. As the dancers warmed up before class, Dunham would invite me to join in, and I’d try my darnedest to keep up with all the students doing grand pliés and battements frappés. But I was so small that all I could muster was hanging off the practice barre. Dunham would laugh, and the dancers started calling me their little monkey.
When she was instructing, Dunham sat on a tall stool with the tips of her bare toes touching the floor as if en pointe. But when she was teaching, she’d get off the stool and demonstrate how something was done, dancing with grand movements, uttering not a word and stretching her limbs so far out that she looked twice her actual height. A drummer would accompany her on his African drums, and the other dancers—whether students or members of the troupe—would follow her movements exactly. There were several celebrities in the class, including Marlon Brando and Sidney Poitier, but what did I know? To me, they were just ordinary people, darting here and there around the studio.
Our living room had wall-to-wall mirrors on one side, and sometimes Auntie Helen would invite the dancers over to rehearse a number they were working on. My mother, who was not the natural performer that Auntie Helen was, played the conga drums. Rehearsals often turned into parties, with other drummers playing and bare-chested men dancing.
Late one summer night, when I couldn’t sleep, I joined the party. At this point, I was so used to hearing the rhythm of the drums that all of the commotion was normal to me. The dancers were practicing the limbo for one of their shows, and when I walked into the room, I saw my auntie gyrating wildly under the limbo stick. (This was years before Chubby Checker made the limbo, a dance that originated in Trinidad, known to ordinary Americans.) She boogied over to me and said, “Now you dance.” Well, I shook and shimmied just as my aunt told me to, and everybody clapped. Putting on my little show was so much fun that I went back to bed happy, dreaming of when I could dance for them again. Mom had other plans. She decided it would be better for me to stay somewhere more wholesome on the weekends, away from all the adult shenanigans. So off we went to Connecticut to see my godmother, Henriette Metcalf, a wealthy widow who lived in a renovated barn in Newtown.
chapter 4
SOPHISTICATED LADY
Me at six, at the Connecticut home of Henriette Metcalf, 1956.
Henriette Metcalf had been married to Willard Leroy Metcalf, an American painter known for his impressionist-style landscapes. When Willard died of a heart attack in 1925, he left Henriette most of his paintings and all of his money—thus enabling her afflue
nt, gracious way of life in Connecticut. Getting to know her was one of those experiences that, though I wouldn’t realize it until I was much older, affected me profoundly. Through her, I was exposed to a way of life I’d never encountered—one of easy affluence steeped in culture, good manners, and reverence for art above all else.
My mom was just fifteen when she met Henriette at the citywide reception where Mayor La Guardia presented Mom with the Pratt scholarship for her painting Tired Woman. Madame Metcalf (as she preferred to be called, since she’d lived in France for many years) was in the audience and, impressed with Mom’s talent, invited her to come visit. Madame Metcalf became my mother’s advocate, introducing Mom to the “right” people in the art world, many of whom asked Mom to paint their portraits. When I was born, Madame Metcalf became my godmother.
One summer weekend when I was five, Mom and I got dressed up and took the train to Connecticut. When the conductor called out, “Dan Berry,” we got off. There to meet us was a tall man with an odd accent (Mom said it was Dutch), and as he drove us through the countryside, he told us he’d had to eat tulips when he was a teenager in Holland during the war, but now he planted them for beauty.
We finally arrived in Newtown. I looked out the window at a glistening new world: enormous country houses, acres of farmland, and flowers of every size and color, like the ones in storybooks. It was all I could do to keep my tongue from hanging out of my mouth in amazement.
Henriette Metcalf was standing at a white picket fence under a trellised archway covered with tiny white roses in front of a big white barn that had been converted into a house. I stared at this tall, slim woman with pale, almost pure-white skin and shiny light-blond hair. She was in her late sixties but seemed much younger, dressed in a wraparound denim skirt with large patch pockets, a simple lemon-colored sweater, and funny cork-bottomed sandals. She welcomed us with open arms, saying something in French. “Bonjour, ma petite . . .” As she bent down to hug me, I noticed her brooch—a big cluster of stones in a deep dark red, like the color of the wine my Aunt Helen drank. I didn’t know a ruby from a shiny piece of red glass, of course, but somehow I intuited that her jewelry was rare and valuable, and it fascinated me.
Walking with the Muses Page 2
