William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions
384
William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions
384Paperback(First Edition)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520215436 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2000 |
| Series: | Music of the African Diaspora , #2 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
William Grant Still
By Catherine Parsons Smith
University of California Press
Copyright © 2000 Catherine Parsons SmithAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520215436
The Formative Years of William Grant Still:
Little Rock, Arkansas, 1895–1911
Willard B. Gatewood
Late in 1895 Carrie Fambro Still, a talented, well-educated, and strikingly handsome African American woman, left her home near Woodville, Mississippi, with her infant son headed for Little Rock, Arkansas. Within little more than a year after her marriage in 1894, the twenty-three-year-old Carrie Still had become a mother and a widow. Shortly after the sudden death of her husband, she decided to move to Little Rock where her mother and sister lived. She and her son moved into the house on Fourteenth Street occupied by her mother, her sister, Laura, and her brother-in-law, Henry Oliver, a barber. Carrie Still acquired a teaching position in the public schools within a year and quickly became self-supporting.1 It was in the capital city of Arkansas—very much a city of the "New South"—that she made a new life for herself and her son, William Grant Still, who would become known as the "dean of Afro-American composers."
The Little Rock in which Still spent his first sixteen years was a bustling center of the cotton trade located on the Arkansas River. Served by five rail lines in 1900, the city boastedthirteen miles of paved streets, a seven-story "skyscraper," a Grand Opera House, numerous handsome residences, commodious hotels, a public library with 3,200 volumes, sixty-odd social clubs, seventy-five churches, public high schools for blacks and whites, and a profusion of gardens and flowers that accounted for its being known as "the City of Roses." But no amount of roses or booster rhetoric could obscure the existence in the city of numerous saloons, houses of prostitution, gaming parlors, and "low life dives," patronized by a substantial proportion of its population.2
The city, however, exhibited a cosmopolitan character unusual in Arkansas and much of the South. In addition to native-born white Southerners, its population included transplanted Northerners, African Americans, and an assortment of foreign immigrants. Conspicuous among the latter were the Irish and Germans who, along with a few Poles and Italians, were responsible for a substantial Catholic presence in the city. Jews were sufficiently numerous to support a synagogue. A few other nationalities such as Slavonians, Italians, Greeks, and Syrians arrived around the turn of the century and like other groups perpetuated their identity through a wide variety of organizations. But by all odds the largest racial minority in Little Rock in 1900 were African Americans, who constituted more than 3 8 percent of its total population of 38,307.3
If African Americans benefited from the diverse composition of the population, the city's distinctive political complexion also promoted their interests. Unlike most of Arkansas, which was solidly Democratic, Little Rock possessed something approaching a two-party system. Such a political environment was advantageous to black citizens, who traditionally supported the Republican party, the party of Lincoln and Emancipation, and helped to explain why they were able to influence city decision making and to obtain public schools of a quality absent in other areas of Arkansas.4
Although Little Rock was a racially segregated city when William Grant Still and his mother settled there, the lines had not yet been rigidly drawn. Interracial association still existed to an extent that had virtually disappeared in the rural districts of the state. Not until 1903 did segregation on streetcars go into effect, and even after that date racial mingling persisted in various areas. Nor did residential patterns yet conform to a rigid color line. In many sections of the city blacks and whites lived in close proximity in what were known as "mixed neighborhoods." Isaac Gillam, Jr., a member of an old and highly respected black family and a well-known educator, was a neighbor and friend of a German immigrant family. That Gillam, a Howard University alumnus who had also attended Yale, spoke fluent German undoubtedly facilitated the friendship. Still himself grew up in one of the city's mixed neighborhoods, and his playmates were white boys. In fact, his best childhood friend was white, the son of a railroad engineer. But Still, unlike his white friend, did not have access to the city's public library, and beginning in 1903 the two could not sit together on the streetcar.5 Still's residence in Little Rock from 1895 to 1911 coincided with the climax of a movement that substantially altered race relations—from a flexible to a fanatically rigid system of segregation, involving both legal and extralegal proscriptions imposed on African Americans. Contributing significantly to the shape of the new order in race relations in Arkansas was the flamboyant, freewheeling Jeff Davis, who after serving a term as an active, highly visible attorney general, occupied the governorship from 1901 to 1907. Few other southern political demagogues of the time were more adept than Davis in exploiting the racial fears of whites. Embracing the myths of white supremacy, he invoked incredibly crude racist rhetoric that often appalled those whites whom he called "the high collared roosters" of urban Little Rock but that made him the darling of rural "rednecks," a term that he used as one of endearment.6 For black Arkansans, as for black Americans in general, it was a time of shrinking opportunities, increasing discrimination, and what has been termed the "withering of hope." The Mississippi Way in race relations was rapidly becoming the American Way.
In 1903, when Still was eight years old, the state legislature in session a short distance from where he lived enacted measures that appeared to translate Governor Davis's racist rhetoric into legal reality. One measure required the segregation of state and county prisoners. Because the statute did not apply to city prisoners, Little Rock continued for some years what has been described as its "topsy-turvy arrangements" in dealing with black and white inmates in the city jail. More relevant to Still's family and most of the city's African Americans was a law requiring segregation of the races on streetcars, a measure that encountered opposition from blacks and some whites. Little Rock's most prominent black citizens vigorously protested the law and organized a boycott of the streetcars. One can easily imagine that the proud, fiercely independent Carrie Still was deeply offended by the Jim Crow streetcar law and participated in the "We Walk League." On an earlier occasion when a white streetcar conductor called her "Carrie," she had rebuked him for such familiarity and had given him a lecture on proper conduct and manners. Neither the boycott by African Americans nor the grumbling of some whites failed to deter the implementation of the streetcar law.7
Despite the enactment of such measures, old patterns of race relations in Little Rock, the only place worthy of being described as urban in the state, adjusted only gradually to the new order. Racially mixed neighborhoods persisted as long as Still resided in the city. The city's police force continued to employ African Americans at least until 1920. Fewpolicemen, white or black, were held in higher esteem than Samuel Speight, a black detective who served on the force from 1879 to 1905, when he left to open his own private detective agency.8 That the color line did not become entirely inflexible while Still lived in Little Rock was also demonstrated by the fact that Dr. James H. Smith, a well-to-do black dentist with an office on Main Street, possessed "a large and lucrative practice among the wealthy white class."9 African Americans still figured prominently in the state's Republican party despite mounting pressures from white members who embraced the philosophy of "lilywhitism." Among these were two of Little Rock's best-known black citizens, Mifflin W. Gibbs and John E. Bush. Elected municipal judge in Little Rock in 1873, Gibbs was reputedly "the first Negro elected to such office in the United States." Thereafter, until his death in 1915, he was active in Republican party affairs and received a succession of federal appointments.10 More than thirty years younger than Gibbs, Bush was also prominent in Arkansas's Republican circles. He served as receiver of public monies in the United States Land Office in Little Rock from 1898 until 1913 and constantly waged war on the lily-white forces in the party.11 Other African Americans in Little Rock were the recipients of federal appointments, including Still's beloved stepfather, Charles B. Shepperson, whom Carrie Still married in 1904. As a clerk in the Railway Mail Service, Shepperson had an income that placed him among the city's most affluent blacks.12
Notwithstanding such evidences of continuing interracial association and the access of a few blacks to federal government jobs, African Americans in Arkansas, including those in Little Rock, witnessed a steady erosion of rights, privileges, and opportunities. During the decade preceding the enactment of the two segregation measures in 1903, new election laws had rendered blacks politically powerless and eliminated them from public office. The "separate coach" law of 1891 had required racial segregation of railroads a dozen years prior to the streetcar law.13
Confronted by the white majority's Jim Crow mentality that was evident in the increasingly rigid color line and diminishing options for the black minority, African Americans sought without success to arrest the assault on their rights, privileges, and even humanity. The new order in race relations prompted them to accelerate the withdrawal into a world of their own that was separate and distinct from the society of whites. The result was a more formalized dual society in Little Rock. Experienced in institution building as evidenced by the existence of their own cemetery, fraternal orders, churches, and home for destitute elderly women,blacks followed the advice of Booker T. Washington, the premier spokesman for African Americans, by launching their own business enterprises that increasingly catered to a black clientele. In fact, Little Rock had a thriving chapter of the National Negro Business League, an organization created in 1900 and headed by Washington until his death fifteen years later. In 1903, Gibbs, a loyal disciple of the Tuskegean, launched the Capital Savings Bank, the second black-owned bank in Arkansas. The bank thrived for five years but failed, for various reasons, in the wake of the Panic of 1907. Other enterprises lasted much longer and even expanded beyond Little Rock.14
One such enterprise was the Grand Mosaic Templars of America, organized in 1882 by Bush, Chester W. Keatts, and a dozen other prominent individuals. Much more than a fraternal order of "men of good character regardless of occupation or class," the Mosaic Templars operated an insurance company, a loan association, and a newspaper. It also owned extensive real estate throughout Arkansas. By the mid-1920s the organization had assets of a million dollars and one hundred thousand members in twenty-six states and six foreign countries. Just as young William Grant Still left Little Rock for college in 1911, the Mosaic Templars headquarters building, a three-and-a-half-story brick structure, opened on the corner of Ninth and Broadway streets.15
By the opening of the twentieth century, West Ninth Street was already emerging as the center of black Little Rock. Blacks had long been present in the vicinity of Ninth Street, but their number vastly increased after Emancipation in 1863. The Union Army constructed a hodgepodge of log shanties in the area to accommodate the freed slaves who crowded into Little Rock. By the turn of the century, black-owned businesses, mostly small, service-oriented enterprises, had substantially increased on Ninth Street, interspersed among establishments operated by people of Italian, Irish, and German descent. While Still was growing up on West Fourteenth Street, the black presence on Ninth Street increased even more. Not only did the street include the headquarters of the Mosaic Templars and other fraternal and mutual aid societies, it also had an assortment of tailors, grocers, barbers, boot makers, jewelers, confectioners, and other small businesses.16 Among these was the Spot Cash Drug Store owned by F. B. Coffin, a graduate of Meharry Medical College and for some years the only black registered pharmacist in Arkansas. Although Coffin made his living as a druggist, his first love was poetry. In 1897 a volume entitled Coffin's Poems was published and sold for $1.00.17 By the 1920s Ninth Street had become virtually all-black and indisputably the economic, social, and political heart of Little Rock's black community. Black professionals—physicians, attorneys, clergymen—were found in this city-within-a-city. As one authority has observed, here African Americans could find everything from medical services and spiritual nourishment to Saturday night entertainment and excitement. Blacks often referred to Ninth Street as "the Line," because it functioned as the demarcation between black and white Little Rock.18
This demarcation was evident in an article by John E. Bush chronicling the "progress" of African Americans in Little Rock that appeared in 1905 in the Colored American Magazine published in New York. Despite his boast about the absence of race friction "of any kind," Bush did not deny the existence of a racially dual society in which "the Negro has his own churches, his own schools, his own secret societies, and his own social functions." But within the racially segregated society of Little Rock, he declared, Negrophobia was "very far in the background" when it came "to trade and commercial relation." Certain white businesses such as the department stores owned by Gus Blass and M. M. Cohn, in fact, did assure black consumers that they were welcome and would be shown "uniform courtesy." The white owner of a jewelry store proclaimed the absence of any "colorlines" in his establishment.19 The optimism expressed by Bush was to be expected of one who was Booker T. Washington's chief lieutenant in Arkansas and who subscribed to his accommodationist, self-help philosophy. When Washington visited Little Rock in November 1905 at Bush's invitation and delivered an address at the Opera House, he had an opportunity to observe the degree to which his host and other blacks in the city had succeeded in implementing his self-help philosophy. His visit was "the occasion of a public holiday by the Negro people," thousands of whom crowded into Little Rock to get a glimpse of "the Sage of Tuskegee."20 It seems reasonable to assume that young William Grant Still and his mother and stepfather were among those who packed the Opera House to hear Washington's address, just as they had been on hand to greet President Theodore Roosevelt earlier the same year.21 Washington's visit in 1905, followed by another in 1911 when his National Negro Business League met in Little Rock, thoroughly convinced him that Bush had not exaggerated in his assessment of the economic progress made by the city's black citizens. "The Business League meeting in Little Rock," Washington confided to a friend in 1911, "was by far the best we have ever held. You would havebeen surprised at the high type of the delegates and especially pleased with the many beautiful homes owned by our people in Little Rock."22
Of special importance in the life of the city's African American community while Still was growing up there were its churches and schools. As elsewhere in the South, the black church was a multifunctional institution that served as an agency of education, social control, and economic cooperation and as a refuge from a hostile environment. Of the thirty-nine black churches in Little Rock in 1910, seventeen were affiliated with various Baptist denominations and fifteen were Methodist, including African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Colored Methodist Episcopal congregations. Other blacks in the city worshiped at Protestant Episcopal, Catholic, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Holiness churches. The largest black church was the First Baptist with a membership of 1,100 and a sanctuary that seated 3,000, followed by Bethel A.M.E. Church with a seating capacity of 1,000.23
No less than churches, educational institutions were centers of African American social and cultural life. Particularly important were Little Rock's black colleges—Arkansas Baptist, Philander Smith, Williams Industrial, and Shorter (located in North Little Rock)—and the public schools. According to Bush, the public school system was "the pride of the city." Of the approximately ninety teachers employed in the city school system, thirty were black, including Still's mother, who was a teacher of English in the high school. This school, first known as Union, was moved and renamed Capitol Hill School in 1902. Moved again two years later, it was known as the Mifflin W. Gibbs High School. The high school was, in many respects, the centerpiece of black education in Little Rock and was undoubtedly the best black public school in the state. Although it included a vocational department, the emphasis was on a college-preparatory, classical curriculum that included literature, foreign languages, science, and social science taught by a highly qualified faculty.24 Here William Grant Still received his secondary education, and his mother, a graduate of Atlanta University, served for many years as a faculty member who not only introduced hundreds of students to Chaucer and Shakespeare but also wrote and directed dozens of plays.25 In addition to Still and Florence Smith (Price),26 the daughter of Dr. James H. Smith, both of whom achieved renown in the musical world, a host of other graduates of Little Rock's black high school demonstrated throughout their careers the high quality of the education theyreceived there. Among these was William Pickens of the class of 1899 who graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale and later won fame as an educator, writer, and official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.27 In 1909, two years before Still departed for college, two other products of the same high school graduated from college: Jefferson Ish from Yale and his brother, George Ish, from Harvard Medical School. Both returned to Little Rock, one to become a teacher and later a businessman and the other to practice medicine in the city for a half century.28
Such conspicuous achievement did little to eliminate the prevailing white perception of African Americans as a homogeneous mass without significant differences in background, attitudes, culture, behavior, and prestige. Whites in Little Rock, no less than those elsewhere in the United States, were rarely inclined to think in terms of a stratified black society across the color line. Reluctant to move beyond vague generalities about the black class structure, whites tended to classify African Americans as "good Negroes" or "bad Negroes" or to designate, for one reason or another, certain individuals and families as exceptional. Even though whites obviously knew that not all blacks were alike, no matter how often they voiced such a sentiment, they undoubtedly would have expressed dismay, even disbelief, at any suggestion that a well-defined class hierarchy existed in Little Rock's black community. Such a suggestion, on the contrary, would have come as no revelation to William Grant Still's parents.
Income, education, occupation, and other indices traditionally used to define the white class structure have proved to be inadequate in explaining the social hierarchy that evolved among African Americans in the decades after Emancipation. More subjective considerations related to historical experience and traditions and to a color-conscious, dominant society figured significantly in determining the contours of the black class structure. Much of what accounted for status and prestige in the black community had no counterpart in white society, because status and prestige among blacks were in large part bound up with their experience with slavery—their particular place in the slave system, their role in opposing it, and the extent to which their families had been free from it. In parts of the antebellum South, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, there developed elites made up of free mulatto families who in some cases were slave owners. Such elites as flourished in Charleston, Savannah, Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans did not exist in antebellum Arkansas or its capital city.29 The black upper class that emerged in post-Civil War Little Rock consisted largely of two groups: one was made up of those who had occupied the status of favored slaves in the city, such as the Andrews, Wallaces, Rectors, and others who came to be considered the "old families"; and the other was composed of talented, often well-educated émigrés including Mifflin W. Gibbs, Dr. J. H. Smith, and the Ish and Gillam families, who settled in the city during or shortly after Reconstruction. A member of the city's postwar black elite whose forebears enjoyed the status of "privileged" slaves in antebellum Little Rock recalled that "class distinction" existed among slaves "perhaps to a greater extent than among white people." Slaves of the highest stratum, she pointed out, cultivated good manners, proper speech, and "good form" in receiving guests attributes perpetuated by their descendants.30 The Andrews, Rectors, and others who could claim to be "old families" easily combined with the more recent residents such as the Ishes, Gillams, and Smiths to form Little Rock's small black elite whose behavior bore all the earmarks of gentility, super-respectability, and refinement. Reflecting their concerns with social ritual, E. M. Woods, the principal of a black school in Little Rock, lectured widely on etiquette and in 1899 produced a full-length etiquette guide, The Negro in Etiquette: A Novelty .31 Alongside this elite that functioned as cultural brokers who spoke to blacks and for blacks to whites, a black middle class drawn in large part from small entrepreneurs, such as those along Ninth Street, began to emerge and figure prominently in the public life of the city's black community.32 The vast majority of black citizens in Little Rock during Still's years were unskilled, uneducated, and low-income people who were largely employed as day laborers and domestics. This group formed the lower class in the black community. As elsewhere at the time, the city's black class structure resembled a pyramid: a broad base rapidly narrowing as it moved upward and culminating in a minuscule elite at the apex.
The black upper class in Little Rock always exhibited a degree of flexibility that allowed admission to those who, unable to claim old-resident status, possessed other essential qualifications. Recent émigrés such as Carrie Still, who was a college graduate and adhered to the "genteel performance," were readily incorporated into what was termed the "upper tens" of black society. Although wealth was a stratifier, it alone did not ensure one a place at the top of the class structure. For example, John E. Bush, perhaps Little Rock's wealthiest black citizen, made his lofty status secure by marrying the daughter of Solomon Winfrey, a highly respectedbuilding contractor and old resident of Little Rock. To a remarkable degree the city's black upper class constituted an educational elite, composed of those possessing a tradition of literacy or advanced education. Various members of the Ish, Rector, Gillam, and Andrews families were identified at some point in their careers with either the colleges or the public schools in the city. Conspicuous among this educational elite was Charlotte Andrews Stephens, an Oberlin graduate who was a teacher in Little Rock for seventy years. She, along with Mary Speight, the wife of the detective, Marietta Ish, Carrie Still Shepperson, and various other teachers and school administrators, possessed enormous prestige and influence in black Little Rock.33
Church affiliation in Little Rock's black community also reflected the prevailing class structure, and association with certain denominations provided an index of social preferment. Although members of the city's black upper class were found in the congregations of the oldest and most prestigious Baptist and Methodist churches, perhaps the largest number of such people belonged to the First Congregational Church, where the Ishes, Winfreys, and "many of the best people of the city" worshiped. Dr. Smith's family was active in Allison Presbyterian Church, while many of their friends were communicants at St. Philip's Episcopal Church, which, according to a black observer in 1901, consisted largely of "the blue veins," a term used to refer to African Americans who were so near white in complexion as to reveal their blue veins. Although many of those in Little Rock's black upper class were fair-skinned, the linking of skin color with social status does not appear to have created the mischief in the city that it did elsewhere. But that such a connection was not entirely absent is suggested by the fact that the New Handy Map of Little Rock, published in 1905, cited St. Philip's Episcopal Church as "blue-vein, col[ored]."34
There is little evidence to suggest that Still's family was particularly religious or that the church was the focal point of their lives. The family appears to have worshiped at Allison Presbyterian Church with the Smiths, their daughter, Florence, and other members of the black "upper crust." Attracted to St. Philip's because of the "glorious music" sung by the Episcopal choir, Still briefly attended services there and even joined the choir. But wearying of the constant kneeling and rising, he left the "glorious music" of St. Philip's behind to concentrate "on the violin, without calisthenics."35
Much of the social life of Little Rock's black upper class was home-centered; therefore, attention was focused on securing commodioushomes in respectable residential areas. The white reporter of the Arkansas Gazette who interviewed Frederick Douglass in 18 89 at the home of Dr. J. H. Smith was surprised at the elegance of the Smith residence. The extensive library, oil paintings, and a variety of musical instruments in the Smith home reflected the family's wide cultural interests. Dr. Smith himself was not merely a dentist but also a successful inventor, a talented artist, and a novelist. One of his paintings was exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, and his lengthy novel about miscegenation, Maudelle, appeared in 1906.36 The Smiths, as well as their friends, entertained mostly at home with small, selective affairs such as teas, receptions, dances, card parties, and musicales. William Grant Still later recalled such social gatherings at the Shepperson home, which was also the meeting place on occasion for the various literary and musical clubs to which his mother belonged.37 The Sheppersons, like other members of the city's black elite, often entertained out-of-town guests, especially when fraternal, church, and other organizations met in Little Rock. Because of the absence of enough black hotels considered "respectable," the homes of the upper class tended to be the stopping-off place for those of comparable status from elsewhere who were en route to other cities such as Hot Springs, the famous Arkansas spa.
William Grant Still's mother and stepfather moved in the highest circles of the city's black community and actively participated in the rich intellectual and cultural life of its black upper class. Charles Shepperson, a strikingly handsome, fair-complexioned man, whom everyone black and white addressed as "Mr. Shepperson," shared his wife's love of "good" music. It was his stepfather's sizable collection of Victor Red Seal phonograph records that introduced young Still to the world of operatic music. A doting, even indulgent father, Shepperson often took Still to the theater to see stage shows such as Ben Hur, The Wizard of Oz, and Robin Hood . On other occasions the two journeyed to theaters on Ninth Street to attend performances by Cole and Johnson, one of the most famous African American troupes in the country. Young Still was also exposed to performances by well-known black artists, including a violin concert by Clarence Cameron White, a vocal recital by Mme Azalia Hackley, and a Shakespearean reading by Richard B. Harrison. The Sheppersons encouraged their son to learn to play the violin and employed a white teacher to provide private lessons.38
Although Still's maternal grandmother, Anne Fambro, an illiterate former slave, scarcely fit into the cultured, sophisticated circles in which her daughter and son-in-law moved, she nonetheless exerted a profound influence on "Baby Will," as she called her beloved grandson. "Grandma" Fambro more than compensated for her daughter's lack of culinary skills and delighted Still with pastries and other delicacies from her kitchen. When he was a young child his grandmother took over management of the household, including "Baby Will." On trips to Georgia with his grandmother he visited his mother's birthplace and became acquainted with his Fambro relatives. His grandmother told him endless stories from the days of slavery, relating in minute detail the "weather portents" just prior to the Civil War and the nocturnal activities of slave patrollers who tried to keep slaves under tight control. Young Still reciprocated by reading books to his grandmother. Anne Fambro not only introduced him to black folk music with her regular singing of spirituals, hymns, and other songs but also connected him to an important aspect of his heritage with her repertoire of stories.39
The central figure in Still's life in his formative years was his mother, a person of wide-ranging interests and enormous energy. A serious student of literature, music, and drama, Carrie Shepperson won prizes for her embroidery and other needlework, painted fine china, was an accomplished pianist, and possessed sufficient business acumen to acquire substantial real estate, including the house in which her mother and sister lived. A strict disciplinarian who was a stickler for proper manners and "good taste," she tolerated no use of what was called "dialect" and constantly reminded her son that he "must amount to something in the world."40
Like others of her station, Carrie Shepperson was committed to a mission of service and racial uplift so that disadvantaged African Americans could also make something of themselves. For example, one summer she, accompanied by Still, traveled to a rural community to teach black children who otherwise had no access to schooling. She labored to correct their speech and personal habits, which she considered "uncouth," and to provide them with the rudiments of education. The children of poor black sharecroppers no doubt looked upon Carrie Shepperson, an educated woman with impeccable manners, as the quintessential lady, a paragon of knowledge and a perfect role model. In Little Rock, Still's mother found time to engage in various civic and social activities. Deeply concerned that African Americans were denied access to the city's public library, she organized and staged performances of Shakespearean plays to raise money for a library of their own. The proceeds from these annual performances purchased books that formed the nucleus of a library for blacks established at Capitol Hill High School. A foundingmember of the Little Rock chapter of the Phyllis Wheatley Club and active in the Lotus and Bay View Reading clubs, two women's literary organizations, she supported the M. W. Gibbs Home for Elderly Women, wrote a book-length manuscript dealing with women's rights, and later helped to organize a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.41
Reared in a comfortable home filled with books, musical instruments, and all the attributes of what was simply termed "culture," Still lived in a world far removed from the black masses, and, in view of the strong discipline imposed by his mother, he undoubtedly lacked any direct knowledge of the seamier or "lowlife" aspects of life in Little Rock. "I grew up," Still later recalled, "in an atmosphere of literary clubs, lectures, musical recitals [and] stage shows, Red Seal operatic recordings, lots of homework, and violin lessons.42 He could scarcely have been unaware that he and his family were indeed different from the vast majority of blacks in the South who in the early years of the twentieth century suffered from poverty, ignorance, and daily encounters with racial prejudice. Indicative of his class consciousness were references to "our group," a term he used to identify friends and associates whose social life conformed to all the prevailing canons of polite society. Furthermore, his reaction to the black residents of the rural community in which his mother conducted a summer school can only be described as cultural shock. The product of a relatively affluent, sheltered environment in an urban setting, Still was appalled at the "primitive" life of these rural blacks—their appearance, living condition, speech, and even worship services.43
Notwithstanding the proliferation of Jim Crow contrivances directed against all black Arkansans, both Carrie Shepperson and her son considered Little Rock a center of racial enlightenment and "open-mindedness." In view of the racial climate in rural Mississippi, where Still's mother had lived immediately before settling in Little Rock, such a view scarcely seems unreasonable. As for Still himself, he remembered his boyhood in the city as a time of happiness in which he had white playmates, including several who remained his lifelong friends, and strong, loving parents who shielded him from the grosser forms of racial prejudice to the best of their ability, maintained high standards and ideals, and provided a home in which, as Still later observed, "we were not accustomed to think along racial lines."44
By the time Still graduated from high school at the head of his class in 1911, his primary interest was clearly in music. He had long since abandoned the fleeting idea of attending Booker T. Washington's TuskegeeInstitute in Alabama to learn how to raise chickens. If Carrie Shepperson found such an idea repugnant, the prospect of her son embarking on a musical career was scarcely more appealing. For her, Still recalled late in life, "the majority of Negro musicians of that day were disreputable and were not accepted into the best homes." That her son would be unwelcome in "the best homes" was unthinkable to Carrie Shepperson. Her plans for Still to attend college with a view toward studying medicine prevailed, and at her insistence he entered Wilberforce University in Ohio. An institution supported by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and often the scene of fierce ecclesiastical politics, Wilberforce was especially well known for its strict discipline, military science training, and premedical curriculum. In the fall of 1911, William Grant Still left Little Rock to begin the protracted process of preparing to become a physician. Instead, he became a world-renowned musician and composer.45
Reflecting on his early years in Little Rock from the perspective of almost six decades, Still described his boyhood there as "a typically American one, far removed from the ordinary concept of a little colored boy growing up in the South."46 Because his family neither possessed the substantial wealth of some whites and a few blacks in the city nor experienced the grinding poverty of most of its African American residents, Still described himself as a product of the "middle class," who had enjoyed the luxuries and amenities characteristic of that class at the turn of the century.47 His reference to his "middle-class" origins was a case of using generic terminology to describe what was actually the upper-class status of his family within the black community of Little Rock more than a half century earlier. But Still's intention was not to provide an accurate analysis of the city's black class structure; rather it was to underscore the fact that, given the time and place in which he grew up, he had possessed extraordinary advantages.
Those of the class to which Still belonged were keenly conscious of their family background and often viewed themselves as heirs to a legacy that commanded authority, bestowed prestige, and imposed responsibility within the black community. Such people, according to an African American journalist in 1902, dealt "heavily in family trees." Other blacks ridiculed the pretensions of these so-called thoroughbred families. There is no evidence that Still's family drew up elaborate genealogical charts that included an assortment of African kings, Indian chieftains, European noblemen, and white American statesmen, as some upper-class black families did,48 but Carrie Shepperson and her mother possessed intimate knowledge of their ancestry. Still clearly understood that he representeda "mingling of several bloods"—Negro, Native American, Scotch, Irish, and Spanish.49 Such blending was obvious in the physical appearance of Still and his mother no less than his stepfather, all of whom possessed light complexions, but not as light as some of their African American acquaintances in Little Rock who chose to "pass" for white.50 Regardless of his "mixed-blood" ancestry and light complexion, Still grew up in an era in which whites adhered to the "one drop" rule that classified all persons with any black ancestry whatsoever as Negroes and subjected them to Jim Crow proscriptions.51 Although his parents never encouraged him to "think along racial lines," Still was fully aware that he was a Negro and was painfully reminded of the fact by the occasional slurs and insults directed at him by whites. On a trip to Georgia with his grandmother he witnessed a frenzied mob of whites "out for the blood of a Negro accused of rape." Such early experiences with racism could have easily created within him an enduring bitterness toward whites in general, but they did not for a variety of reasons. His pleasant association with whites, especially those in his neighborhood, coupled with efforts of his parents to impress on him the necessity of evaluating others in nonracial terms, enabled him to conduct himself "as a person among people instead of as an inferior among superiors."52 The "mingling of several bloods" in his ancestry meant that the notion of proud hybridization also figured in his sense of himself, making it all the easier for him later to characterize his extraordinary musical achievements in terms of a fusion of diverse cultural traditions.
Still repeatedly insisted that "Negro music" per se was not an important part of his youth in Little Rock and noted that during the summer when he accompanied his mother to a rural community to conduct a school, he laughed at the shouting and singing of the black residents during religious services. "The thought that I was hearing 'authentic Negro music at its source,'" Still recalled, "never entered my irreverent little mind."53 But "Grandma" Fambro's continual singing of "Negro songs" as she worked, coupled with her seemingly endless supply of stories about black life both before and after the Civil War and the performances of Cole and Johnson and other black troupes that Still witnessed in Little Rock, became elements in a memory bank that, either consciously or unconsciously, must surely have figured in the musical compositions that later won him wide acclaim. By the time Still left Little Rock in 1911, he had been exposed to both black vernacular and classical musical traditions that he used to produce a music that expressed the rich diversity that is America.
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Excerpted from William Grant Still by Catherine Parsons Smith Copyright © 2000 by Catherine Parsons Smith. Excerpted by permission.
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