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Not for the first time, Wilbur and his
wife Caroline prayed for me. Nor did they omit entreaties to the
Lord for my financial good fortune as well as health and safety
in my drive from Landrum, SC, back to California. An hour later,
the ’62 Plymouth station wagon performing most satisfactorily,
I was into Georgia on Interstate 85, and two hours after that
into Alabama and passing to the north of Tuskegee, where, on the
first day of 1889, a shy young black man called William James
Edwards completed his three-day, 90-mile walk from Snow Hill to
enlist in Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
Institute. He walked with a limp, the souvenir of scrofula that
had seen him only able to crawl as a boy, enduring without anesthetic
Dr. Keyser’s periodic though ultimately successful assaults
with a knife on the infected bone tissue on his heel and elbow.
Three years later the young man who’d
never seen a kitchen knife and fork, and who’d slept all
his life on the dirt floor of a one-room shack, graduated second
in his class. He was confident and determined to return to Snow
Hill and open an institute on the Booker T. Washington model.
There were more than 400,000 black people in Alabama’s Black
Belt in 1870, freed from slavery and mostly facing the new oppression
of sharecropping, which seasoned nominal freedom with grinding
toil and constant indebtedness, the lynch mob ready to chasten
any impertinence with whip or noose.
Ahead of his time, Edwards reckoned
one of the big problems of Southern agriculture was the destruction
of the topsoil by greed and ignorance. "These waste places,"
he wrote in his 1918 memoir Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt,
"can be reclaimed and the gutted hills made to blossom, only
by giving the Negro a common education, combined with religious,
moral and industrial training and the opportunity to at least
own his home, if not the land he cultivates. The Negro must be
taught to believe that the farmer can become prosperous and independent;
that he can own his home and educate his children in the country.
If he can, and he can be taught these things, in less than ten
years, every available farm in the rural South will be occupied."
Edwards started the Snow Hill Institute
in the mid-1890s in a one-room cabin with one teacher, three students
and 50 cents in capital. By 1918 the school boasted 24 buildings,
between 300 and 400 students learning 14 trades and assets including
1940 acres of land valued at $125,000 and deeded to a board of
trustees. Dignified and fervent, Edwards was a wonderful fundraiser
among Northern whites, as Booker T. Washington gratefully appreciated.
He raised many thousands for Tuskegee and Snow Hill. Anna Jeanes,
a Philadelphia heiress, listened to him for an evening and sent
Snow Hill a check for $5000. Andrew Carnegie doubled that sum
in a donation to Tuskegee, with more to follow. Snow Hill waxed
in reputation and achievement.
In 1925, under the fearful strain of
keeping Snow Hill going, Edwards lost his mind at 56. Friends
found him in a cheap hotel in Jackson, MS, fighting the air with
a stick and throwing money in the fire. He recovered, retired
and lived another quarter century, but the fire was gone. By the
time it was closed in 1973, the Snow Hill Institute, now run by
the state of Alabama, was in poor shape.
About 50 miles southwest of Montgomery,
a sign on Rte. 28 announced Snow Hill, of which there was no other
visible trace. I asked an old black man where the institute was,
and he told me the next blacktop side road on the right. Soon
enough, a mile later, I could see a group of big red-brick buildings,
a venerable school bell, but no one around. Higher along the little
ridge there were handsome old frame houses, all deserted. A trailer
with a radio at mid-volume. Knocks produced nothing, and feeling
a little like the first to board a ghost ship I went back down
the lane, saw a smaller school building and opened the door to
find Consuela Lee, Edwards’ granddaughter, calmly waiting.
My friend Pierre Sprey told me about
Consuela last year. He’d just finished recording a session
with her for his Mapleshade label in his Maryland studio, east
of Washington. Pierre was ecstatic about Consuela’s playing:
"Though different in style, she comes out of a very interesting
tradition of classically trained black pianists, like Dorothy
Donegan, Mary Lou Williams or Shirley Horn, who early in life
decided they loved jazz but continued to become classically disciplined
pianists. Nat King Cole was another, and in a lot of ways she’s
a modern evolution of Nat King Cole, who was an astonishing virtuoso,
way beyond Oscar Peterson, though more modest about it."
Pierre mentioned Snow Hill and the summer
arts sessions Consuela has been running there, her operettas from
Uncle Remus stories, her steely will, her talented musical family,
including her brother, the bassist Bill Lee, father of Spike.
Pierre sent me the newly released CD a few weeks ago, and I loved
its spirit, its subtleties, its discipline. (To get hold of it,
call 1-888-CDMAPLE, or visit www.mapleshaderecords.com.)
It didn’t cross my mind, until
she’d thrown enough dates into her life story for me to figure
it out, that Consuela Lee is set to be 75 in November; nor did
I think her slight, though she’s probably around 5-2 and
remarked to me the next morning, with a 60-pound Doberman called
Garvey (the successor to an earlier Doberman, Toussaint) sitting
in her lap, that her two children worry about her weighing 110
pounds. There’s so much fire and focus in the woman that
such vital statistics aren’t vital at all.
Though the food was good at a place
in Camden, the next town west, Consuela said the owner was a racist
who’d recently refused to serve her and a friend. We should
go to Selma. Off she went to one of the big frame houses on the
hill to make ready, handing me a package she’d prepared.
In a couple of pages I was in the midst of Consuela’s onslaughts
on the board of trustees of the Snow Hill Institute.
When he was lying by the roadside, stricken
with scrofula, young Edwards would often see Roscoe Simpson, the
owner of the Snow Hill plantation, riding by, and Simpson would
toss him a coin. Then, when Edwards returned from Tuskegee, he
went to see Simpson, who strongly supported the plan for a school
and gave him his first seven acres, then 33 and then 60 more,
an overall gift of 100 acres. Some $30,000 of the money Edwards
raised up north later bought half of Simpson’s plantation,
an overall holding of some 1950 acres. In his memoir Edwards said
this allowed "black people still living in the slave quarters
to own their homes and small farms." He was unstinting about
Simpson as "one of the noblest men I have ever met, North
or South...at least fifty years ahead of his time... Without Mr
R.O. Simpson there could not have been any Snow Hill Institute."
After a career teaching music, Consuela
got back to Snow Hill in 1979 to try to get it on its feet again.
She’s been at loggerheads with Snow Hill Institute’s
trustees ever since, whose black members, she charges, "fulfill
the roles of: 1) ‘window dressing’ in compliance with
the look of integration, and 2) protectors of white interests,"
with said white interest "lining its pockets with money on
behalf of big national timber companies who have made huge profits
from Snow Hill Institute’s timber for years at the expense
of the community, and the detriment of the children."
On the face of it, Simpson and those
Northern liberals who supported Edwards could, if they were still
living, probably gripe that the Institute does not seem to be
conspicuously exerting itself these days to fulfill Edwards’
dream of educating black children. Similarly, the state of Alabama,
which holds the 10 acres on which the main school buildings stand,
isn’t doing anything either. According to Victor Inge, a
Selma writer who last year wrote and published From the Ground
Up, a good book about Edwards, Wilcox County ranks bottom of Alabama’s
67 in the usual stats concerning children, education and unemployment.
The public school system in the county is overwhelmingly black
and scandalously underfunded. At one school, according to Inge,
all but one student qualify for free or reduced lunches. As for
Edwards’ vision of independent black farmers, in 1900, 68
percent of Alabamians worked in farm-related jobs. These days,
in tune with the national destruction of small farms down the
decades, about 2 percent work in agriculture. For years, as a
lawsuit successfully charged in 1999, the USDA has been discriminating
against black farmers.
As I told her, Consuela’s driving
is like her piano playing, spirited yet disciplined. We shot along
the narrow roads, across the Edmund Pettus bridge where whites
ambushed the civil rights marchers in 1965 and into Selma. Consuela
described how her grandmother, at her wits’ end about Edwards’
collapse, had finally taken him to a local woman who practiced
voodoo. Inside the dark little hovel the woman talked to Edwards
in her kitchen for a while, told Susie Edwards she could help
and gave her a bottle of "stuff" with instructions how
to administer it. Edwards recovered, and Consuela remembers him
for her first 20 years, a muted figure smoking his pipe and reading
the New York Herald Tribune on the porch of one of the big frame
houses.
Everyone was musical in Consuela’s
family: from her father, an electrical engineer (cornet), her
mother (piano), Consuela (piano), sister Grace (singing), brothers
Bill (bass, "the musical genius of the family, though he’s
hard to get along with"), Leonard (sax), Clifton (trumpet),
Clarence (trombone). Bill organized a successful family group,
the Descendants of Mike and Phoebe, that played around the country,
including a particularly turbulent Newport Jazz festival: "The
hippies pulled the strings out of the piano. Tore it up. That
was ’74 or ’75. Why did they tear it up? It was during
those times."
Commencing her autobiographical sketch
with the words, "I was brought up like a princess,"
Consuela briskly marched me through her life, from music at Fisk
in Nashville, a spell teaching in a private college near Ocala,
FL, where she met the man, Isaac Thomas Moorhead, she was to marry
in 1950, then divorce 41 years later. He was the basketball coach
on a visiting team and his role in her life narrative these days
is not flattering. "Coaching, recruiting, playing around"
is Consuela’s pithy resume of men in her husband’s line
of work, though she does give him credit for their two fine children.
They were in New York in the early 1950s
when bebop ruled, and she could hear Art Tatum, Charlie Parker
and Bud Powell, along with friends like Mary Lou Williams. She
applied to the University of Alabama to do her masters and the
school acknowledged her talent, adding that it couldn’t accept
her and would pay for her to go to any school outside the state.
She ended up at Northwestern ("though don’t think that
was any bed of roses").
The late 1970s found her playing three
nights a week at a hotel in Williamsburg, and then she saw Snow
Hill on a visit to her mother: "I came onto the campus and
the weeds were knee high. Devastating. I went into the vocational
building where the boys learned farming. The back door was open.
I went in and there were bales of hay. They were using it as a
barn." She resolved to get Snow Hill back on its feet, and
began to spend more and more of her time there, starting her own
Spring Tree/Snow Hill Institute for the Performing Arts. In 1993
Consuela was rebuffed in Wilcox County Court for her charges that
the trustees were endangering Snow Hill Institute by selling property.
Relations with the board are acrid.
After reading through the judgment later
that night, I fell asleep on a nice big bed under the high ceiling
fan in Consuela’s front room. Ghosts are supposed to haunt
the night. I felt them in the dawn, one of the most beautiful
I’ve ever seen, sitting on Consuela’s porch looking
through huge old trees, listening to the birds. Down to the left
was the old spring where the slaves used to haul water to their
shacks. Along to the right was Edwards’ house, books in his
library just the way he left them. Next door one of her brothers,
a diabetic, is tended by Minnie, a local woman who later that
morning sang a spell-binding spiritual, plus some of the devil’s
music, blues. The feel of history was heavy, though not oppressive.
Consuela came out with Garvey the Doberman
and we talked as the sun began to climb. I asked her why one beautiful
piece on her CD, a composition of her own, was called "Prince
of Piano–Alfonso Seville." "When I got to Fisk,
and this was the odd thing about black colleges, they didn’t
want us to play jazz, which they thought quite a cut below Bach,
Beethoven and Chopin and the boys. They wanted us to concentrate
on the Europeans. Of course we’d play jazz anyway. One day
I went into the music building, 18 at the time, and there was
this guy sitting there, playing like Tatum. I just stood there
looking at him. He asked me my name and said, ‘Are you a
music student? Aha, do you play jazz?’ ‘No, but I’m
trying.’ He was a medical student at Meharry, a black medical
school in Nashville. We introduced ourselves and from then on
it was Alfonso Seville. The heck with Beethoven. I got a C in
piano. My report came home, my mother said, ‘Consuela, a
C in piano?’ That’s all she said. She’s a very
gentle person.
"I can’t say enough about
Alfonso Seville’s influence on me as a pianist. He had huge
hands. Usually you can reach a 10th, he could reach an 11th. I
can reach a 10th, I really had to work to do that, to get sounds
that he was doing. I had to do 10ths with one and fourths with
the other. He became a doctor and he died young."
"Did he record?"
"Let me tell you, after I got word
he’d passed I called his wife, I said, ‘Listen I’d
really like the tapes.’ ‘Oh, I don’t have any.’
‘You don’t have a tape of your husband, who was the
greatest pianist that ever lived?’ I was so mad at that woman...
"Rap? They call it music, but if
anything it’s poetry, and dance. No melody. Singing is part
of our legacy. Had we not been able to sing I just don’t
know if we would have survived or not. Not only do we sing, but
we tend to improvise as we sing and it’s such a part of our
history. Since rap came in the late 70s I’m finding our children
aren’t singing. I decided to organize a mass choir of the
children of all the elementary schools in this county. In auditioning
I had to teach them to listen for the tone before they tried to
sing it. For me that’s so elementary, but these children
did not have music, so who’s to blame? They sing in church.
But the churches... Sometimes the musicians are not quite up to
par. They play electronic instruments, turned up too high. If
you’ve got to out-sing a bass guitar and an electronic piano
and a drummer, it begins to be just hollering, and it’s not
music."
"Down the road here is your grandpa’s
grave? Snow Hill must have educated a bunch of Wilcox County people,
but the effect has been lost?" I felt a little bad about
asking, essentially, whether her grandfather’s legacy had
been whittled down to zero, but Consuela answered quick enough.
"Yes, the effect has been lost.
Right now we’re at a stage where we can go anywhere we want,
we can eat where we want, sit where we want. I’m saying that
to say something else: we’ve lost something. Because we were
a black community that was sealed in by segregation, we had our
own businesses. We had our own restaurants, beauty parlors. We
were self-contained. But now we have very few entrepreneurs, especially
in the South and even more especially in the rural South. We’re
very dependent on whites. We owe the banks too much. We owe the
credit cards too much, so we’re not in full control. Even
the churches.
"Thank God, because of my grandfather
we never had to sharecrop. But I do know the demeaning, debasing,
horrible things we went through in that segregation era. You don’t
forget. People say you should be thankful, you should forget.
But you don’t forget it. So it wasn’t easy, but we were
all lumped together. On a train, we were in a car, there were
just blacks. That meant you got the doctors, lawyers, sharecroppers,
the women, all of us, all of us there. So we had a camaraderie
that’s definitely missing now.
"My mother was not religious, though
she was very spiritual. My grandmother took us to church and thank
God she did, because we heard those spirituals. I don’t go
to churches, because I’m not getting anything. The ministers
come in here, from Selma or Montgomery, and they come and they’ll
preach their sermons and they’re gone. Hey, a minister is
supposed to be working in the community. So I stay right here.
I have my church right here in this house. I go in there and practice.
I try to get in two to three hours a day, usually morning. After
I walk the dog. Generally 6:30 to 8:30. I’m playing better
than I ever played in my life."
Older folks often say such things and
they’re not always to be believed, but I believed Consuela.
She has the fire her grandpa lost. I said goodbye, and after a
wonderful plate of soul food (baked pork chops and collard greens)
in Camden, headed off down the road to Mobile.
Alaxander Cockburn
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