Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations

2000s: Declaration of Freedom and Independence: The Invisible Story

2010-12-20T12:04:00.006-05:00

This essay was written by me in conjunction with the 50 Year Retrospective exhibition of Faith's work at Rutger's University, and published in the catalogue.

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit.

W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Primitive is a word I use in a positive way to explain the completeness of a concept in art. I like to layer and pattern and embellish my art in the manner of tribal art, and then, like a blues singer, I like to repeat and repeat it again. Fragmented, understated, or minimalist art forms frustrate me. I want to finish them. In the 1960s there was a minimalist aesthetic advocating “less is more.” To me, less is even less and more is still not quite enough. I was now using feathers and beads as never before.

I had been to the African source of my own “classical” art forms and now I was set free.

Faith Ringgold, We Flew Over The Bridge (1995)

In W.E.B. Dubois’ beautiful words on the cultural legacy of African Americans, which were written relatively early in a lifetime of struggle to uplift the race, one hears succinctly put the counter-claims of the African American experience in active contradiction with the utopian rhetoric of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. No, Dubois, seems to say, none of you who would call it your country have a claim that proceeds or outweighs the claim of the descendants of the slaves. It was the slaves, the kidnapped Africans who were here from the time of Jamestown in 1619 tilling the soil, contributing their flesh and sinew and ingenuity to build up this beautiful country, those 13 colonies, that the Founding Fathers would declare independent of the British crown.

It was the former slaves who would supplement the military forces of the colonies in the hopes of earning their freedom in a new nation. And for some time immediately after the Revolution, it seemed in some quarters as though slavery’s day was done. It was in this context that the Northern and Southern colonies struck the pact that would give slaveholders three-fifths of a vote for each of their slaves in the subsequent writing of the Constitution, helping to make their weight in national legislative bodies roughly equivalent to the non-slaveholders until the balance of power could not be maintained one minute more and the country itself faced a great Civil War.

Ironically, neither Dubois nor anyone else gave much thought to the potential for visual productivity among the slaves or even for the role of visual art in the lives of African Americans generally. When Dubois lists the African American contributions to the building of the land, the houses, the fences, the gardens and estates that the slaves made possible are considered unworthy of a mention. It follows then that it should be no surprise but when we turn to look for illustrations of the issues of race and gender in connection with the Declaration of Independence, we find precious little worthy of our respect and consideration. We find very little that can help enlighten us on the relationship of the Founders to their many slaves, and the future of those slaves. The women of any color were not even a thought.

Therefore when Faith turned last summer to the project of illustrating the Declaration of Independence, I took upon myself the task of finding what did exist among the images Americans invoke in celebration of the birth of the United States of America. I could find no visual images created specifically by African Americans in the 18th century at all bearing upon the rhetoric of the Declaration. Of the objects or images produced at the time of the American Revolution, I found some black artists: Joshua Johnston, the portrait painter who painted both blacks and whites, the slave potter from North Carolina known as Dave, the etchings by Scipio Moorhead (1773), among them one of the slave poet Phyllis Wheatley, the silhouettes of Moses Williams, who was a slave of Samuel Copley, the artist, including a silhouette of himself (in Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Addison Gallery of American Art 2006).

With little in the way of precedents, Faith nonetheless devised six original images, each one double-sided with an image taken from the struggle of the American Revolution paired with an image relevant to the African American struggle for freedom and justice which continued for another two hundred and fifty years after the Revolution. First she made paintings of them as the basis for a series of lithographs with the help of her favorite Master Printer Curlee Holton, with whom she had collaborated on the prints included in The Jones Road Series and in the limited edition of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Letters from a Birmingham Jail (2007).

From the outset Faith knew she wanted to emphasize African slavery since we know that slavery was a vital aspect of the colonies and would remain crucial to the productivity of the new nation. But her biggest challenge turned out to be not representing the plight of African Americans in relation to the Declaration, but rather the plight of women.

It is no secret to anybody who knows me that I love to watch films and I love to read books. There are a lot of great books about slavery, and the books that consider the issues of the 18th century and the Enlightenment in relation to slavery form a distinct category in the field of American History. In the past two decades since the unearthing of the colonial slave burial grounds in lower Manhattan, our picture of the lives of slaves and the role slavery played in the colonies, particularly in the North, has been irrevocably altered and enhanced. (This material resulted in among other works the epic New York Historical Society’s Slavery in New York edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, The New Press 2005).

Whereas when I was a graduate student in American Studies at Yale University briefly in the early 80s and studied the history of slavery and abolitionism there, the colonial period was interesting yet still sketchy in terms of readily available secondary sources, now the secondary sources are both provocative and fascinating with work on the slave trade, itself, on the piracy on the high seas that resulted from it, on the development of abolitionism and African Diasporic contributions to the movement to end slavery, as well as such special works as Annette Gordon Reed’s Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, University of Virginia 1997, in which we learn about the fascinating connection between a family of slaves and the family of the most prominent of Founding Fathers.

I drew upon my background readings in the field to advise my Mom, such as most significantly the incomparable Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (Oxford UP 2006) by my former teacher at Yale, arguably the most distinguished historian of abolitionism in the world today—Professor David Brion Davis. But Faith would insist upon visual sources, regardless the arguments I might make for the supremacy of concepts and ideas, and for the visual we turned together to the recent documentary work in the field. The best of these were the following:

Slavery and the Making of America Series produced by Thirteen/WNET New York 2004, Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery Series produced by WGBH Boston 2006 and The Middle Passage produced by HBO 2003. But with precious few antecedent illustrations, paintings and sculpture to draw upon, no photographs and little in the way of a visual imagination, the palette of these documents remained largely monochromatic. Their artistic strengths lay largely in their use of music, in particular Slavery and The Making of America for which the celebrated African American musician Bernice Johnson Reagon wrote the score and performed much of the music, some of it with the help of her multi-talented daughter Toshi Reagon. I acquired as well the extended cds Reagon wrote and produced to accompany the production. Since the world of the slaves she is creating is as much a mystery in its musical composition as it is in its visual composition, Reagon uses her considerable knowledge of the history of African American music in the 19th and 20th century to reconstruct the music the slaves of the 18th century might have made, or might have understood if they had heard it. In the process, Reagon produces one of the most beautiful compilations of music I have ever heard, which served as an inspiration, albeit in the abstract, to Faith’s wonderful work.

Faith was particularly struck by Reagon’s rendering into song, WEB Du Bois famous words on the founding of the American nation, “Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here,” which he addressed to his white readers in The Souls of Black Folk (1903).

But perhaps my fondest memory of our whole interaction during her completion of the project was viewing together the docu-drama of the life of John Adams produced by HBO that spring. From this riveting experience came Faith’s interest in the letters Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John Adams who was one of the signers of the Declaration. Sadly, this was as close as any woman in the 18th century got to having a verifiable impact on the contents of the Declaration.

In the second of her illustrations of the Declaration, Faith used a painted portrait image of Abigail Adams as her model, rendering it in black and white and juxtaposed it with a carte de visite photographic portrait of the 19th century black feminist orator Sojourner Truth. On these images Faith superimposed in turn the handwritten words by Abigail Adams in the 18th century concerning the rights of women and the words Truth spoke in her defense of the vote for women (which were not successful) at the conclusion of the Civil War.

Faith’s first image juxtaposes King George III against a background of the British Flag. He is walking on the heads of the American Colonists. King George III was the person to whom the Declaration of Independence was addressed. His response was extremely dismissive, which set off the American Revolution. Next to King George, Faith has set an image of a slave ship in which there is superimposed a diagrammatic portrayal of how the slaves were packed in the holds.

In the water are slaves either being dumped or jumping to their deaths, recalling most famously JW Turner's 19th century masterpiece “Slaveship.”

The third illustration "Absolute Tyranny" juxtaposes the portrayal of the Boston Massacre in which Crispus Attucks, an African American was the first to fall (a version of the images printed and circulated by Paul Revere) with a lynching scene in the American South.

The fourth illustration juxtaposes a rendition of The Boston Tea Party with an image taken from the famous photograph of the Civil Rights Confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge some two hundred years later.

Illustration 5 juxtaposes an image of Benjamin Franklin pleading the case of the new nation before the British Crown after the American Revolution in 1776 with an image of Frederick Douglass addressing a hypothetical abolitionist meeting under the trees in the period after his escape from slavery in the 1830s.

Wherever the slave ships traveled on the high seas, there was an ongoing blood bath of contending forces. There was no justice. There was no peace.

Faith’s final image juxtaposes Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence at his entirely slave-built estate in Montecello, Virginia with Martin Luther King writing Letter from a Birmingham Jail in his cell in 1963.

The Enlightenment was full of contradictions, including the Declaration of Independence which was arguably the first world historical document to result from Enlightenment ideas: equality yes but for rational, civilized human being, which as everyone knew included only white adult land-owning males. This was such an implicit assumption at the time of the writing of the Declaration, that these terms need not even be explicitly stated, leaving perhaps the loophole of the next two centuries which find us now with a President who descends from Africa and from America combined.

Of course, Thomas Jefferson, the most revered of our founding fathers and the author of the Declaration of Independence, thought that Africans were culturally inferior based upon some rather fanciful observations culled from existing readings of African cultures and his close observation of the African slaves he owned and carefully managed. His Montecello estate, where Faith pictures him quietly writing the Declaration, still stands today as a celebration of the beauty and careful design that he and his well trained and skillfully trained artisan slaves constructed. He kept his slaves and their families with him for life, if his finances didn’t interfere, and he also chose to have each of his slaves educated in a useful trade or craft contributing to the self-sufficiency of the beautiful Monticello. But they were still slaves, and even Sally Hemmings, whom it is widely thought bore him children, was sold to cover his debts when he died.

Thomas Jefferson was one of the masters of enlightenment thought, which has been remembered for its rationalism based upon observation, its banishment of confusing and useless emotionalism as well as religious intolerance. Yet Jefferson’s pristine intellect remained tainted by his own complicity in the horrifying ordeal of European and American cooperation in the slave trade in Africa. As such, his dream nation remains haunted by the psychological and historical traumatization of slavery's middle passage.

ENDIT

Interview with Mme. Willi Posey

2010-09-05T00:52:00.001-04:00

http://www.archive.org/details/InterviewWithWilliePoseyIn1980PartI

Faith Ringgold: On The Necessity of Primitivism to the Blues Tradition

2010-05-13T19:40:00.005-04:00

Faith is describing the superstructure mask, originally uploaded by Barbara Company.

This is Faith describing how she made the superstructure for her mask of Aunt Edith. Barbara Wallace, my sister took this picture at her talk at Rutger's.

This image links to more photos of the masks Faith Ringgold made with her mother's help before either of them had been to Africa (early 70s I think). I think Momma Jones (Willi Posey) may have gone to Africa first. Both were always intrepid travelers.

Faith has done a great deal of soft sculpture and masks in the course of her 50 year career as an artist. This work is well documented in the writings of art historian Lisa Farrington and in Dancing at the Louvre edited by Dan Cameron (University of California Press 1990) and others, but not necessarily widely seen otherwise. This soft sculptural work, which can be seen now at ACA Gallery in Chelsea, will be featured in exhibitions coming up this year and next year at ACA, Rutger's University and other venues.

Photo copyright Faith Ringgold and photo by Barbara Wallace at ACA GAlleries.

All of which I mention in order to provide the necessary background for understanding this quote from Faith's autobiography, which seems particularly appropriate to the topic of Blues People:

I came back from Africa with ideas for a new mask face, more primitive than any I had ever done before. Primitive is a word I use in a positive way to explain the completeness of a concept in art. I like to layer and pattern and embellish my art in the manner of tribal art, and then, like a blues singer, I like to repeat and repeat it again. Fragmented, understated, or minimalist art forms frustrate me. I want to finish them. In the 1960s there was a minimalist aesthetic advocating "less is more." To me, less is even less and more is still not quite enough. I was now using feathers and beads as never before. I had been to the African source of my own "classical" art forms and now I was set free.

Quotation from WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE by Faith Ringgold

Artist, Children's Author and mother of Michele Wallace, Your Teacher

Pictures for Soul Pictures 1940s through 1950s

2010-03-25T11:34:00.016-04:00

See text to follow in next post (http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=5870283782622464993&postID=3611475788842301458)

Change Story Quilt: (All photos used in collage are taken by H. D'Laigle, Sr.)--still working on these images from the Change Quilt itself at Flickr Change Set

Image Four--Change Detail, Introductory Text Box (1986)

Image -- Change Detail, 1940s Photo Collage (1986). All rights restricted. Faith Image Six--Change Detail, 1940s Text Box (1986). All rights restricted. Faith Ringgold Archive.

Image Seven--Change Detail, 1940s Photo Guide Map: 1940-1949 (1986). Faith Ringgold Archive. All rights restricted.

Image Eight--Faith’s older sister: this is Barbara’s official portrait as she was graduating from Morris High School in 1943 at the age of 16. She had begun kindergarten at three because on the first day of school (1930), the principal felt sorry for my grandmother (later Mme. Willi Posey) who seemed to have four small children (although one of them was her sister’s daughter). Faith was then a new born. Copyright Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved.

Image Nine--. Faith and Earl as teenagers on Edgecombe Avenue.
It was 1946. Faith was 16 and Earl was 19. He was a musician and attended college at the New School and Julliard from time to time. They say he was very smart. Copyright Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved.

Image Ten-- Faith and her friends in the 40s on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. Strolling in what was largely a segregated town then. Faith says they looked forward to staying all summer and enjoying the race movies at the local cinema. Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved.

Image Eleven--Faith’s high school graduation photo. Faith graduated from Morris High School in 1948 and begun studies in Art Education at the City College of New York at a time when girls were still not admitted to the school of liberal arts, and when black students were practically non-existent. Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved.

Image Twelve-- Barbara remained ahead of her cohort educationally until she graduated she completed college at NYU in Home Economics. This is the day of her graduation with her mother. Photo taken by Cardoza Posey, her mother’s older brother who had helped with the expense. Copyright Faith Ringgold Archive.

(Still working on these images from the Change Quilt itself, very large, See Flickr Change Set)
Image Thirteen. Change Text Detail, 1950s. 50s Collage—Change by Faith Ringgold (detail) 1986. Faith Ringgold Archive. All rights reserved.

Image Fourteen. 50s Handwritten Text—Change by Faith Ringgold (detail) 1986. Faith Ringgold Archive. All rights reserved.

Image Fifteen-- 50s Illustration Grid—Change by Faith Ringgold (detail) 1986. Faith Ringgold Archive. All rights reserved.

Aunt Barbara's Wedding Series:
Photographs by H. DeLaigle Sr.

Image Sixteen--Arriving at Aunt Barbara’s wedding: Mme. Willi Posey, Mrs. Brown, Barbara, Faith and Grandpa Andrew. Posey and he are no longer married. Divorced since 1946 (also featured on the cover of Dark Designs and Visual Culture, Duke University Press 2004). Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved.

Images Seventeen and Eighteen--Aunt Barbara and Groom after the wedding. Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved

Image Nineteen-- Aunt Barbara's ladies in waiting including her younger sister Faith on her right in the large flowers. Faith is 19. Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved

Image Twenty-- Wedding Party including Earl (my father) and Faith (my mother) months before they were married and two years before I was born. 1950 at 363 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All rights reserved

Image Twenty-one-- Uncle Andrew, Faith and Barbara's older brother, dressed for Aunt Barbara’s wedding. Faith Ringgold Archive. All rights reserved

Image Twenty-Two-- Mme. Posey (Faith’s mother) and her friends Lottie Belle and tba at 363 Edgecombe Avenue for Aunt Barbara’s wedding. Faith Ringgold Photo Arhive. All rights reserved

Image Twenty-Three-- Mme. Willi Posey business card. Faith Ringgold Photo Archive. All Rights Reserved.

Image Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five--Mme. Willi Posey fashion pose in dress of her own design. Photos by Thomas Morrison at 363 Edgecombe Avenue in 1950. Faith Ringgold Archive. All rights reserved.

Image Twenty-Six--Aunt Barbara modeling coat made by Mme. Willi Posey in apartment at 363 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem. All rights reserved. Faith Ringgold Archive.

Soul Pictures: Mid 1940s Through Early 1950s

2010-03-25T10:55:00.011-04:00

Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations--
Mid 1940s to Early 1950s
by
Michele Wallace

By 1986, Faith Ringgold was even somewhat ahead of her plans for artistic success. She had been unrelenting in her choice as a black woman artist to do that which no one had ever seen anyone do, which was to render herself a world class visual artist, somebody her peers regardless of race, gender and ethnicity would know, respect and recognize. Failing that—because it didn’t look much like anything anybody else of her race and gender could do in 1959 when she started out after grad school—well at least she would have pursued every possibility, produced as much first rate work in as many ways as she could imagine.
In 1986 she had achieved her 50-year landmark and then some, despite the burden of two daughters who didn’t always appreciate the importance of her goals and two husbands. Her second husband (Burdette Ringgold) had been extremely helpful in terms of providing security both for her and the girls.

Faith had thus become a relatively well known artist in cultural circles all over the United States and abroad via her travelling exhibitions of tankas (sewn clothe frames around acrylic paintings, which included her Slave Rape Series, her Political Landscape Series, and her Feminist Series), her soft sculpture (including sewn and beaded dolls, sculptures and masks) and her performance pieces in which she read to college audiences from the text of her autobiography in-progress wearing a variety of costumes and masks she had made with the help of friends and various artist assistants. [1]

By this time she had major league representation in a gallery in SoHo and she had received an appointment as a full Professor at the University of California in San Diego where the position granted her a large studio to work in, spending six of the coldest months of the year in California. Now she retained artist assistants in both New York (Lisa Yee) and California (Gail Leibig) to handle the increasing commissions, to do the intricate needlework her projects required, and to leave her time to continue to pursue her further developments in her own art even as she still engaged in college tours and college teaching. She had always had a lot of energy and an indomitable spirit. Such qualities were to rise particularly to the surface in the 80s. Her New York address remained in Harlem in the apartment where our family had come to live in the early 1960s.

But the single aspect of her work that would account for bringing her the most attention in the 80s was the development of the story quilt. Quilting she had learned from her mother (Mme. Willi Posey), who had learned it from her mother (Ida Matilda Posey) and her grandmother (Betsy Bingham) in Palatka and Jacksonville, Florida, who had learned it from their female forebears who had been weavers, quilters and seamstresses for their families and their communities.
When Faith’s mother Willi Posey died in 1982, it was a setback for the entire family but especially Faith because she was still in the early stages of pursuing the quilting collaboration with her mother prompted by an invitation to participate in an artists/quilters collaborative show which begun at the University of Texas in San Antonio.[2] Out of that collaboration had come “Echoes of Harlem (1980),“ and then “Mother’s Quilt (1983),” which was made by Faith from pieces cut by Posey shortly before her death.
In 1983, when Faith was producing her first story quilt “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?” she was doubtful of its artistic value or legitimacy in the beginning, not sure of what it was she had.

Image One--Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? By Faith Ringgold (1983). Private Collection. All rights reserved. Story Quilt Acrylic Painting framed in tie-died quilted fabric. Tie-Die by Marquetta Jones.

Image Two--Detail of Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? Handed beaded and painted images of Aunt Jemima as a modern middle aged woman with dignity and ambition. Faith's first story quilt.

Faith hid this quilt under an extra bed because she wasn't sure she had done anything worth being seen. Moira Roth came to stay with us at 345 West 145th Street. I was then living with my parents. Moira who would offer the job of the professorship at UCSD wanted to see her work in preparation for writing about her for a catalogue for her 20 Year Retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem when mother confessed that her newest work she had hidden under her bed. Of course Moira asked to see it, loved it. She and Mary Schmidt Campbell (who was then Director of the Studio Museum) insisted that it be featured on the cover of the catalogue (which I edited) and on a poster advertising the show. Both the catalogue and the poster can still be found on sale at the Studio Museum.

Made up of heavily embroidered squares of all the characters in the story, in particular several versions of Aunt Jemima, Faith centered the art work around a fictional narrative in dialect describing the rise to economic glory of Aunt Jemima and her happy marriage followed by her death and the African funeral her children then gave her.[3]

Image Three--“Change: Faith Ringgold’s Over 100 Pounds Weight Loss Story Quilt” January 1, 1986. All rights reserved. Faith Ringgold Archive.

At that point, Faith’s major writing experience had been in the context of her autobiography in-progress, which had not yet found a publisher. Indeed, she read from the autobiography and began to write on her quilts as a way of publishing despite the rejection of publishers.
Of course, in 1988 Faith would do what is still her most famous story quilt, «Tar Beach», which is currently in the Collection of the Guggenheim Museum, as part of her Women on a Bridge Series of story quilts featuring as well «Sonny's Quilt.» which featured her childhood friend Sonny Rollins practicing his saxophone on a bridge. It was someone who admired Tar Beach who first came to her with the idea of making a children’s book out of it. That book had such success among children and adults that it won the coveted Caldecott Prize.

Nonetheless in 1985, Faith was still lugging one very concrete vestige of the grief that had descended onto her shoulders after the unexpected death of her mother in 1981 (Posey was 78) and the equally unexpected death of her sister, and her only remaining sibling, Barbara (she was 58) in the following year. It had been a sad business indeed but it was now time to shed that burden, which had taken the all too tangible form of a precipitous weight gain. In the course of this struggle, Faith produced a work of art unlike any she had done before or has done since. It was a joyful and mostly light spirited work of art (probably the lightest she had done yet) that would draw heavily upon the story of her family as represented by the huge photographic archive my grandmother and her mother Mme. Willi Posey had painstakingly composed in the course of her lifetime. This new work in story quilt form would summarize and comment upon her travails as a black woman up to and including the present (Faith was 58 at the time, the same age I am now). The purpose of the work, which was clearly stated in the work, itself, was to support her in her effort to lose the weight she had gained over the decades.[4]

Change: 100 Pound Weight Loss Story Quilt was anchored around yet another version of a story quilt, this time based on Faith’s life and her relationship to food in 7 rectangular sections composed each of a photo/collage of pictures of herself and family transferred to a white muslin surface in a then experimental printing technique with matching text panels hand printed by Faith telling stories about the role food had played in her life in that particular decade. The panels were then sewn together and quilted.
Since this story quilt seems to me to provide such a pivotal turning point in the development of our life as a family and in the development of Faith’s work as an artist, I have decided to use its gathering of pictures and family memories to organize the story of the women in our family.

Their black feminist legacy was curiously shaped out of many things not ordinarily thought of as feminist, such as fashion shows, weddings, cocktail parties, club dances, and trips to Africa and Europe, although these activities are often thought of as markers of striving for upward class mobility, particularly among the black bourgeoisie. What I would like to suggest in this case is that it is visually impossible to distinguish the aspirations of women for improvement in their status as nonbeings in a world dominated by men from the more problematic characteristics of striving for what Thorsten Veblen called invidious class distinction.
From the mid 1940s, when her daughters finished high school and 1960, Posey was heavily engaged in the life of a fashion designer (self-employed Harlem seamstress) and active in a variety of national women’s clubs and local organizations, many of them formed by her and her close friends. These were also the years in which Posey divorced her husband (Andrew Jones) who had financed Faith’s childhood, took back her maiden name (Posey) and moved from 222 West 146th Street to an apartment on the 4th floor of 363 Edgecombe Avenue on Sugar Hill.

In this chapter of Soul Pictures: Black Feminist Generations I propose we take a closer look at the section of the quilt, which focuses on the years of the late 40s and the early 1950s before I was born in 1952.

During this time, Faith was a student in college and an apprentice to Posey in her work as a fashion designer. Faith would not begin to produce what she now calls her early mature work until the early 60s.

Change Text: Part II by Faith Ringgold (copyright 1986)
“1940-1949 (Transcription)
By the 1940s we all had to clean up our plates for the starving children. That of course was right up your alley since you never left anything anyway. It was in those years that you discovered chocolate candy bars. They were a nickel then and as big as the ones that cost 50 cents today. All you really thought about in those years were chocolate candy bars, boys, make-up and clothes. Actually you never really pursued your chocolate addiction past your teens, except for the time you thought of making chocolate candy as a business. You found it’s quite easy to make chocolate candy and even easier to eat it all.
It’s lucky for you that you never learned to make pastry. The few times you tried it, the results were more useful as bricks you could throw in a real pastry shop window. Some people would call that a sacrilege, and give you two to four years time. But you wouldn’t have minded if you could do it in a bakery. Some ideas are so bad you wonder how you entertained them even for a minute—like the one you had about making all your pastries so that you would at least have good nutrition. You made a pound cake that weighed more than you did. Industrial strength pound cake. You needed a saw to cut it. And you ate it. You had to steam it first, but you ate it.”

(See Flickr Link TBA)

Image Four--Change Detail, Introductory Text Box (1986)

Image Five-- Change Detail, 1940s Photo Collage (1986). All rights restricted. Faith Ringgold Archive.

Image Six--Change Detail, 1940s Text Box (1986). All rights restricted. Faith Ringgold Archive.

Image Seven--Change Detail, 1940s Photo Guide Map: 1940-1949 (1986). Faith Ringgold Archive. All rights restricted.

Change Part II: 1950-1959 Text by Faith Ringgold (transcription) “Women in the 1950s had to get married to leave home. Barbara was married first. Her wedding was beautiful; however, both of you marriages were terrible mistakes. You were still in college when you and your two daughters moved in with your mother after your divorce. All through the 1950s you were scantily clothed in tight, revealing dresses with matching three-inch heels, a size too small; and often amazed onlookers by falling down whole fights of stairs without injury.

You also modeled for your mother in her many fashion shows, and was her master of ceremonies, which was more appealing to you. Being a model seemed an unnatural thing to do. You were a connoisseur of pork chop sandwiches—that was natural to you. Birdie, (your soon to be second husband) often brought you a pork chop sandwich and some tutti frutti ice cream made from whole milk and cream when he came to call. That was love.

Pork chop sandwiches cost 75 cents. They were greasy and fried—better than steak. A date was to go to the movies or a concert for a dance and then dinner at Sherman’s Barbeque or the Red Rooster on 7th Avenue for fried chicken and a drink. The next day after a date you were always sick with asthma. As a matter of fact, many times you got asthma before the date and had to go to the hospital instead; or you went out and got asthma on the way home and had to be carried upstairs. That was romance in the 50s.”

[1]For information concerning Ringgold’s work during the 70s and the 80s, refer to Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold’s French Collection and Other Story Quilts edited by Dan Cameron et al. University of California Press 1998 and We Flew Over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold, Duke University Press (originally published by Little Brown 1993) 2005. For more information concerning Faith’s earliest mature works, mostly oil paintings on stretched canvases, see Lisa Farrington’s Art on Fire: The Politics of Race and Sex in the Paintings of Faith Ringgold, Millenium 1999 and her more recent monograph on the work of Faith Ringgold published as part of the Pomegranate Series edited by David Driscoll.

[2] See Declaration of Independence: Fifty Years of Art by Faith Ringgold, May 17-June 26, 2009 curated by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin, Essays by Tanya Sheehan and Michele Wallace, Mason Gross School of the Arts Galleries, Rutgers University, Institute for Women and Art, New Brunswick, NJ.
[3] "Whose Afraid of Aunt Jemima?" was featured on the cover of Faith Ringgold: Twenty Years of Painting, Sculpture and Performance edited by Michele Wallace, The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1984. One of Faith's favorite stories is about how she asked me to write the text of Whose Afraid of Aunt Jemima and that I declined, saying that Aunt Jemima wasn't my story, that I ran several miles a day in order to avoid that story. So Faith took up the pen and wrote her own story and put it on her quilt for the first time. In the following year, Faith composed a story quilt series called The Bitter Nest, which has said in both her autobiography and elsewhere was in response to the difficulties of her relationship with me at that time.
[4] Faith Ringgold Change: Painted Story Quilts, January 13 through February 7, 1987, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery. All rights reserved. Essays by Moira Roth,Thalia Gouma-Peterson.

The Other Side of Harlem

2010-01-30T13:07:00.008-05:00

This post originates at SOUL PICTURES:

http://mjsoulpictures.blogspot.com/2010/01/other-side-of-harlem.html

This blog has been devoted to interweaving the visual artifacts of my family, in particular the women, narratives and explanations of how they came about. In the process, one aspect of my family experience has been very consciously excluded: that of my father's family. It wasn't because I didn't or don't know my father's family or didn't know my father. It was rather because the rupture that took place between my father and mother's family when their marriage was annulled in 1956 was so profound and so unhealed even these sixty-five years later, that I conceived of the Soul Pictures project as solely a portrait of the transmission of culture via my maternal ancestry.

I thought to myself that I would leave my father's family to another time, a time when my focus on my father's family, their strengths and weaknesses, and the many photographs I have access to of them, would give less offense to the people who really raised me (in particular my stepfather Burdette) and took responsibility for me as a child.

But something very dramatic has happened since then related to this split between the maternal and the paternal sides of my legacy and ancestry. Also, some of the developments around the progression of the Soul Pictures project as a book about the women in my family has moved to the next stage, making it more conceivable to devote some space to my father's family in this blog afterall.

The dramatic thing that happened was the profile of Mom (Faith Ringgold) as part of a group of young people who began their careers as artists as children on Edgecombe Avenue, which recently appeared in the New York Times. Featured as a visual accompaniment to this article, is the multimedia presentation as part of the New York Time's new multimedia offerings at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/01/22/nyregion/sugarhill.html

My father Earl Wallace, who was a classical and jazz pianist, was one of the young people who grew up on Edgecomb Avenue, at 365 Edgecomb Avenue in fact, and Edgecomb Avenue is where Earl and Faith first met and played together. His parents were from Jamaica, West Indies as were the two other people featured in the article about Faith. Both Roy Eaton and Cecelia Hodges were of West Indian ancestry and, no doubt, knew my father Earl.

Granted Earl didn't survive or become distinguished, as was probably true of many of their generation of both Southern and West Indian ancestry, but the main point I want to make is this: there were two distinctly different black migrations to New York which contributed substantially to the concentration of talent in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem in the thirties, forties and fifties when my Mom was a young woman.

There was a West Indian migration (from most of the islands of the Caribbean, of which my father's parents and extended family were part) and there was a Southern migration, which brought Faith's mother and father to Harlem. Both migrations were massive and both contributed substantially to the fame and cultural vibrancy of the area. Although the relative dimensions would be hard to determine since we rarely acknowledge the fault line between the West Indians and the Southerners.

At least if my family stories are any indication, and my own experience of having served as the only bridge along with my sister between the two families since we were infants, there wasn't a lot of love between the West Indians and the Southerners. Although I need to acknowledge here as well the efforts of my maternal grandmother, Momma Jones, Mme. Willi Posey, and her determination to foster our connections with my father's family. As a result of her efforts, I saw a great deal more of my father and his family than I think my mother has ever been aware of.

It is hard to tell how my family experiences relate to the larger picture for the area in general though but I do know a great deal about the ancestry of my father's family and this area mapped out as Sugar Hill in Harlem is precisely where they were then. Thanks to a meticulous family history (not formally published) including many photographs written by a cousin named Robert Tomlinson (an artist now who lives in France) on my father's side of the family, I have extensive information about the members of this family lineage and where in Harlem they were concentrated.

Of course, I think the story gets a good deal more interesting and instructive to current audiences if it is allowed to go beyond the production of the reputations of the people who became world famous and gets more into the historical and cultural particulars--the nature of their practices.

The list of people pointed out as having emerged to flower, or having lived in Sugar Hill, I find particularly frustrating and am hoping that it will simply be a beginning to which flesh and blood can be added over time. Chronologies and Maps are wonderful audio visual tools when the layers are allowed to build. All in all, I am so happy this happened.

And now I will tell you about my father's family because my father, my Mom and my stepfather were all very good friends on Edgecomb Avenue and the second marriage issued almost seamlessly from the first marriage. Unfortunately, my father died in 1966 when I was 14 and he was an only child but as an adult I have come to know that he had an interesting and accomplished family of origin. He, himself, got swept away by the plague of heroin addiction that settled upon the jazz community in the 40s and 50s and then branched out into a full scale plague by the 60s and 70s.

We Came to America

2010-01-20T09:58:00.000-05:00

http://kpfawomensmag.blogspot.com/2010/01/martin-luther-king-jr-day-on-womens.html

Women's Magazine - January 18, 2010 at 1:00pm | KPFA 94.1 FM Berkeley: Listener Sponsored Free Speech Radio

2010-01-19T21:26:00.001-05:00

Women's Magazine - January 18, 2010 at 1:00pm | KPFA 94.1 FM Berkeley: Listener Sponsored Free Speech Radio

This is a deep little gadget. Anyhow, I pressed a button enabling me to post on my blog an audio file of this women's program from KPFA 94.1 Berkeley broadcast at 1 p.m. on January 18th. I occupy about fifteen minutes of a highly worthywhile show with Kate Raphael. Aside from a discussion of Haiti with a biographer of Aristide, Raphael interviews me about the history of black feminism, the fallout from Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman and the writing I've done since. As i was going on about the global dimensions of feminism, as I have learned from many of my other black feminist colleagues, including Beverly Guy-Sheftall, we ended up with a few minutes on Precious and how it fits, if it fits. All these months (since July really), I've been honing my spiel on Precious and I got it just right right here. Maybe I can make my little speech at the Academy Awards. I guess Monique is sure to win. Are the nominations out yet?

The Faith Ringgold Society

2009-12-21T22:46:00.011-05:00

CHANGE: THE 100 POUNDS WEIGHT LOSS STORY QUILT & PERFORMANCE

Can't believe how long its been since I posted but it is necessary to explain that I have in the interim really transformed the way the work on Soul Pictures is going. I did two public presentations of work from Soul Pictures, the first at Broadway Housing at the Dorothy Day Residence, which was composed of about 130 images about the life and work of Faith Ringgold. I used the powerpoint application, which I have never really mastered. Also, in the process, I poured water into my laptop causing the memory board to have a breakdown (I think that is what my computer person called it).

My computer person is Linda Conoval who has a lovely little helpful business called Mac Solutions in downtown Englewood. She is also an artist and a photographer and somebody who is as fascinated as I am by film and by the life's work of Faith RInggold. She is my first real New Jersey friend who actually lives and feels comfortable in New Jersey.

In any case, overcoming great difficulties, I presented an extended powerpoint focused upon CHANGE: THE 100 POUND WEIGHT LOSS QUILT AND PERFORMANCE, which Faith composed in the period from 1987 through 1991. In the first of the story quilt, she constructs photographic lithographs of each of the decades her life in order to document the progress of her body and her process of weight gain.

This is the first photographic panel with pictures of Faith as a child in the 30s when she was
quite thin as a result of the rigorous diet her Mom (Mme. Willi Posey) put her on in order to control her allergies and her asthma.

These are two details from the first panel. My talk was composed of an illustrated lecture explaining the relationship of this work to Mom's entire career and work. I did a second talk as well, but this time focused in particular on the years from 1978 through 1983, which was includes the years immediately following the death of her mother, and which were transformative for Ringgold's life and career. Yes, she lost the weight and gradually hit upon a new arrangement whereby food would no longer be controlled entirely by her impulses but there were many other developments woven into the story of this quilt, including a change in style, materials and focus. It is a moment of great revelation in her life and mine. Of course, I was there.

In the process of doing these talks, I was so impressed with the audience they drew that I decided I need to set up someway of continuing this feedback in perpetuity. So I founded the Faith Ringgold Society to study her life and work primarily on facebook. Yet I am painfully aware that I know many people whom I cherish who don't make time in their lives for facebook. It is afterall largely a careerist network. In the meanwhile, I've seen my neice Baby Faith who has helped me to construct a website for The Society. The address is http://www.faithringgoldsociety.org.

If you wish to be a member in this mostly research oriented society, please follow the link to register and sign up for our activities and publications.

Barbara when she was sleek and fit

2009-11-01T17:56:00.003-05:00

MJ-2005-1212, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

1981 in the little house I rented in New Haven. Barbara is 28 I think since it is Christmas apparently. Photo taken by I am not sure whom. Perhaps it was me with Barbara's camera. She lived with me in New Haven briefly.

Program from an Early Fashion Show

2009-10-23T00:04:00.003-04:00

1951 FashionS01, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This show was held at Abyssinian Baptist Church, which was apparently where the movement of black fashion designers began. In 1951. MJ was one of the designers. There are also other fashion show documents to be seen at flickr.

MJ's Models--Edgecombe Ave

2009-10-23T00:01:00.004-04:00

MJ's Models--Edgecombe Ave, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

A real spirit of the fashion shows that emanated from Edgecombe Avenue in the 50s. I was a small child in the background of this scene. The women that populated my early life, MJ, my Mom, my Aunt Barbara sitting on the couch, behind mother the lovely Ann Porter and their many beautiful friends. These were happy times. Innocent times for me.

De Facto Segregation by Faith Ringgold

2009-10-05T18:23:00.004-04:00

Faith did this cartoon for The Nation in 1994 in connection with the anniversary of the Supreme Court Decision on Brown versus the Board of Education. They paid for it but chose not to print it. It thus became one of my prized possessions. I love it more and more as time goes on. It is very particularly the Ringgold brand of humor. This is also what I mean by the idea that some pictures talk, and some people talk in pictures. Maybe we should do this more.

Faith Wallace Gadsden as a Baby

2009-10-05T16:07:00.005-04:00

This photograph captures everything about Baby Faith as a Baby that I simply adored. She isn't really able to entirely sit up yet so she is leaning slightly to the side of her stroller and the hair is only growing on part of her head thus far but the indomitable spirit and determination to stand up and be counted, to be focused and unforgettable is already there. One hand in a fist the other reaching out. Perhaps she is 3 or 4 months. I loved her then and I love her still. Soul Pictures is dedicated to her future, and to the future of the planet Earth. Photo by Faith Ringgold.

A Little Darling 1987 CHANGE

2009-08-23T22:14:00.007-04:00

This post is just for you Dawn and your precious daughters and son.

This picture is a photo taken of Baby Faith (Faith Wallace-Gadsden) by Clarissa Sligh in the process of documenting Faith Ringgold's CHANGE: PAINTED STORY QUILTS (1987). Faith is, of course, Faith Ringgold's oldest and first granddaughter.
In 1987, Faith had composed a quilt made up of a black and white collage of family archival photographs, which were then stencilled onto canvas and framed with quilting partly conceptualized by her lovely former assistant Lisa Yee. These photographs were made up of those that Momma Jones (Mme. Willi Posey, my grandmother, Faith's mother) kept and commissioned as part of her collection to document her work in fashion, and those photographs Faith had begun to keep and commission to document her work in visual art.
In addition, in 1986 Faith had begun a project to document a personal goal of losing 100 pounds, as her slow addition of body weight had become intolerable to her. In an attempt to politicize and universalize her own drama with food and excessive weight, she devised a script and a performance centered around the slow steady weight gain which often characterizes the lives of women as they have children and center their lives around their offspring and husband. She called it CHANGE and the message was that anyone could do anything he or she wanted, especially if it involved one's own body.

"January-October 1986
The worst part of being fat was squeezing yourself sideways through the subway turnstile, hobbling down the stairs to the train in hopes that it would still be there when you finally arrive and that you would be lucky enough to find two seats. Together."
Text of Change: Painted Story Quilts. Copyright Faith Ringgold 1986. All rights reserved.

The story of Tar Beach, that anyone could fly, came directly out of the resolve and the message of CHANGE. CHANGE also marks a transition in how Faith would approach her materials in the conception of her work. CHANGE was a story quilt composed of portions of her actual life in the form of her family photographs and the stories of her weight gain over the decades of her life due to the usual burdens of being a wife and mother.
But by virtue of this composition, Faith invented an indelible marker delineating the first half of her career as an artist and the second half. She did in fact lose 100 pounds. And her life and her career, would in fact, be different from then on in so many ways. It wasn't that she would no longer struggle with her weight or leave all concerns about her appearance behind her. The interest in appearance, as well as fashion and imagery in general, is part of the legacy of our family, especially of the women, although the men were far from shabby either. I know the men less well because there have been very few men. Of the men who survived, few had any children. And if they had children, they were daughters and those daughters had no children or had children who didn't survive to have progeny of their own.
Someone just recently suggested to me that families tend to be either predominantly male or predominantly female and I have noticed that this tends to be the case. The ongoing war between the sexes probably helps to exacerbate this tendency. Some countries are using ultrasound in order to weed out female babies in order to produce a marked dominance of male children throughout their populations.
In any case, from 1987 onward, Faith's work would be marked by an optimism and a buoyancy not particularly evident in her work before this time. To some degree, she began to leave behind the preoccupation with the more earthy topics of her earlier works, paintings and sculpture, such as the Slave Rape Series, the Weeping Women Masks, Windows of the Wedding, Emanon, Dah and Baby Faith and Willi Series of paintings, the America Black and American People Series, The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro and the Atlanta Children Sculpture.
The particular works of that immediate period--The Street Story Quilt, The Bitter Nest and the Flag Story Quilt would help to provide the transition to a more utopian as well as child centered vision. The work that fully signaled this development was the hugely successful Tar Beach Story Quilt, which is today part of the collection of the Guggenheim Museum and the basis for an award winning children's book also called Tar Beach.
In the 60s, 70s and the 80s work before CHANGE, the difficulties of being born the descendant of slaves and of being the survivor in the midst of a family in which alcoholism and drug addiction had taken its toll were obviously overwhelming in the issues addressed by her work (from The Flag is Bleeding (1968) to Die Nigger Flag for the Moon (1969), Political Landscapes (1972), Slave Rape Series (1973), The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro (1976), Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima (1983) for example).

In the 1980s, after her mother died and her sister died, Faith would do the Emanon Series, Baby Faith and Willi Series, the Dah Series and the California Dah Series, all abstractions in which she would express her grief over the death of all her immediate family as well as her joy over the birth of her first granddaughter Faith.

Grandma, Teddy and Faith 1980s

2009-08-23T20:26:00.006-04:00

Faith and her grandchildren in Harlem in the 1980s. These photographs are part of the series taken at the time of the Change Performances and Story Quilts. Photo by C. Love.

Faith looking over Harlem 1980s

2009-08-22T14:16:00.005-04:00

Faith on Roof at 345 Photo by Ellen Eisenman 1987, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

Photo by Ellen Eisenman, 1987. Taken from the roof of 345. Harlem was composed by a desolate landscape then but Faith was always hopeful, always positive. She is the peak of her weight loss powers.

Baby Faith, Grandma and Teddy 1980s--Part of the Change

2009-08-22T14:12:00.005-04:00

Baby Faith, Grandma and Teddy, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

At 345 West 145th Street in Harlem with her granddaughters Faith and Teddy. 1987. Photo by C. Love.

Change 1987 VI

2009-08-22T14:02:00.006-04:00

Faith Ringgold's Change 1980s VII

2009-08-22T13:54:00.006-04:00

Faith in La Jolla, California. 1987. Photo by C. Love

More of the performance of Change by Faith Ringgold. In the foreground, plastic bags filled with water equivalent to 100 pounds of weight. Celebratory dance at the end with Barbara and her two children, Faith in the dress and Teddy in her arms. 1987.

Michele on The Terrace in 1978

2009-08-18T14:02:00.002-04:00

These pictures were taken by my sister Barbara in the summer of 1978 when I was still teaching Journalism at NYU and had just completed the manuscript of Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman.

It was a lovely little apartment, a studio with a kitchen, a bathroom and a rather extensive dressing room with shelves and closets with shutters that I particularly liked. All parket floors. I could have remained in the apartment well after having left the employ of NYU but foolishly sublet the apartment to a real clown when I moved to New Haven and he simply walked away from it without paying the rent, without telling anyone. When I discovered what had happened, I had already been evicted. It was all I could do to pay the outstanding rent and achieve financial closure so that debt would not be hanging over my head. I lived at WSquare Village for about 3 years and there were many adventures, many parties, quite a few romances, about which the less said, the better.

Mother and Daughter Faith

2009-08-15T19:52:00.009-04:00

Photo by Anna Morris/Anna Shoots 2009
These two ladies will be major subjects in this book. One was once known as Baby Faith by all those who loved her. She is now 27 years old and divine. Next to her is her mother Barbara, my sister, and just as beautiful.
Baby Faith was born in 1982 and I can proudly say that I was there. Barbara was born in December of 1952 11 months after me. As an infant I paced the house anxiously awaiting her arrival. Yes I walked at 11 months as did Baby Faith.

This lovely picture was taken by Anna Morris at Faith Ringgold's Garden Party for The Any One Can Fly Foundation, devoted to the work of promoting a canon of African American art.
If you would like to see an article I wrote on the mission of the foundation, it can be found at
http://sharpeartfdn.qwestoffice.net/supplement/supplement08.htm

"Chapter 7: THE ANYONE CAN FLY FOUNDATION: THE LIFE, CAREER, AND

MISSION OF FAITH RINGGOLD—AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTIST, FEMINIST

WRITER, AND CHILDREN’S BOOK ILLUSTRATOR, PAR EXCELLENCE

By Michele Wallace"

in The Visual Artist's Guide to Estate Planning: The 2008 Supplement Update sponsored by T. the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation and the Judith Rothchild Foundation edited by Barbara T. Hoffman who is the lawyer of The Anyone Can Fly Foundation founded by Faith Ringgold, who is also its President.

Introductory: Facebook, Soul Pictures and Michael Jackson

2009-08-11T17:03:00.008-04:00

Interestingly, I don't have any photographs to illustrate anything I am about to say. Yes, there really is an entire conceptual universe beyond illustration, photography, images in general.

Gotta get some stuff clear about facebook now that I have discovered that I can actually post an entire blog in my notes on facebook. Still struggling with the advanced notes so I won't say anything about that right now.

In any case, Soul Pictures is now imported or exported, which ever the case may be into a note on my facebook, which is then broadcasts to the people whom we call "friends" on facebook. As I guess everybody has realized by now, even me, facebook has nothing to do with what we use to think of as friendship. The flow of it seems to have been largely determined by young people and current concepts of friendship, about which I won't comment since I don't understand it and don't have time to study it. It's their business. We had a chance to experiment with new forms of affiliation when we were young. Now it is their turn. Hopefully they won't make the mess of it that we baby boomers made of it. Affiliation, that is.

But that isn't my topic. For me facebook has nothing to do with friendship. Not really sure what friendship is anymore, only that I don't have any friends in the true sense in which I regarded friends. There are many reasons, not sure about all of them, but I am content that this is as it should be for the time being. I don't have friends because I am otherwise occupied in deep work of the soul which takes up all of my time at the moment. I don't feel like I am missing anything. I don't feel like this is the way it will always be but people need hibernations, hiatuses, sabbaticals, vacations, retreats, whatever you want to call them. But this is not a vacation either. Rather this time and everything I am doing in this time is the chance I have been waiting for, planning for, dreaming about for at least twenty years, maybe more.

That's how long it has been since I have had a time of months long in which all I had to do was write and plan to write, research and plan research, and string it all together. I had such time after I wrote my first book Black Macho with the royalties I got from that book but I didn't yet have the skills or the research abilities or the spirit to know what to do with it. Instead I went back to school and I read and I studied which is pretty much what I have done with every other sabbatical or free moment since then. My last sabbatical since I have been a tenured professor I spent doing my Ph.D. in Cinema Studies at NYU, and believe me that was no vacation. I tried to make it as much about writing as I could but being a student just isn't the same thing.

So you see I am writing Soul Pictures as my sabbatical project. I am organizing the materials or that project via the resources of this blog, coordinated with several other blogs I use to coordinate and organize subsidiary materials to Soul Pictures, one on the culture of blues people which is how I refer to African American history and culture, the music of blues people, which is what it is all about, another blog on personal, emotional stuff I don't plan to pursue in the book but which might get in the way if I didn't have a chance to get it off my chest. There's a blog on African American photography and visual culture, which bears a symbiotic relationship to Soul Pictures. That is it is my study of the accomplishments of others in African American visual culture and American visual culture that has prompted my reading of the visual culture of the women and men in my family.

As for facebook, it has gotten rolled into the project because there were two reasons I thought blogging might be a good way to organize materials for facebook. First, because at the same time you are formulating your ideas, you can also be helping to formulate the audience for your ideas. Because I don't have an audience. Or rather if I have an audience, it is not an organized, identifiable niche audience. There isn't any way that I know of to make a living serving or speaking to that audience and that has to change. Otherwise the discourse, the exchanges, the languages, whatever you want to call it, will die out from lack of reinforcement. So blogging is audience development as well as tangible progress and work that you can track in its accumulation. It's also like a scrapbook in that you can actually show it to people, even to perspective publishers should the occasion arise. Facebook can conceivably fulfill the same purpose if you handle it right, which in my view it is possible to do best in the form of the notes application, which seem to have no length limits or time limits.

As for audience development, the opportunity of facebook seems crucial. Your first thought is well how many people are you actually talking to, how many pay attention, etcetera and so forth. But what could be more useful to the development of an audience tailor made for your material than to concentrate on a carefully selected group of people whom you already know and who have expressed some interest in accessing your daily, weekly or monthly development?

So this is the deal. Sorry if you want to be friends but for me facebook has nothing to do with friendship. I am 57 years old. I don't know how to make friends with anybody on a machine. More than likely all the friends I am ever really going to have, I already have. In any case, the development of new ones is temporarily suspended. This is about the work. And while the work is for career purposes, it is first and foremost the labor of the soul, the stuff I recognize I need to do before I go one step further into the future. If I were religious, I would say it is between me and God or me and my maker, or something like that, but I am not religious, so I will just say it is between me and me, or me and whatever there is beyond me and you. It is between me and the planet. Me and the vibrations of the universe. Because I think vibrations might be real, which is where the music comes into it.

These remarks I address in particular to my nieces, my sister, my Mom and Dad, and to my friends. It's about the work right now. Whatever you see me doing, that's what it's about. In the beginning, I conceived dance, drumming and music as the entertainment aspect of the whole thing-- but I have known for some time now that entertainment doesn't interest me right now. For awhile I thought well maybe it is the physical exercise but as I progress, I realize I can't take a step without this Blues People culture because it was the culture that produced my grandmother, Momma Jones, the patron saint of this project.

Every moment I ever spent with her was spent hip deep in the Blues tradition. I am realizing now that the experiences Mom had with her going to see shows and listening to music in the 30s and the 40s in Harlem was much like the experiences I had with her as a child except that I was her companion of the 50s and 60s. She was constantly taking me to a church, or a show, or a concert, constantly playing music, dancing with me or for me, and encouraging me to dance. Her first ambition was to be a dancer but she wasn't allowed to continue to pursue it by her family. She pursued it until she got married though. She talks about winning every dance contest she ever entered with Mr. Morrison, her second husband, and performing in shows at the Lafayette Theatre or wherever she could get on. MJ's youth was in the 20s and from her pictures you can see that she was a real flapper, body and soul. We think that when she died that Mr. Morrison took the scrapbook with her dance pictures in it, since he probably took a lot of those pictures and was probably also in those pictures. I am going to try to find his family and see if these pictures survived somewhere.

When I was quite small, before I entered grade school, and we were still living with MJ on Edgecombe Avenue, she use to take me to church at the children's church in the basement of the Convent Avenue Church on the corner of 145th Street and Convent Avenue. In the Baptist Church, Baptism is reserved primarily for adults. In the service, the congregation is encouraged with music and prayer at a certain point in the service to come to Christ, that is to come to the front of the church and accept Jesus. Well, I watched this ritual every Sunday in the children's church with fascination, wondering what happened to the people who came forward. I resolved that I would find out by going forward myself. I had noticed that only adults did so (many young adults attended church downstairs with we children), which made it all the more interesting I guess.

But once I had done this, the result was some consternation, which everybody was careful to keep from me. The dilemma: I was 5 years old, surely too young to understand what I was doing, what coming to the church and being baptised really meant. But with MJ's support it was decided that if I had come forward it was because I had been called, and to interfere with that would be to get in the way of something that was little understood by the adults who ran our lives. My grandmother told me shortly before she died that I was questioned by the minister to test my comprehension of the process and apparently I passed the test. This was the last conversation I ever had with MJ and she told me how proud she had been of me when I had chosen to be baptised.

What happened then was one of the fondest, most exciting series of memories of my life (and I don't know why it is I remember all of this stuff). A special white garment was made for me and I was prepared in various ways for the baptism ceremony which would take place in the big adult church upstairs. That day, my grandmother accompanied me into the changing room with other adult women (or maybe Mom did or maybe they both did--it was a big deal!). The thing I remember was how shocked I was to see an entirely naked female body for the first time and to learn that adult women had hair down below because needless to say, I had none. Then I can remember I was briefed on the baptism itself, getting dunked and everything. I was handed to the minister who was standing in a pool of water and then he lowered me into the water, backwards which was a bit of a shock, three times I think. I'll never forget it. I was well and truly baptised not only into life but into the Blues People culture. I have always felt like I was somebody special from that day to this.

Maybe five or so years later, I was baptised once again, this time into the Lutheran church, confirmed perhaps, where they sprinkle a few drops of water on you and call it a baptism. We attended a Lutheran school. During the week we were Lutherans, on weekends we were Baptists. God I loved religion when I was a kid. I always say I had enough of it growing up to last me a lifetime. I love it all but I loved most the music.

With that proviso, I turn now to Michael Jackson and the show I am about to do with Joyce Jones on WBAI-FM (99.5), Women and The Blues Part II, Suga in My Bowl, next Monday from 9 to 11 p.m. Mostly there will be music. Joyce and I will talk for a half hour one half hour into the show. If it goes well, we'll talk again for another half hour. Otherwise, there will be music, which she and I have chosen as a discussion between us. Music that we care about. This last Sunday we spoke about the fact that both of us wanted to insert the voice of one male among the women. The voice of Michael Jackson, for a lot of reasons, which I am sure we are both trying to formulate in words. In the meanwhile, let me direct your attention to one work of Michael's that I have been listening to since his death.

It is a piece called "They Don't Really Care About Us" that he did in 1991. And it is worth a listen I think. The video is good too. In the work of this period of History, Book II, Jackson gets a nice little soulful groove going with large groups of people singing, dancing, playing instruments. It is very Baptist Gospel Church Choir in its inflection and mood, which I find irresistible. Ironically, I also find it very bluesy.

And I am thinking this. Words I could live with out. Or let's just say I could live a long time with anybody speaking directly to me. Sometimes I crave that particular kind of silence. But music I would die without. And there is nothing better than being in the presence of a large group of people singing, dancing and playing instruments. Failing being there live, it is not a bad thing to listen to on a recording or watch on a video. I've been around large groups of people singing and dancing all my life. It has been an essential aspect of the culture that made me, Soul Pictures, Blues People, Blues Music, all of that. I have been up to my neck in it all my life and I try to keep it that way as much as possible.

So let's see how this reads. I've probably left some stuff out. But I can start with this. All I wanna say is they don't really care about us. You ain't never lied about that!

Faith's 6th Grade Graduation in 1942

2009-08-10T15:17:00.006-04:00

Faith Ringgold, then Faith Jones, graduated from P.S. I86 then located on 145th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway in 1942. This is her class picture. She was 11 years old (her birthday in October). The principal she can recall was Dr. Bernath. Her best friend was Catherine English. Catherine and she went through Elementary, Junior High and High School together. Faith describes her teachers as mostly Irish Catholic, not racially progressive but excellent teachers nonetheless. The students, she says, were immigrants from China, Puerto Rico and Germany.

Their graduation ceremony in 1942 was suspended for fear that there might be an air raid during the ceremonies. WWII was still in progress.

Faith reports that the classroom instruction was often racist in its interpretation of history and culture but Faith had a mother (Willi Posey, Momma Jones) who was vigilante and attentive who accompanied her to school every day and who often interacted with her teachers in order to straighten out various misconceptions of African American history. She also says that all the teachers adored her mother who had a winning personality.

Although the student population was racially integrated, the neighborhoods they lived in were not. On the other hand, the neighborhoods were also smaller and probably all in direct proximity to the school. Faith says she never had any white friends until she went to college at the City College of New York which was right there in the same neighborhood.

Faith also describes the WPA Murals that decorated the auditorium. We all wonder what happened to them. P.S. 186 has stood vacant and in decrepit condition for decades now. Owned by the Convent Avenue Baptist Church, something prevents this magnificent building from participating in the architectural renaissance going on in the rest of Harlem, not sure what. Partly because of her experience of teaching in the public schools, Faith decided to never send my sister and I to public schools. The City College of New York was the first public school I ever attended. I began classes there in 1970 after a first semester spent at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Halloween at 409 Edgecombe Avenue 1980s

2009-08-09T12:36:00.006-04:00

How old is Teddy in this picture? Perhaps three. Dad, who was then about 59, took his second granddaughter Teddy to a Halloween party in the lobby of 409 Edgecombe where he had grown up and his Mom was still living. So my guess is this is either 1988 or 1989. It has always been one of my favorite pictures of the two of them. Mother Faith accompanied them and took this picture.

In fact, I wanted to use this picture on the cover of my most recent book Dark Designs but it was ruled out immediately for reasons that completely escaped me since nothing was ever articulated but over the years I have formed an opinion of what was being seen here that others found objectionable and inappropriate, but that I found highly seductive and irresistible. Of course, it has everything to do with race, and the perception of what is expected of a person in terms of conforming to expectations of race, especially in terms of skin color.

Not the least of which has me thinking about these matters lately has been the controversy over Michael Jackson's recent death and the difficulty people seemed to have with accepting him as he was or as he had become. Also, the ongoing discussion of who and what our President is, mostly generated by the fact that he is of biracial birth and that his father was African and Muslim. Clearly it makes people crazy. It's his blessing but it is unsettling for some. Not me but for some. Is he or was he or will he ever be a real black man? If not, what is he? Answer: he is the President of the United States but that doesn't satisfy some.

I cannot remember a time when I didn't know Burdette Ringgold. We called him Daddy long before mother and he were married. Not sure why but he was a close friend of my real father to begin with. He was also good friends with my grandmother Momma Jones. He knew Earl's mother as well, Momma T. They were all Edgecombe people, as was my mother. Almost a tribe they were. He use to take us out a lot to the zoo, Coney Island, the circus (which he adored), walk us to death, babysit with us, help my Mom out, etcetera, which was part of the thing that made us all feel that he would make a good permanent addition to the family.

But at a certain point, not sure what our age was, Barbara and I began not only to notice that he could be mistaken for white, we also began to ask him point blank in the manner that children will, "Are you white?" I would imagine that this would have been soon after we had begun to notice that there were different races, which I can recall was not obvious to me from the very beginning. But I can remember us asking him again and again, determined to get an answer, and he never answered.

We could see that he was flustered and disturbed by the question but he brushed it off pleasantly and tried to distract us. We discussed it among ourselves, what to make of it and could come to no satisfactory conclusion except to ask him again. But he mentioned it to Mom and I don't recall how she got us to stop but I know she told us he was black, or rather Negro or colored as we use to say in those days (this is in the late 50s) and we finally lost interest in the question.

Before we get too deep into this, you need to know that both of his parents were racially black. Obviously of racially mixed descent but all sorts of racial mixtures are by no means unusual in the Afro-American community mainly because we are descendants of slaves and the slavemasters had their choice of the women in the quarters, just generally. The outcome was slaves who were biracial. Sometimes the master freed such slaves or adopted them. But obviously this was unusual as we can see from the variety of shades among Afro-Americans who were around when slavery finally ended in the first half of the 1860s.

So the thing is this. While this picture encapsulates my fondest memories of my family, to others the picture is both inconceivable and unacceptable. It matters if you are black or white and looking white or not looking black enough if you are actually black is not one of the options. So I am writing this as a present to Teddy who is the little girl in this picture. This is your birthday present Teddy, something educational, constructive, character building, not pleasure seeking in the childlike sense because you are 24 years old now and I would like it very much if you were to point your nose in the direction of growing up. If you were to really work at it. Part of it is to understand your unusual legacy, having a grandmother who could take such a picture and a grandfather whose greatest joy was to take you to such a party. In this picture you are having a time out because you had been having a little too much fun with those balloons. I guess we should call this picture, Time Out.

I love it. We keep it in a silver frame that mother received as an award from Ms. Magazine in 1983 long before you were born.

More with the Cake 1980s

2009-08-08T08:54:00.005-04:00

Marrying Gene was complicated. He ended up pretty much fully occupying the social aspect of my life from the time I first met him, which was in 1985 in California through 1999 when we began to live apart. We didn't actually get divorced until maybe 3 years after that so that's a total of about 18 years right plunk in the middle of my adult life. My best years, as some might put it.

Hearing him say that he wanted a divorce was one of the worse moments of my life. It came as a complete shock to me. I immediately asked if he would do a double session with my therapist. My hope was that it would turn into couples therapy and a healing of our marriage, that she might talk him into staying with me and giving it another try. But as I would subsequently realize, he had already given it several tries and I had not been able to make the compromises he needed me to make to make it seem worth his while.

I could not see a bit of that then, even after the double session with my therapist but I can see it much more clearly now. Maybe I am wrong but I think I was an impossible wife to have for a man like Gene (traditional, Southern, proud, gregarious and fun). Also, the situation we were in as a married couple, particular vis a vis my fairly frequent bouts of illness (lupus) were bound to run through the marriage and make it untenable in a decade or so.

Most importantly, I had manipulated him into marrying him. I say this with no shame at all. I thought this was what a woman was supposed to do. No man in his right mind would ever get married I thought so you had to prod him a little. We had been a couple for five years, during most of which we were living apart. For the first two, I was living in Norman, Oklahoma teaching at the University of Oklahoma and he was doing his MFA in Theatre at UCSD in San Diego. That was from 1985 through 1987. Then in the winter of 87, I returned to UCSD to do a second stint as Visiting Professor in English in Sherley Anne William's position while Gene completed his degree and went for a season to the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. Meanwhile, I had procured a post as an Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at SUNY Buffalo. We decided that he would next move back to New York where he had a small apartment. So then the two of us drove my car across the entire country from San Diego to New York City, with a stop in Norman, Oklahoma to say goodbye to everybody there and pick up my things in storage.
Another two years passed during which I taught at SUNY Buffalo, finished my M.A. with Professor at CCNY, and he did the actor thing in New York. We were together either in Buffalo or New York as often as possible. Then in the fall of 1989, I had landed the job at CCNY, with the first year at the Center for Worker Education running the Life Experience Program. We got an apartment together in Brooklyn, and I've been at CCNY ever since.
When we married, I was the breadwinner. He was a freelance actor, caterer, a little of this and a little of that and very happy about it. He had learned how to be an actor in New York and live on very little and he had just finished his MFA in Acting at UCSD. His goal I think was to have a woman with full employment who had benefits and insurance while he pursued the more creative task of cobbling together a reputation and a living in the theatre, television and/or film.

Except the work was extremely unsteady and I simply was not convinced that acting was the right career for him. Arrogant I know but that was me. I didn't do boundaries well at all. I pushed him and prodded him into teaching as an adjunct at CCNY and then pursuing a full time position as a professor. We masterminded the counter-job offers at SUNY Buffalo. If CCNY didn't hire him, they would lose me to SUNY Buffalo. I actually wanted to go to Buffalo. I hate New York but as an actor, New York was always the preference for him for obvious reasons.

As I see it now, once Gene had the full time job at CCNY, he didn't need me the way he had up until then. Added to this he wanted to buy a little house somewhere, a fixer-upper. But I knew I was not the fixer-upper type. I have very sensitive skin and I can't live in any kind of dust or filfth. Gene was a procrastinator. A broken metal bed frame laid by the side of our bed waiting for him to fix it until the day I left. When the housekeeper came, she would have to dust it. It was a permanent part of the furniture. Which made me so mad I thought the top of my head was going to blow off? Just let me throw that crap away. But no. Mr. Green Jeans never wanted to throw anything away. These are the kinds of things you want to check before you marry somebody.
Also, he wanted to have a baby and as it turned out given that I was already in my late 30s by then, I couldn't get pregnant. With the lupus, which I didn't fully realize I had until 1993, it might have been a disaster. Then in 1994, I went back to graduate school, this time in pursuit of a Ph.D. I was not then aware of the impact advanced degrees have on relationships and libido. It's disastrous. Soon he was also pursuing a Ph.D. but there was never any doubt I was going to get there first.
In any case, once Gene had the job and the pension and the paycheck, my behavior issues did not get better, they got worse. School is stressful. The discipline concentrated in one area isn't likely to lend itself to greater discipline in other areas. First, I like to shop and I was controlling the bank accounts because he would never pay bills on time. I needed my bills paid on time so I could shop. He didn't think I ever needed to buy anything new, so I lied and hid new items.

Everything we ever bought I had to cajole and manipulate him into allowing it in the house. I often thought about how if it had been left up to him we would have had a bed and a chair and no other furniture because we couldn't afford it. He was right of course but I was somebody who believed in using credit, unwisely but with conviction.

Moreover, in a social context I was unpredictable, intrusive, nosy and often downright rude to his friends and family. I didn't mean any harm, most of it was good natured and in fun but he didn't like it. In my family we are more confrontational and humorous and loud. I realized this the day we met with my therapist when he complained about incident after incident in which something confrontational had ocurred with his friends or his family. Something or other he had begged me not to do or to say, which I had done or said anyway. As far as I was concerned, I had won every one of those debates but it seemed the point with the friends and family of the partner was not winning the debate but avoiding the debate to begin with. That day the scales began to be lifted from my eyes and they have continued to fall away to this day. I still don't like what I see but I know that that was, is me and that I probably can't change. I still find myself so amusing. And I am thinking, more often than not, husbands just get in the way. At 57 I feel comfortable admitting that. God bless those who are willing to work with the brothers. I gave it 18 years of my life.

So Gene was a darling, remains a darling. He stood by my side in sickness and health and we had a fabulous time most of the time. He also got me through my craziness for which I will always be grateful but I know I wore him out. I kind of feel sorry for whoever follows me because I think I got the best of him. Not sure where he is now or who he is with but God bless both of them.

Divorce Follows Marriage Sometimes 1990s

2009-08-05T11:27:00.005-04:00

Photograph by Eugene Nesmith. All rights reserved. Collection of Michele Wallace

This is sometime after 1993, after I had been diagnosed with lupus. Totally covered in black and with a sun hat to protect me from the Florida sun at my mother-in-law's house in Naples, Florida. I am not sure what year this is but we're getting close to the end of our union (1999). I can't say this little dance helped but I think I look marvelous, and I know I was having a good time. Oh well.

When I Got Married--1989

2009-08-05T11:14:00.011-04:00

It was December 1989. And almost everything about that wedding was a complete surprise to me, never having gotten married before. As soon as it began, I regretted that I hadn't held out for something much bigger but then my groom was quite skiddish. I had to reel him in when I could. My only advice is this: never marry a man who doesn't want to get married to you, no matter how much you think you love him. When one person isn't doing what he or she wants to do, it gets thin real quick. Actually, I have lots more advice but I will save that for another time.

In this picture from left to right is Dad (Burdette Ringgold), Mom (Faith Ringgold), Michele Wallace the bride, Gene Nesmith the groom, and Virginia Nesmith, the mother of the groom. Picture taken by Corinne Jennings.

Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman 1970s

2009-08-02T10:28:00.010-04:00

The inside first page of the cover story in Ms. January of 1979. The double excerpt from BLACK MACHO AND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERWOMAN (The Dial Press 1979).

The picture by the celebrated and brilliant black photographer Anthony Barboza. I have always wondered why he never exhibits this picture. I guess he is ashamed of it. But it is one of my prized possessions. I got the people at Ms. to give me the print they used and one day I gotta get Tony to sign it or whatever photographers do in a case like that. The only stupid thing is that it was 11 x 14 which seemed to me awkward. So what did homey do? She cut maybe an inch or two off the bottom. Stupidly, I think they call it these days.

In the summer of 1978, my first book BLACK MACHO AND THE MYTH OF THE SUPERWOMAN was at the publisher, receiving the final touches from my editor Joyce Johnson at The Dial Press and n search of a marketing strategy among the sales force. Meanwhile, MS MAGAZINE had purchased the first serial rights for a double excerpt that would (if I played my cards right and my hair, as it turned out) be featured on the cover of the magazine in January of 1979.

The way the game played out from then on until the publication was largely determined by two opposing forces, as I now see it 30 years later. On one side were the feminists at Ms. Magazine, and on the other were the anti-feminists at the Dial Press. Ms. Magazine was then run by an editorial collective which included most significantly for my cover, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, Robin Morgan and Mary Thom. That summer or perhaps a bit earlier Ms. Magazine hired Susan McHenry, fresh from a position with the editorial staff at Harvard University Press. She was young, about a year older than me (I was 26) and most importantly she was black. At the time, MS had no high level black editorial staff who was fully participant. Alice was crucial editorially for me and lots of other people but she was first and last a writer who was in the office maybe a day or two and always held herself far above anything ugly or pedestrian.

Unfortunately, I wasn't quite wise enough to follow her judicious careful lead. In any case, Susan worked closely with me as I recall (and became from that day to this a close personal friend) along with in particular my old friend and associate Robin Morgan (but whom I haven't seen or spoken with in years).

Gloria also wasn't involved on a day-to-day level but I had lunch with her and Alice at least twice during this period. Moreover, they both generously participated in an advance public reading to the feminist community at The Feministfw Salon, which was then located at Wesbeth. Gloria was there as was every other significant luminary on the then New York Feminist scene. My good fortune was that my sister Barbara Wallace took meticulous pictures of the gathering and as such I have a perfect visual record of the whole event. Most of the people there I didn't know at the time. Over the years I've met them all.

Alice and Robin Morgan introduced me and I read excerpts from my book. At the time, Alice wrote me several deeply encouraging handwritten letters of support (which I still have) in which she did, however, give me some crucial advice about last minute changes I should seek in the final draft of the book. As I recall the two particulars were to seek more knowledge of the history of struggle in African American communities via Vincent Harding in particular. The other piece of advice was to write more about black women writers, in particular such figures as Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper who were virtually unknown. This advice was not followed although it has shaped my career as a writer, a feminist and intellectual ever since.

The celebrated cover from the book which shaped my 80s and indeed all the rest of my life until this day.

Not to excuse myself at all from responsibility for what was and was not in the book but the power struggle between these two constituent elements of feminists (white actually) was a determining factor in the kind of reception I got. The other side of the equation was the anti-feminists at The Dial Press, in particular one brilliant anti-feminist named Joyce Johnson who was my editor and who all but breastfed me through every stage of the writing and the completion of the book for publication. I call her an anti-feminist not out of any malice but I don't know how else to put it. She and the others opposed the use of the word feminist in connection with the book, on the publicity materials, on the book jacket, and in every aspect of the packaging or promotion of the book. Feminism they said would kill the book because feminism was finished and done with.

There weren't going to be any more important feminist books so there wasn't any point in dooming my project to abject obscurity in this manner. The feminist movement was over, not that it didn't have some merits but the represenatives were clueless about everything that mattered. Women would find another way to pursue their rights, if at all.

These white women seemed to be as convinced they were already liberated as a lot of black women I knew. Of course everything black, black women, black feminism, black whatever was sure death to a book because as everyone in publishing knew, black people did not read and they did not buy books. I was told this by one and all repeatedly.

The average reader and buyer of books was the little old lady from Pasadena, I think it was.. In any case, she was white. And to show you what kind of shape we were in in 1979, nobody really could prove otherwise. Blackness had come and gone with the popularity of black cultural nationalism, just as feminism had come and gone. Of course they were right about feminism, which I still don't understand.

Blackness they seriously got that one wrong. And indeed my book would prove it. I probably had the largest black reading audience anyone had ever had for a first nonfiction book by an "unknown." Nevermind for a "black feminist." I was one of the people who broke that wall. I went out on one tour for the little old ladies in Pasadena. Then I went on another one that stretched out for six months to every major black reading market. Nobody in the publishing industry seemed to know that there was even such a thing but they continued to clamour for me. The only bestseller list I ever really had traction on was the Washington Post Bestseller List, guess why? It got so I felt like I was practically living in D.C. I went there so much. I often appeared at black venues generally. I almost never said no so that was no problem.

I had quit my job teaching journalism at New York University at the end of the spring 1978 semester. I had some vague idea that I could make it as a freelancer. My Mom's lecture agent, Lordly and Dame, who was then handling her, black feminist Flo Kennedy and a hot set of black luminaries, got me lecture dates which from that time provided at least half of my income until I began teaching full time at the University of California at San Diego as a Visiting Lecturer in 1984 as companion to my Mom who began her stint as Professor of Art there at the same time. But I am getting ahead of myself.

From the summer of 1978 through the spring of 1984, I would go all the way from alpha to omega.

Everything after that up until the initial release of the book was influenced by this fierce struggle, which at 27 and black, I felt powerless to address or to contain. Later on there got to be a third component in the struggle (my Mom) and almost immediately after that a fourth (the men I was dating) but that's completely in Act 2.

This is a polaroid from a story that a black hair magazine did on my hair, which was at the time pretty unique (I think it was just me in Bo Derek--I am kidding, no e-mails!). My mother designed this hairstyle for me and the fixtures that made it possible. These were my braids wrapped in that waxy black cord that African women use to make their twists with a bead knotted at each end. I taught my favorite hairdresser who came to my house to do it. I felt safest when my hair was like this but none of the publicity people of either camp like it. Take it out! Take it out! The other thing I liked to do, which they hated was to wear a scarf over it. Hate it! I wore a scarf on the Today Show. Okay so I was also chewing gum. So shoot me. I was interviewed by Tom Brokaw. I bought my first tv so that I could watch it and my other television appearances. It was my first book promo and it was crazy but I am getting ahead of myself.

Anyhow I've kept these pictures all these years. I love these polaroids. Photographers always made them on shoots so I started asking for them because they usually threw them away.

This polaroid is from the Essence shoot. There was a major story in Essence written by Marcia Gillespie who was then editor-in-chief. Little did I suspect that she was going to tear me a new one. She's somebody I had lunch with all summer before the book came out too. (At least she didn't drop me after it was over like some. Dropped me like a hot rock, like my sister likes to say). But the pictures were great. For some reason they shot me both in black and white and color and in two different dresses. I forgot to say, Essence liked the braids. In fact, the black folk liked the braids. Thank god. Of course, I had my own make-up person who was also then doing Natalie Cole's make-up. That was the most fun shoot I ever did. We balled (as Aunt Barbara would say), at that shoot. Was the photographer black or white? Gotta check that. Essence always used the best unlike our friends at Ms, who could be uneven.

Meanwhile here comes this excerpt, which I actually think is excellent now that I am re-reading it for the first time in 30 years, I mean really reading it. It's tight, it is to the point and I pretty much agree with everything in it. They shaved many a rough spot from the actual book, including a diatribe or two about this and that which I sincerely wish I had never written. Either that, or that somebody had prevented it from being included in the final book, including the crazy quote on the cover of the book with the statement about how black man and women hated each other. Yes I wrote it, but that damn cover design and everything on it was the nightmare vision of the cover depart, the sales force and publicity. More about the quote later.

But the cover of Ms. with the cover lines about the book that would shape the 80s, as well as the quotes from Robin Morgan, Alice Walker, and Alice Walker which graced the back of the book were Ms.'s brilliant invention all alone. Joyce and the others at Dial did what they did to slow it down. The first blurb that came in the door was from somebody I didn't yet know but who would become a pretty good friend, Ishmael Reed. He loved the book for all sorts of reasons including the fact that he was then raising a real homegirl daughter who he was trying to keep on the straight and narrow. He wrote the blurb from that emotional place and with that inimitable energy that is Ishmael Reed's alone. It came in the door first and The Dial Press wanted to go with it alone, a one shot blast covering the inside leaves, the back of the book, everything. He was Joyce's kind of writer and Joyce had been editor to Amiri Baraka's HOME ( collection of essays), Eldridge Cleaver's SOUL ON ICE and Harold Cruse's CRISIS OF THE NEGRO INTELLECTUAL. We spent many an afternoon when I was blocked with her telling me the stories about working with these guys, in particular Cruse whose book fascinated me then.

She was sick and tired of their crap about women and so was I so when I wrote BLACK MACHO first, which took me maybe a month or two (it just poured out) to write, she took one look at it and announced that instead of the 10 chapter book on black women I had planned, this essay would be the key and title essay with perhaps one other companion essay on black women. I called it The Myth of the Superwoman, and it took me the balance of two years to finish it. Rather Joyce finished it for me because she kept insisting that it wasn't finished and that it needed more work in this manner that editors will always do. More work, more work, more work. She wouldn't write a single word. This was her way of showing her respect for my writing abilities she said. In the end, I cried so hard about not being able to go on one day that she did a massive edit in particular on the second part of Myth of a Superwoman, which was one of the historical sections.

Joyce oversaw and supervised the battle against the citation of my sources in either a bibliography, footnotes or even an index. I still don't know whether they were just cheap or whether they were trying to destroy the rest of my life on purpose. But in any case, this was as it would be. But she would not have her way on the characterization of me a black feminist on either the publicity material or on the book jacket. The media did the rest.

Final story, although there is a million others. when we shot the cover for Ms., it was understood that I had only a rat's chance of ever seeing the color. I was nobody, black women were rarely featured on magazine covers then and my book had no news hook so it likely wasn't going to happen unless I followed every instruction and did exactly as I was told. At the shoot, instruction one. Take those braids out of your hair. They will ruin the cover. This the hairdresser did. But I didn't know what to do with my hair under such circumstances so you see instead that unruly hair style I had where my hair is being I am not sure what. If it looks like my face is covered with makeup, it is, as the makeup artist applied layer after layer of a various assortment of foundations trying, I can see now, to somehow brighten my hopelessly olive blackness. People say this is a beautiful picture but I can't see it. I hated it.

But there it was in December of 1979 on every newstand in New York with that inflammatory announcement that it would be the book to shape the 80s. I am not sure I will ever live that down but then I didn't say it. The person who did say it, Gloria Steinem, found a way to publically withdraw it by blurbing my Mom's autobiography, WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE with Little Brown in 1990.

And thus begun the craziest most exciting time of my life, the year of 1979. At the time, I had no idea whether it was going to be like that from then on or how whether it was going to be different, less more or what.

This is one of a series of pictures of me taken by the photographer for Emerge in January of 1979 in connection with a piece on the book written by Paula Giddings. She tore me a new one too and then went on and wrote the definitive book on black feminism, WHEN AND WHERE I ENTER. Still the classic I think. Don't remember the name of the photographer but he was black and he said let's just go over the park (Washington Square Park--I lived in the village then) and shoot some stuff for the fun of it. It was cold as you know what and my hair was blowing. I am thinking, this guy has got issues but let's just get through this. It took about 15 minutes for him to shoot about a 10o pictures, the prints of which he gave me and which I still have. Fun and this is me with normal make-up then, which was no make-up, or just mascara, eyeliner and lipstick.

Mom and Dad at Mom's surprise birthday party at 345 in Harlem. October 8th, 1979, in the thick of it.

MJ, Mr. Morrison and Mom at the Lenox Terrace 1970s

2009-07-30T01:58:00.004-04:00

MJ with her husband, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This picture taken by my sister Barbara in 1977 during our usual family gatherings for the holidays captures very much what my life was before 1981 when my grandmother died. She served as an anchor for the kind of life I had and somehow imagined I would always have. From 1979 when Black Macho was published until 1981 when she finally died, that world shattered all to pieces never to assume its former shape again. The absense of just a few people can alter your life forever. This is the thing one must learn and know about death, that it is constantly altering the shape and reality of the world we live in. One must constantly leave a place for it, be flexible about its constant arrivals. I know it sounds a little miserable but actually it isn't.
It is just real.

Excerpt from my Ms Cover of 1979

2009-07-29T01:34:00.004-04:00

Photo by Anthony Barboza, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

The excerpt is a thing of beauty to read. Perfect in every respect except that it softens a number of the rougher edges, in particular the critique of white women. The other edge it softened, which was much appreciated, was its critique of various black writers including Nikki Giovanni and Angela Davis. I love both of these ladies, always did in truth. They are fierce. The picture is heaven although I know it wasn't heaven for Mom. She felt like she got the shaft. I KNOW I did.

Aunt Helen Died at 51 60s

2009-07-24T22:20:00.005-04:00

This is a picture of the side of the big house at Camp Craigmeade and this lovely lady is one of the campers, not me but somebody who didn't mind having her picture taken. I don't know why we have her picture or who she might be but suffice it to say that when I was at Camp Craigmeade I knew who everybody was.

Just today realized that the summer Aunt Helen died at camp was in 1962. Barbara and I went to Camp Craigmeade for the last time in 1962, also the first summer of Faith and Burdette's marriage. Didn't know it would be the last year but it makes sense now that without Aunt Helen's determination to make it work, the camp could not survive. There were many kids there who went to the school she ran. I was ten and Barbara was nine. Yet another thing was about to change forever subsequent to our new life with Dad (Burdette).

Her name was Helen McIntosh Meade, as I have learned from her obituary in the New York Times (August 15, 1962) as unearthed by my sister Barbara today. The headline reads "Mrs. N.T. Meade, 51, Led Private School." She was the owner of Camp Craigmeade, which was described as "an interracial camp" in Roxbury, New York. It says she died of a heart attack on a Saturday, although nothing about her illness while at camp. The biggest surprise was that she was only 51 when she died when I thought her to be much older. She was the wife of Nathaniel T. Meade, who was also a founder of their school the Little Brown School House in 1934 in the Bronx at 1177 Hoe Avenue. I also thought the other two Aunties, who were perhaps relatives of hers, were much older too but they too were probably at most in their early 60s. Afterall, the hygenic conditions at the camp--no running water, no hot water, no heat, no plumbing to speak of and outhouses, no paved roads--were certainly challenging for anybody not ambulatory and strong.

I had always suspected that Aunt Helen was highly educated and progressive and this is confirmed by the obituary, something about the way she wore her hair, something about the way she talked that I could already see even though I was only ten. She had graduated from New York Teachers Training College in New York in New York in 1931, and later received her B.S. and M.A. degrees from Teacher's College at Columbia University. After teaching briefly in the public school system, she founded her own school and operated summer camps for many years. She was national recording secretary of the National Council of Negro Women and the President of its Manhattan Chapter. Meade was also a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was survived by her husband, Nathaniel, her stepmother and her brother Eugene E. McIntosh, Jr. I am perfectly thrilled by this discovery.

Easter Outfit 1967

2009-07-24T12:35:00.003-04:00

Easter 1967, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

By this time in my life, I was 14, extremely shy and self-conscious. Lots of things had happened to move me in that direction. Probably the most important was that I had gone from being an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan, thanks to the invention of the hydro-cortisone creams pioneered by my personal dermatologist Dr. Norman Orentriech, a really famous doctor from then to now, which meant the males of the species were noticing for the first time in a big way.

As part of participating in the lab work for the new product, I had to collect my urine all day in bottles in my locker and take it to the doctor's office downtown. I lived in mortification that somebody would catch me with one of these bottles. I am sure it built space between myself and my fellow students. The process was over in the course of a month as I recall, or maybe from time to time I had to collect urine. Who can remember. I just know I lived in my own world in my thoughts, which I had no idea how to express in words. I was in Tenth Grade.

That summer Barbara and I would go to Europe with MJ while mother stayed home in New York and put the finishing touches on her American People Series. In this picture we are with MJ visiting with Uncle Cardoza and his wife Esther in Hempstead.

I remember these stockings and that coat and that i was wearing a garter belt to hold up the rather shiny, light colored stockings. The coat was creme colored and made my MJ as were the shoes, which I adored. The mini-skirt was in. I wore it at all times unless I was wearing bell bottoms, which were also in.

Marion, My Counselor 1960s

2009-07-24T12:21:00.003-04:00

MarionCamp, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This lovely lady was my first counselor at camp and I adored her. She was sweet, gentle and pretty.

Aunt Helen 1960s

2009-07-24T12:18:00.005-04:00

Aunt Helen, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This is Aunt Helen in the white shorts (always wore white shorts) with the other two aunties who ran the camp. They did the cooking. Back in the 50s. We first went to Camp Craigmeade, an all black camp in the Catskills between 1956 and 1958, and we went there another four summers until one summer Aunt Helen died when we were in residence, which was the end of the camp. The location was a mountain site about a mile outside of Roxbury, New York and I have always meant to return there just to see if the outhouses and everything is still as I remember it. The story of who these black people came to own this camp is of interest to me as well. Were we not welcome at white camps? I don't know. I do know that Aunt Helen Meade was a maverick in everything she did, unlike any person I've ever met. Behind them stands the stone wall where we often gathered at the camp, or walked along on top of it. Childhood was heaven indeed.

Momma T, MJ and Michele 1950s

2009-07-22T21:39:00.003-04:00

Momma T, MJ and Michele, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

What are the chances of anybody having such gorgeous grandmothers in 1952. They are stunning, glamourous women like two great actresses who effortlessly outperform one another. The competition between them, the awkwardness of the fit between the two families--one Jamaican and one from Florida, both spearheaded by young women who fled their homelands for New York City while they were still in their teens. Both women pretend to be wryly thrilled about the arrival of their baby grandchild to persons who have no job or security. My mother is 22, my father 25 but being a woman of this age myself and then some (both were born in 1903 and were therefore 49 years of age pushing 50) , I can recognize the signs of their delight that their granddaughter is so fit but also that they are worried about what will become of my future. These are not women who stand back and let things go as they might. Momma T has only one child, my father, although I guess you would have to say she had abandoned him for her second husband in a time of great need. Momma T is on her way back to Guam with her second husband who is in the military. MJ is probably deeply wondering when or how her daughter and her grandchild will be removed from this apartment where things are not going well for her own daughter. From what I understand, the uncertainty of their relationship was plain from the very beginning.

Baby Michele 1950s

2009-07-22T21:27:00.004-04:00

Baby Michele, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This picture of Aunt Barbara represents very much the way she was, somebody who confronted the camera, who was there to meet it. She adored me from my birth, she had told me endless times. In 1952 on Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem, what a beautiful baby I was with a beautiful aunt. Beauty was a pretty big thing for Aunt Barbara and God had blessed her with great beauty for much of her life. Here she is, somehow, very much as I remember her from the 50s. And me as the fat faced, big headed baby, alert and alive to the attentions of these beautiful women. This may have been the day upon which I was christened at Abyssinian Baptist Church with Mr. Morrison as my godfather and Aunt Doris as my godmother. Momma T had come from Guam in particular to see me. Everybody know a man's child, my mother reports she said upon seeing me. My mother was only 22 and already in need of a divorce from her musician husband, Earl Wallace, 25 years old.

Willi Posey, Faith, Barbara, and Andrew 1970s

2009-07-17T11:36:00.005-04:00

Willi Posey, Faith, Barbara, and Andrew, originally uploaded by Barbara Company.

"Primitive is a word I use in a positive way to explain the completeness of a concept in art. I like to layer and pattern and embellish my art in the manner of tribal art, and then, like a blues singer, I like to repeat and repeat it again. Fragmented, understated, or minimalist art forms frustrate me. I want to finish them. In the 1960s there was a minimalist aesthetic advocating "less is more." To me, less is even less and more is still not quite enough. "
Faith Ringgold, WE FLEW OVER THE BRIDGE: THE MEMOIRS OF FAITH RINGGOLD, Bullfinch 1995.
These words written to amplify her use of beads, feathers and embellishment on her masks inspired by her trip to Nigeria and Ghana the summers of 1976 and 1977, are also stunning to consider in relationship to much of the soft sculpture and painting Faith did in the early 70s. For instance, these soft sculptures which were part of an extended series of masks with costumes made by MJ in tribute to the memories of the families she knew growing up in Harlem, are relevant as well to her approach to primitivism as an aesthetic concept in which one would deliberately overdo, underscore and emphasize.
Many of these masks were of people no longer living and may have been in part inspired by the series of deaths of many older members of Faith's immediate family in the 60s and early 70s, as would be more strongly referenced in THE WAKE AND RESURRECTION OF THE BICENTENNIAL NEGRO. This particular sculptural group is of MJ, Mom and her siblings as children. All these years later, now that the others are dead (Aunt Barbara and MJ) as well as Uncle Andrew, these sculpture have a commemorative feeling to them. For me I had always thought of their faces as masks of death. The faces are placid like corpses displayed in an open coffin at a funeral, of which there were many we attended at that time.
As for the sculpture themselves, it is as if I had grown into the acceptance of them over time in replacement of the lost family members. At the time, when I would visit Faith, I remember the house slowly filling up with them and wondering what it might mean for the future.

One needs to be reminded that these soft sculptures (also masks with costumes attached) are designed to be abstract representations of MJ (Faith's mother), herself, her sister and her brother as children. Photograph by Barbara Wallace at ACA gallery earlier this year.

Mom and Dad in 2009

2009-07-16T10:49:00.005-04:00

Mom and Dad in 2009 at IHop. Pictures taken by their loving granddaughter, Faith Wallace Gadsden. Just brilliant!

Mom and Dad 1970s

2009-07-15T16:47:00.009-04:00

Mom and Dad II, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This is Mom and Dad back in the day at 409 Edgecombe Avenue. The year is 1977.
My Dad is Burdette Ringgold. My mother Faith and he were married in 1962. In 1963, we all moved from the Bronx to 145th Street, where for the first time we had enough rooms for one of them to be devoted to a studio for my Mom's art work. Barbara and I shared the largest bedroom which had its own toilet attached, separate from the larger master bathroom.
My sister and I switched that fall from Our Savior Lutheran School in the Bronx to New Lincoln School on 110th Street and Central Park North. And what a switch that was.

First, a new Dad. Then a new school and a new neighborhood. I was definitely reeling from the culture shock, thoroughly intimidated by my new surroundings.
And then in November of 1963, while Barbara and I were still scrambling to adjust to New Lincoln's distinctly secular and progressive approach to education in which, for example, we called our teachers by their first names, something truly awful happened, something I can no longer really imagine but rather can only recollect based upon previous recollections ad infinitum.
I suppose the best thing about it was that I was a child and therefore had nothing to compare it to. But I can still remember something of the physical landscape of that day, that it was in the fall and I recall, the leaves were already turning.
When 9-11 happened in 2001, as it happened I was again living in the same building on 145th Street in Harlem where we had lived then. I thought of that previous day when President Kennedy had been shot and idly wondered if the experiences of school children were anything like the way it was for us. I hoped that it was because I remember only that I felt very protected when Kennedy was shot, not at all in any kind of personal danger. But then Jack Kennedy had been shot in Dallas, Texas which from my point-of-view at that time might as well have been Oz for all I knew about its connection to the part of the United States in which I was living.
The school day ceased to progress in a manner that was then entirely invisible to me but which I would always recognize from then on in times of emergency in educational settings. The announcement was made in a quiet and dignified way that the President, John F. Kennedy was shot, and I had occasion to recall this in particular recently when reading a reminiscence of that very same day written by my former 7th grade teacher, Helen Myers. It was good to learn that even though I had been only 11 years old that I had still gotten the essentials right.
   I can't remember then how long it was from the announcement of his shooting to the announcement of his death, or whether I received any further information until I was actually with my parents but I remember that the next order of business was getting us home as quickly as possible where my family (and I guess I would assume all the other children's families) remained glued to our black and white television sets and the two or three television stations we then had for the duration, which I would guess extended over a period of days.
   In the Christian tradition, getting a head of state properly buried, particularly if it also happens that he was assassinated while in office, was I would guess a protracted process, not a simple matter. And children are easily amazed at how long adults can take to do such things at such times. I think I can recall some aspects of the processional apparently patterned after that of Abraham Lincoln as called for by his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy.
   I don't know if I actually remember seeing John John saluting his father's coffin that day or whether it is all the times I have seen it replayed in various forms. What stands out in my mind since then is that he wore those short pants that little boys up to a certain age were sometimes dressed in, and that that same boy became a man who died only a year after his own mother died of cancer.
   From 1963 to 1977 was not such a very long time. Malcolm X was shot in 1965 and that was a highly personal occasion because it happened in Harlem and my family lived in Harlem. My parents and everybody I knew were deeply affected by his death. His processional, viewing and funeral all took place in Harlem. Then Robert F. Kennedy was shot in 1968, and this isn't to say that a great many other things didn't happen in between these dates, including the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. as well but I run the chronology through my mind if not daily, certainly often enough just so I won't ever forget the order in which things happened.
   I asked my Dad whether he was sent home on that day, whether they closed the line down at General Motors in Tarrytown when John F. Kennedy got killed. He said they did. I asked because I know they rarely closed the line down and his coming home from work without completing his day was something that only happened on fewer days than I can count on one hand during the time he worked there. He then mentioned, as well, that he had come home early on the day that Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot but this time without authorization from the bureaucracy. I gather the black workers, including him, refused to work. His punishment was a 3 day suspension. So much for the widespread love and respect for MLK in 1968. But he says they didn't close the line down for Robert Kennedy either. What a crazy time.

   Then I graduated from high school in 1969, went to Mexico during the first half of the summer, did not want to ever return to the United States but had to anyway, then spent the second half of the summer in the Sisters of the Good Sheppard Residence for girls in need of supervision across the street from Beth Israel Hospital in 17th Street.
Then I went to Howard University for one semester in the fall of 1969, personally delivered by my Mom with a suitcase full of new clothes and brand new bank account at the Howard University's campus bank. Dad came to visit me sometime in the fall, was shocked at the free floating cattle market on display on the campus green right outside my dorm, which had just started to allow boys to visit on weekends, and advised Mom to bring me home immediately.
   I was back in New York at the City College of New York by February of 1970, working as an account adjuster at Best & Company during the day and attending night school. I truly loved that job at Best & Company but they soon went out of business forever. In 1974, I graduated from the City College of New York with a major in English and Creative Writing, under the careful tutelage of my mentor Mark Mirksy, now my colleague.
The summer of my graduation, the same summer in which Richard Nixon was impeached, I was working as a secretary in the office of the Editor-in-Chief of Random House at an exciting new job. The world seemed to pass through that office. I served coffee and did all the dictaphone typing.

In the fall of 1974 I had moved on to a job I liked even better on most days because I was no longer a typist and a server of coffee but a "research assistant" in the Book Review Department at Newsweek Magazine. Even more of the world flowed through these offices, which was known as "The Back of the Book," with Jack Kroll in charge. It was during the two and a half years that I was employed by Newsweek that I met the people and made the connections that would lead to my free lance writing career at The Village Voice, a literary agent and a book contract at McGraw Hill for an as yet untitled book on the sexual politics of black women and black men.
At the birthday party for my Dad, and his sister Gloria in September of 1977, at which this picture was taken, I was presumably then engaged in writing the manuscript that would become Black Macho and The Myth of the Superwoman in 1979. The contract money had already run out and I had just begun to work full time in the position of Lecturer in the Journalism Program at New York University. I was living at Washington Square Village, NYU housing. I had moved from 345 early in the summer of 1976 upon the occasion of the massively successful Sojourner Truth Festival of the Arts, which was given by a committee composed of Margo Jefferson, Pat Jones, Monica Freeman and myself at the Women's Interarts Center on the Westside.
See more of these pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mjsoulpictures/sets/

Mme. Willi Posey in Her Prime 1950s

2009-07-09T01:40:00.003-04:00

This is the same suit on the same day but in color.

Mme. Willi Posey in her Prime 1950s

2009-07-09T01:32:00.005-04:00

Absolutely in her prime in a black suit designed by her posing for the camera at 363 Edgecombe Avenue in 1954, the day Barbara and I and Mom came to live with her. MJ was 49 years old. Always looking up. Photographer TBA.

MJ with Her Favorite Model Anne Porter1950s

2009-07-09T01:24:00.006-04:00

In the 50s, MJ had a particular favorite among her models. This was Anne Porter. The two of them sitting in the livingroom at 363 Edgecombe Avenue. Photographer TBA.

MJ and Me on The Beach at Setauket 1980s

2009-07-09T01:14:00.005-04:00

These were good times, the summer of 1980 or so with Momma Jones (MJ) and Pop-Pop on the Beach at Setauket. MJ married Pop-Pop, her teenage sweetheart, in the late 70s perhaps because her cataracts made her feel as though she needed a shoulder to lean on. I am 28 and the author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. My sister Barbara, I suspect, is the photographer in this case. By this time, MJ had begun to wear a blonde wig, much to the consternation of her daughter Faith.

Hartford Insurance Fire Company

2009-07-06T18:57:00.011-04:00

Policy Number 4043 Stock Policy

In Consideration of the Stipulations herein named and of eight and zero dollars premium does insure B.B. Posey for the term of 3 years from the 1st day of August 1, 1906 at noon to the 1st day of August 1909, at noon, against all direct loss or damage by fire, except as hereinafter provided, To an amount not exceeding Three Hundred, Fifty and zero Dollars, to the following described property while located and contained as described herein, and not elsewhere, to wit:

Dwelling Form

$350 on the one story frame, shingle roof building and additions thereto, and fixtures for heating and lighting, as part of the building while occupied as a dwelling situate on west side of Peck Street at No. 203, Block 58, Sheet 13, of Sanborn's 1903 Insurance Map of Palatka, Florida. Loss, if any, payable to East Florida Savings & Trust Company, Mortgages, as their interest may appear.

To comply with the Act of the Legislature of the State of Florida regulating the issue of policies by Fire Insurance Companies, approved May 31, 1899, the insurable values of the buildings herein described are fixed at the following amounts: $350.00.

Lightning Clause. Electric Light Permit. Kerosene Oil Stove Permit.

G. Loper Bailey & Co.
Fire Insurance.
Palatka, Florida.

In Witness Whereof, this Company has executed and attested these presents this 30th day of July 1906. This Policy shall not be valid until Countersigned by the duly authorized Agent of the Company at Palatka, Florida. Geo. L. Chase, President.

Sonny's Blues

2009-05-28T21:25:00.005-04:00

In connection with Sonny Rollins' receipt of an honorary Doctorate of Music at Rutger's University, Sonny Rollins joined Faith at her 50 Year Retrospective at the Mason Gross School of Art. Faith received her 21st honorary doctorate as well, and we celebrated with Rollins playing at her exhibition in front of her image of Sonny Rollins practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge.

Sonny Rollins Plays At Faith Ringgold's Retrospective

2009-05-28T21:06:00.008-04:00

Dr. Phillip G Zimbardo, Faith Ringgold, Prof. Abenia Busia, Sonny Rollins and Burdette Ringgold at Rutger's University, 2009

Sonny Rollins and Faith Ringgold, childhood friends from Edgecombe Avenue on Sugar Hill together again. And how sweet it is. Aside from my Dad, Burdette Ringgold, these pictures include Sonny Rollins, the great musician, Faith Ringgold, the great artist, and Dr. Phillip G. Zimbardo, distinguished professor of psychology at Stanford who is perhaps best known for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment in which the innate corruptibility of situational dominance is explored. All three New York City bred. New York's Finest you might say.

Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima? I Don't Know!

2009-05-26T16:24:00.007-04:00

This is a wonderful wonderful picture of the two Faiths at the Gala at Mason Gross. They are both exquisite 78 and 27. I just love this little grown up girl.

Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima dates from 1981 and belongs to a Private Collector.

Meanwhile in front of the picture-- and I never realized it could be so much fun to have people juxtaposed with images--is Grandma Faith and Baby Faith. She was then 1 year old and now 27. The two Faiths. Who is afraid of Aunt Jemima? Not me!

2009-05-25T16:15:00.005-04:00

This is myself and Barbara standing before one of the key images of Coming to Jones Road, a theme extensively represented in the exhibition. Mom did the series Coming to Jones Road to commemorate the awful difficulty she had in getting to build the studio she wanted on the Jones Road property she purchased in 1992. Her white neighbors banded together and hired a lawyer to try to prevent her from completing her plan of adding a studio to her acre large property on the hill in Englewood, New Jersey. The subsequent struggle, which did not result in the building and modifications of the property until 1999, inspired her to return to the issue of how black people had escaped slavery--sometimes leaving in large groups and taking back roads to their destination and freedom.

New Jersey continued to have slavery right up until the end of the Civil War but much of it was rural and it probably always had pockets of resistance and refuge for slaves who had escaped the South. Sometimes this is called the Underground Railroad, which became all the more a necessity as the Supreme Court upheld Fugitive Slave Laws and the awful Dred Scott decision, whereupon fleeing slaves might stop briefly in a remote location and then continue on toward Canada where they might be free. In Coming to Jones Road, Mom has explored ad infinitum the theme of resistance with your feet headed toward freedom in a rural America.

Englewood is really no longer a rural idyll although sometimes it can look like one. There are lots of places that are still almost wild.

The Gala at New Brunswick

2009-05-25T16:03:00.006-04:00

This is me and the prodigal son, Curlee Holton. It was also an exhibition for him as well as Mom since he is Mom's Master Printmaker and was closely involved with the production of the print/lithographs illustrating the Declaration of Independence. The wall text included a statement by Faith and one from him.

I was supposed to write for their book but I couldn't quite make their deadline although I have an essay for them now. The Declaration of Independence book is a very limited edition, maybe 1000 or so and very expensive so I wasn't particularly eager to be included in such a book. Moreover, for me the issue of the Declaration of Independence is a question of how things were in the 18th century, not my favorite century. Nonetheless, I wrote the essay and have included on this blog above.

I was fascinated by the difficulties Thomas Jefferson, Phylis Wheatley, David Walker and Maria Stewart all present to the visualization of issues intersecting race, gender and American Independence. These four would be my favorite subjects in 18th century America along with John Adams and his wife Abigail Adams from the standpoint of someone who loves to read about history and to read literature.

Mom at the Gala

2009-05-24T23:21:00.004-04:00

Photograph taken by Anthony C. Dominiczak. All images property of the Institute for Women and Art, Rutgers.

These photos belong to IWA.

Faith Ringgold's Retrospective--NYTimes Review

2009-05-24T11:37:00.020-04:00

Art Review - New Jersey - Master of Story Quilts and Much More - NYTimes.com

Source: www.nytimes.com

A half-century of artmaking by Faith Ringgold is on display at Rutgers University.

I am thinking about this portion of the review published in the Times:

Ringgold’s story quilts are the highlight of her career, combining painting, fabric and storytelling. You can see her masterly talent in “The French Collection Part 1: #2 Wedding on the Seine” (1991), one of a series of story quilts based on trips the artist made with her daughters to Paris, Giverny and Arles in the early 1990s, according to the exhibition catalog.

The trouble is that this statement misrepresents both the truth and what the exhibition catalogue text (not yet published) intends to say. No trips to Paris, Giverny and Arles were made with her daughters in the early 90s. Faith went to these places in the early 90s alone (as we discuss in detail in The Mona Lisa interview (http://www.faithringgold.com/ringgold/guest.htm) and in "The French Collection: Momma Jones, Mommy Faye and Me" in Dan Cameron ed., Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts (http://ucpress.edu/books/pages/8209.php). I maintain in these texts of which I am the author that Faith is integrating her real-life memories of previous trips with her mother and/or daughters to Europe and to Africa in her fictionalization of the travels of Willia Marie, her heroine, who is loosely based on my grandmother and her mother, Willi Posey, or Momma Jones.

Moreover, if you read Faith's autobiograpy, We Flew Over the Bridge (Little Brown, 1995 and Duke UP reissued 2005) you will note exactly what Faith, herself, has to say on this subject, which is slightly different from my projections. She is an individual and so am I.

In my essay in Dancing at the Louvre, I propose that Willia is an imaginary combination of Josephine Baker, Faith and her Mother Willi. And Baker occupies a singular place in the paintings of The French Collection in a portrait of her painted by Willia Marie commemorating Baker's birthday, suggesting that they were contemporaries and friends. The question is this: who among historical figures came closest to going to Europe to live and work in the manner of Willia Marie? The answer is Josephine Baker, the patron saint of this particular series of paintings. Anyhow that's just my opinion but I have an opinion. It would appear that the writer of this review, Benjamin Genocchio has no opinion on the matter because he simply knows so little about it.

Wedding on the Seine (1991) which illustrates this review, the number 2 image in the series, is deeply representative of the incorporation of these multiple themes--Faith's life, the lives of her mothers and daughters, and the lives of black women generally who wanted to become successful artists. The French Collection commemorates that potential and possibility.

Our trips as a family to Europe began in 1961. Grandmother, mother, daughters. 1961, my grandmother was 58, my Mom 31, Barbara and I were 11 and 10 so The French Collection painted in the early and mid 90s reflects upon a collective experience of over 40 years. The complexity of the process is collapsed but why? I don't know but it is frustrating.

Therefore the failure to mention either Faith's design of a deck of cards commemorating the election of Barack Obama and her illustration of the Declaration of Independence, in honor of which the retrospective exhibition is named "A Declaration of Freedom and Independence" fits in with the wilful ignorance of the review. Nonetheless, perhaps if you haven't yet seen the show, you could be happy with it. But I've seen the show.

Once in Awhile

2009-05-16T00:13:00.007-04:00

http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m1LFIKVV2ZC2AL

The Man of the Moment--1963

Once in awhile something comes along that relates to every aspect of your life. I have I am not sure how many different blogs--on blues people music, my blues people curriculum, soul pictures on the family archive, talking in pictures on race and photography in general, and one on my take on the movies--but this thing I am about to mention relates to all of them, brings them all together, intersects them all because it reaches so far back into the period under my closest examination, the early sixties when I was a wee girl.

It is the upcoming graduation ceremony at which both the master jazz artist Sonny Rollins and my Mom Faith Ringgold will be presented with honorary doctorates. This event will take place next week. Sonny Rollins, my Mom and my stepdad all knew one another as children and teenagers who hailed from Edgecombe Avenue and St. Nicholas Place.

To give this a musical hook, I would direct your attention to the release of the Jazz Icon DVD of Sonny Rollins playing in Denmark in 1963 and 1965. He performs several of his classics, most majestically for me the fabulous St. Thomas, which he could probably continue to play for hours and hours. He does a fabulous job here. So cool. So right. So perfect.

It has autobiography (Soul Pictures), stunning pictures (Talking in Pictures) film (Michele's Movie Talk), the drama of African American culture unfolding in the course of the 20th century (Blues People Curriculum) and great blues people inspired music (Blues People-The Music). Actually Sonny Rollins as well as Arthur Taylor both played for Aunt Barbara's wedding, the event that anchors this blog. It doesn't get any better than this.

Enjoy and remember! http://jazzicons.com/vid_rollins.html

Michele on the Last Day of School

2009-05-15T10:49:00.004-04:00

Michele Wallace., originally uploaded by Stacy in wonderland..

Stacy took pictures yesterday on one of our terraces at CCNY. He asked me to show the disapproval I felt when a student had said something ridiculous. I don't know whether this was one of those but in any case, this is me with my hair blowing in the wind in May of 2009 at the ripe old age of 57.

The Final Stage Approaches

2009-05-15T01:54:00.008-04:00

The Final Stage of Soul Pictures--translating the amorphous process of scanning pictures, tracking events, photographers, proper names and dates for the lives of the women in my family into a series of specific, finite projects which may, in turn, become a chapter or chapters or even book projects of their own--will be protracted. I don't know how long it will take, except that I would like to finish at least one book project from it during my sabbatical, just because that's the measure of a successful sabbatical. If you come out of it with a book ready to deliver to the publishers, you had a good one.

It's been a few weeks since school more or less ended (it never really ends) and I have begun to imagine completing the book faster than I had once imagined it. My sense is that it could consist of a series of chapters as follows:

The Introduction will be devoted to Dr. Baby Faith, my neice, her birth in 1982 and the series of paintings Mom did in her honor: Willi and Baby Faith, a series of lovely abstractions. This section will be composed of the photographs of Baby Faith, her photographs and Faith's art in this period, including the Dah Series and Emanon--all abstract paintings on canvas.

In each section of the book, the overarching theme will be provided by a particular set of Faith's art work. In this section the rubric will be provided by We Came To Jones Road.

Chapter One will be devoted to Faith and Burdette's experience purchasing a home in Englewood and their struggle to build a suitable studio combination house for herself. In 1999, Faith also initiated the activities of the Any One Can Fly Foundation, including the Garden Party, the Lifetime Achievement Awards and the Scholars Grants.

Chapter Two will look at the origins of the Posey family in Rocky Grove, SC.
Right now the way I am thinking is in terms of a set of discreet projects named after the focus of research and the available documents. Each has to do with questions I wish to pose to the sources. Most would focus on African American family life in a series of locations:

Rocky Grove, SC Project: Apparently, my great-great grandfather, the grandfather of my mother's grandfather was named Free Posey. He is named the head of the family in the 1880 Census, born about 1813, which would make him 67. His wife Matilda was born in 1830, making her about 50. There may have been another wife before her since Free Posey apparently had so many children, maybe 22, quite a few of them older than my great-grandfather Professor Benjamin Bunyon Posey.

I am assuming that both of them were former slaves, and guessing as well that they are living not too far from the location of their enslavement. A brief period of researching the Posey name in cemetaries in that county would seem to indicate that Posey was a very strong and widespread name both among whites and blacks in that particular location and that a site visit would be likely to render some insight into how this name functioned locally.

It looks as though Rocky Grove has experienced a county name change but that it remains a fairly small community, which should be good for tracking ancestral history, and getting a sense of what it was like from 100 to 200 years ago.

I have gathered the names and locations of the various Posey siblings, their spouses and from subsequent papers, letters written on the occasion of the death of Lawrence O. Posey, who was living in Washington D.C. early in the 20th century. Also apparently Benjamin Bunyon Posey, Mom's grandfather, were among those former slaves and their children who were most eager for education and opportunity and travelled in search of it. So this story should be an adventure I think, another chance to explore the mysteries of the rural South and how my ancestors fared in this strange place. I love South Carolina anyway because of its rich history as the earliest states where slaves outnumbered free, also the state that was the first to succeed from the union and to join the confederacy. They were instigators and a place where they liberally continued to import slaves from Africa long after it was illegal to do so in the entire U.S. It may be possible that Free was an African. What a name.

Washington, D.C. Project: A branch of the Posey family settled in Washington D.C. Benjamin Bunyon Posey (my great-grandfather, MJ's father) lived with a branch of this family in order to pursue the education that prepared him to be a teacher and to start schools in Palatka, and other places in the South. I would like to track the fortunes of the Poseys in Washington D.C. after the Civil War, and the manner in which D.C. became the hub of Reconstruction and the first place in the country to see widespread efforts to educate the former slaves.

When I was a little girl, Mom took Barbara and I to visit Lottie Bell and Junior who had moved their from Atlantic City. We spent perhaps a month with them on a quiet little residential street when we were 5 and 4 I think. It's the first trip I can remember taking in the summer. Lottie Bell, as I recall, was the very stuff of which life is made, a joy to be around. We played with lots of black kids and had a fabulous time. This would be in 1957.

I adore Washington D.C. I attended Howard there briefly in the fall of 1969 and had a completely unforgettable time. I would like to understand this very African American place's link with my family history. Who were the black people who built this magnificent city? Were some of them Poseys? It must have been a fascinating place after the war. Also, apparently my stepfather's grandfather also named Ringgold was in Washington D.C. after the war, possibly a soldier in the Civil War. I had thought before of Washington D.C. being a transitional space in the fortunes of African Americans but I think it probably was crucial.

Hampton/Tuskegee Project. As part of this project, I would like to go to Tuskegee just to get a better understanding of the role of these two institutions in the development of the struggle of HBCUs for self-definition. Of course, there were many other schools--Spelman, Atlanta, Morehouse, Fisk and Lincoln--which were very different from Hampton and Tuskegree but I am interested in the geography and the landscape of such places since their patterns must have impacted all the rest, regardless of whether the pattern was followed. The idea of an educational system having to be formed under such prohibitive constraints as segregation and apartheid is deeply intriquing to me. I have no ancestral links there so far as I know, only that B.B Posey and all the other Posey probably admired Booker T. Washington's work there.

Mother often mentions that Uncle Cardoza Posey, MJ's oldest brother was a Republican. He graduated from the Florida Baptist Academy in 1915, three years after the death of his father BB. Posey, and he often participated in reunions there.

He moved to Orange New Jersey as a young man and proudly participated in the 369th in France during WWI, emerging from the military with the rank of sargent. Born in 1892, he was active in the NAACP and a number of other organizations, including the Masons. He worked in the Post Office all of his life, maintained a vigorous correspondence with family and friends, and spent his vacations hunting down Poseys across the country. My Mom has inherited his papers and his photographs. His role in the family that Mom grew up in is as chief advisor and patriarchal figure to his sister's children. He never had any children of his own although he was married three times. The home he lived in when he died in 1968 is still there and occupied his stepdaughter by marriage who is a teacher. Been meaning to get over there to Hempstead to see what she's got for at least a decade. The last time I spoke to her, she said there wasn't much left. Mea culpa.

Provincetown/Martha's Vineyard Project--Almost every summer from 1957 until 1966 my Mom sister and I spent in Provincetown as part of the artist colony there or in Martha's Vineyard with the Goldsberry family. The Cape Cod summers were a crucial aspect of my life growing up.

Camp Craigmeade Project--Every other summer we spent at Camp Craigmeade and all black, very rustic camp in the Catskill Mountains run by a lady name Helen Meade with her husband and her two older sisters. We called all of them Aunts and we had so much fun that usually we didn't want to go home. Mom would come up and spend a long weekend with us up there along with the other parents. She painted many beautiful paintings of the landscape around Camp Craigmeade. I long to relocate this camp and the family who started it. This all black camp gave me great strength and resilience throughout my life in integrated schools where being black was never the best thing to be.

Palatka/Jacksonville, Florida Project--These two places are the starting points for a substantial portion of family history in the 20th century, in particular the Poseys, who lived in the little town of Palatka, which my grandmother MJ remembers and describes so well in my interviews with her, and Jacksonville, the place of the Binghams, the family into which B.B. Posey married. There were also other Poseys and Binghams who were not my direct ancestors. Both places had racial segregation and yet MJ seems either unaware of it or very reluctant to talk about any firsthand experience of it.

From the reading and map gazing I've done, it sounds as though Palatka is or was a beautiful place with a natural water link with Jacksonville. Also it is very near both historic Eatonville and Daytona Beach, as well Orlando. This will be a visit, and to some degree a search for surviving family and insight into the family's choice of location there. My husband was Naples Florida and I just love the place anyway--the swamps, the aligators, the palm trees and so forth.

Atlantic City Project: In the summer, MJ took her children to Atlantic City where there was a thriving black resort community. They watched black movies all summer and luxuriated in the black section of the boardwalk and the beach. Their visits were always with Lottie Bell, a very close friend of my grandmother's and her son Junior, who was a life of the party type. I look to visit this place and learn all I can of this lovely community and what became of it.

the Bronx Project: A few members of our family, in particular my Mom and my sister and myself lived in the East Bronx for about six years in a building known as St. Mary's Projects, Mitchell Lama housing I believe. We also attended a Lutheran School in the Bronx on Williamsbridge Road. What became of this house and of this school?

The Harlem Project--Needless to say, this was everybody's destination on both sides of my family. And they lived within a one mile radius pretty much for the entire time of their existence, Edgecombe Avenue, St. Nicholas Avenue, and St. Nicholas Place from 145th to 155th Street. As a child to me it had all the qualities of life in a small village of black people. I loved it and miss it still.

Other Possible Location Projects:

the San Diego Project
the European Tours Project
the West Africa Project
the Brooklyn Project
the Englewood NJ Project

Also, there are some topics focused on institutions:

WWI Project--Uncle Cardoza, Uncle Fred and probably Thomas Morrison were soldiers in WWI. This is a fascinating war from the point of view of issues of race. Black soldiers had to go through so much just to even get into the battle. The other kinds of "household" and "maintenance" services they rendered have always been belittled and dismissed, although I am not sure why. Anything anybody did in WWI automatically placed the soldier in harm's way.

WWII Project--Uncle Hilliard was a soldier in WWII and would serverely wounded, ending up with a metal plate in his head and also maintained a close relationship with the Veteran's Hospital in New Jersey for the rest of his life. Mom's Dad Andrew Jones volunteered to fight in WWII and cried when they said he was too older. Grandpa Andrew was an emotional man. It may also be that Uncle Cardoza was in the national guard or saw some kind of service in WWII. He was very patriotic.

the Addiction Project--my Dad, my Uncle Andrew and my cousin Jimmy died of drug overdoses of heroine all in the 60s before any insight into the treatment of addictions had come. The family assumption has always been that racism killed them but with all this work on genes, I am beginning to wonder if there might not be some insight there. Afterall the death rate in the family has been truly astounding. It includes my paternal grandfather and my Aunt's deaths related to alcoholism.

the CCNY Project--Mother went to CCNY, Grandpa Bob briefly taught chemistry there, and Barbara, myself and my former husband attended their as undergrads. I now teach there and have done so for almost 20 years. Have been asked to supervise the writing of the formal history of the English Department, which should allow me to master the history of the school, some of which would be relevant to Soul Pictures. I am curious about the link between Max Bond, Keith and Mamie Clarke (who were responsible for the research which contributed to the defeat of the Separate But Equal decision), the Northside Center and New Lincoln where I went to school.

the New Lincoln School Project--both Barbara and I went to school here from 1963 through 1970. The impact on my life is incalculable. Also, my neice Faith went their briefly when they incorporated with Walden.

the Public Schools in New York Project--mother taught in the public schools of New York for 17 years while I was growing up in the 50s and 60s. Aunt Barbara also taught. MJ attended Wadleigh High School in the early 20s. Mom and Aunt Barbara went to P.S. 136, Stitt and Morris High School in the 30s and 40s. Uncle Andrew went to the same schools. Dad went to George Washington High School in the 40s. My sister Barbara taught in the public schools for a number of years. I, myself, never attended or taught in a public school. As such, I find them fascinating to consider. Most schools have rich histories which are largely neglected.

The Marriage Project--the key occasions would be Aunt Bessie's marriage in Jacksonville in the teens, MJ's marriage to Andrew Jones in Harlem in 1923, Aunt Barbara's marriage to Jo Jo in 1950, my Mom's elopement with Earl (Dad) in the same year, my mother's subsequent re-marriage to Burdette Ringgold in 1962, my sister Barbara's marriage to Glen Gadsden in 1980, my marriage to Gene Nesmith in 1989. Marriages are fascinating events drawing together all sorts of people who would otherwise have nor reason to associate with one another. A wedding is the only event I have ever given where the attendance rate is very close to 100%. It was 20 below the day I got married and yet everybody I asked to come was there. It was crazy.

the Howard University Project--I attended Howard University in the fall of 1969.

My Mom received a lifetime achievement award from the Porter Colloquium there about three years ago. In 1963, James Porter, Art Historian at Howard University, was the first person to buy one of his paintings. The Bridesmaid or Bride of Martha's Vineyard was painted the summer we spent in Martha's Vineyard.

the Wallace Family Project--the topic here is the families of my father, Robert Earl Wallace, who died in 1966 of a heroine overdose. Before then, he had an interesting life. He was a master classical pianist and jazz pianist but apparently without the ambition or drive to succeed at anything. He is and was an interesting person himself, somebody whom I saw on many occasions and spoke with although I cannot say I knew him well. I was forbidden to see him but my grandmothers conspired together to make it possible for us to see one another. Afterall, my two grandmothers lived right next door on Edgecombe Avenue.

In addition to Earl himself, there is another whole cast of characters made up of my grandfather, Grandpa Bob, my grandmother, Momma T, and my step-grandfather Chiefie who was Momma T's second husband. All of these people were originally from Jamaica, W.I. although in Earl's case, he had no trace of an accent. Like his own father Grandpa Bob, he ewas a brilliant man who loved to do intellectual things. Each grandparent brings with him or her a rich array of subsidiary figures. My father's father's people are among the ones I know the best at this point. They educated people so this is extremely helpful.

NAAFAD Project: National Association of Fashion and Accessories Designers
the Black Feminism Project

The intimate memories project--this section will focus on topics related to my intimate personal life. Sex, married life, personal emotional stuff that doesn't belong anywhere else. Herein would also belong my reflections on issues of mental health and their impact on my family.

I am currently working with a chronology encompassing all relevant events in which the main women in my line have been engaged from roughly 1900 to 2000. Both of my grandmothers were born in 1903. Both grandfathers were born slightly earlier, which gives me a nice frame for the century, and the story their lives and the lives of their descendants can tell about the culture and civilization in which we participated. A major theme is the Great Migration and its outcomes.

A major focus of the project is to render most things in a visual form and to search for language that can further assist the images in characterizing the times for a book reading public. The blog form, as far as my concerned, is a means through which to endlessly explore possibilities for the book. This book will also be for me my first, most sincerely intend book with its own structure of self-sufficient narratives.

Family Genealogy Site

2009-05-04T01:08:00.006-04:00

Perhaps a year or more ago I established a family tree on Ancestry.com, which I try my best to maintain and keep up. The service has been very helpful in terms of supplementing the material i Had on the members of the family I knew. Among the things made available by Ancestry.com are census figures, social security records, military records, death and birth records. It is considerably easier to track males, even if they have common names such as Jones and Wallace, as opposed to female who are expected to change their names as soon as they become adults.

In any case, as I understand it, my tree is open o the public and would appreciate any useful imput from outside.
Go to http://www.ancestry.com and then search for Benjamin Posey's family tree. This is my great grandfather and Mom's maternal grandfather. There are 89 other people in the tree, which includes Barara, my sister, my Mom and I. Earl's famly (that of my biological father and mother) and Burdettte's family (that of our adopted stepfather) are included.

This Whole Blogging Thing is Crazy

2009-04-26T18:28:00.008-04:00

You never know whether anybody is reading this stuff or not, or whether you are just playing with yourself in public. In any case, last weekend I was honored to participate in the Porter Colloquium at Howard University. Everything about it was just a blast from the past. I saw and heard artists William T. Williams, Frank Bowling and Mel Edwards talking about and showing their own work on an artist panel. Also in attendance was Deborah Willis moderating a Collecting Panel.

I managed to completely exhaust myself by insisting upon walking from the hotel to Howard University's campus but it gave me a wonderful opportunity to reacquaint myself with a little bit of Washington, D.C., particularly that part immediately around the campus. My own presentation was called The Soul Century and was focused on pictures and stories relating to the development of the women in my family since my grandmother's birth in 1903 through the final years of the 20th century.

I tried to use my pictures on Flickr with an internet connection, hoping I would be able to set it on automatic slideshow but that was a disaster, probably because of fluctuations in the internet connection. Subsequently I was forced to narrate my images rather than reading from the text of the two chapters I have prepared on Soul Pictures. One of the texts will appear in an anthology on The Black Bougeoisie, which should be out in about a year.

This is why you have to use powerpoint when you do public lectures. Powerpoint is boring and inhibiting but it is ideally constructed for the rigors of a public lecture. So I've started rounding up my powerpoints and will begin to work on them again. Unfortunately, they take up so much space on a hard drive and I've got a lot of material. I have to get a new computer just to be able to handle it all.

I should think each chapter of Soul Century will have its own powerpoint presentation for public lectures. And that the chapters that will make up the book will be entirely different from the lectures because you can show a great many more pictures in a public lecture than you would ever want to put in a book, or that I would want to put in a book. You could have postage stamp pictures but I don't like those in books.

The reception for my work at Howard, despite my technical difficulties, seemed warm and enthusiastic and I was much heartened by the questions that were asked. They were as follows:

Does your family have re-unions. If not, you should because this is a great way to access further material. The answer to that is that we don't have family reunions because we have so little surviving family. Almost everyone is dead. It was not a prolific family so far as offspring to begin with and the death rate among the young men was high--my biological father, my Mom's oldest brother and my Mom's cousin Jimmy. Of MJ's two brothers, neither of them had children. MJ had the most children but they are all dead except Mom who has two children, my sister and I. I have no children. My sister has three children, all girls none of whom is married or who has any children.

Another question. Had I ever heard of any Posey's in Oklahoma City? No I haven't but Prof. B.B. Posey had 22 siblings and it seems as though they may have wandered far and wide so Oklahoma City would not be a surprising place for some of them to end up. It was one of the places blacks went at the turn-of-the-century in hopes of reversing their fortunes.

Another question. Am I interested in genealogies? Not so much as i am interested in learning about the pulse of our cultures and societies during the early through the middle twentieth century. The mixtures of the varieties of human personalities and how the children who are nurtured in them turn out is fascinating to me. Since I am less wedded to the precise genealogy of my family of origin, this frees me to include Burdette's (Dad) kinships and whatever else about their contemporaries that is interested in my picture of the century.

What has been happening is that I've started to get interested in Darwin's theory of evolution and the elaborate observations of plants and animals that led to them. I am interested in the human genome as well, and how surprisingly genetic variables can turn out in combination.

What happened to Earl? What happened to Andrew? They both died prematurely of drug overdoses, in 1966 and 1961 respectively.

The other thing that really struck me was how much work it would be to completely archive and digitize Faith's entire collection of family records. I am thinking perhaps it is too ambitious for me, not to mention my wallet, so I am going to stick to something I can handle--the book on the Soul Generation.

Faith with her Mom

2009-04-16T01:20:00.002-04:00

Faith with her Mom, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

I just love this picture of Momma Jones and Little Faith. Reproduced a lot but it is still great. About 1933.

Letter From a Birmingham City Jail by Faith Ringgold

2009-04-15T13:54:00.002-04:00

Letter From a Birmingham City Jail, eight serigraph prints by Faith Ringgold, originally uploaded by barbaraco03.

Here are copies of all eight prints illustrating Letter from a Birmihgham Jail by Faith Ringgold. Beautifully photographed by my sister Barbara.

Photo by Star Black April 2008

2009-04-15T13:50:00.002-04:00

Star Black Photo_8809, originally uploaded by barbaraco03.

Photo by Star Black April 2008. This is Mom at her most Santa Claus' brightest helper, Peter Pan-ish perfection at the event to celebrate the publication of the illustrated version of Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It is a limited edition of a few hundred, very expensive. Perhaps one day it will be made available to all in an inexpensive paperback edition. In the meanwhile, check your libraries.

On The Road with Black Feminism by Michele Wallace

2009-02-21T13:25:00.004-05:00

Michele modelling at 19 in MJ's fashion show, 1971.

This autobiographical essay written in 1999 is in response to a series of questions Thelma Golden asked me when she was preparing The Black Male Show at the Whitney Museum.

To Hell and Back: On the Road with Black Feminism in the 60s & 70s

Faith Ringgold--National Visionary Leadership Project

2009-02-01T13:26:00.009-05:00

Faith Ringgold and Momma Jones (Willi Posey) at 345 West 145th Street in front of one of her murals with dolls for which MJ provided clothing, 1981.

This is the project of interviewing all of the great elders of the African American community, which Camille Cosby has been working on for quite a few years now. It has had several incarnations on the web but the current one (at a glance) would seem to be the most impressive and accessible. In any case, there is a lovely page devoted to interviews and other kinds of resources on Ringgold, the Kid (or my Mom, in other words) at http://www.visionaryproject.org/ringgoldfaith.

P.S. There's some really juicy stuff about my sister Barbara and I--hint, hint!

Ancestor Project--Why and What

2009-01-04T18:09:00.013-05:00

Why am I doing this project on my Ancestors, which I call Soul Pictures? It is important to say.

Is it to prove to my mother that I love her?

No, because that would be impossible.

To prove to myself that I love her?

That would be unnecessary.

Is it to prove to others that I love her?

Well, that might be nice but it would be, I think, without substance or meaning. In other words, to prove something, anything to "them" is to prove nothing.

Is it to prove that I loved Momma Jones, or my other female ancestors?

Everybody knows.

Is it to make sure that the story gets told as it should be told?

That could not be.

To make sure that the story gets told as I wish it to be told?

No.

To make it a story to stand in equality with other family stories or other stories of mythic proportions?

This would be nice, of course, but no longer of crucial importance to me.

And so, knowing what I already know about the pictures, the narratives, the interviews, the documents and their intrinsically incomplete nature, then I can accept the tenuous nature of the conditions of my work, and I can accept finally whatever I am able to do in the time I have left?

The importance of this work for me lies in its connection to the continuity of my life, from my youth through the end of my life, how I make sense of my life in connection with other lives through the past, the present and most importantly, the future-- or that which cannot be known in advance.

It is important to leave something, to make sense of the past, and to leave some indications of how it once made sense. The choice of the future may be ultimately to use it in ways not anticipated by me.

But I am entirely opening myself to that possibility. The future will use, exploit, eviscerate, appropriate the past, which is currently my present, I hope. I sincerely hope.

I sincerely hope there will be something left of us. I worry about that because we live in such a violent world. What becomes of these internet universes when everything is being blown up?

I think a lot of us have the sense that the internet can survive the physical destruction of our cities, of even our planet but how would that work? Although the web seems ephemeral, in fact, it is not, is it?

Writing about life is a good thing, in and of itself, and separates us (in a productive way, I think) from the animals who have no language, and therefore no historical narrative.

And that is that.

American People: Die (1967) by Faith Ringgold

2009-01-01T00:55:00.011-05:00

Faith's mural Die is featured in an exhibition at the Art Galleries of Ontario, which has a post on the web at http://www.ago.net/contemporary-collection-1960s-freedom-and-conflict.

I remember very clearly and very distinctly when Faith painted this diptych oil on canvas somewhat imaginative depiction of the "race riots" that had begun to plague the United States landscape every summer like clockwork. I was fifteen and had just returned from a summer in Europe with my grandmother (MJ) and my sister Barbara. I came home to find mother hard at work still on two of her three murals for her first one man show at the Spectrum Gallery scheduled for the fall.

These riots were almost always in what we then called "black ghettos," and most participants were either black people who lived in the community, or white officers policing the black community, or white press attempting (usually unsuccessfully) to report on the action. Faith's Die (1967) has grown even more fascinating to me over the years because I am more struck by the tension between her depiction, which portrays both whites and blacks bleeding and fleeing, males and females engaged in a free-for-all reminiscent of Picasso's Gernica (which we had been to visit so many times at the Museum of Modern Art when I was a child) whereas the actual riots were largely black men breaking into stores, battling the police who had guns with rocks or other objects, chaotic affairs.

So the battle Faith's mural portrays is a conceptual one, revealing the undercurrents of what was really at stake in the riots of the 60s, which was black against white conflict mostly in urban cities. Blacks (mostly males I believe) were registering their dissatisfaction with the restrictions of ghetto life, the lack of genuine opportunities for advancement and prosperity, and their realization that despite the absense of the obvious signs of Jim Crow segregation and restriction in the cities, the white power structure was still pulling the strings and keeping them in check.

From this point on (in the late 60s), by the way, the numbers of black males incarcerated begun to increase exponentially even as other kinds of opportunities began to open up for black men who were educated and had bourgeois aspirations. Up until today where we find ourselves with a black president, a black secretary of state, a black governor of New York, and it was a white Governor Rockefeller who caused the massacre at Attica and engineered the discriminatory incarceration practices (see my first book Black Macho [1979], which was all about Black Power, as well as subsequent editions and publications).

Aside from Die, there was also The Flag is Bleeding, which was entirely finished I believe, and U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, which immediately became my favorite painting in the world. I was only fifteen so my thinking about it wasn't particularly deep. It was for the simple reason that it included 100 faces in a grid of ten faces by ten faces, with ten black faces in diagonal order representing their status as 10% of the population of the United States and all the rest of the faces were white.

What really held my attention as she painted this painting was the idea, which she shared with me, that the trick of it would be to make each of the faces somewhat distinct from every other and yet obviously more alike than different apart from the difference of skin color. This notion of difference was enthralling to me. Even more enthralling was that every day when I got up and looked at the painting, I would notice that one or more of the faces would have changed owing to the manner in which Faith was building up layer upon layer of paint in construction of these images. Each and every face was entirely different from every other ever so slightly but how? I would scan the surface looking for the slight differences of appearance, and how it was that I knew one face from the other. I never grew tired of this exercise.

These many years later, I have learned of the fascinating work psychologists have done on the human memory for faces as well as the scientific verification we now have that each and every face, with its complex structure of muscles and tendons and emotions, is completely unique and goes much deeper than differences of skin tone or hair texture or gender. It is possible to have a stroke and have one's memory for faces knocked out, leaving other kinds of memory intact. Apparently the loss of the ability to distinguish one face from another and to recognize familiar faces is devastating.

The 60s were a complicated period about which there is a great deal more to say. It is great to see that museums in Canada are taking on the political art of the 60s since our own museums in the United States have been largely unwilling to come to terms with the masterpieces of American political art of the 60s. Of course, a lot of that art would be African American. Could that have something to do with their reluctance? I hope not.

The Any One Can Fly Foundation

2008-12-30T11:51:00.009-05:00

Faith Ringgold and Lifetime Achievement Honoree Painter Richard Mayhew having a laugh on the porch at the Foundation Garden Party in 2008, Englewood NJ

I have written an article on the programs of the Any One Can Fly Foundation, my mother's foundation, for a book on artists foundations edited by Barbara Hoffman .

This Chapter 7 --The Anyone Can Fly Foundation: The Life, Career, and Mission of Faith Ringgold--African American Artist, Feminist Writer, and Children's Book Illustrator, Par Excellence, along with the entire manuscript entitled 2008 Supplement Update to A Visual Artist's Guide to Estate Planning is available online at www.sharpeartfdn.org.

Faith is the only African American artist with a functioning foundation, the purpose of which is not only to further the study and knowledge of the canon of African American artists but also, upon her death, to inherit and manage her entire art collection mostly composed of works by herself.

This is My Office, Which I Just Adore

2008-11-06T20:26:00.004-05:00

Concerning Work on The Ancestors

2008-11-06T13:10:00.017-05:00

Michele Wallace and Mme. Willi Posey (Momma Jones) after the college graduation of the former standing outside of Madison Square Garden, New York June 1974. It was a windy day and Mom (Faith Ringgold) was took the picture.

Yesterday I attended a powerpoint Faith did at the National Arts Club as she was receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award for the City College of New York Art Alumni.

She presented recent soft sculpture of her ancestors--her grandmothers and grandfathers, and her great-grands and great-great grands with the years of the life span following the place of birth. Almost all died some place else other than where they were born owing to the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North during the early decades of the 20th Century.

In particular I was struck by this in the case of Ida Matilda Posey, Mom's grandmother, who was born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1869 but then died in New York City in 1927. It creates an entirely different picture if you think she lived her whole life in Florida, which she did not. Mom's grandfather was born in Rocky Grove, Aiken County, South Carolina--so far as I can tell--but he died in Palatka, Florida in 1912 suddenly of appendicitis.

Although it is often remarked how young he was when he died, he was born in 1860 and he was 52. The same story was told of Ida that she died in her youth, yet she was actually 58. Not that 52 and 58 are that old but it isn't the first blush of youth either. Ida died of Bright's Disease. Obviously they both died of the tenuous health care of the early 20th century, with an added component perhaps of Jim Crow health care although how this worked for Ida Posey in the New York hospitals is a subject to be explored. I am assuming that blacks received sub-standard health care in the hospitals of New York in the 20s since they still do especially in the public hospital of New York in 2009.

But it may be that people didn't often live of a burst appendix in 1912 or of Bright's disease in 1927 period.

I do know that great care was frequently taken to conceal the true age, to the point of lying to the census takers, for which they no doubt had their very good reasons. I suspect in cases where education was highly valued (such as happened with Zora Neale Hurston), the age was put back in order to take advantage of some public program restricted to the young. From the time of the Emancipation Proclamation until now blacks were always playing catch up.

But the location and date of B.B.'s death in Palatka in 1912 is very important because Palatka is also where his youngest children Edith, Willi (Mom's mother) and Hilliard were born. It was when BB died suddenly of appendicitis that the family was gradually split up and scattered. It is also important because in the interviews I did with her in 1978 and 1980, MJ obviously considered Palatka her true place of origin. Apparently MJ ended up staying in Palatka to finish her primary schooling perhaps at that very same primary school for colored listed in the directory, living with a family named the Massingales, who had never had children themselves, whereas Ida sold the house in Palatka and took the other children with her to live with her mother, Betsy Bingham in Jacksonville, Florida.

Palatka and Jacksonville are only about 30 miles away from one another and connected by a very convenient railroad line then. There was also a ferry although MJ doesn't mention it. No doubt it practiced Jim Crow and it may be that blacks carefully avoided Jim Crow accommodations and shielded their children from them whenever they could. MJ remarks upon how her mother would bring Edith and Hilliard with her to visit MJ in Palatka on Christmas and other holidays. Could it be that the commuter rail was small enough that the seating wasn't racially segregated or perhaps it was underutilized?

The education of the eldest children Cardoza, Bessie and Inez at the Florida Baptist Academy was terminated because of lack of funds. Cardoza who had been born in 1892 was 20 years old and would by 1917 move North to New Jersey, establishing the first outpost of the immediate family in the North. Bessie who was 16 in 1912 and would live with her mother in Jacksonville until she married Henry Austin and then moved to Harlem with her husband who had a job as a cook on a boat docking in New York. This change of venue is important to our wing of the family because MJ would travel to Harlem to live with her and to attend Wadleigh high school in New York, and so therefore MJ went from really small rural town, which was hardly racially segregated to Harlem which was the capital of the black world. Although she was born in the South, she had never really experienced the pain of segregation and Jim Crow first hand.

Which may account for much of her sunny disposition toward life, I wonder? She was no doubt of an optimistic bent but whether this was her innate disposition backed up by life circumstances or whether life circumstances generated her optimism is not a question I can answer any better than most psychologists.

For me the fact that Mom is doing this work is fascinating, particularly since she has done so much other work using the figure of MJ and her immediate family. If it happens over and over again in an artist's work, one must ask how has that meaning grown? What does it mean this time, as she grows older. It's like artist self-portraits as the artist changes.

One can see the development in self-perception and world perspective. In any case, this project was initiated with friends Linda Freeman and Grace Matthews.

1909 Palatka Directory

2008-11-06T13:05:00.005-05:00

This is information culled from the Palatka City Directory:

Public School #2 for colored,
cor of North and Reid,
CB White, Principal, Mrs. Maggie M. Drakeford,
asst. Misses Bessie E. Hawkins, Estelle D. Drakeford, Alaie J. McLaughlin, Margie E. Trapp.

St. Mary's Day School (negro Episcopal),
Lemon (the street MJ is always talking about) between 8th and 9th Street, Mrs. L.A. Morris< Principal.
Presbyterian (negro) cor Lemon and S. 8th Street. Rev. F. Gregg, principal.

How could MJ not have noticed that every thing was segregated although she readily conceeded that she didn't know where the white kids went to school. It just underscores the observation my therapist Dr. Lila Coleburn made in her Ph.D. thesis at the CUNY Graduate Center in Psychology that children under a certain age, children aren't able t incorporate the full complexity of racial segregation as a social practice since superficial groupings such as races are not a part of their world view yet anyway.

Concerning Copyright Use of Images--Very Important

2008-11-02T13:47:00.015-05:00

All images posted on this blog, including both photographs and works of art, are restricted by copyright use. With very few exceptions, the copyright registration is Faith Ringgold. It is illegal to use any of these images in any manner without the explicit permission of Faith Ringgold or her legal representatives (which I have!)

All such request for use, which will be given due consideration in the order of their receipt, should be made to Grace Matthews, Artist Assistant, and/or Faith Ringgold at ringgoldfaith@aol.com. For more information concerning the art work, see http://www.faithringgold.com, Mom's website.

Presentation of these images on my blog and my website is purely for research and scholarly purposes in order to disseminate the existence of such images under the "fair use" provisions of the copyright law, and in all cases in which copyright use applies.

In this regard, I am also eager to receive information concerning any and all the photographers who produced the photographs included herein, and can be contacted via my webpage at http://www.michelefwallace.com.

Yes, I've decided to use my middle name (faith) afterall. Or at least the first initial f for purchase of a domain name. Apparently Michele Wallace is actually taken so don't go there looking for me. My name was at birth Michele Faith Wallace, as my sister's name is Barbara Faith Wallace. And my niece was named after Grandma and as such has both her first and middle name, Faith Willi, and so you see we are all named Faith. FYI, both Faith Sr. and Faith Jr. get their middle names from my grandmother Willi Posey, who provided the inspiration for this blog.

The Mona Lisa Interview

2008-11-01T18:25:00.033-04:00

Figure II--Whose's Afraid of Aunt Jemima copyright Faith Ringgold 1983, Collection of Fred Collins.

Figure III--Whose Afraid of Aunt Jemima Detail copyright Faith Ringgold. Collection Fred Collins.

Figure IV Whose's Afraid of Aunt Jemima Detail 2 copyright Faith Ringgold, collection Fred Collins.

Figure V--Detail of Michele in front of Who's Afraid of Aunt Jemima, 1983

at 345 West 145th Street. I am 31 years old in this picture.

On the guest spot at Faith's website (www.faithringgold.com/ringgold/guest.htm), I have an interview with Mom concerning her paintings in The French Collection and the American Collection. This happened around 1998 or so when she had the retrospective at the New Museum and the catalogue Dancing at the Louvre was published by the University of California Press including my essay "The French Collection: Mommy Jones, Mommy Fay and Me." You can get a copy of this gorgeous book with essays by Rick Powell, Moira Roth, myself and others for $35 at Amazon, $10 less than UC Press is currently charging.

It is called the The Mona Lisa Interview because Leonardi da Vinci's Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre occupies a central place in Faith's French Collection, a series of paintings she did in the 1990s. In Faith's Dancing at the Louvre, the heroine of the series visits the Louvre with her friend and her three daughters. The three daughters are dancing in front of the Mona Lisa. In the interview we discuss the possible significance of the Mona Lisa in the life of our family since my Mom, my sister and I, and my grandmother who is the model for the heroine of The French Collection made our first trip to Paris in 1961. My sister and I were nine and eight and it was an experience that was formative in my life and imagination, more fun than anything I could ever imagine.

Figure VI--Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa

I can't believe it has been ten years already, and that so much in my life has changed since then. In these past ten years, I divorced my husband, left Brooklyn and moved back to Harlem then to Ithaca to teaching at Cornell University for two years and then came back to City College and the CUNY Graduate Center and moved in with Mom and Dad in Englewood, NJ.

It had always been my intention to expand upon this interview/conversation and to illustrate it. In fact, I expected that the interview would be the centerpiece of a book to be called Olympia's Servants: The Problem of the Visual in African American Culture, or Black is Beautiful but the proposal encountered some red tape in the form of mixed reviews asking for extensive revisions perhaps aimed at not publishing the interview at all.

Meanwhile, the content of the interview has continued to be of interest to me although the manner in which I might best get its content to a reading public continues to elude me. That's the story of both blogs and websites, trying to make some sort of direct contact with an interested audience or at least keeping your chops up should the opportunity arise.

Like most writers I suppose I just hate the idea of a forthcoming book that never comes forth, although the chance that no one will ever see this particular book in gestation grows exponentially these days. My sense is that there is very very little interest in whatever I might have to say on this topic, that people's obsessions are focused entirely elsewhere, and it doesn't surprise me at all. There is a great deal to get one's head around these days.

Nonetheless, I have noticed "Black is Beautiful" floating around here and there in the world of academic publishing. There is a whole new crop of academics focused on black studies and African diasporic studies, a lot of them deeply invested in popular culture approaches. It is not as though I had any proprietary claim on the expression (although I bet somebody has already purchased that domain name).

The expression "black is beautiful" arose as popular parlance because of the lack of recognition of such a possibility in mainstream public discourse. The original reasons for anybody feeling the need to say "black is beautiful" back in the 60s continues just as much in force as it ever was, although one can also see a slow shift in attitudes and values in the past 40 years concerning blackness. By "blackness" I am referring to the coloration in the broadest and most profound sense: including the ideas associated with blackness as beautiful, and that all colors have the potential for beauty, that most things that exist in nature have a good portion of beauty in their make-up, as well as our obligation as members of the human species and the present caretakers of this planet to appreciate the potential for beauty in as many aspects of nature and humanity as we possibly can. Beauty stands in for the notion that we are able to co-exist easily and comfortably with something other than ourselves.

The thing I find most surprising about beauty when I hear someone say something is beautiful is how uniform and homogeneous images of beauty have become. When it comes to standards for ideal beauty among women it is almost as if "beauty" stands in for "uncomplicated." And we are gradually moving towards the same standards of beauty in men. To say that someone or something is beautiful is to say that I will accept you without knowing who you are or where you came from. Beauty requires no introduction.

Anyhow, needless to say, my interest in this stems from the racial dimension. I am thinking, in fact, that all notions of animal or human ugliness relate to racial antipathies, that is the notion that another human being exhibits visual traits disqualifying him or her from equal participation in the major activities of human society (nurturing, mating, pro-creating and everything else stemming from such activities). Such antipathies, I am assuming, are both automatic and largely unconscious. Not sure whether you have to learn them or unlearn them.

I don't know how exaggerated negroid features became identified with ugliness although my sense is that such notions are peculiar to particular cultures and are culturally relative, as well as subject to variations toward greater standardization depending upon the amount of mechanical reproduction involved in the dissemination of the images. That is to say, the more proliferation of reproduction there is, the more standardization creeps into the process and the image.

Could it be just that difference from the norm is what ugly is considered to be? Because the older I get, the less I feel that anything is truly ugly. The human form and the human face become more complicated and less symetrical as it gets older, not uglier. And some people have more complicated faces, and that is the way I prefer to see it.

The first of many links I hope designed to explicate the relationship of Faith's work to the emergence of an international movement of Modernism is to Alfred Barr's diagram illustrating the development of abstract art for the Museum of Modern Art, 1936. African Art (or Primitive Art) is cited as just one of many influential strands in the profile of Cubism and Abstract Art for the purpose of helping to define and delineate Moma's intended mission in the Art World.

This diagram is provided by the Creative Synthesis blog.

THE FRENCH COLLECTION BY FAITH RINGGOLD

2008-11-01T15:04:00.012-04:00

The French Collection Number 8:

On the Beach at St. Tropez,

Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed quilt frame

74 x 92 inches

The French Collection Number 7:

Picasso's Studio, 1991

Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed quilt frame

73 x 68 inches

Worcester Art Museum

Worcester, Massachusetts

Charlotte E. Buffington Fund

French Collection Number Five:

Matisse's Model, 1991

Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed quilt frame

73.5 x 90 inches

Baltimore Museum of Art

Baltimore, Maryland

French Collection Number 6:

Matisse's Chapel, 1991

Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed quilt frame

74 x 79.5 inches

Collection of George Wein

French Collection Number Nine:

Jo Baker's Birthday, 1993

Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed quilt frame

73 x 78 inches, St Louis Art Museum

St. Louis, Missouri

French Collection Number Three:

Picnic at Giverny, 1991

Acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed quilt frame

Private Collection

See "The French Collection: Momma Jones, Mommy Fay and Me." In Dancing at the Louvre: Faith Ringgold's French Collection and Other Story Quilts edited by Dan Cameron, University of California Press 1998. Forgot to mention that this is a pretty expensive book if you buy from the University of California, which is where this link goes. The price is $35 or so at Amazon. Of course, there's shipping. Also, for more on this topic see The Mona Lisa Interview at http://www.faithringgold.com.

Faith Ringgold, my Mom

2008-11-01T13:02:00.018-04:00

The French Collection Number 4: Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles,

acrylic on canvas, tie-dyed pieced fabric border

73.5 x 80 inches 1991

Collection of Oprah Winfrey

This blog is devoted to exploring the photographs and art works of Faith Ringgold, with a particular focus on the photographs, documents and art related to the lives of Ringgold, her mother Willi Posey and her two daughters, Michele Wallace and Barbara Wallace.

We have always lived in the immediate context of a world mediated by visual art and photography. Both Barbara and Faith, Sr. are wonderful photographers in their own right. Barbara's oldest daughter Faith, whose major occupation is as a micro-biologist, is also a wonderful photographer, as well as the prime initiator of these blogs and my new website, www.michelefwallace.com. Barbara has also been tremendously helpful in getting the blogs started and I am looking forward to loading onto this site the many wonderful pictures she took of me during the heyday of my first book Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman in the late 70s. There are also the photographs she took of us around the time that Faith Jr. was born. I find that I am scarcely able to remember those chapters in my life which aren't bookmarked with photographs taken at the time.

I find that often when I look at a picture of myself, whether it is photographic or an original work of art, I can remember exactly what I was thinking at the time, and even though a moment before I had no recollection of the events, I can now remember the context, the people that were there and things that happened that I had completely forgotten. This is also true, sometimes, of photographs and images of others, photographs and/or images of news events or photographs which recall for me a landscape or a location or even a piece of furniture that was once in my life. It seems that these images occupy the key to the cryptic manner in which my memories are arranged, with the most important memories right beneath the surface of the gaze when my eye comes in contact with something visual that seems familiar. The next moment I am remembering something that I had completely forgotten, in oddly shaped fragments. Each time, for particularly powerful images, I will remember something altogether different.

I don't believe it has much to do with the intrinsic qualities or value of the image-- how well it is done according to some impartial standard of photography or art making-- although it may be that the images to which we attach the most meaning, significance and financial value are those that touch the widest array of people, or maybe they touch the richest people, or the whitest people, or the people who think of themselves as white. I don't know and I don't have much interest really in figuring this part out. All I know is that the images you care about (or that I care about) have to be safeguarded because there are a lot of people out there who wish to tell you that your visuals are without value or importance and that you should stop looking at them and get rid of them. This seems perhaps the unintended consequence of the digital revolution and everybody snapping cell phone images twenty-four-seven.

In short order, if it hasn't already happened, this endless proliferation of digital images which are crowding everybody's hard drive and so forth will drown out all sense of the place photography once occupied in our lives before computers and digital files and digital cameras. Not that digital cameras don't produce beautiful pictures. They can and they do. And it seems the difference between the real photographers and the fakes is as much in place as ever.

BUT it is going to get harder and harder for ordinary people (who have no time to study the situation) to tell the difference and to attach value and/or meaning to visual images in general, photographs perhaps in particular.

In the meanwhile, here are the links to www.faithringgold.com and the Mona Lisa interview, the conversation I had with Faith where we discuss at length the autobiographical aspects of her series of painted story quilts included in the French Collection (1991-1993:

These painted story quilts are as follows:

I. Dancing at the Louvre, 1991, Private Collection

II. Wedding on the Seine, 1991, ACA Galleries

III. The Picnic at Giverny, 1991

IV. The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles, 1991, Collection of Oprah Winfrey

V. Matisse's Model, 1991

VI. Matisse's Chapel 1991, Collection of George Wein

VII. Picasso's Studio,1991

VIII. On the Beach at St. Tropez, 1991 Private Collection

X. Dinner at Gertrude Stein's, 1991 Private Collection

IX. Jo Baker's Birthday, 1993

XI. Le Cafe des Artistes, 1994

XII. The Moroccan Holiday, 1997

Each of these paintings has not only a particular story Faith Sr. gave them but also they issue from particular experiences and connections to the artist's own fascinating life. For more on this topic, see The Mona Lisa Interview at http://www.faithringgold.com.

Picture of My Family

2008-09-27T11:37:00.014-04:00

The picture which provides the opening image for this blog is of my family, my mother and father and my Aunt Barbara on the eve of Aunt Barbara's wedding. It is a party taking place in my grandmother's livingroom at 363 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem in 1950. I am not yet born or even considered. My parents are not yet married. They will elope and marry later in the same year.

After this lovely wedding, in which Aunt Barbara married Jo-Jo, the man who is kneeling in the picture, they will live together with Momma Jones and my Mom Faith in this same small appartment. Faith says now the reason she decided to marry Earl was to avoid the crowd at the house, principally composed of Aunt Barbara and Jo-Jo. Aunt Barbara, Mom says, would strut around in her slip on hot days while Mom was forced to be fully clothed from the first thing in the morning to the last thing at night because Jo-Jo was there.

I can imagine that the party wore pretty thin after awhile.

So Mom and Earl eloped also in 1950, timing it to coincide with Momma T (Earl's mother) getting married to someone I called "Chiefie," or "Sarge," whom I thought of as one of my four grandfathers and going off to the Air Force post in Guam as his wife.

It was a series of endless weddings, triggering one another like falling dominoes. Weddings have potentially tragic consequences. They are major events, one of the few ways to completely change the trajectory of whatever your life might have been without them.

As it turned out, Jo-Jo, who had been the cause of all this dislocation, was already married to somebody else. One day, Jo-Jo's real wife appeared at the door. Aunt Barbara and Jo-Jo's marriage was subsequently annulled.

A few years laters, my mother and Earl had married, and my sister and I were born, and my Mom left my Dad and took us to live with Momma Jones at 363 Edgecombe Avenue. Mother's marriage would be annulled as well on the grounds that she had not realized that he was addicted to heroine. In those days, it was not so easy to sever a marriage.

This seemingly happy-go-lucky photograph continues to wreak of tears and sadness to me. And yet I love it still. Soul Pictures. Such is the spirit in which this blog, which I hope one day will be a book, is constituted.

My Photo Sets on Flickr

2008-08-24T14:38:00.010-04:00

I am including here a link to the family photos collection I have uploaded onto Flickr. All of these photos are limited in their use by the copyright of Faith Ringgold. They are currently available at this address on Flickr for research and/or genealogical investigation.

We have many more but this is a healthy group made up of photos from the teens through the 90s of myself, my sister, my Aunt, my mother, dad and grandmother Mme. Willi Posey.

MJ Collection Inventory Notes

2008-08-16T12:45:00.005-04:00

I. The Posey Family History: Photographs & Letters, Autobiography

1893-1992

List of Contents--Documents

1. Cardoza Posey note: “a part of two letters to me, father to son while in school at Florida Baptist Academy, Jacksonville, Florida. A letter from Papa, Feb 19, 1911

6 pieces of a handwritten letter from B.B. Posey, hardly legible.

2. Certificate of Death Evelyn Muriel Bingham (MJ's cousin, granddaughter of Betsy Bingham).

Department of Health, Division of Vital Statistics Certificate of DeathDuval County Florida, Jacksonville 56 years old. Jan 10, 1958. Born Oct. 22, 1900 Public School Teacher Mother Janie Brown and Father Peter Bingham Address: 612 Owen Avenue.

3. Funeral Service, Friday July 31, 1964—The Late Dr. JY Posey, Third Stone Baptist Church, 1591 Boston Road Bronx New York

4. Board of Public Instruction: Contract between BB Posey and Jacksonville, Florida.

Putnam County, Sept 15, 1897. Salary $50 per month.

Public School 29 at San Mateo

5. Letter from Aunt Janie in Jacksonville, Florida to nephew Cardoza July 4, 1960.

“It is very hot down here. I miss Evelyn so much. I feel strong in a new place. I am old now and I can’t get out much.”

6. Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia October 6, 1963.

7. J.W. Posey State of South Carolina County of Aiken Teacher’s Graded Certificate. September 3, 1883. Second Grade.

8. July 1, 1953—Letter from Ida Mae Bingham, Jacksonville Florida.

9. Letter from W. Walton Edwards—Attorney and Counsellor

August 9, 1913—Mr. Bunyan B. Posey, concerning the property of brother L.O. Posey.

10. Clipping—“Lawrence Dargan Hanged in Palatka” August 19^th, not sure of year.

11. Family Record Pages—

B.B. Posey—birth January 16, 1860, married Oct 15, 1891 and died May 15^th 1912.

Ida Mae B Posey—birth July 18tk, death July 20, 1927, etcetera.

Blake Funeral Home Book for MJ. Died October 28, 1981. Book of Friends Who Viewed.

Sonny Rollins Podcast and Interview at CUNY

2008-08-11T12:25:00.006-04:00

Sonny Rollins Videos

The link here is http://www.sonnyrollins.com/video.php. These materials, including lots of videos of concerts and interviews, are from the website of Sonny Rollins who was a childhood friend of my Mom, my Dad Earl Wallace and my other dad Burdette Ringgold. The videos begin with an interview with Sonny's sister Gloria reminiscencing about life in the Harlem--the Sugar Hill Edgecombe Avenue area where they all grew up-- of the thirties and forties as Sonny, her younger brother, was growing up.
Rollins playing his saxophone on the Brooklyn Bridge figures prominently in one of my Mom's painted quilts to be seen on her website www.faithringgold.com. Bebop was the required music of my early childhood and of my parent's youth and Rollins was one of the precocious creators of this magnificent music. Recently Rollins was interviewed by Gary Giddins at the CUNY Graduate Center where Giddins teaches and where I am also on the faculty of the English Ph.D. Program. My sister and I were in attendance and hoped to get a chance to say hello personally because my sister Barbara hasn't met him (not much of a jazz fan) but the magnitude of the event including an overflow room made it an accomplishment just to get into the auditorium. I don't know Giddins personally and there were clearly so many fans of one kind or another in the audience who were obviously willing to stand on their heads to greet Sonny, Barbara and I decided to retreat to my office on the fourth floor quietly. I hope Barbara will get a chance one day to meet him. I wonder what she'll think?
Here's the link to the interview with Gary Giddins on the CUNY website at
http://www1.cuny.edu/portal_ur/news/radio/podcast/lecture_107.mp3

Ida Matilda Posey

2008-07-29T17:10:00.009-04:00

The mother of Willi Posey, and the grandmother of Faith, was Ida whose middle name was Matilda. I guess I should say also that she was my maternal great-grandmother, which makes her more cuddly, although I never knew her. I was always told of her that she died prematurely of a broken heart in 1927 in New York City. MJ never spoke of her without a pained expression on her face.

From my limited study of the census records and the variations over a period of decades, it would appear that some people did a lot of fiddling with their birthdates as time went on so it is difficult to tell with certainty when Ida Matilda was born but my guess would be 1869, which would have made her 58 when she died. I guess that could be considered rather young to a grieving daughter with young children (Uncle Andrew and Aunt Barbara, four and one, respectively.

B.B., my great-grandfather and MJ's father, was born in 1860 in Rocky Grove, Aiken County, South Carolina of Free and Matilda Posey, and he died in 1912 in Palatka Florida, which would have made him 52, also a fairly young age. He was nine years older than his wife Ida. This information I gathered from census records from Palatka, Florida in 1880.

B.B. Posey also died young of an attack of appendicitis. This could not have been an easy thing to die of in 1912 in Palatka, Florida. With no x-rays and I don't know what else (but maybe some morphine), this meant a protracted death at home. As MJ tells it, he died at home.

This picture, which is extensively doctored and colored, may have been taken soon after Ida Matilda's husband's death or around her move to New York, maybe in about 1918 or so, although the long skirt suggests closer to the earlier date of 1912.

I used to call her Ida Mae because there is another Ida Mae, the daughter of Hilliard Bingham (Willi's Uncle), Ida Mae Bingham who never married, and who was a choral director at the Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida.

Matilda seems to have been a somewhat popular name during the period. Free Posey's wife, and the mother of B.B. Posey was named Matilda, born in about 1815 in Aiken County, South Carolina. Her husband Free Posey was born in about 1813. The first name is highly suggestive.

1900s--Posey Family Chronology

2008-07-27T21:16:00.008-04:00

Mme. Willi Posey was my grandmother, and Faith Ringgold's mother. Posey was her maiden name, and the name of her father Benjamin Bunyon Posey who was educated in D.C. and a teacher in South Carolina and in San Mateo and Palatka, Florida in the late 19th Century and the early 20th century. He had a great many siblings and he had six children, one of whom was Willie, Faith's Mom.

Not sure why the census says BB Posey is a drayman in 1900 except that in those awful days it was not unusual for blacks who were professionals (ministers, teachers) to engage in more than one occupation with the second one being more menial such as being a laborer of some kind or a farmer. Being a black teacher in the public schools in the South then was far from a secure or reliable line of work from what I gather from reading some of the histories. It has occurred to me as well that descriptions recorded in the census or in city directories may have been distorted by racist competition, and that considerable inaccuracies might creep into the records.

The Binghams are the family of MJ's mother. There were two generations of Peters and three generations of Hilliards, which can get confusing.

1900s—Posey Family

1900—Benjamin Bunyon Posey, enumerator of the 12th Census of the U.S. Precinct #24, Palatka, Florida, 6th Ward, Putnam County. Peter Bingham (Ida’s father) “can read, can write, can speak English, Drayman. Owned land and business.”

1900—Susan and Robert Shannon (Willi’s maternal great-grandparents) residing at Waller Street near Day Avenue, married 60 years. Susan had borne six children, three of whom survived—Betsy, Peter and Hilliard), Jacksonville, Florida.

1900—Peter Bingham II (Willi’s Uncle) and Janie marry in Jacksonville.

1900—12th Census of the United States
Schedule No. 1—Population
Precinct #24 Palatka, 6th Ward of city, Putnam County
Enumerated by me on the 21st day of June 1900,
Benjamin B. Posey, Eumerator
Enumeration District 151
Supervisor’s District #2

Peter Bingham, Black Male, Born March 1841, 59, Married 38 years. Born Virginia
Drayman, Can read, Can write, can speak English, Owned land, mortgage, business

Bessie (or Betsy) Bingham, Black Female, Born May 1850, Married 38 years, Borne 8 children, three of whom survive (Ida, Peter and Hilliard or Hillyarde), Born in South Carolina, Can read, can write, can speak English.

1900 Census, Putnam County
B.B. Posey, 40 years old.
Spouse: Ida, born 1869 in Orange Springs, Florida
Isaac C. Posey (45), BB’s brother living with them.

1901—Andrew Jones born in Alauchua County, Florida to Walter Jones and Baby Doll.

1902—Gainesville, Florida—March 20, 1902.
Dear Brother: This will inform you that Babe (not sure who this is, maybe Mary E. Knight) is dead and buried. She died Sunday night March 16th. She had the pneumonia, had been sick about three weeks. I arrived in Tallahasee Monday 3:30 p.m. and saw that she was nicely laid away. Rev. JB Hawkinson preached the funeral at the cemetery.

She was buried late Monday afternoon. (maybe William Knight) had a good Dr. treating her, and she seems to have been well cared for. She looked natural. She was speechless about three days before she died. She asked her husband was Joe going with her. Sunday during the day she though speechless called me loudly, and that was her last talking. She leaves three beautiful little girls to mourn her loss. Her husband expects to keep the children. It was a sad funeral to me. I am your brother J.W. Posey.

I do not know Bingham’s address. Please send this letter to him after you’ve read it.

1903—Evelyn born to Peter II and Janie Bingham in Jacksonville.

1903—March 22nd, Willi Posey born in Palatka to Ida and BB Posey in Palatka, Florida West side of Peck Street at #203, Block 58, Sheet 13.

1907, August 27--Letter from lawyer Wm. L. Pollard, Attorney in D.C. to Bunyan B. Posey, Esq. (the father of Willi Posey) Palatka, Florida. This list refers to all of B.B.s siblings, as well as their children and husbands in those cases in which the sibling is deceased, together with the place of their most recent address.

Concerning Lawrence O. Posey’s death. Unmarried. No children.
Silbings who are alive:
Mrs. Aklin Stroman, Springfield, SC
Mrs. Annie L. Frazier, Blackville, SC
Mr. Bunyan B. Posey, Palatka, Florida
Mrs. Emma Blasengale, Salley SC
Mrs. Frances Simons, St. Augustine, Florida
James N. Posey (deceased)
• Mary Posey (wife) Kitching Mill, SC
• Aquilla Posey, Kitching Mill, SC
• Priesta Posey, Jacksonville, Florida
• Belle Posey, Kitching Mill, SC
• --- Posey, Kitching Mill, S.C.
Viney Dunbar (deceased)
• Washington Dunbar (Husband) Aiken, SC
• George Dunbar, Texas
• Della Stroman, Dupont, Florida
• Chas. Dunbar, Aiken, SC
• Dorsey Dunbar, Aiken, SC
• Eddie C. Dunbar, Palatka, Florida
Issac Posey (deceased):
• Sarah Posey, Palatka, Florida
• Pauline Posey Palatka, Florida (deceased)
• Daniel Posey Palatka, Florida
• Lenora Posey Palatka, Florida or Federal Point
Mary E. Knight (deceased)
• William Knight (husband), Tallahassee, Florida
• Alwillie Knight, Tallahassee, Florida
• Sally Knight, Tallahassee, Florida
• Mabel Knight, Tallahassee, Florida

1907, Aug 26 Letter from Rev. Jacob Posey from Washington D.C. concerning the death of their oldest brother Lawrence who had no wife. All of his things had already been claimed by the city authorities.
$2800 worth of real estate
$700 in cash in the bank.
Safety vault had $100 in cash including gold, and two gold chains. Some stock. Some mortgages and notes.
5 or 6 lots, the most valuable of which was assessed for $916.
He was once worth $25,000. Should be able to find $7000 all told.
Location: 609 F Street, Washington D.C.

1907—Letter from Jacob to B.B. He will need to publish all debtors and creditors in the paper in response to Bunyon’s complaints of immediate financial need.

1907. December 31st—Jacob thought he would be
able to send a check by now but the Judge allowed the lawyer Pollard a fee of $300, another judge revoked it and allowed $150. He paid the first order and now Pollard says he will not repay the $150 unless ordered to do so.

1908--Letter January 10, 1306 22nd Street, NW
Concerning the problem of brother Frazier who wants a promissory note for his portion of the estate in exchange for paying some of the expenses.
He says he’s found about 3 acres of land out in Mt. Pleasant. He had begun to see one of the Anacostia properties, and it is almost paid for. He claims that none of the creditors wish to pay.

1908, January 17, 1908—Letter from Jacob Posey continuing to track down parcels of land and determine their status. He goes to visit a piece of land at Mt. Pleasant, which is 5 or 6 miles from the city. The car runs within half a mile of the land. There is an open road from the cars to the front lot. The back lot has a stream running through it. Before Lawrence bought it, it was sold for 1903 taxes. It might cost $100 to redeem.

He hasn’t gone to Delaware (not sure what is there) but he says he’s been to Alexandria, Va., found $500 in furniture, clothing, books, etc. “I have all of his clothing and books here in my room. They can be divided at any time. The money comes to slightly more than $1000 dollars.” This is for money owed, which he may not be able to collect. He mentions a letter that Daniel Posey wrote to the lawyer, which he hasn’t seen and didn’t ask to see.

1908---January 11th--“I can’t see how a man of your intelligence can speak as you do.” I think he is saying his share is $172. He is still waiting on the $150 refund from Pollard.

1909—March 16th, Letter from Denmark (where Jacob lives?)
“Booker T. Washington spoke here today to an immense audience. He is touring this state for the next week or so.”

1910s--Posey Family Chronology

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1910s

1910 Census—Alachua County, Florida, Tampa.
Walter Jones can read and write, married to Baby Doll with 7 children recorded: listed Walter Jr. 15, Mary, 12 and Andrew 9, Erwin 7, Laura 4, Anna 3.

1910 Census. Duval County Florida, Election Precinct 27.
13th Census of the United States. Population.
Peter Bingham Head of Household, 49, married 20 years, from Florida.
Janie Bingham 39 married 20 years from South Carolina.
1 child: Evelyn Bingham, Daughter 7.

Jacksonville 1910 Directory, Volume 1 & 2
Elizabeth Bingham ,Waller near Day Avenue.
There is also Hilyard Bingham, laborer, at 1116 W. Ashley
Peter Bingham, laborer, Owen Avenue near Waller
Lydia Bingham (wid of Elisha P), 1015 E. Duval
Ella Bingham 605 Main

Susan Shannon
Died March 22, 1910, Article from the Metropolis Newspaper, pg. 17
dated March 23, 1910.
Survived by 2 sons and one daughter (Betsy, Peter and Hillyard)
Mrs. Shannon’s body was shipped by Geter and Baker undertakers to Reddick (Marion County), Florida.

Cardoza Posey note: “a part of two letters to me, father to son while in school at Florida Baptist Academy, Jacksonville, Florida. A letter from Papa, Feb 19, 1911
6 pieces of a handwritten letter from B.B. Posey, hardly legible.

1911—from Anna L. Frazier: Sister Emma died on the 12th of February in 1911 in Blackville SC. This letter is from Anna L. Frazier.

1912--B.B. Posey of North 7th Street died this morning. Mt. Tabor Baptist Church, Rev. William Bell presiding. Resolutions read by Mrs. D. Drakeford of the Central Academy recognizing him as a teacher.

1912--A letter to BB Posey from the Fessenden Academy, English and Industrial Departments, Martin, Florida. Principal.

1912--Letter to Mrs. Ida Posey in Palatka, Florida. Sympathy note D.A. Thomas. May 13th—B.B. Posey dies in Palatka, Florida.

1913—August 16th, Letter to Mrs. Ida Posey, Palatka. The Posey case has been referred to the auditor of the court, to state the account and determine what is due each one of the heirs out the fund now in hand. One month after he files his report in the clerk’s office, the distribution can be made. Thomas Walker Attorney at law in D.C.

Letter from W. Walton Edwards—Attorney and Counsellor
August 9, 1913—Mr. Bunyan B. Posey, concerning the property of brother L.O. Posey.

1912—Benjamin Bunyon Posey dies at home of appendicitis in Palatka.**
B.B. Posey—birth January 16, 1860,married Oct 15, 1891 and died May 15th 1912.
B.B. Posey of North 7th Street died this morning. Mt. Tabor Baptist Church, Rev. William Bell presiding. Resolutions read by Mrs. D. Drakeford of the Central Academy recognizing him as a teacher.

Photographic Portrait of B.B. Posey taken by the Nugent Studio at Fourth and Lemon Street in Palatka, Florida.

Notice in the Paper—Gem City Paper:

While lying . . . . Monday night . . . . to the Sweet singing of the children at the graduating exercises being held in Bethel Church only a half block away, and as hundreds of hearts were beating with joy and ecstacy at the success of each number, and while one graduate whom had performed her part well, was awaiting her diploma. Hark! There breaks in on the stillness of the night, the solemn toil of Mt. Tabor Church bell a block away, heralded to the citizens that the grim reaper had stalked into the city.

About 9 a.m., word was received of the death of Prof. B.B. Posey of N. Seventh Street, whose daughter Edith was the graduate. The end came unexpectedly, as but very few knew him to be but little indisposed. Prof. Posey was well known, having lived here a number of years, and having lived here a number of years, and having been a school teacher for some time. He was a man who stood by his judgement, and dared to do the right as he saw it for this cause as all good men do. He had some enemies, nevertheless he feared them not. The funeral was held on Wednesday at Mt. Tabor Baptist Church at 2 pm. Rev. Wm. Bell officiating, words of eulogy by Revs. T.E. Debose, MD Potter and LW Robinson. An excellent set of resolutions were read by Mrs. M. Drakeford on behalf of Central Academy, recognizing him as an ex-teacher.

A letter to BB Posey from the Fessenden Academy, English and Industrial Departments, Martin, Florida. Principal.

1914—Bessie Posey marries Henry Austin at 1607 Davis Street, Jacksonville, Florida across from 8th Street.

1916—Inez Posey marries George Washington in Jacksonville.

1917—Willie comes to New York to stay with Bessie who has married a seaman.

1919—Willie Posey graduates from Wadleigh High School.

Mme. Willi Posey Family Tree-- 19th Century: Binghams/Shannons

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The Shannons were Faith's great-great grandfather and great-great grandmother. We assume they were both born as slaves but we have no further details yet, both of them from Virginia.

Their daughter was Betsy Bingham, who was MJ's grandmother and Faith (Mom)'s great-grandmother. She was a quilter and a dressmaker in Jacksonville Florida.

1815—Robert Shannon born (MJ's maternal great-grandfather), farmer in Palatka, Marion County according to 1900 Census.

1817—Susan Shannon (MJ's maternal great-grandmother) born in Virginia, according to the 1900 Census, Marion County Florida.

1845—Peter Bingham I born in Virginia, Farmer.

1850—Betsy Bingham (MJ's maternal grandmother) born in May in South Carolina.

1867—Betsy and Peter marry (maternal grandparents of MJ), bore eight children, three of whom survived, Ida Mae (MJ's mother), Peter and Hilliard.

1869—Ida Bingham born in July in Orange Springs, Florida, MJ's mother.

1870—Peter Bingham II born in Orange Springs to Betsy and Peter, MJ's Uncle.

1880—Janie born, will marry MJ's Uncle, Peter Bingham II.

1880 Census Data

Schedule 1—Inhabitants in District 14, in the County of Marion, State of Florida enumerated June 1880: Peter Bingham Black Male 35 years old Farmer. Born in Virginia.

1880—Peter and Betsy Bingham (Willi's grandparents) living in Marion County, Jacksonville.

1880—Janie born, will marry MJ's Uncle, Peter Bingham II.

1880 Census Data

Schedule 1—Inhabitants in District 14, in the County of Marion, State of Florida enumerated June 1880: Peter Bingham Black Male 35 years old Farmer. Born in Virginia.

1880—Peter and Betsy Bingham (Willi's grandparents) living in Marion County, Jacksonville.

1890—Peter Bingham II (Willi's Uncle) marries Janie Bingham.

1891—BB and Ida Posey married in Orange Spring, Florida.

Teacher’s County Certificate of Qualification, Second Grade. (This grading refers to a tripartite system in which the highest grade was third grade, representing the highest score and also the greatest level of teaching experience). Third grade qualified one to teach at all levels. Second grade qualified to teach at a variety of grade levels, as I understand it.

These certificates were awarded on the basis of extensive examinations partly enforced in order to discourage black teachers in Florida and other Southern states, and to make the educating of blacks that much more difficult since education was not something that white Southerners wanted for blacks. The white landowners who were Democrats felt education of whatever kindwould not help them to be more contented poorly paid workers in their fields. The white Republicans were not much better.)

State of South Carolina, County of Aiken, Teacher’s Graded Certificate.

This Certifies, That JW Posey having furnished evidence of good moral character, and having passed a satisfactory examination in the following named branches, with the annexed results, is recommended and authorized to Teach in the Free Public Schools of this County:

(JW was apparently an older brother of B.B., MJ's father.)

Orthography 10
Reading 10
Writing 10
Arithmetic 4.5
Geography 8
English Grammar 7
History 5.5

This Certificate to continue valid for the term of one year from the date hereof, unless sooner revoked, given under our hands and seals at Aiken the 3rd day of September AD 1883

SW Williams and Chase ER Drayton, County Board of Examiners for Aiken County.

Note—The figure against each of the branches denotes the grade of attainment in such branch, 10 being the highest and 1 the lowest. If the average for all the branches reaches 8.5 or more, this Certificate should be marked First Grade; if under 3.5 Second grade, if 5 and under 7, Third Grade.

Susan Shannon circa 1910

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Susan Shannon circa 1910, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

Susan Shannon was the great-great-grandmother of Faith Ringgold, the great-grandmother of Willi Posey and my great-great-great-grandmother. In this photo, which may have been taken by Uncle Cardoza, she was almost 100 years old. Born in 1917, she surely had many memories of slavery.

Betsy Bingham's house

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Betsy Bingham's house, originally uploaded by olympia2x.

This photograph is taken by Cardoza Posey. The writing is Uncle Cardoza's.

This is Betsy Bingham standing in front of her house in Jacksonville, Florida. Perhaps the oldest photograph in the collection depending on who the woman is who is standing at the entrance in the white dress. This is perhaps around 1900.