Black Bottom Saints Read online

  Dedication

  To Caroline Randall Williams, poet—

  a granddaughter and great-granddaughter

  of Black Bottom

  Epigraph

  Resurget Cineribus

  We shall rise from the ashes

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Summer

  Week 1: First Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 2: Second Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 3: Third Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 4: Fourth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Summer Moveable Feast: Juneteenth

  Week 5: Fifth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 6: Sixth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 7: Seventh Sunday after Father’s Day

  Summer Moveable Feast: Independence Day

  Week 8: Eighth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 9: Ninth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 10: Tenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 11: Eleventh Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 12: Twelfth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 13: Thirteenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Fall

  Week 14: Fourteenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 15: Fifteenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Fall Moveable Feast: Labor Day

  Week 16: Sixteenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 17: Seventeenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 18: Eighteenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 19: Nineteenth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 20: Twentieth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 21: Twenty-First Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 22: Twenty-Second Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 23: Twenty-Third Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 24: Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Fall Moveable Feast: Thanksgiving

  Week 25: Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Winter

  Week 26: Twenty-Sixth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 27: Twenty-Seventh Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 28: Twenty-Eighth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 29: Twenty-Ninth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 30: Thirtieth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 31: Thirty-First Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 32: Thirty-Second Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 33: Thirty-Third Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 34: Thirty-Fourth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 35: Thirty-Fifth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 36: Thirty-Sixth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 37: Thirty-Seventh Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 38: Thirty-Eighth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 39: Thirty-Ninth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Spring

  Week 40: Fortieth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 41: Forty-First Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 42: Forty-Second Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 43: Forty-Third Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 44: Forty-Fourth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 45: Forty-Fifth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 46: Forty-Sixth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 47: Forty-Seventh Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 48: Forty-Eighth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 49: Forty-Ninth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 50: Fiftieth Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 51: Fifty-First Sunday after Father’s Day

  Week 52: Father’s Day

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Alice Randall

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  “Ask every person if he’s heard the story, and tell it strong and clear if he has not, that once there was a fleeting wisp of glory called Camelot.”

  Camelot. Seven years ago, in late 1961, I saw that musical in New York City. Detroit’s best-known songstress-daughter, Della Reese, was booked on The Ed Sullivan Show, which made the time right for a few of us to fly to Gotham from Motown. Making my way, in a yellow cab after Camelot’s closing curtain, from the Majestic Theatre on 44th Street to my Harlem home-away-from home, the Hotel Theresa, on 125th Street, and whistling the title tune, I was thinking about Detroit, not Jack and Jackie. I was thinking about Maxine Powell, John White, Robert Hayden, and other Black Bottom Saints who need their story told “strong and clear.”

  And loud.

  Nothing shines brighter than Black polished right. Too often we’re too tired to get out the rag. Our brightest people and places get quickly forgotten and tarnished. Once there was a Black Camelot. And right down the road from Black Camelot, otherwise known as Detroit, was Black Eden, otherwise known as Idlewild. Our resort town, Idlewild, Michigan, was a cross between Nantucket and Las Vegas. At the end of my life, a life that started in Chicago’s Bronzeville in 1913, that whirled into gleaming hours in Harlem, St. Louis, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, one place and time shined brighter than all the rest—Detroit City, from 1937 to 1967.

  And, as quickly as I am writing, evidence of our shining hours, our shining places, our shining people is getting knocked down by the wrecking ball, dynamited to pieces in the name of urban renewal, singed in the embers of righteous rebellion, buried in cemeteries, locked up in an aging memory, and coughed out into oblivion.

  I’m sick. I’m probably dying. Bad kidneys, bad prostate, bad heart, struggling lungs, but my memory is good. I remember all the tall tales and most of the facts. Memory and stories are powerful tools of rebellion. I have long been a rebellious man, and now I am quickly being disarmed. In my most lucid hours I type a few pages, while on spottier memory days I dictate to my new, young, and healthy wife, Baby Doll, and she embellishes.

  I work from Kirwood Hospital, a Black-owned, Black-operated, and Black-staffed institution where I have been sequestered for going on three months as life—stealthily some days, boldly other days—evacuates the premises of my once-agile dancer’s body. I continually thank my friend Dr. Guy Otha Saulsberry, who founded Kirwood in 1943 in a stately Motor City mansion at 301 East Kirby, not far from where I would later found the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre in a modest concrete box.

  Comforting me, extending my last trip around the sun, always near, are the brown and tender well-trained hands, fluttering or poking, of nurses and doctors, able and ready to battle death.

  My life began in a Southside Chicago shotgun apartment owned by an ofay. Now it’s pleasant to anticipate dying in a mansion owned by a Black man and being in the care of doctors trained at Meharry and Howard.

  Not every memory is pleasant. Like the plans that John Wooley and I had to buy the Rhumboogie and make it a club of the highest caliber, this last effort, to return to my school triumphantly restored to health, fizzled. But before I fizzled, I burned bright.

  * * *

  For the past twenty years I have worn three hats—each of them dapper, and all in Detroit: writer, emcee, and dean.

  Hat one: Following in the wake of the great sepian entertainment columnists in our papers: Sylvester Russell, Dave Peyton, and the inimitable Salem Tutt Whitney, I write a weekly entertainment and gossip column for Detroit’s “colored paper,” the Michigan Chronicle. I was in the inaugural issue of Duke magazine, the Black, better-than-Esquire men’s publication. If you count the variations of my Detroit columns published in the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, I have published over a thousand ar
ticles. And still counting. Now, I am posting from this hospital room. If Jesus loves me, and if Ethel Waters prays hard, my last column will be published after I die, but before I am buried.

  Hat two: I emcee at the swankiest club in town. For a long time it was The Flame, but now I’m presenting Berry Gordy’s top talent in the Driftwood Lounge, the almost-private club hidden inside the very public 20 Grand. You may say, Hold up! You can’t be a patient in Kirwood and the master of ceremonies at the Driftwood Lounge! I say—I pick the acts, I write the intros, I scold whoever is too drunk to go onstage or too drunk to get off, even if Baby Doll must drag the miscreant to my sickbed for the scolding. I, following in the footsteps of Eddie Plique, am the emcee.

  Hat three: I preside as the unofficial Dean of the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre, where I teach the breadwinners’ children.

  That word explains Detroit to me: breadwinner. The partying factory people were those whom I first noticed when I arrived in the late thirties. Large numbers of Black men who earned a good, steady wage, doing a skilled job, then returned to the homes they owned, ready to refuel, and to dress to the nines, to head out to hear fabulous music and drink good liquor.

  I was the breadwinners’ emcee of choice and producer of choice—and proud to be so.

  * * *

  Songs, lines of dialogue, beats of choreography that ofay and mixed audiences loudly applauded in Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York clubs were often met with silence in Detroit showbars. For twenty years I created my best work playing to a sepian Detroit audience of breadwinners and their entourages.

  It wasn’t just Black factory folk in the audience, but on most nights, in most places, most people in the audience were there because of the factory folk. Black doctors, lawyers, ministers, businessmen, gamblers, dry cleaners, hairdressers, barbers, restaurateurs, teachers, policemen, firemen, bus drivers, gas station attendants, car salesmen, newspaper columnists, grocery store owners, funeral parlor directors—we all lived off the wages of factory folk.

  Back in the day, because of the breadwinners, Detroit could support all-Black hospitals, and all-Black private schools, and even exclusive all-Black beach resorts.

  The factory folk—the breadwinners—drove the Black city. Black Detroit knew this. We gave the factory folk who worked in the automobile plants their proper respect. We loved those men who did that shift work that meant eight out of ten Black families in Detroit owned the home they lived in and could afford to go out to a club to hear live music any night they chose. Our breadwinners built this city. We remember when River Rouge ran twenty-four seven. Three shifts a day at the plants meant the showbars had two shows on Sunday and late shows every night, sometimes at 2:00 a.m., for those who got off the late shift. That was the opportunity that created caramel Camelot.

  All-Black Detroit audiences were fire. They brought a rare light and a heat that rated Black achievement and performance by a Black yardstick.

  It was nothing unusual for a breadwinner or a breadwinner’s wife to go to 52 shows a year. It was unusual but not rare to go to even 150 shows a year. Some breadwinners went to over 250 shows in a given year. The breadwinners heard so much excellent music that they became experts. And the more expert they became, the more everybody wanted to play Detroit. It was a self-perpetuating cauldron of sepia excellence.

  I stirred that pot.

  I wanted to do something for the breadwinners’ children because the breadwinners had done so much for Detroit—and there’s nothing a breadwinner loves more than a breadwinner’s baby.

  I taught the breadwinners’ babies, and I did not just teach them to be dancers.

  Week after week, hiding behind practicing new steps and learning sophisticated choreography, I shared stories that put a limelight on the Black Bottom Saints—people who had suffered so much, and so differently, but who had each found a way, or made a way, to experience radical joy. In my classes I dropped bits and pieces about the Saints’ lives like breadcrumbs that marked a path out of the automobile plant for the breadwinners’ children. I did this to celebrate and honor what the breadwinners did outside the factory: make worthy and beautiful babies—and be worthy and beautiful their own sometimes-damned selves.

  And once a year, always on Father’s Day, my School of the Theatre presents the extravagant recital that Black Detroit calls “Youth Colossal” at the legendary Latin Quarter Lounge.

  On that day, there are no white faces in the Latin Quarter. None. There are just our children on the stage, and everybody in the audience, looking at our boys and our girls, has the same thoughts: He is the second coming of Christ; she is the next Virgin Mary; and Lord, don’t all the bronze apostles look good?!

  Youth. The seven most radical words in the Bible: And a little child shall lead them.

  From the day it opened in 1952, the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre was a citizenship school. I did not run a dancing school. We were rehearsing for the theater of life. I have seen Butterbeans and the little genius Sammy Davis Jr. perform. I well know we don’t need a school to learn to dance. From jump, it was my ambition to educate boys and educate girls to be dangerous citizens.

  By the time we were open for a few years, I was focusing on the girls. In Detroit, the boys and men were doing okay or, at least, so I thought. The girls had it harder.

  I have known too many young, brilliant, precise women with heads for numbers who never considered attending medical school, never gave two shakes for Meharry or Howard. And I’ve known women who could argue the paint off a wall and didn’t dream of law. I’ve seen girls who got raped, blamed themselves not the man, then got talked into thinking sex was evil and they were dirty. And I have also seen women driving Cadillac cars wearing furs who have never voted. That’s what I set out to change at the Ziggy Johnson School of the Theatre. Autonomy, ambition, renewal, pride, and creativity are the five basic positions we teach.

  That is why the big performers—the Supremes, the Mills Brothers, The Temptations, Gladys Knight, and the marvelous Marvin Gaye—loved to step to the stage and play my kid show where they remembered and played for the little boy or little girl they once were who, if they wanted to sing just for home folk, had no place to perform, except in a church or a juke joint.

  * * *

  All my girls will say, “I was raised by a village of Saints.” They will say, “Ziggy filled our heads, his citizen girls, with the lives of his saints, who whispered encouragement, and clapped us forward, as we spotted to hard-won ‘happy.’” They will say, “God doesn’t make Saints—people do,” when they ask for something and it is given. One will say, “Kidnapping, rape, and a Judas kiss were eclipsed by step-together, step-together, step-together-step!” Another will say, “It’s not just us Black folk who need Ziggy’s book—it’s everybody!” The girls will say things I don’t say.

  Now, in my last days, I am wearing a fourth hat—Saints Day Book author.

  “I wrote a Saints Day Book!” I don’t know anybody else alive, Black or white, who’s done that. Saints Day Books usually list feasts and dates, along with a little biography of the saint being honored. Detroit likes to do things a little different than they been done before. My Saints Day Book includes biographies, plus cocktails in celebration of the Saints, and provides recipes and instructions on how to make them. Regular Saints Day Books don’t do a thing about helping you make a feast. They just tell you on what day to do it. I’m not telling you exactly on what day to have your cocktail—but I am instructing you exactly how to make it, thanks to one of my favorite Saints, Thomas Bullock.

  The best cocktail man I ever knew was Bullock. In Detroit, people spend a whole lot of time in bars drinking cocktails. Every bar I ever walked into was improved by my knowing that every bar in America owes something to one brilliant sepian, Thomas Bullock—the greatest bartender of all, and the first Black man ever to publish a cocktail recipe book. All Black folk—hell, all folk!—can be a particular kind of proud when they walk into a bar if they think about B
ullock and all he knew about altering perception to improve reality.

  Sometimes we start celebrating ourselves by celebrating the ones who brought us over. My Saints Day Book gives you precise ways to do just that.

  I am not sorry to be dying. I was born with the gift of premonition. There are things I do not want to live to see. Martin Luther King Jr. will be shot down. I don’t want to live to see that. With his dying, everyone will forget about me. That story will eclipse all other Black American stories—maybe forever—unless I do something. I’m not worried about me, but I’ve got some saints to attend to. And I’ve got just the young person to help me do it: the kid we call Colored Girl, the one who got snatched out of Detroit.

  Colored Girl will complete my task, by hook or by crook. She’s not a breadwinner’s baby, but that child is Black Bottom to the bone. And a child will lead us.

  These are the lives of my Saints.

  Summer

  * * *

  Robert Hayden (1913–1980)

  Nancy Elizabeth Johnson (1887–1968)

  Edward St. Benedict Plique (1896–1986)

  Night Train Lane (1927–2002)

  Joe Louis (1914–1981)

  Thomas Bullock (1872–year unknown)

  Cordie King Stuart (1924–2004)

  Sadye E. Pryor (1899–1977)

  The Reverend Cook (1900–1961)

  The Reverend Clarence Cobbs (1908–1979)

  Bricktop (1894–1984)

  Butterbeans (1893–1967) and Susie (1894–1963)

  Tim Moore (1887–1958)

  Valda Gray (1914–1980)

  Ethel Waters (1896–1977)

  * * *

  Week 1

  First Sunday after Father’s Day

  The poet known as Robert Hayden was born in Detroit’s Black Bottom in 1913 to Ruth Sheffield and was named Asa Sheffield. When Asa was eighteen months old, he was informally adopted by his next-door neighbors, the Haydens. Sue Ellen and Will, austere Christians, raised the boy as their only child and began to call the future poet laureate of the United States of America “Robert.” Ruth Sheffield, an actress who knew her way around a bar, remained in sporadic contact with the child she birthed, off and on vying for his affection and attention, while maintaining the Haydens ruse of formal adoption.