Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  During the generally expansive economic conditions in Detroit in the 1950s, black men had better opportunities for higher-paying jobs in auto and other manufacturing concerns than did black women, and thus Franklin’s assignment of traditional roles within the family economy made a certain economic as well as cultural sense. But it was also during this decade that black women’s earning power began a significant rise, while that of black men slowed, if it did not yet decline. This combination of a potentially new economic role for women, coupled with the slow stirrings of new attitudes toward divorce and family limitation, challenged traditional practice. C. L.’s sermon, then, was intended as a counterstatement. Growing up in an agricultural society, he insightfully exaggerated in another sermon, “We didn’t have hardly anywhere else to go but to church. But the young folk who are coming up today are faced with all kinds of resultant problems emanating from a complex urban society.” With two working parents, Franklin reiterated even years later, his thinking constant, the children “spend many hours alone” or with other unsupervised children, and “there’s no telling what they might get into.” The solution, in short, was for women to remain in the home.12

  Thus, the essence of “Hannah, the Ideal Mother,” for all the power of its delivery and the enthusiasm that greeted its repeated presentation over the years, remained mired in an earlier cultural moment. Franklin—who encouraged silenced southerners to find their voice, to envision a new political presence, and to explore various forms of cultural expression, all the while gently but insistently prodding them to transform their initial fundamentalist perspective—could not harness that creativity to present a revised understanding of the interior landscape of family life. Had Franklin been able to use his personal history as a resource in this regard, as he had in so many other contexts, he might have explored the changing nature of marriage so as to allow a more compelling presentation of even his traditional ideas. But that would have required a willingness to acknowledge, however obliquely, his feelings about his father, his marriage, about relations between men and women, about his experience of migration, and about that deeply American belief that often equated a rise from poverty with the essence of fathering. Such thoughts, however, he rarely allowed himself to express; never once in a sermon did he ever mention Willie Walker or Henry Franklin. Instead, as in “Hannah,” he constructed an ideal to cover his actual, if imperfect, human experience.

  C. L. always managed to have a woman at the helm at home who accepted her role as mother in a fashion that, not unlike the idealized Hannah, allowed him his freedom. Before 1948, it was Barbara, and following their separation, it had been his mother and a series of housekeepers and friends. These arrangements allowed him unquestioned access to the traditional male role despite the absence of a permanent mate.

  Over the years since Barbara’s death, the composition of the family had changed in certain important ways. Vaughn, after graduation from high school, entered the U.S. Air Force. Tragedy brought another kind of change when, in January 1954, C. L.’s younger sister, Louise, died of cancer. She had been living in Detroit, and her funeral at New Bethel was large. The official participants signified the family’s stature in the community. Two former New Bethel pastors, H. H. Coleman, who delivered the eulogy, and W. R. Ramsey, attended, as did A. R. Williams, of Memphis, along with other Detroit preachers; Mahalia Jackson, Clara Ward, and Sammy Bryant soloed with the New Bethel choir. C. L. and his mother enfolded Louise’s daughter, Brenda, then age seven, into his family, where she was raised with the other children “like brother and sisters [as] opposed to first cousins.”13

  By the time the family moved to the large, well-appointed house at 7415 LaSalle Boulevard, “an estate home,” Aretha remembered, on “an exclusive residential street with enormous lush trees and manicured lawns,” Henry Franklin had died and Rachel lived with Brenda in the carriage house just behind the main building. That same year, 1958, the family grew yet again in a rather dramatic and, for the children living in Detroit, initially a shocking manner. Carl Ellan Kelley, C. L.’s natural daughter with Mildred Jennings from his Memphis days, contacted her father by letter. She knew from her mother’s family he was her biological father, and as she approached her eighteenth birthday, she felt compelled to contact him in order to know “who I am,” she explained years later. Carl Ellan and her mother were members of A. R. Williams’s Memphis church, and the daughter knew that her pastor and C. L. were “like brothers.” She talked with Williams at some length and then, with his encouragement, “wrote dad.” C. L. did not respond directly to her but rather called his close friend. What transpired between the two preachers remains unknown, but Carl Ellan sensed that her pastor forced C. L. to acknowledge her existence. It was not something that C. L. would have at first approached enthusiastically. The rumors of his personal life were widespread, and Carl Ellan’s reemergence would only intensify interest in them. Far more profoundly troubling was the meaning of his daughter’s incorporation within the family. None of the children in Detroit, from the oldest, Erma, to the youngest, Brenda, knew of Carl Ellan’s existence. To them, her very presence questioned the depictions of their parents’ relationship they had previously learned.14

  Whatever precisely passed between A. R. Williams and C. L. Franklin in that or subsequent phone calls, the result was that Carl Ellan visited Detroit a few months later. Under considerable pressure, C. L. nonetheless did for his child what his father had never done for him. To acknowledge the child he had walked away from was a significant act, one that may have eased the memory of his childhood pain. Carl Ellan experienced it differently. She thought that he had been “painted into a corner to acknowledge what happened.” Regardless, she welcomed the opportunity. On that first visit, Carl Ellan spent part of the time at a hotel and then came to the Franklin home, where she met all of the other children but Carolyn. In a very real way, an earthquake had shaken the children’s familial foundation. Yet, over time, a real closeness developed between some of the children, probably encouraged initially by Rachel Franklin’s example, as “Big Mama” embraced Carl Ellan as one of her own.15

  With her father, there was a different pattern. C. L. never acknowledged Carl Ellan’s presence from the pulpit, as he might other family members; nor did he ever publicly ask for God’s forgiveness before congregations in Memphis or Detroit—a not-uncommon ritual for clergy and laity alike in the Afro-Baptist tradition. Yet, as Carl Ellan occasionally visited Detroit over the next five years, she felt her father’s initial awkwardness diminishing. In 1964, after she moved from Memphis to New Orleans, their relationship grew closer. When C. L. came to New Orleans, he usually found time to visit with her and once sat her in a deacon’s chair behind his pulpit, a seat of honor, as he preached. A few years later, after she moved to Seattle, she and her father were close enough that he gave Clara Ward, then touring, her phone number. The two women met, and after the concert, Carl Ellan brought Clara and a group of friends back to her place for “an all-night girl talking party” that largely focused on C. L.16

  Rachel Franklin, however, preserved the emotional balance in the family. She was a slight woman, perhaps a little over five feet, but she possessed an unrivaled emotional power. Without exception the grandchildren, whatever the specifics of their biological relation, returned the unquestioned love they received from her and relied on her for needs both pragmatic and emotional. She was a source of support and encouragement, a stern disciplinarian, and she touched them deeply through the force of her religious faith. Mother Rachel also occupied an important role in New Bethel where, given the absence of a pastor’s wife, she was the de facto first lady of the congregation. But it was on her son that she had the greatest impact. Her presence allowed him to maintain his traditional attitudes toward family life (and the traditional male freedom from it), since she now played the role Son had projected onto Hannah. It was one she accepted smoothly.17

  While C. L. was on the road, surrounded by music and friends, his chil
dren stepped forth into Detroit. Al Young recalled his teen years in 1950s Detroit, a city so saturated with music that people “walked and talked and thought and fought to it.” Its power was infectious: “Smokey-throated kids on playgrounds and street corners harmonized in counterpoint and weren’t even studying about cutting a demo or getting discovered.” The Franklin children relished the excitement. Cecil, sixteen in 1956, remained close with Smokey Robinson, who, in turn, introduced the Franklins to his new friend, Diane Ross. Shortly later, Ross moved to the Brewster Housing projects, where she formed a singing group with Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard. Mary Wilson was a member of New Bethel as, less regularly, was Diane Ross. A few years later, Diane became Diana and the group, the Supremes, one of the most successful groups ever recorded by Motown Records. As a teenager on a Saturday afternoon, Mary Wilson relished joining with the Franklin girls and other teens at the movies, rollerskating at the Arcadia rink, or playing the pinball machines at a neighboring arcade. Aretha, whose singing stunned Wilson in church, would “whiz by” on her skates, attuned to the music over the loudspeakers: “She didn’t just skate; she bopped.” Wilson’s classmates at Algers Elementary School in 1956, the first year of school integration in Detroit, included Carolyn Franklin, who was already forming a singing group and arranging its material. Within a few years, Ross and Ballard also became high-school classmates, and Otis Williams, soon of the Temptations, asked Carolyn for a date.18

  C. L.’s children were the brightest stars in this extraordinary cluster. Erma and Aretha soloed with the New Bethel choir from an early age, and when Carolyn and Brenda began singing in church when they were “the littlest things,” they skipped the children’s choir and immediately “got to sing with the grown folks.” The “Franklin girls,” Mary Wilson remembered of these years, were already “local celebrities.” After finishing high school, Erma sought a career in music. Her fine voice attracted the attention of Berry Gordy, also an occasional member of the New Bethel congregation and an aspiring record producer then. In 1959, Gordy offered her “All I Could Do Was Cry,” but Erma would not record it, as she was then more interested in jazz. Etta James did, and it became a signature song for her. Carolyn, still in high school in 1960, possessed a fine voice and a magnificent ability at writing and arranging songs. Unlike his three sisters, Cecil was not a particularly good singer.19

  Without question, the most famous of the Franklin children, even in the 1950s, was Aretha. Her extraordinary voice drew both adults and her fellow teens to New Bethel and to concerts on her father’s tours. She was but sixteen and already a rising star in the gospel world. In the same year that witnessed Carl Ellan’s entry into the family, Aretha gave birth to her second son, whom she named Eddie, after his father, a Detroit teen. How C. L. reacted to Aretha’s pregnancy or to Erma’s, who had a baby boy and soon after separated from her husband, remains unknown. Aretha stated that his “concern and participation in the lives of his children were exemplary” and insisted that, with all of the demands his career imposed, “he still performed the duties of a dad with patient love on the road and at home.” That C. L. might have desired to do this, after his own fashion, is possible, but that he could do that for all of his children, “on the road and at home,” remains improbable. He was gone often, whether it was out at the Gotham or the Flame Show Bar of an evening, or on the road near and far from Detroit. There were private moments, such as Aretha’s fond memories of watching the prizefights on television with her dad, “with popcorn and hot dogs and screaming and cheering.” But often the house was filled with people, with singers and musicians eating, drinking, and partying; with church people at more sedate teas; and with a close group of ministerial friends for late night discussions. Recalled Sylvia Penn, Franklin was “very, very good to his kids. He gave them anything, those kids never had to wash, iron, or do anything. He had people there to wait on them.” But this path was actually the easier for C. L., an approach to parenting that remained a far cry from the stern Mother Rachel he evoked in his sermons, whose disciplinary hand left the distinct feeling of being loved long after the sting of the spanking subsided.20

  It was not that C. L. did not care for his children. Erma, for example, remembered numerous lectures the children received concerning behavior and especially emphasizing the importance of education. Like parents the world over, C. L. delivered criticism of a specific act and then, for emphasis, drew on his own, less-privileged childhood to drive the point home. “Then you’d get that sermon,” Erma laughingly recounted. “Oh, and then how they used to [have] to go on the truck and sharecrop, you know, in the fields. Which was to make us feel guilty,” she quipped. Clearly, C. L. cared for his children, but his expression of that caring came on terms comfortable for him emotionally and for his career rather than necessarily in ways the children might have needed. He was “a man, not a water walker,” Carl Ellan suggested of her father. “Just a man.”21

  Despite the pressure of his schedule, Franklin tried again in 1959 to build a citywide organization that would offer him a secular platform comparable to his pulpit. The Metropolitan Civic League for Legal Action began with another critique of established black organizations whose efforts to curtail police brutality and job discrimination, Franklin thought, were never aggressive enough. Since Mayor Louis Miriani won election two years earlier, relations between the police and black Detroit, never very good, had deteriorated further. Franklin’s league appealed to those who so often were on the receiving end of the police club or the indiscriminate police raid: the league announced it would provide legal and medical assistance for victims and hold a series of public meetings to protest the mayor’s public support of current police practice. C. L. was the founding president, but as before, neither his travel schedule nor his personality particularly recommended him for organizational leadership. Instead, two other Detroit Baptist clergy, William J. Bishop and J. H. Bruce, actually ran the group. The league’s achievements remain obscure, as there is no evidence it represented any victim of police actions. Although it claimed seven hundred members in 1961, the league soon disbanded in an acrimonious public dispute when it supported the reelection of the Wayne County prosecutor, Samuel H. Olsen, who was widely perceived as hostile to black defendants. By that time, Franklin was no longer associated with it.22

  The league was “a flower that want[ed] to bloom,” Arthur Johnson thought, but even had C. L. devoted his considerable energy to the organization, it is doubtful that a different outcome would have emerged. The league offered no compelling alternative politics to distinguish itself, and C. L.’s power, always more prophetic than programmatic, was less suited to developing sustained political programs. He was also away even more than usual in the years following the league’s founding. Urban renewal claimed his church in 1960, as it did Hastings Street itself, replacing the vibrant cultural crossroads with the Chrysler Freeway. Dispossessed a second time in a decade, the congregation wandered again and often had to make do without their famous pastor’s presence. Franklin accepted a call to lead a large new church in Los Angeles, attracted by the weather and the opportunities in the entertainment industry, and he simply stayed in Los Angeles as long as he desired at any one time, without ever resigning his position at New Bethel. So dominant was his control of New Bethel’s governing bodies, and so anxious were members to retain their pastor at whatever cost, that C. L. “just [came] back to New Bethel whenever he got ready,” his friend, Jasper Williams, observed. With a foot in two cities, it would be nearly impossible for Franklin to create a forceful political presence in either.23

  Of course, in contrast to Martin Luther King Jr., who by now had implemented an alternative politics constructed around nonviolent civil disobedience—or to less famous ministers, such as Samuel Kyles in Memphis, Kelly Miller Smith in Nashville, or Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, who led protest movements in their cities—Franklin devoted relatively little energy to building a movement. Even when he did focus on the league, he shared much
with the approach favored by the very groups he criticized. Franklin welcomed into the league ministers such as Albert B. Cleage Jr., of Central Congregational Church, who was consciously building a church community focused on social and political action. But he rejected the active involvement of two of Cleage’s leading members, the brothers Richard and Milton Henry, on grounds that they had once been accused of Communist sympathies and therefore, Charlie Thompson surmised, “could be a liability to the organization.” This attitude aligned Franklin with his erstwhile NAACP opponents and distanced him sharply from Coleman Young’s earlier tradition of activism.24

  Franklin remained able to connect his faith’s powerful stories to the emergence of a more historically grounded, self-conscious identity among African Americans in the urban, industrial world they now largely inhabited. But beyond his dedication to his ministry and to using the pulpit to encourage others to give voice to an expanded consciousness, his efforts lacked focus, divided as they were between two cities, two congregations, and the continuing allure of the celebrity recognition his talents brought him. He had come a long way from the plow, and he meant to enjoy it. As his record sales and appearance fees rose, he reveled in the celebrity culture his new base in Los Angeles made even more attractive. In 1962, C. L. even assured a Los Angeles entertainment management firm that were the parties to agree to terms, he would promise “to at all times devote myself to my career.” As the specific contractual terms defined only recording royalties and appearance fees, it is hard to gauge precisely how C. L. envisioned this new balance between faith and fortune.25