Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Ardent lovers of the American soil, it is my duty and yours to prod America to live up to her ideals and to not lose hope that someday she will. We must hold fast to America’s founding principles and institutions. As your editor, I claim for the black American protection in every right with which the government has invested him. The rule of justice must be held high. If it is dropped it will be the duty of Jam on the Vine to pick it up and hold it higher.

  Ona closed her book and rose to watch the breaking waves roll and recede past the ship’s hull. The handwriting was on the sea: Bunchee’s cable wire, received that morning, reported yesterday’s headline of the Kansas City Star Ledger: “Federal Agents in Kansas City Target Jam as Source of Racial Enmity.” According to the article, Ivoe was a persistent source of radical opposition to the government’s established rule of law, wielding her newspaper as the most destructive weapon in Kansas City’s political life. That Jam was the most constructive tool in black Kansas City was cause for further celebration. They were sailing home with invitations for Ivoe to lecture in Atlanta, Dallas, New York City, Washington, D.C., and London. They would arrive in New York Harbor without incident, spend the day and a half on the train devising how to expand the paper through staff-purchased stocks that would finance a twelve-page spread. At Union Station, she expected the KCPD, maybe even the mayor himself. Now with the newly formed AJRAD and black newspapers across the country committed to publicizing the legal embroilments of fellow editors, white authority posed a mere inconvenience.

  “I’ve caught a chill, you coming?” Ona said.

  Silence came down between them like a curtain on a stage. Ivoe’s mind raced. She’d retire Woman About Town. On Democracy—a more apt title—lent focus to her weekly column, anchored the paper in its true purpose. She closed her notebook to think some more. The first order of business when they arrived home was to compile a list. Jam’s assailment of the mayor and his police commissioner would draw a federal investigation. She needed all the support she could get—names and addresses for every black politician in the country, from alderman to senator, on a clipboard within reach. They were up against a mighty bear, but each cell door flung open in the name of justice was an arrow in his tough skin.

  “Oh, I’m just getting started good—be down shortly.”

  “Well then, carry on. Carry on.”

  Author’s Notes

  •Unusual for Texas, the extraordinary cold of the winter of 1898 refers to the Great Texas Blizzard of 1899.

  •From March to June 1906, black Austinites launched a boycott to protest segregated public streetcars.

  •Ivoe’s Willetson Herald article “Walk a Little Longer” appeared as a newspaper article under the same title in the Nashville Clarion, September 23, 1905.

  •Born and raised in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway wrote for the Oak Park and River Forest High School newspaper, the Trapeze. After graduating, he was a journalist for the Kansas City Star for six months in 1918, after which he joined the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. (I could not resist his path crossing Ivoe’s, so moved his tenure at the Star up by one year.)

  •Ivoe’s Jam on the Vine article “The Colored Soldier’s Problem” appeared as a newspaper column under the same title in the October 6, 1917, issue of the Kansas City Sun.

  •I moved the release of Sophie Tucker’s “Mammy’s Chocolate Soldier” (1918) and Oscar Micheaux’s The Homesteader (1919) up one year. The fictional lynching of Willie Baker is based on the factual public lynching of Will Brown, which occurred September 28, 1919, on the south side of the Douglas County Courthouse in Omaha, Nebraska. (Actor Henry Fonda witnessed the lynching from the window of his father’s printing shop across the street.)

  •In 1919 more than thirty race riots broke out in U.S. cities. This nadir in our nation’s history was dubbed Red Summer by writer-scholar James Weldon Johnson.

  •The poem “Peaceful Village” was printed in the convict newspaper Weekly Clarion, published by the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1922.

  •Ivoe’s article “Black Prisoner Shot to Death—Penitentiary Is Scene of Confusion” was taken from “Felon Is Slain, Eight Wounded in Prison Break,” which appeared in the Modesto Bee and News-Herald on December 29, 1931.

  •W. E. B. DuBois spearheaded four Pan-African Congresses in Paris (1919); London, Paris, and Brussels (1921); London and Lisbon (1923); and New York City (1927). Although there was no Pan-African Congress in Paris during 1925, the International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts, which spawned the term art deco, was the World’s Fair Ivoe and Ona thrilled to.

  •Portions of Ivoe’s editorial “Le Tumulte Noir, My Trip Abroad” were taken from “Ten Weeks in Europe” by Willis N. Huggins, which appeared in the Chicago Defender on January 17, 1925.

  •Four sentences in Ivoe’s “Le Patriotisme: On the Dawn of True Democracy” are excerpted verbatim from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s “Duty to Dependent Races,” in Rachel Foster Avery, ed., Transactions of the National Council of Women of the United States (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1891), pp. 86–91. Another passage follows nearly verbatim the quote excerpted below, taken from Samuel Cornish’s Colored American (March 1837): “Many would gladly rob us of the endeared name ‘Americans,’ a distinction more emphatically belonging to us than five-sixths of this nation and one that we will never yield. In complexion, in blood and in nativity, we are decidedly more exclusively ‘American’ than our White brethren . . . who would rob us of our nationality and reproach us as exotics.”

  Acknowledgments

  Now then . . .

  Art, for some, is much more than an object of comsumption, the latest fad, or a once-in-a-blue-moon experience; it is mother, father, sibling, best friend. I owe considerable debt to African American art, my greatest source of inspiration. From the unsigned spiritual and Joplin’s rags to Mingus’s bass, Battle’s coloratura, and that honey-voiced one who sings of pipers, broken drums, and red guitars; from Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life and Fauset’s Plum Bun to Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Morrison’s Jazz; from the cakewalk to the moonwalk, the Nicholas Brothers’ tap routines and hip-hop’s break-dancing crews; from the paintings of Lawrence and Motley to the sculpture of Lewis and Catlett to Saar’s dioramas and Walker’s silhouettes; from the comedy of Mabley, Pryor, Chappelle, and Epps to all that drama for the stage and screen: Hansberry, Kennedy, Burnett, and Lee; it is black art that demonstrates with heart, verve, and no shortage of courage exactly what it means to jam!

  Firsthand research is always a worthy endeavor. This story bene­fited immensely from black newspaper archives at the Library of Congress and the Chicago Public Library. The following works were inspiring and useful: Ida: A Sword among Lions and To Keep the Waters Troubled, biographies of Ida B. Wells-Barnett by Paula Giddings and Linda McMurry Edwards, respectively; William G. Jordan’s Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914–1920; Charles A. Simmons’s The African American Press: A History of News Coverage during National Crises, with Special Reference to Four Black Newspapers, 1827–1965; Stephanie J. Shaw’s What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era; Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854–1868; William A. Shack’s Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story between the Great Wars; Charles E. Coulter’s Take Up the Black Man’s Burden: Kansas City’s African American Communities, 1865–1939; and “The Boycott Movement against Jim Crow Street Cars in the South, 1900–1906” by August Meier and Elliot Rudwick (Journal of American History 55, no. 4 [March 1969]).

  Ida B. Wells-Barnett said, “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” To the spirit and legacy of Ida; Charlotta Bass, the first African American woman to found and operate a newspaper (the Californi
a Eagle); the Kansas City Call (going strong since 1919); and the black press then and now: thank you.

  Leery of institutional praise (for some it can send the wrong ­message—this is the way to go—when the path must be organic and individual, if the work is to be), I must express great gratitude for Sarah Lawrence College’s graduate program in women’s history, where many moons ago I learned the benefit of marriage between historical inquiry and imagination and how to use the historian’s tools, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where I met Gail Hochman, who like any stellar agent taught me about the publishing world with patience, wisdom, and generosity of time. Extraordinarily, Gail adds to this mix boundless energy and insight born of head and heart. Few others have so quickly won my respect and complete admiration like her.

  Director Justin Ahern and the Noepe Center for Literary Arts provided ideal surroundings for the completion of this book (and a future book). Thank you so much, Justin, for your vision and commitment to artists, regardless of accolades.

  Morgan Entrekin and Grove Atlantic don’t merely publish books; they welcome writers and their manuscripts home. I count it among my life’s big blessings that this story landed where passion for literature and true care for writers lives. Executive editor Elisabeth Schmitz believed in this story and so has my eternal gratitude. Assistant editor Katie Raissian showered the Williamses with deep thought and care, posed the smartest questions, cheered Ivoe and me along nonstop. She also guided me with stealth and grace through eleventh-hour revisions. Charles Rue Woods, a brilliant designer of books, graciously allowed my input and encouraged me with southern charm.

  Here, finally, is the space to express long-held gratitude. I am especially blessed to have known and loved Abbey Lincoln—friend, sage, artist extraordinaire, who taught me how to live as an artist—figure out what is worth saying, then put your shoulder to the wheel and say it.

  In her weeklong advanced fiction course in Provincetown (summer 2008), Amy Bloom provided critical, invaluable observation that pushed me beyond my perceived limitations and helped to change the course of my writing at a crucial moment. Thank you, Amy Beth.

  I am most grateful for my unusual family—a lifetime in the making—including former elementary school teachers Blanche White and Victoria Zeritis. It was Blanche who first told me I could write a good story—in her third-grade classroom at Beacon Hill (District 163, Chicago Heights). For thirty years, she has persisted with the sometimes painful, always precious question: “Are you writing?” Beyond fourth and fifth grades at Algonquin Middle School (District 163, Park Forest), Vicki lent a hand in raising me, instilling a fierce independence and strong sense of self and indulging me with music, theater, and art. Blanche and Vicki, for propping me up all these years with expectation, faith, and the only thing better than love—devotion—you have my loving gratitude.

  To my mother and sister, Brenda Jean Long and Lisa Wilette Perry—my “first and forever” readers—the Williams clan and all the family: thank you for unconditional acceptance, support, and encouragment through the years.

  Friends who brightened this journey, offered more gifts in the ways of friendship than I could ever put into words, and sustained me more than they know are owed much more than this roll call acknowledgment, and have my dearest appreciation: Malinda Walford, Rachelle Sussman-Rumph, April Mosolino, Cassandra Wilson, Suzanne Gardinier, Darrell Ann McCalla, Kamilah Moon, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Nyala Wright, Isobel Floyd, Tiphanie Yanique, Karma Johnson, Hermine Pinson, Ellen Eisenman, Jacklyn Bookshester, Johari Shuck, Felicia Gray, Dana Boswell Williams, Jennifer Williams, Lisa C. Moore, Jason Perry, Lonnie Plaxico, Charlie Lott, Claire Andrade, Joe and Sheila Heit and the Heit family, and my sorors of Alpha Kappa Alpha. Tonya Engel possesses a mighty fine paintbrush, a palette of spirit and extraordinary color, and she is also my dear friend. The inspired cover art is hers and it makes my heart sing. A special thank you to John Richard Davis, who models with joy, discipline, and grace what an artist can be; and he also provides encouragement and a port in a storm. There are many others who aren’t mentioned here by name, for I have always been blessed with an embarrassing number of the right friends and opportunities; I hope you know how much your support means to me.

  In giving thanks, we reserve the best for last as some measure of the great extent to which the recipient has influenced our life. Ruth Goldie Heit, great giver of laughter, adventure, encouragement, and love, believed in this story from word one and blesses my life with unstinting support. She was the unequivocal champion of this book and remains the greatest friend I have ever known. Golden one, you are my profound gift. Ivoe and Ona thank you; their love will live forever, as will mine for you.

  I am told my grandmother Helen Jean Williams “hoped on” me fervently when I was in my mother’s womb. When I arrived, she instilled in me—in the most special ways—a work ethic, determination, pride. Big Mama’s unconditional love sprang effortlessly but it is the gift of her unending inspiration that makes me marvel still. It has taken more than years, tears, music, art, and romance to heal all that broke after her passing. The truth is, the cost of great grief is paid by fragments of the soul, yet in writing this novel I have learned what worthwhile things can be made of fragments.

  —LaShonda Katrice Barnett, Martha’s Vineyard

  Ki Olodumare gba a o. Olodumare a ran rere si o.

  Kansas City native LaShonda Katrice Barnett grew up in Park Forest, ­Illinois. Editor of I Got Thunder: Black Women Songwriters on Their Craft and Off the Record: Conversations with African American and Brazilian Women Musicians and a story collection, she has received a NEH grant and awards for short fiction, including the College Language Association Award and the Barbara Deming Memorial Grant. She has taught history and literature at Sarah Lawrence College, Hunter ­College, and Brown University, and holds a PhD in American Studies from the ­College of William and Mary. She lives in Manhattan. Jam on the Vine is her first novel.