Letchworth Park By Jane Berry Judson

Jane Berry Judson (1868-1935) was born in Castile, a small town on the western edge of what is now Letchworth State Park. When Judson was growing up in western New York State, the area was the private thousand acre estate of William Pryor Letchworth, home to a spectacular gorge with three of the steepest ribbon waterfalls in New York.

Buddy Bolden: "The Best And the Loudest"

COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER by Michael Ondaatje
New York, Vintage International: 1996 FIC OND

Buddy Bolden and the 20th century arrived on the New Orleans music scene - not yet defined as jazz - at about the same time. Later musicians like Louis Armstrong and Freddie Keppard recognized Bolden's accomplishment and gave it a name but Bolden, with his cornet and his band, led the way.

Bolden (1877-1931) live a short, intense life, suffered a nervous breakdown at the age of thirty-one, and was confined to the East Louisiana state Hospital at Jackson for the rest of his life. He was a barber by day, not perhaps the safest occupation for a man with an excess of temperament in a hostile world with a razor in hand. By night, Bolden made music in clubs and 'houses', maintaining his energy with the injudicious imbibing of whiskey. His patron Tom Pickett, "King of the District", published a yearly directory of services offered to men and where to find them. Bolden also published a local newspaper called The Cricket, filling it with the stories people told him while under the towel or under the influence.
The hard information about Bolden's life is minimal, but Michael Ondaatje's prose poem of a novel offers a convincing attempt at Bolden's truth. (A native of Sri Lanka and longtime resident of Canada, Ondaatje is best known for his novel The English Patient.) He has Buddy's wife Nora Bass, a former prostitute, think about his haunted aspect, "When they were alone together it was still a crowded room." When Bolden falls in love Jaelin Brewitt, the wife of a friend, and disappears for two years, Ondaatje has her husband Webb, a police officer, follow his intuition to discover Bolden in a bathtub. The real life character, E. J. Belloq, photographer of the underside of New Orleans life, makes an appearance but respectable New Orleans barely exists except as customers seeking out carefully disguised pleasures in an America forever protesting its innocence.

ONdaatje reveals that the seed for Coming Through Slaughter planted itself in his mind when he read "Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade...". It was April, 1907, while Bolden was playing with Henry Allen's Brass Band in a street parade that he had a fit and was taken to jail. Two months later a judge committed Bolden to the asylum where he lived for another twenty-four years. It is painful to think about those years, locked in a place with no black staff and little communication between blacks and whites. Ondaatje reminds us that the mortality rate at the asylum was ten per cent a year, appalling but similar to what awaited Bolden's friends on the outside. "You removed yourself from the twentieth century game of fame, the rest of your life a desert of facts."

From The Craftsman

A design featured in The Craftsman from May of 1906, the magazine published in Syracuse, NY, by Gustave Stickley. - Image from the digital collection of the New York Public Library.

"Must I Sit And Sew?"

LYRICS OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

by Eleanor Alexander New York, New York University Press: 2001 928.1 ALE

“I was a timid, scared, rabbit sort of a child, but out of desperation I learned to fight.” -

Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar Nelson

"Because you love me I have much achieved,Had you despised me then I must have failed,But since I knew you trusted and believed,I could not disappoint you and so prevailed. " - Paul Laurence Dunbar, Encouraged (1913)

The marriage of two writers leaves more written traces of itself than other marriages. So it was with the marriage of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and journalist Alice (Ruth Moore) Dunbar Nelson (1875-1906). Their union, like others, was both a personal relationship and a creation of the larger society they inhabited, as Eleanor Alexander's book sensitively demonstrates.

He was a young Negro poet from a small town in Ohio, whose brief career (ended by a premature death from tuberculosis at age thirty-three) was meteoric and even unprecedented at the time. Oak And Ivy, published in 1892 attracted the attention of James Whitcomb Riley, one of the most popular poets of the day. She was the daughter of a Creole seamstress in New Orleans, who graduated from college, became a teacher and also published a volume of poetry at twenty (Violets and Other Tales). Both of them were the children of former slaves.

The young Alice was a celebrated belle of black New Orleans society when Paul saw her picture in the newspaper and began a courtship by correspondence. The two eloped: in the event their marriage was brief, passionate, tragic, and brutal. Paul drank heavily and beat her. Alice left him, but eventually forgave his cruelty. Talented people are often stifled by convention, but these two had been grievously harmed by prejudice. Their hopes and fears clouded the air between them.

When Paul died, no one told Alice: she read about it in a newspaper while riding a streetcar in Washington, D.C. Alice remarried (twice) and became a mover of history. She was the organizer for the Middle Atlantic States in the women's suffrage campaign in the 1910s and in 1924 took the campaign to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill to President Warren G. Harding himself.

And of course, you can read their own words.

GIVE US EACH DAY: The Diary Of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, New York, W.W. Norton: 1984 DUN

THE COLLECTED POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR, Charlottesville, University Of Virginia Press: 1993 811.4 DUN