Angel Mo' and Her Son: Roland Hayes

by MACKINLEY HELM

9

MY WIFE, who was born Alzada Mann, remembers me in my first pair of fancy shoes. I was fourteen years old and my shoes were bright yellow. They squeaked in a high-pitched voice which gratified my ears. Down on the farm we had worn shoes only in winter. In summer we wore them only on Sundays, and even then we walked barefoot up Mount Zion lane until we came within sight of the steeple. There we plunged into the woods and put on our brass-tipped brogans and clumped impressively into the church. Many of our friends had no shoes at all.

In the fall of 1900 we had no shoes ourselves. We paid our debts in the Flatwoods and went to Chattanooga with the little cash money Ma had after the last crop-gathering. Robert and I went barefoot, summer style.

Mother and baby Jesse took the train up to the city, while Robert and I went over the road with Frank Adams. Frank had a horse and wagon and was moving up to Chattanooga because he could no longer put up with the Flatwoods wits. He had an infantine lisp which stimulated his friends’ gift of imitancy; and when he foolishly married a notorious woman, life became much too difficult for him at home. Now his friends were lisping lewd commentaries on his bride. Hence he struck out to the city, where he hoped to live in peace.

Robert and I took turns riding old mooneyed Molly, who pulled a load of furniture and feed in our own one-horse cart. Although Molly could see a little in the dead of night, she was as blind as a barn-owl in the daytime. Whoever drove her had to keep her on the right side of the road, while the other of us, traveling on foot, urged our cow along. The cow was securely tied to the wagon, but she was not used to traveling thirty-five miles a day. She needed frequent encouragement.

At ten o’clock at night after two days of traveling we reached the brightly lighted streets of Chattanooga. Not one of the great cities of Europe has ever held the wonder for me of that first view of the Southern city, the breathless and holy wonder of a revelation. Perched upon Molly, with Robert afoot by my side, I rode through the gaslit avenues of a new Jerusalem.

Aunt Harriet Cross had invited us all to come and stay with her in the colored section around Tenth and Douglas. She and her husband, my Uncle Cross, received our family most hospitably. Uncle Cross, a huckster, had a reputation for being able to skin a housewife out of her eyeballs, but he had nothing but kindness for us. Uncle Robert Mann had a good many children, of whom Alzada was one, and brother Robert and I were anxious to meet them. Accordingly Ma bought us each a new pair of shoes and we went out to the eastern outskirts of the city, one Sunday, to pay a visit to our cousins. That was the day I met my wife, although she pretends now that it was my shoes and not my person that impressed her then.

Mother took in washing, and presently we rented a house on Douglas Street, not far from Aunt Harriet’s. Robert and Jesse went to school and Ma promised me that in a year or so I should have my turn at book-learning. Robert was two years older than I, but he was in delicate health. Just before my fourteenth birthday I therefore became the wageearning head of a family of four, with a fine position in the Price and Evans Sashweight Foundry at eighty cents a day.

When I applied for a job the foreman said, “Son, you’re moughty small. Do you think you can do a man’s work?” I said I had a mother and two brothers to support and I reckoned I could do anything.

The foreman put me right to work with a wheelbarrow, along with a full-grown man. From early morning until three o’clock that afternoon we unloaded scrap iron from freight cars and wheeled it into the foundry. Then we went to work for the rest of the day at the cupola, where scrap iron and pig iron were melted for casting. I carry today on my feet and legs the scars of many a burn from molten iron, which had the habit of exploding in every direction when it was spilled out upon the damp earth. Time and again my flesh was burned to the bone.

At length I was given a chance to learn the trade of core-making. A core is a molded form which is used to make an opening in an otherwise solid casting. It is made from a tricky blend of sand, resin, and sticky black molasses, and even today it is molded by hand. Core-making was easier than the carrier’s job. I had shorter hours and better pay, and plenty of time for experimentation. I discovered a new formula for blending, and then I was promoted to foreman. My wages went up all at once to five dollars a day.

10

I was still not quite sixteen when I was converted to true religion and baptized by immersion into running water. In 1902 there came to town a celebrated zealot, the Reverend Mr. Ward, a persuasive Negro evangelist, and I gave myself to Jesus. In those days, the Jesus of my mother’s religion was truly my Lord and my Redeemer. I was ready to abandon and renounce the world for Him. It may be thought, since Ma had allowed us so little liberty, that I did not actually have anything much to surrender in this world. Yet such as my attachments were, I gave them readily up to follow Him. I was baptized in the Tennessee River. A day or two after my conversion, I was forcemarched across the city in angelic habit, together with twenty-five or thirty heterogeneous fellow-converts, and led down to the river’s edge, where I received the watery seal of my profession.

My first act of renunciation was to give up buck-and-wing dancing, in which I had only lately become proficient. My legs still hold the memory of the steps of the buck-andwing and I dare say that even now I could execute them accurately. Still, except for that boyish surrender, my need for music might never have become a mission. If I couldn’t make music with my feet, I had to learn to let it come out of my mouth like a Christian.

Neither my mother nor the compulsions of my religion required me to withdraw from a quartet which I had joined. Our songs, to be sure, were sometimes subject to revision in the interest of piety, but so long as I went home by half past nine at night and refrained from street dancing and other low forms of minstrelsy, Ma allowed me to remain in that profitable organization. We called ourselves the Silver-Toned Quartet and soon graduated from the curbstone to the railway station, where we sang at the arrival and departure of late afternoon and evening trains. In the summertime we strolled up and down the avenues where rich people sat on their verandas to enjoy the night air, and caught in our caps the nickels, dimes, and quarters they shelled out to us over the hedges.

The boys of our neighborhood had an evening rendezvous on the sidewalk in front of the Fort Wood grocery store, and I used to listen there, entranced, to one of the older boys, Lemus Hardison, who sang soft and low in a high, sweet voice. I knew nothing then of the middle voice, or mezza voce. It had always been as natural for me to sing as for water to bubble up out of a spring, but now it came to me that the voice possessed certain delightful qualities that only practice and experimentation could release. I began the cultivation of those qualities so that, like Lemus, I could sing beautifully.

On the day after my baptism I went back to my new job at the Case and Hedges foundry, all tired out, and took my customary place in front of a set of rattles fastened to an endless belt. I had just loaded one of the rattles with some newly cast pipe-fittings, and was ready to throw the conveyer on with a stick, when I saw that the idler had flopped off from the governor and was revolving ineffectually. I tried to replace the idler with my stick, which was then and there caught up in the twisting loop of leather; and before I could let go my grasp on it, I found myself being pulled into an insensible machine which had been put in motion by the contraction of the idler. Hand, arm, shoulder, and then my whole body, were drawn ineluctably into an engine of indescribable torture.

I came to in a plaster cast in my bed at home. Negroes were rarely hospitalized in those days, but I had received first aid at the plant, and then I was taken home in an ambulance. As soon as I was able, I went back to the shop, only to find that I could not stand the sight of rattles and conveyers any longer. When I saw the machine in operation again, I could not understand how I had come out of it alive. I quite simply believed that my escape was miraculous. God had spared me, I thought, to work out in me some mission which had begun with my baptism.

After my sixteenth birthday it was Robert’s turn to go to work, and I entered the fifth grade. It was embarrassing to have to make recitations in front of children so much younger than I and so much more used to reading aloud and reciting. My teacher, Mrs. Cora Phillips, a motherly woman, was kind to me. She praised me for what I could do by myself, and helped me with difficult studies. When Mrs. Phillips’s brother, Professor Calhoun, came from Oberlin to give a concert in our church, he heard me sing a small solo and invited me to go for a walk with him after the concert. He offered to coach me, and presently I became his pupil. Another miracle had come to pass!

I took two lessons a week, for which I paid fifty cents a lesson. Ma was inclined to think that I was wasting my money. She wanted me to work at my books so that I might be a preacher. I respected her judgment, yet I had not been studying with Calhoun for more than two or three months before I had privately resolved to make a career of my music.

Until I met Professor Calhoun I had heard very little white-folks’ music, apart from some Victorian anthems which we sang in church. I owe to him my first hearing of great voices in classical songs and traditional arias; for he made it possible for me to hear distinguished music sung by Caruso, Scotti, and Melba through the horn of a phonograph. My dormant senses were awakened by Caruso’s matchless tones and taught to lend themselves to musical enchantment. Indeed, I received then my first intimation that singing is an art.

11

In the summer of 1905 I gave up my job — I had returned to work after my year in the fifth grade — and asked Ma for my share of the family savings. I wanted to go away and study music. She gave me fifty dollars from my own earnings, and although she did not exactly give me her blessing — indeed, she hoped that I would change my mind before the money was gone — she let me go ont to find my way alone.

I made inquiries about entering Fisk University in Nashville, only to be reminded how slight my resources were. My fifthgrade education hardly made me a suitable candidate for college, and besides, I could not pay the tuition. A friend offered to take me out to the campus to meet Miss Robinson, the director of the department of music. When we reached her office in Jubilee Hall, Miss Robinson was on her way out to keep an urgent engagement. A tall woman with a thin, elongated face and unsmiling, Puritanical expression, she was polite but not especially cordial. I had two ragged sheets of music in my pocket, “Beyond the Gates of Paradise,” and “Forgotten.” With Miss Robinson’s permission, I sang from them. I sang as I had been taught — with expression. Nothing in Miss Robinson’s countenance suggested that my singing sounded good in her ears.

“Wherever did you learn such sentimental rubbish?” she said. “The composer’s sentiment is written into his music and it is vulgar to add to the sentiment written into the notes.”

My heart went down into my boots. And as though she were punishing me for causing her to miss her appointment, Miss Robinson kept me by her for an hour to tell me how impossible it was to receive me into the school. But at the end of that time she handed me a slip of paper and sent me off alone to the President’s office. I went trembling into that great man’s presence and was terrified to see a spectacled individual with a big Roman nose and heavy, overhanging eyebrows.

“The man is an eagle,” I said to myself. “He is the American eagle himself.”

I handed my slip of paper to a secretary. Presently the eagle turned his gaze upon me. After quite a long time he shot questions at me, without stopping to listen to my answers. Who was I? What was my name? Where did I live? Why had I come to Fisk? Why did I come without money? How did I mean to get on? How did he know whether I was fit to enter the school? When he had finished frightening me, he posted me off to the head of the academic department for impromptu examination.

I took my tests on the spot, orally: in arithmetic, geography, and reading. I also recited a poem. Then I was sent back to the President with a note which said that I was at best a fifth-grader. He read the note aloud, giving me ample time to ponder it. Then, quite unexpectedly, his face broke up, its severity lost in deep, kind lines. He told me he had got me a job as furnace boy and waiter, and admitted me into the lower school on probation.

Before night I was installed in a room over a stable. My head reeled with instructions about tending furnace and cutting grass and serving table. Molly, the cook, had shown me how to lay silver and exchange heirloom china plates. With board and room secure, and a dollar a week for my pocket, I began my college life.

At the end of my fourth and last year I could not help wondering, as I sadly said farewell to Fisk, how in the world I should get on with my voice. I got a job at the Pendennis Club in Louisville and joined a new quartet. One of the members of the club introduced me to an opera director who considered ways and means of turning me into a white man, so that he could take me into a company which he had brought to Louisville for a fortnight’s run. Nothing came of that project, but a local theatrical manager found a way to put my disembodied voice to use. He stood me inoffensively behind a moving-picture screen to sing arias illustrating silent operatic “shorts.”

Just before the expiration of the contract for my ghostly services, which had netted me forty dollars a week, the President of Fisk offered me the post of leading tenor with the Jubilee Singers, who were rehearsing for a summer conference in Boston. I signed up for fifty dollars a month and expenses, because I was willing to go to Boston at any price. A gentleman from that city had told me that if Nashville was the Athens of the South, Boston was truly the Athens of America.

Before my trip to Boston I went to Chattanooga to take leave of my mother. My brother Robert had married and moved to Los Angeles and Ma was living alone. She took in washing and still milked her own cow. I found her heating kettles of water over coals she had picked up in the railroad yards. I told her that I was going to look for a job in Boston, and promised to come and fetch her, and make a home for her up there. But Mother was not yet convinced that I could make a career for myself as a singer. She recited all the familiar objections.

It was with bitter sorrow that at length I said farewell to my mother. I had wanted so much to go away with her blessing. A lonely time lay ahead of us both.

12

In May, 1911, with a voice still nearly as naked as a jaybird, I arrived in Boston. I had a letter to a businessman named Mr. Henry H. Putnam, who arranged for me to sing to five teachers. The last of them, Mr. Arthur J. Hubbard, a rough Yankee giant who both terrified and attracted me, put me through my paces thoroughly and concluded that he was willing to take me as a pupil, provided I felt perfectly sure it was going to be worth my while to try to become a singer. I kept puzzling over the proviso until I went back to see Mr. Putnam.

“Two of the five gentlemen who have heard you are willing to teach you,” he said, “and one of them will give you a scholarship. But I warn you that every man jack of them believes it is impossible for a Negro to be accepted as a serious artist.”

I liked Mr. Hubbard, for all his gruffness, and wanted to study with him. It was agreed that I should begin in the autumn to take lessons in the evening at his house in Dorchester: at his house, so that I should not embarrass him by appearing in his studio amongst his white pupils, many of whom were Southern boys and girls; and in the evening, so that I could support myself by working in the daytime. I undertook to pay five dollars a lesson.

Meanwhile I had a job at the Brunswick Hotel on Boylston Street. After a month of wrestling brass spittoons — the bellboys called them puppies — I got a temporary job distributing campaign cards for the Republican Club of Boston. One of the members, an officer of the John Hancock Company, asked me one day what I intended to do for a living after election. I told him that I was looking for a job that would enable me to bring my mother to Boston.

“You can go tomorrow and fetch her,”he said. “Come back a week from next Monday and you can go to work for us. We will pay you seven dollars a week.”

Mr. Hubbard lent me seventy-five dollars and I went to Chattanooga to get Ma. We sold the old cow for what she would bring and bought a large packing-case. We stuffed the box full of Ma’s household possessions — feather-ticking, sheets and pillow-slips, quilts and blankets, towels and tablecloths, flatirons, pots and pans and china dishes —and checked it on our railway tickets. Ma was very quiet all the way to Boston.

Some friends invited us to stay with them in Roxbury, but Ma was restless because she could find nothing to do in their immaculate house. “Misery” set in, and Ma was sure that she could get well again only in her own home. We moved our few possessions into an unfurnished apartment in Westminster Street, and Ma’s misery departed. A scrubbing brush in her hand and good boards under her knees were medicine enough.

Just before Easter, the year after I settled in Boston, I had somehow managed to get an engagement to sing in a church in New Hampshire. It was canceled, almost at the last moment, on account of the scarlet fever, and Mr. Hubbard recommended me to another out-of-town church. I happened to be in his studio when somebody telephoned to say that the music committee had decided not to take me. I could see Mr. Hubbard bristle. He clutched the receiver with a strangle hold and roared into the mouthpiece.

“You tell your church people verbatim,” he thundered, “that they may be followers of the meek and lowly Jesus, but at a hell of a long ways off.”

The message was straightway delivered, the committee engaged me, and until I went to England in 1920 I was the Easter soloist at that church every year.

By the time I had paid off my debt to Mr. Hubbard, my mother was ready to make a visit to her family and friends in Chattanooga. She felt strange in the North and longed for a glimpse of home. I bought her a round-trip ticket, some percale dresses and a worsted coat, and saw her off for the South. Within ten days she wrote that she was coming back to Boston. I had taken a better apartment, to surprise her, and I needed a few more days to furnish it. I therefore urged her to stay out the month, as she had planned, but I had hardly posted my letter before she turned up.

“I didn’t like it down there, son,” she said. “Folks carry on too much foolishness.”

When Ma came back I was half fearful of showing her around our new apartment, but she was so glad to be back that she did not scold me for extravagance.

“Lawsy, son, here’s a bed, here’s a real bed of my own,” she exclaimed. And she loved a wicker rocking-chair which I had covered with dark green paint and tufted in some light green stuff. She used to pin her pocketbook to a flowered and beribboned headrest which I had suspended from the top of the chair — a gesture of appropriation which always seemed to me to be quaint and touching, considering that Mother was generally so detached from her physical possessions.

13

In the summer of 1915 I toured the Pennsylvania Chautauqua circuit with two friends. We called ourselves the Hayes Trio and collected a hundred and seventy-five dollars a week. Having begun to think of ourselves as artists, we tried to look like artists. We wore stiff collars and flowing black ties, one-button black jackets, white flannel trousers, and white buckskin shoes. We sang Beethoven, Schubert, Rubinstein, and the obscure Venetian, Polani. Two years later, in 1917, against the advice of my teacher and most of my friends, I announced a concert of my own in Symphony Hall.

Even my Negro friends, many of them, thought the concert would be a calamity. Nevertheless, along with white friends, fellow-employees who had heard me singing in the corridors of the John Hancock Building, they bought box-office tickets by the hundreds, and filled the hall — floor, balcony, and stage — to overflowing. My mother came to the concert and was proud of me. She walked through the colored community with her head high after that.

Early in 1918, I started out on a crosscountry tour which I managed myself. I got out a prospectus which showed me in a belted and fur-lined overcoat and a pair of laced shoes with cream-colored tops. I announced myself as “Roland W. Hayes, Celebrated Negro Tenor.”

Lawrence Brown, who later became Paul Robeson’s accompanist, made that tour with me, and so did my mother. We left Washington for the West in the midst of an historical blizzard. Our train broke down in the mountains of West Virginia, and for hours upon end we were stalled in snowdrifts, suffering from cold and hunger. Ma disappeared — head, feet, and body — under a warm blanket from which she emerged only once, and that was for the purpose of addressing a fellow-traveler who was complaining loud and bitterly.

“Put yo’ haid under a blanket, like me, and make yo’ own heat,” she said. That shut him up.

I sang in Chattanooga and afterwards in Nashville, and from there we went to St. Louis, to visit Poro College — a clinical establishment in which a group of ambitious young ladies was being instructed in the use and distribution of cosmetics. The proprietress had accumulated quite a comfortable fortune from ointments which make kinky hair straight. She had few competitors in her business, for the reason that the white unguentaries were busy compounding preparations to make straight hair kinky. Ma walked about amongst the laboratories and classrooms, quoting Ecclesiastes on the subject of vanity.

Our excursion failed to give Ma all the pleasure I had planned. It seemed to her to be a worldly junket, once we had embarked upon it. She refused to go to parties which were arranged for us, and disapproved of my going to them alone. In Denver, where we stopped on the way to the Coast, Ma threatened to take the train to Los Angeles, where my brother Robert was living, because I insisted upon going to an entertainment after my concert. I tried to explain that I was sometimes obliged to meet my public. On that particular occasion, in fact, it was hoped that my appearance at a ball would help the management make up my not inconsiderable fee of two hundred and seventy-five dollars. I went to the party, promising to come home early, but when I returned my mother had left. I rushed to the railway station and found her trying to negotiate for a ticket to California.

Nothing I could say would persuade her to go back to the house from which she had so unceremoniously departed. I went back to gather up our luggage and returned to the station, where we sat up all night in a chilly waiting-room. Ma looked as pleased as if she had snatched me from the embrace of Satan himself. She grew neither weary nor cold in well-doing.

14

I received in Los Angeles a few days later a letter complimenting me upon my diction. Ma was better disposed toward me after that, for she had been trying to teach me how nearly sense is related to sound. One time, only a few weeks before the tour, she was out in her kitchen ironing while I was practicing a song in the front room. She called out, “What was that you said, Roland?”

“I’m just singing, Mother,” I replied.

“But what did you say?” she insisted.

“But, Mother, I tell you I’m only singing,” I said.

“Well,” said she, “if you are singing words, I don’t understand them. When you sing, I think you ought to say the words so that everybody can hear and understand.” After that I tried not to mumble my words.

My correspondent also said that my voice reminded her of a “rich purplish red,” and from that comment I got a really creative idea. It had not yet come to me, in so many words, that even the voice I was born with was colored. I began to listen more closely to white singers, and to my amazement I discovered that their voices were as white as their skins.

In the winter of that same year I made another transcontinental tour and took my mother with me again because I could not bear to leave her behind. Before we started out she said to me, “Son, I still don’t believe in this yere concert business, but since you are fixin’ to go on with it, I am goin’ to axe you to do one thing to make your old mother happy. When you have made good somewheres, get out. Don’t hang around and kill the fine impression you have made.” In these days, when publicity bears almost no relationship to the art it celebrates, Ma’s advice seems conservative. Nevertheless, I have tried to follow it.

On that second tour, I was invited to sing at a benefit given by a white congregation in Santa Monica. I sang a spiritual called “My Soul Is a Witness,” a sung sermon I had learned in my childhood from a Negro preacher who had a knack of putting whole chapters of the Bible into memorable poetic form. It begins with the theme, “My soul is a witness for my Lord,” and goes on to recite examples of “witnessing” in the Old Testament and the Gospels.

I had sung this song only in Negro churches, before this time, and I was chagrined to discover, when I had sung half my way through its considerable length, that it seemed to be making very little impression upon my well-groomed white audience. Of the whole company of people there, only my mother was a practitioner of the primitive and highly emotional religion which had produced those sermons in song; and she, great soul, under the compulsion of deep religious feeling, stood up in the midst of that fashionable assembly and called out, in a clear and ringing voice, “Hallelujah! I’m a witness, too.”

It was as though she had touched a match to a resinous torch. The hall became suddenly luminous, with the light of feeling come out of its dark hiding place, and at the end there was a fury of applause, a kind of manual Amen.

After the concert an elderly gentleman of aristocratic bearing came to me and said, “Mr. Hayes, you seem to me to sing with all the art of the masters I have heard, and yet with some new emotional quality of your own. I wish you would tell me how you have come by that special quality.”

At breakfast under a palm tree with my mother, I told her what the man had said.

“Do you suppose,” I said, “that I have been trying to turn myself into a white artist, instead of making the most of what I was born with?”

“I am glad you are finding yourself out, son,” said my mother. “I knowed what was what all the time, but I wasn’t going to tell you. Now go ahead and work hard and be your own man.”

(To be continued)