Romare Bearden in the Homeland of His Imagination

An Artist's Reckoning with the South

Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781469667867
• eBook ISBN: 9781469667874
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Romare Bearden (1911–1988), one of the most prolific, original, and acclaimed American artists of the twentieth century, richly depicted scenes and figures rooted in the American South and the Black experience. Bearden hailed from North Carolina but was forced to relocate to the North when a white mob harassed his family in the 1910s. His family story is a compelling, complicated saga of Black middle-class achievement in the face of relentless waves of white supremacy. It is also a narrative of the generational trauma that slavery and racism inflicted over decades. But as Glenda Gilmore reveals in this trenchant reappraisal of Bearden’s life and art, his work reveals his deep imagination, extensive training, and rich knowledge of art history.

Gilmore explores four generations of Bearden’s family and highlights his experiences in North Carolina, Pittsburgh, and Harlem. She engages deeply with Bearden’s art and considers it as an alternative archive that offers a unique perspective on the history, memory, and collective imagination of Black southerners who migrated to the North. In doing so, she revises and deepens our appreciation of Bearden’s place in the artistic canon and our understanding of his relationship to southern, African American, and American cultural and social history.

CHAPTER 1

LOVE IN SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

What could Romare Bearden understand—in words—about his heritage? He knew only these facts: His beloved great-grandfather, Henry B. Kennedy, was born in 1845 in Chester, South Carolina. Kennedy’s mother was named Jeraline Oates. In 1863 in Augusta, Georgia, Henry married Charleston-born Rosa Catherine Gosprey. Henry and Rosa had been enslaved to President Woodrow Wilson’s father; when they spoke of it, they said they had been “servants.” But the term “servants,” a common way that freed people described their former condition in slavery, confused Bearden; tellingly, he did not know whether Henry Kennedy and Rosa Gosprey had been enslaved. He thought perhaps but “maybe his father [Kennedy’s] or hers were slaves. … I was too young to get into a discussion of that.” He also said that Rosa “was considered a Cherokee Indian. Whether she was or not, I don’t know.”¹

But as a child at Kennedy’s knee, he heard—and forgot—stories before he had the words to process them as memories. They conjured the visions that he remembered in art. Visual recall, a part of memory, rarely flows smoothly in the channels that words excavate. For example, Bearden denied his great-grandparents’ enslavement, possibly because he could not conceive of these dignified, loving heroes of his childhood as enslaved to anyone. When, after 1964, Bearden turned to memory to render a visual narrative of his early life, he teetered on the verge of making a coherent narrative. Each time he reached for it, it shattered on his canvas and fell into pieces as collage. Ralph Ellison understood that art gives us more than memory, even more than history. He said Bearden’s collages revealed “one of the ways for getting at many of the complex matters which we experience. … Because Art is the mystery that gets left out of history.”² Bearden’s great-grandparents’ history is more complex—more mysterious—than the history that he knew consciously. And much of their history he never knew at all.

Henry and Rosa’s love story spans more than half a century. In the 1870s, they moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they built a family edifice that they hoped would secure and protect three generations of their descendants. Bearden lived in the Kennedy’s family complex until he was almost five years old, and his very early memories sometimes surface in his art. As a historian, I honor Bearden’s wispy memory, but I also want to know the things that Bearden could not. Severed from his family’s past, he sometimes built a mythical one for himself.³ We start now with two facts that Bearden knew: his great-grandfather Henry Kennedy told him that he was from Chester, South Carolina, and that his mother’s name was Jeraline Oates.

Henry Kennedy’s mother had told him about her own family, including a man named Charles Oates, who was either her husband or her father. He may have been enslaved to a Scots-Irishman named John F. Oats, a Chester plantation owner. The slave owner himself lived across the North Carolina state line with a large family of mulatto slaves. Charles and Jeraline Oates may have been among them.⁴ The only record of their existence is on a large obelisk that Henry Kennedy erected late in his own life. It reads, “Charles Oates, died April 22, 1832, Father” and “Jeraline Oates, died January 22, 1864, Mother.” In so cryptically marking his heritage, however, Kennedy partially obscured it. Charles Oates (Father) died thirty-two years before Jeraline did and thirteen years before Henry was born. He was not Henry’s father; he was probably Jeraline’s father, not her husband, and therefore Henry’s grandfather.

White supremacy’s theft of memory continued into death, since very few enslaved people had family Bibles or headstones to mark their ancestors’ passing. There are at least two possibilities to explain how Henry knew Charles’s specific date of death. Either Jeraline Oates gave Henry a family Bible in which she recorded it, or she told him his grandfather’s name and Henry visited his grave and saw his headstone. If the latter is true, Charles Oates was probably a white man. In slavery and freedom, the census designated Henry Kennedy a “mulatto.”

It seems that Henry knew his mother as he was growing up, so she must have been sold by the Oatses to a family named Kennedy in Chester, from whom Henry took his last name and where he was born in 1845. Among the Kennedys in Chester, only one, the most powerful man in town, owned an enslaved person, a mulatto male born in 1845. Major John Kennedy, born in 1770 in County Antrim, Ireland, moved to South Carolina just after the American Revolution. Known as the “father of Chesterville,” John was a covenanted Presbyterian who escaped British pressure to join the official Church of Ireland. In Chester, he founded Purity Presbyterian Church.⁵ Kennedy ran a hotel, operated an adjoining “grog shop,” and served as sheriff. They called him “the Major” because he raised a company of soldiers in the Mexican War, but they never left Chester. The Major remains a legend. “Generous, impulsive, and full of genial humor,” Kennedy was a “quick Irish wit and full of jokes.” At seventy-five, he could jump over a cane held straight in both hands; at ninety, he could leap up and click his heels together. It is also possible that, at seventy-five, he held Jeraline enslaved and fathered Henry, since the boy was the only mulatto slave among the twenty-four people whom he enslaved.⁶

However, given the Major’s age, Henry Kennedy’s father may have been the Major’s son, George, who managed his father’s hotel. In 1850, a free mulatto male servant and twelve slaves, including three Black women in their twenties and thirties, worked there.⁷ Since we do not know Jeraline Oates’s birthdate and cannot estimate her age, it is impossible to know whether she was one of these enslaved women. By 1850, however, five-year-old Henry lived with Major John Kennedy.⁸ Until shortly after his fifteenth birthday in 1860, he remained the only mulatto enslaved person in the Major’s household.⁹

Thus, on the eve of the Civil War, ninety-year-old John Kennedy found himself living with an enslaved fifteen-year-old, most likely his son or his grandson. Two facts indicate an unusual relationship between Henry and John. First, Henry was literate by the time he was emancipated, but it was a crime to teach a slave to read. Second, John evacuated Henry from South Carolina to Augusta, Georgia, after the 1861 attack on Fort Sumter. One clue—Presbyterianism—links the tracks between Chester and Augusta. The Major was well connected among Presbyterians and certainly knew Augusta’s up-and-coming Presbyterian minister Joseph Ruggles Wilson, father of the future president, Thomas Woodrow Wilson.¹⁰ In 1861, Major Kennedy either hired out or sold sixteen-year-old Henry outright to the proslavery minister as a house servant when the future president was five years old.¹¹ Since Henry stayed in touch with his mother Jeraline—evidenced by the fact that he knew the exact day of her death in 1864—perhaps she was sold to the Wilsons as well.¹²

Thomas Woodrow Wilson, known as Tommy, was born on December 28, 1856. He declared that his earliest memory when he heard at age four that Abraham Lincoln had won the 1860 election and that war would come.¹³ But that might be apocryphal, something that Tommy later dreamed up to befit the Lost Cause–inflected, mythical childhood of a future president. Certainly, among Tommy’s early memories was Henry Kennedy’s arrival in the household a year later. He must have remembered Henry’s wedding in 1863 to Rosa Catherine Gosprey, also a “servant” to the Wilsons. Given that Henry and Rosa were enslaved people, their marriage meant nothing in the eyes of the law. Tommy seems to have suffered from dyslexia and could not read until he was eleven or twelve. By 1865, literate Henry Kennedy had watched for three years as Joseph Wilson tried each day to teach Tommy the alphabet. He finally learned it in 1865, when he was nine.¹⁴

Rosa Gosprey’s complex family history fits even more awkwardly into the frame of plantation slavery than Kennedy’s does. Rosa was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1844, although her tombstone gives the date as 1847.¹⁵ Her father was Francis Gosprey, a white man of Portuguese descent, born in Pennsylvania in 1799.¹⁶ A successful carpenter and joiner, in 1840 he lived with his wife, daughter, and ten other white people; a “free colored” man; two enslaved women; and three enslaved children. Elizabeth, Rosa’s mother and Bearden’s great-great-grandmother, was not yet twenty-three in that slave census. Gosprey seems to have taken no pains to deny his paternity of his enslaved children. In official records, Rosa and her siblings clearly stated that her father was white and Portuguese. When Gosprey began having children with Elizabeth, he was married, but he became a widower in 1856.¹⁷

Families like Rosa Gosprey’s, enslaved mixed-race people living with white families, were not rare in the urban South. But their ability to occupy a third space—between Black and white—shrank in the 1840s and 1850s, particularly in low-country South Carolina, with a majority-Black population. The planter-dominated legislature, threatened by abolition and slave revolts, sharpened its legal tools. For example, in 1841, legislators made it illegal for a white person and a Black person to look out of the same window at the same time. In 1844, they banned Black and white people from playing games together. Both laws speak to whites’ efforts to sustain slavery, but they also speak to fear: there were enough Black and white people looking out of windows and playing games together to prompt the legislation.¹⁸

Elizabeth Gosprey had eight children with Francis and remained enslaved to him until 1860, when he died of “country fever.” One of those children was Rosa Catherine, born in 1844.¹⁹ Elizabeth and her family were either sold to strangers or to one of Francis Gosprey’s white children. After the Civil War broke out, the slaveholders fled Charleston for Augusta, taking enslaved Elizabeth and Rosa with them. Within three years, Rosa married Henry Kennedy.²⁰ And then they were free.

On August 16, 1866, Henry and Rosa probably joined the hundreds of Black Augustans who heard Black abolitionist Henry M. Turner, a former Union Chaplin, tell them, “This is a day of gratitude for the privileges of meeting as other people.”²¹ As Black Augustans celebrated emancipation with frequent meetings and parades, whites condemned the “juvenile darkies and idle negroes” who crowded the streets.²² History is silent on how the Wilson family reacted to the events unfolding around them. However, when Woodrow Wilson became president in 1912, he hosted a White House screening of The Birth of a Nation, replete with street scenes that recalled white Augustans’ outrage at Black freedom. But that mid-August day must have been full of promise as Henry Turner gave thanks for three “blessings” of emancipation that affected the Kennedys directly: the destruction of slavery, the freedom of matrimony, and the freedom of labor.²³ Henry Kennedy and his wife Rosa took advantage of all of those blessings.

The couple gave their only child, a daughter born in 1865, her mother’s name—Rosa Catherine Kennedy—and called her Cattie—signifying the importance they placed on heritage. Kennedy exercised his “freedom of labor” by running an “ice cream salon.” He and Rosa lived with her dressmaker sister Anna and brother-in-law Peter Smith, who worked at a drugstore.²⁴

Sometime before 1872, Kennedy’s literacy and community standing enabled him to secure a job as a federal railway mail service employee between Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, and Augusta.²⁵ The cotton that the rail carried into Charlotte made the city a “cotton-trading town,” and the federal mail service employed Black and white men who sorted mail on the Charlotte, Columbia, Augusta Railroad’s five mail cars.²⁶ Charlotte was fast becoming a major marketing and transportation hub. In 1871, a local newspaper crowed that it was impossible to “pass out from the centre of this little City, in any direction, without crossing a Railroad track.”²⁷

In 1877, Henry earned $900, and he moved his family to Charlotte, the railroad’s headquarters. He chose the fastest-growing town on his route: in 1880 it had 7,094 people, even though it was only a mile from one end to another. Some 3,338 of them were African Americans, who accounted for 47 percent of the total population, the highest percentage ever. Between 1880 and 1910, Charlotte’s population increased by an average...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Love in Slavery and Freedom
• Chapter 2. Home and Away
• Chapter 3. The Price of the Ticket
• Chapter 4. Bearden’s Harlem Renaissance
• Chapter 5. Lost in Abstraction
• Chapter 6. From Darkness to Light
• Chapter 7. Round-Trip Ticket
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index