Lena, The Lady, her Life and her Music
A good friend passed away yesterday, she was quite the lady.
Lena with Cab Calloway
I never actually met Lena Horne, but she has been a principle inspiration of mine for about 30 years. Around 1980, she came to Miami where I was living at the time, and played on Miami Beach. I was out of work, and didn’t have the money to go, but when the album of her one woman show came out a year later, I snatched it up immediately.
The album, filled with her musical career, included many “dialogues” in which she recounted her struggles, a woman “before her time”, dealing with pervasive racism in a world that was not ready for her. But she prevailed, and lived to see the world become a very different place, and was an active part of the movement to make those changes happen.
She was a very light skinned African American woman, with what is called “good” hair. As a child, the other children taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”
Lena was the first black performer to be signed to a long term contract by a major Hollywood studio (1942/3, MGM, 7 years), and went on to achieve international fame as a singer.
But the studio never really knew what to do with her. They wanted to re-cast her “as a Latin”, but that idea was scrapped when Ms. Horne refused to agree. So most of her “career” with MGM consisted of her singing a song in the middle of a movie, completely unrelated to the plot, so that it could be cut from movies going “down south”, a decision made by the studio, which Southerners were never aware of.
In 1981, my career in job training and mental health seemed an exercise in futility. Ronald Reagan was eliminating both, erasing CETA and the mental health agency where I worked went from 160+ employees to 28 in one day. My God Daughter Nicole had come to live with me, and we had moved into a large house on NE 45th street in Miami, the southern end of the Haitian area, and mostly African American.
It was there that I learned just how nuts most white people can get about race, particularly if we are outnumbered (in the minority). I spent 15 months watching the way most of my white friends responded to the house and the neighborhood. Visitors after dark would park out front, scramble to the front door, and dash in as soon as I opened it. The response was always the same, “This is a beautiful house, but the neighborhood, how do you live here?” I noted that the Miami Herald had published the crime statistics for the county and we had the lowest crime rate in the entire county, that didn’t phase them. It was as if they expected that a thug was behind every bush, waiting to jump them. Really crazy stuff.
It was there in Buena Vista East that I coined the term “Schvartsa-phobia” (”Fear of Black” in broken Yiddish).
Every white person should live in a non white neighborhood, or work in a non white environment for at least a year in our lives, it is very educational. I’d already worked in “Liberty City” when I moved in, and have since spent many years working in Black neighborhoods, but that time spent on 45th street was my first time living “in the ghetto” and seeing the world from a non white person’s perspective. It was VERY enlightening.
It was in that time of my life that I formed my “good enough for you, or your kids” rule. At that time, people would say about gay and/or race, “It’s okay for others, but not for me” or “It’s okay for others, but I wouldn’t want my child to (be / marry) one.” That’s where the truth gets told, and the truth is, we still have a long way to go.
In her monologue “1940″ Lena described going to Hollywood to get in the movies. As she quoted, the response from the movie “moguls” was something to the effect of, “You don’t look the way you’re supposed to look.” She responded, “I was cool, I knew the only thing they knew about us was what Tarzan had told them. And Tarzan was not the bright one in the outfit. Cheetah had to teach him how to put his clothes on, read and write, eat with a fork, everything.”
Living in Buena Vista East was one of the happiest times in my life. I was broke for half of that time, but we had great friends and neighbors, and about half way through, discovered that one of our neighbors, Verna Edington (and her sisters Jessie Tanner and Naomi Smith) were all related to Nicole (her paternal grandfather was brother to their mother, Carrie (Glenn, Nicole’s name) Lewis. As it turned out, her family was solidly middle class, very well known in Miami’s Black community, all of them very elegant, educated and proud. Their mother Carrie had worked on Miami Beach for years, and was a very fashionable woman. Verna taught me more about how to shop than anyone I ever knew. She loved slumming through Saks and Neiman Marcus after school. Her daughter LaTaryn would find something she liked, and Verna would say, “Put it back honey, we’ll come back and get it when it’s on sale.”
Most white people, unless they are Jewish, don’t have to deal with a hostile world that rarely provides openings or opportunities, and from whom “permission” has to be granted to do almost anything. That is part of what is called “privilege.” We may fight amongst ourselves, and certainly are competitive, but we don’t live under the shadow of a larger and more powerful “them” who are constantly watching and judging us.
So as a gay man, who is white, I am grateful to all of my friends who aren’t white, who have taught me how to live with oppression, and learn to love myself in spite of that oppression.
Lena was an early mentor, smart, beautiful, talented, spirited, and a great sense of humor. She remained gracious in her persistence to make a life and a career, in spite of all the road blocks that were thrown at her. From that, I gained great inspiration to remain in my profession, in spite of all the set backs and struggles and disappearance of funding by subsequent Republicans who were more dedicated to making war than making peace.
Now that I’m 60, her rendition of “Yesterday When I Was Young” cuts deep into my memories. 80% of the friends I had in my youth have all passed on, mostly during the plague years when there were no treatments for HIV and infection was an automatic death sentence.
And the soundtrack for all of this was Lena’s “The Lady and Her Music”, offering ongoing insights into daily life, with music and stories. Her song “If You Believe” from “The Wiz” continues to remind me of the importance of hope and self esteem.
“If you believe, and within your heart you know,
that no one can change the path that you must go.
Believe what you feel, and know you’re right because,
the time will come around when you’ll say, it’s yours.”
Lena spent most of her life in New York (she was from Brooklyn). The New York Times has done a great story on her life and passing. Here is a link to the story, which is a great read:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/arts/music/10horne.html?emc=eta1
Broadway musical “Jamaica”, 1957 - 1959 (she was 40)
1981, Grammy award for “The Lady and Her Music” (she was 64)
1982, Nicole and Ed at the wedding of Michael and Mary Gray-Reeves. (she was 7, I was 32)
Mary Gray-Reeves is now the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of El Camino Real (central CA coast)
Nicole in 2004 with husband Jorge Ramirez, their kids, and my mother Edna (who was 90)
(2005) Jesse Tanner (red), Baljean & Naomi Smith (Naomi in floral print), Verna with grandson Jeremy in foreground.
Naomi and Baljean taught at Miami Northwestern Sr. High for 30 years. Jessie and her late husband owned a funeral home and he was an AME minister.
Verna was the first Black teacher at Miami Beach Sr. High and taught biology for 30 years.
(2005) Verna’s daughter LaTaryn, a former Miami Dolphins cheerleader and Miami Heat dancer, currently a realtor, her husband Greg Gay (city of Miami Planning Department) and their second child, Braydon.