Memories Are Bittersweet

BIRTHDAY — Dr. Eva Jessye, artist-in-residence at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, looks at the candles on her 84th-birthday cake here recently. Dr. Jessye, who directed the original chorus of 'Porgy and Bess' on Broadway in 1935, donated the Eva Jessye collection of music memoriabilia to the University of Michigan.

Memories are bittersweet

By Norman Gibson
NEWS DRAMA REVIEWER

She is 84 and it hardly shows. She seems a lot younger.

Eva Jessye laughs about not losing any weight. She talks with a laugh about how much more time she is being given in this life. At times, she is quiet, watchful. Then there are times when she talks a streak.

Dr. Jessye recalls the 1940’s and her tour through Wisconsin with the Eva Jessye Choir. Racism sometimes is at its worst in the North.

The choir sang at a church benefit and went across the street to eat after 15 straight hours on the road.

They were refused service by the white owner of the only restaurant that was open in town.

“THEY HAD worn themselves out traveling and singing and they were hungry,’’ Dr. Jessye recalls. “They had hunger pains but they couldn’t eat in Wisconsin. They could sing but they couldn't eat. They had to sing while they were hungry in Wisconsin.”

Dr. Jessye doesn't preach.

She just tells stories, antecdotes from the past. She tells about the time in the South when the choir went into a restaurant  in Mississippi. The owner was black.

One of the choir members ordered oysters. In those days, a dollar was a dollar, more or less. One seemed to go farther, anyway. They were harder to get, but they went father.

A big order of oysters? Two bits would have been a good price, but the Mississippi restaurateur wanted 75 cents.

“Seventy-five cents!” Dr. Jessye winced. The man who paid the price yelped. He refused to pay. The restaurant owner called the police, and when the sheriff arrived, he listened to both sides.

"YOU THINK these oysters are worth 75 cents?” the sheriff asked. The man nodded his bead.

“It’s a good price,” the sheriff said. “A price like that should be for all the oysters these people can eat at a sitting. I can’t tell you how much to charge for your oysters, but I think you should let all these people come back and eat all the oysters they can at one sitting. Do you agree?”

The intimidated restaurant owner reluctantly nodded his head.

“If all these people come back and want oysters, you have to give them all they want for 75 cents. If you don’t, you are violating what I have said.” He asked the choir if they would be back. The members said with one voice that they would.

“You should have seen him fret.” Dr. Jessye says. “We were 10 miles down the road before anybody remarked we would not be coming back that way ever again.”

It’s a good thing that Dr. Jessye is writing her autobiography.

She has a thousand stories to tell. She has suffered racism and she has known joy.

I’ve noticed over the years, though, that Dr. Jessye has only one major theme. She wants people of all races to love each other, to respect each other.

She is remembering from her birth in Coffeeville, Kansas. 84 years ago, through the New York years, when she directed the choir for the original Gershwin opera “Porgy and Bess” in 1935, to her more recent history.

Let’s hope that she soon finishes that autobiography.