June 18, 2011
BY ADAM PARKER
aparker@postandcourier.com
Standing at the window of her
bungalow not far from where the Coosawhatchie drains into the Broad River,
Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor contemplates the marsh.
Across the way is Beaufort County.
Today, Interstate 95 takes travelers north, but in slavery days, blacks only
had the Underground Railroad.
Grosvenor, who lives on a former rice plantation on
a spit of land called Palm Key in Jasper County, looks out across the marsh and
talks about the workers who, she imagines, once threw down their rice threshers
in exhaustion and disgust, escaping their fate with nothing but the tattered
clothes on their backs, wading through the creek beds, hiding in the tall grass
and praying that some friendly soul would lead them north. Grosvenor
contemplates the spirits of those slaves lingering in the marsh and the path
they forged to a better life.
The past is present. The present
is ancient. Nothing is new, everything is new.
* * *
When she was born at home in
Fairfax, S.C, she weighed three pounds and was called Verta Mae Smart. She was
a twin, smaller than her brother, but strong. Her parents, Frank and Clara
Smart, placed her in a shoebox and kept her by the oven. She survived. Her
brother did not.
But there was no proof of her
birth.
Years later, when she returned to
South Carolina and wanted to renew her passport, she contacted the authorities
to request a copy of her birth certificate.
“I’m sorry, we have no one with
that name on record,” the clerk told her.
“You mean I don’t exist?” she
said.
She does not know her age with
certainty. “It depends on how old I feel when I get up,” she says. She knows
only the month and day she entered the world: April 4. Ask her for her proper
name, she will cite several. Virter. Verta Kali Smart. Mae. Verta Mae.
Vertamae. Space Goddess. Obedella.
* * *
When she was around 8 years old,
her family migrated north, taking their Geechee ways with them. Verta Smart
came of age in Philadelphia.
Tall and skinny and interested in
the theater, she was teased by the other children. She slouched. She mused
about being weird and unwanted.
As a teenager, she would hang out
at a coffee shop. Someone told her to check out a young woman playing music at
a hotel across the street. Nina Simone, not yet famous, was performing at
various venues in Philadelphia after the Curtis Institute of Music declined to
admit her. She and Simone became friends. Many years later, on July 26, 2003,
three months after the famed troubadour died, Smart offered a tribute at the
memorial service in New York City.
At 18, she read about the Beat
Generation, about their nonconformist ways, love of literature and
determination to explore the world. If she were a “bohemian,” she would be
accepted, she thought.
So she took a boat to Europe,
alone, uncertain what she would find.
* * *
In Paris, the Beats were finding a
freedom of the mind they were missing in the U.S. Smart, too, wanted freedom.
“I thought it was a good way to
escape,” she says.
She found the Beat Hotel on the
Left Bank. She found a colony of expat artists and writers — the Scottish folk
singer Alex Campbell, the American writer Jonathan Kozol, the French painter
Lucien Fleury. She would marry one of them, the artist Robert Grosvenor.
Photographer Harold Chapman was
staying at the rundown hotel at No. 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur. During the late 1950s
and early 1960s, he took pictures of “Verta Kali Smart” and the others,
including Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs and Gregory
Corso.
In Paris, she began to write. She
made her own clothes. She prepared simple, delicious meals based on the
heritage she kept safe within her.
She found herself.
“I grew taller there,” she has
said. “My mama measured me. You know, I had grown two inches and I didn’t even
feel like a misfit.”
* * *
After a couple of years, she
returned to the U.S. and settled in New York City. Daughter Kali was born in
1962; three years later Chandra arrived. During this period, she and her
husband split.
The 1960s was a heady time for
Grosvenor. She had studied acting at the Hedgerow Theatre in Philadelphia under
Jasper Deeter and now, in New York, was finding opportunities to apply her
skills. She became active in the theater, and even made it to Broadway. She
played Big Pearl in a production of “Mandingo,” a play that ran for just eight
performances before closing.
In 1966, Louis Gossett secured a
grant from the Office of Equal Opportunity, and a group of actors, including
Grosvenor, mounted a series of improvisations in Tompkins Square. Her two
daughters, Kali and Chandra ran around the neighborhood rounding up the
spectators.
She frequented the jazz clubs. She
brushed up on the Black Power movement. She organized dinner parties. She threw
a fundraiser fish-fry for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in its
waning years.
* * *
She was a Space Goddess in Sun
Ra’s Solar Myth Science Arkestra for about three years. She designed the
clothes, danced and sang. She read his poetry as the cosmic philosopher played
free improvisation. When the band went to the south of France for a jazz
festival, it drew attention.
“Where did you find these people?”
someone asked Sun Ra.
“I just thought them up,” he
replied.
She met and married the artist
Elsworth Ausby, but the marriage only lasted a few years. She met the
Bahamian-American actor Calvin Lockhart. He was handsome, sociable,
tempermental.
He took Grosvenor to meet Muhammad
Ali at the boxer’s Deer Lake training camp in Pennsylvania. He took her to
England so he might appear respectable before the Royal Shakespeare Company,
which wanted him to become the first black actor-in-residence.
When Kali was 5, she started
writing poems. Three years later, photographer Joan Halifax decided the poems
should be paired with pictures and published. In 1970, Doubleday agreed. Kali’s
book led the publisher to her mother’s work, and that same year, “Vibration
Cooking” was released. It made Grosvenor famous.
* * *
By the early 1980s, she was living
in Washington, D.C., and contributing stories and commentary to National Public
Radio. She reported on the threatened Gullah-Geechee communities of the South
Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands as only someone can when they are reporting
about their home. She reported on the cultural significance of food. She
reported on the expatriate experiences of African-Americans in Paris.
Her stories were gorgeously told,
rich in characters and dimension and unlike most of radio’s offerings,
colleagues said. Her cooking show “Seasonings” won a James Beard award. Her
renown led to many things, including a television show, part of the America’s
Family Kitchen series produced in Chicago, called “Vertamae Cooks.”
“I exploit Afro-American dishes
every chance I get,” Grosvenor once wrote. “For instance, collard greens. A
bowl of collard greens does for me what a bowl of chicken soup does for
others.”
In 1998, the University of New
Hampshire granted Grosvenor an honorary doctorate and promised to send her a
chair. She assumed they meant some kind of desk ornament. But it was a real
chair, displaying an inscription: “Doctor of Humane Letters.”
Soon after the chair arrived, her
10-year-old grandson Oscar asked, “Grandma, is there such a thing as inhumane
letters?”
* * *
On the occasion of writer James
Baldwin’s 60th birthday in 1984, Grosvenor arranged an interview. Baldwin told
her to meet him at his house on West 71st St. at 2 p.m.
When she arrived, Baldwin was not
there. Then she remembered his reputation for being late. She waited and
waited.
That evening, Baldwin’s mother
Emma prepared the guest room and cooked up something for dinner. Eventually,
the writer returned home, wearing white pants and a navy blazer, looking
dapper.
“We talked about what we’d talk
about the next morning,” Grosvenor says.
Three years later, she was an
honorary pallbearer at Baldwin’s funeral, joining the immense gathering at St.
John the Divine Episcopal Cathedral in New York City.
* * *
In the street one day, when the
family was living in Washington, D.C., granddaughter Charlotte put Grosvenor on
notice.
“See you later in the week,” she
said. “See you Wednesday.”
This took Grosvenor by surprise.
“Oh? Why?”
“I signed you up.”
Charlotte’s 4th grade class was
inviting people of interest to visit with students and talk about their lives.
“And, Grandma, can you bring a pan
of rice?”
So Grosvenor woke up early and
prepared a pan of rice, struggling to get the hot dish into a cab and to the
school.
The children gobbled it up,
listening to Grosvenor explain its African origins and its cultivation along
the tidal rivers of South Carolina.
One asked, “Do you know how to
make peas and rice?”
Another described the rice dish he
ate in Jamaica. Another mentioned the rice she ate in the Dominican Republic.
They all knew about rice, and Grosvenor was struck by the way different cultures
share certain essential elements.
* * *
In late 2009, Grosvenor was
socializing with friends when she began to slur her words and lose
consciousness. She was rushed to the hospital where it was discovered she had
had a brain aneurysm. She spent two weeks in the hospital after her operation,
then about six weeks in rehab.
Grandson Oscar jokingly explained
the situation this way: “They had to operate on Grandma’s brain; they took it
out, rinsed it off and put it back.”
Well, it was something like that, more
or less, Grosvenor says.
% % %
SIDEBARS
Sue
Goodwin met Vertamae Smart Grosvenor 17 years ago when Goodwin was working on
the Hothouse Project, part of National Public Radio’s cultural programming.
“The
goal was to develop new shows that highlighted diversity,” she said.
A
friendship quickly blossomed. Grosvenor became an NPR correspondent,
contributing various reports and commentary beginning in the early 1980s.
“I
looked to her as someone who just had a genius for understanding the nuance and
all the complexities of culture in this country,” Goodwin said. “This is always
something I’ve wanted to understand better. I just felt every time I talked
with Verta I learned something new. I just attached myself to her.”
Every
conversation was enlightening.
“She
was always thinking, and everything she said came with a lot of thought and
insight. She was really unique, and she didn’t back off. So a lot of how I
understand American culture ... comes from her.”
Goodwin
noted that her friend’s embrace of cuisine was her way of exploring a large
cultural inheritance, one that has profoundly influenced life in the U.S.
“Not
many preceded her in using food as a lens,” Goodwin said. “You know the saying,
there’s a universe in a grain of sand? That’s what she did with food. You saw
the (entirety) of America’s history with race through food.”
Sue
Goodwin is producer of NPR”s “Talk of the Nation.”
% % %
The
poet and jazz aficionado A.B. Spellman met Vertamae Smart Grosvenor in the early
1960s, not long after Grosvenor returned from Paris and settled in New York
City’s East Village.
It
was “a fairly big scene” in Alphabet City in those days, a tight community of
musicians, artists, poets and others, Spellman said. “So it was easy to meet
people. We had lots of mutual friends.”
Spellman,
Grosvenor and their friends frequented jazz clubs and gathered for parties and
events.
“Most
of this was before (black) nationalism took hold, so it was fairly integrated,”
Spellman said.
Grosvenor
was by far the best cook among this group of artists, he said, and people often
partook of her down-home dishes. She was often called, simply, “Mae.”
“I
have memories of her coming home in her moonbeam outfit, telling stories about
Sun Ra,” Spellman said, referring to Grosvenor’s three-year stint in the jazz
musician’s band. “And she was the first person I knew to have a real interest
in the lives of servants.” That interest would be channeled into a book titled
“Thursdays and Every Other Sunday Off: A Domestic Rap,” published by Doubleday
in 1972.
“She
was a real original in a whole scene of originals,” Spellman said.
A.B.
Spellman is a poet, music historian and former administrator for the National
Endowment for the Arts.
% % %
Karen
Spellman met Vertamae Smart Grosvenor in the late 1960s, when her future
husband A.B. Spellman moved to Atlanta to help the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee. She was its research director, and soon became A.B.’s
love interest.
Grosvenor
was good friends with A.B. and came to Atlanta with her daughter Chandra “to
put a viewing on me,” Karen Spellman said. “She was the spy from the Lower East
Side,” checking out the new woman in A.B.’s life.
Spellman
knew of her new friend’s reputation for cooking. When the hostess began preparing
collard greens, Grosvenor interrupted.
“Verta
came into the kitchen and said, ‘Girl, give me those greens.’” Then she started
wrapping them a certain way and cutting them a certain way and preparing them a
certain way. Her way.
“It
was like a religious ceremony for her,” Spellman said, a chance to pay respect
to her elders. “She always quotes her references, and her references were
people in her life, people in her family. So she showed me how to prepare the
greens, and I’ve been doing it that way ever since.”
When
“Vibration Cooking” was published in 1970, it made Grosvenor famous. Spellman
remembered basketball star Walt Frasier of the New York Knicks walking out onto
the court before a game carrying the book.
Karen
Spellman is an event organizer and former member of SNCC.
