MAN: So much of Bill Traylor's work is gone.
RADCLIFFE BAILEY: It's almost like someone did something and vanished.
SINGER: ♪ Hambone, hambone where you been?
♪ ROBERTA SMITH: Traylor is probably the greatest artist you've never heard of.
SINGER: ♪ Papa's gonna buy me a... ♪ We're talking about the realm of mystery.
BAILEY: When I see Bill Traylor's work, I see movement.
I feel jazz, I feel past steps.
ANNOUNCER: "Bill Traylor: Chasing Ghosts" on Afropop.
SINGER: ♪ Now hey ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Hey!
♪ ♪ ♪ Funding for Afropop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the MacArthur Foundation.
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (birds chirping) I'm the great-granddaughter of Bill Traylor.
My father was the grandson of Bill Traylor.
Clemmie Traylor was my father.
TATE: Traylor's an inspired visualist.
That's the only way you arrive at work that's that distinct, that esoteric and that visually elegant and refined.
SMITH: I think Traylor is probably the greatest artist you've never heard of, but he's getting heard of more and more.
He put down this entire oral history in the language that was available to him, which was the language of pictures.
The surrealness of it is that in those artworks that he's creating, he is engaging with issues around class, how we behave and how we treat one another.
Sometimes good and sometimes not so good.
Often not so good.
TATE: I see a very animated, agitated, violent, mystical realm.
When I see Bill Traylor's work, I see this yearning for a place that's beyond here, it's a place that's not, not tangible.
It's almost like someone did something and vanished.
(tapping) (tapping continues) (tapping concludes) ♪ ♪ (birds chirping, insects buzzing) ♪ ♪ (crow cawing) ♪ ♪ (wind rustling) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR 1: "The sign of High John "De Conquer was a laugh, "and his singing-symbol was a drum-beat.
"No parading drum-shout like soldiers out for show.
"It was an inside thing to live by.
"And it was sure to be heard when and where the work "was the hardest and the lot most cruel.
"It helped the slaves endure.
"They knew that something better was coming, "so they laughed in the face of things and sang.
"And the white people who heard them were struck dumb "that they could laugh.
"What was Old Cuffy laughing for?
"And all that time, there was High John De Conquer, "playing his trick of making a way out of no way, "hitting a straight lick "with a crooked stick.
Winning the jackpot with no other stake but a laugh."
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR: Local art historian Miriam Fowler documents that Traylor got his blue poster paint from a white teenage sign painter.
That was Jay Lavelle, a budding artist himself, and he told his teacher, Charles Shannon, about the old Black man drawing on the street corner in front of the Pekin pool hall.
Shannon was a socially conscious Montgomery artist who went to check Traylor out.
SHANNON (dramatized): This is how my involvement with Bill Traylor started.
I used to come into town on weekends to see my family and friends.
Saturday mornings I'd go down on Monroe Street.
It was Black territory, a rich and interesting world unto itself, with my sketchpad.
On one such Saturday, an old Black man was sitting on a box on the Monroe Street sidewalk.
When I got close to him, I could see that he had a small straight-edge stick and was ruling lines with a stub of pencil and a small piece of cardboard.
It was curious for an old man to be sitting on the sidewalk drawing in the first place.
I mean, just as a phenomenon, this was an interesting one.
That was the way it started.
LAPSLEY (dramatized): I was the first to discover Traylor.
He was a good artist, and pure and self-taught.
He was also a former slave, he was Black.
Perhaps the only other attribute that could have lent more to his popularity now is if he were a woman.
SHANNON: I was just simply enjoying him.
I loved the street and the place and all that.
He was part of the fun.
Man, as it went along, it started to, you know, it began to shape up.
I mean, wait a minute, I think this is awfully good.
LAPSLEY: He had been around Montgomery for some time, and when I first met him, he was drawing very crudely.
He drew on small pieces of scrap paper, and his pictures were raw, simplistic sketches of animals, dogs, cats, mainly a single figure-- for example, a rat.
SHANNON: Rats, cups, shoes, all arranged neatly in rows.
(metallic tapping) In the blacksmith shop, the upward movement that begins with the angular cut into the bottom of the board is picked up by the legless man's rockers and the curving tong and swings up into the spinning figures at the end.
(metal hissing) The gray patch where the paper is torn from the cardboard is so perfectly integrated into the design, that it's not perceived as a flaw.
When we think about Charles Shannon's work in relationship to Bill Traylor, it seems so divergent.
Charles Shannon paints with oils and on canvas.
He's really rooted in a kind of an academic approach and a tradition.
And Bill Traylor's work is in some ways the antithesis of that.
SHANNON: Then came what I called exciting events-- storytelling pictures such as possum hunts and drinking bouts.
Soon I began to bring him art supplies such as pencils, better cardboard, full range of poster paints, brushes, and his work became more abstract; thatched baskets, geometric shapes and more complex compositions full of wonderful humor, a sure touch, and a great mastery of his craft.
He sat quietly, a kind of beautiful simplicity came through.
Something impersonal, selfless.
Ancient is a word that comes to mind.
You think of something ancient, like you were looking through the eye of an elephant and seeing something with a long history to it.
Not just the history of one man, but of the race or something.
As if you're looking at something almost eternal.
POWELL: One senses, when you look at the work of Bill Traylor, he's on his own.
He's on his own path.
The sources are what's immediately around him, but also what's, what's inside of his head.
BAILEY: I always felt like my studio was church.
You know, I have all my books.
I have my Bill Traylor books.
I read and I try to go back, and try to get a sense of where he may have been coming from.
It's very complicated.
I want to walk... ...to those places where he once lived.
I want to know those places, I want to see those things, because I get a better sense.
I mean, it's kind of like I want to go back to all those past experiences.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR 1: "Like the dead-seeming cold rocks, "I have memories within "that came out of the material that went "to make me.
"Time and place have had their say.
"So you will have to know something about "the time and place where I came from "in order that you may interpret the incidents and directions of my life."
SINGER: ♪ Throw me anywhere, Lord ♪ ♪ In that old field ♪ NARRATOR 2: Bill Traylor, the fourth son of Sally and Bill Calloway, was born into slavery in 1853 on a small plantation near Pleasant Hill, just outside Vinton, Alabama, in Dallas County.
At the time of his birth, he and the 17 others on the farm were some of three million African Americans held in bondage in a nation of about 23 million.
NARRATOR 1: Calloway, Bill Traylor's father, was a skilled bricklayer and carpenter who worked with his owner, John G. Traylor, on constructing the built environments on the plantation, from the slave quarters, cotton press, smokehouses and outbuildings, to much of the main house itself.
JOHN TRAYLOR (dramatized): February 25, 1848.
Bill plowed new ground today.
March 8, Bill made a horse rack, cow pen and stable doors while George was ditching.
March 22, Bill and me working on the house.
Bill made a chimney Hired a Negro boy to pick cotton while me and Bill worked on the house and the rest of the hands chopped cotton.
Went preaching, left Bill in charge.
Went hunting with Bill.
Went fishing with Bill.
I, John G. Traylor, do hereby make this my last will and testament.
First, I give and bequeath to my three children all my property to be equally divided.
It is my will and desire that my Negroes, name Bill and wife Sally, with their children, and with their future increase, be kept together.
NARRATOR 1: And when he died in 1850, that's the way it happened.
People from the outside the south see slavery and race relations as no pun intended, but black and white.
And there's a lot of gray, right?
There's all of these relationships that develop in the breach.
A family would have owned slaves.
They may have even lived in the same house.
The slaves might have slept in the kitchen or on the floor.
So there was a degree of intimacy.
You have people who, like people do, develop very close connections and friendships.
Even in this coercive, you know, environment of slavery.
It's not surprising, then, if you, if you have a situation where relative to other situations, you feel like, well, this is not that bad.
Bill Traylor left little record of his childhood years when he was enslaved.
We do know that in 1863, at age ten, Bill and the family moved to John's brother, George Traylor's, nearby Benton Place in Lowndes County, six miles away.
Emancipation was proclaimed, but slaves were not free until 1865, when the South was finally defeated.
With the war over, young Bill and his family decided to stay put.
They took the surname Traylor, rebuilt the damaged buildings and continued farming the land.
The family would stay together on the Traylor plantation for 40 more years.
It probably seems highly unlikely to many folks, especially folks in the north, but the Black Traylors continue to maintain a relationship with the white Traylors-- the family that had, for so many years, held them in bondage.
For better or worse, the white Traylors had been the Black Traylors' white folks for almost 60 years.
John Traylor left Bill's family in the custody of his brother George, who was mandated to free them after the war, which he did, reluctantly.
TATE: Kind of, post-Civil War, the blues emerges as a form of entertainment on the plantations.
Those troubadours are kind of moving in between stations, you know, between plantations.
BAILEY: Often people would make a reference to Yves Klein.
Because I used a certain blue.
And it was this, you know, a real rich blue.
And I remember searching for the blue, but I picked up the blue through Bill Traylor, not through Yves Klein.
And I just remember searching for this color and it was poster paint, it was children's poster paint.
But that was one way, and it was a reference to Bill Traylor, but it's also a reference to blue used amongst the Yoruba.
There's a blue that just, say, blue, blues.
WILLIE KING: I'm gonna tell you what the blues is all about.
See, you've got to participate in the blues, sing the blues, dance the blues, play the blues, and this will keep the blues off of you.
So now you don't want to participate in the blues, then the blues gonna be on you.
So this will help get the blues off of you.
As you going around every day with the blues, sad, feeling low, like ain't nothing going your way.
But you start howling you some blues, and, man, you just feel them blues just getting in the wind, getting the blues off of you.
So now that's the way I get the blues off of me, keep the blues off me.
Because, man, if you don't, the blues can take you down.
I mean, under.
They can get on you so heavy.
So you got to howl out and whatnot, yeah.
(blues song ends) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR 1: Through the all too brief Reconstruction period, and the long, dark years of racist, white terrorism, Traylor stayed put, worked the land.
And, we assume, caroused whenever he had the chance.
The transcendent surprise is that all the while, as he lived what seemed to be a very small life, he was doing something very big.
He was living and seeing and remembering a region and a people that America would largely ignore or forget.
And he was nurturing a remarkable gift that would not be expressed for decades.
A gift that would bring the forgotten world and its marginalized people back to vibrant, vivid life; but not always with imagery that is without mystery.
BAILEY: I'm not thinking about after slavery.
There's some other kind of movement that goes on, that happens, you know, often when we dream and things come in a very fragmented way.
I think it's very typical.
You could talk about any artists who were working in this combination of from memory and from life.
I think the two were very closely knit for him.
POWELL: I don't think that he consciously is saying, I'm going to channel what happened 20, 30 years earlier on the farm.
My sense is that the reason why these works are so exciting and so vital for us is that they erupt and they erupt with a kind of a, a passion and a verve and an insistence on telling the story.
Traylor had a real knack for going back and forth between the simple and the arcane.
He depicted these scenes that are impossible to really unpack, tell what's going on.
They could be dreams, they could be nightmares.
TATE: Well, I mean, the iconography tells you he's the conjure man of the work.
I mean, these are all a part of the kind of Black Southern storytelling tradition, and the Native American tradition that had kind of formed a syncretism with as well.
The people who were involved in hoodoo are very much concerned with trying to provide means of protection and healing, and fulfillment.
I mean, I just understand it as part of Black expression.
You know what I mean?
And Black mysticism and spirituality.
If we're talking about hoodoo, we're talking about conjuration.
We're talking about the realm of mystery.
SINGER: ♪ Hambone, hambone, where you been?
♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Around the world and back again ♪ TATE: There's certain elements in the work, the use of animal spirits and plant spirits, and there's hybrid people, there's were-people.
SINGER: ♪ Papa's gonna buy me... ♪ TATE: But all of these speak to someone operating intentionally with the desire to render the fantastic.
So he's giving us a whole enchanted, magical realm.
The figures seem many times to be apparitions.
You know, just in terms of the way they float on the surface of the work.
SINGER: ♪ If that wiggly snake gets smote ♪ TATE: There are times when people have these implements.
So if we look at that picture, "Chasing Ghosts," that figure seems to have an axe.
Is that a ghost or is that a representation of the wife's lover?
(chuckles) The mystery prevails throughout.
SINGER: ♪ Around the world and I'm going again ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Now hey ♪ (clapping) ♪ Now hey ♪ ♪ Now hey ♪ ♪ ♪ (water splashing) SHANNON: One subject Bill Traylor drew more than once was, he told me, a construction they made by the river when he was young.
They would run out on it and dive into the river, come out and take a drink and return and dive in again.
(water splashing) NARRATOR 2: "Close to the time when he's 18, 19, "young fella feel like he's a man.
"I know I was feeling my man "getting up close to grown.
"Nature will teach you, "like it teaches a stallion to jump a fence.
"You ain't gonna hold down.
"The thing for a boy to do when he gets old enough "for his nature to teach him, "don't make a dog of himself.
"Now, I was always a fella "that taken well among the girls.
"All I had to do was present myself.
"I was a popular young man.
"The girls would cut buttonholes over me.
"It was the easiest thing I ever done in my life, tampering with women."
♪ ♪ While most of Bill Traylor's relatives seize the opportunity to farm on their own, Bill, living at home with his mother, worked for day wages as a field hand.
By 1870, Bill and his younger brother, Emet, moved out of their mother's house and into their own place next door, and then a year later, he married a neighbor, Elsy Dunklin.
NARRATOR 1: Years later, later, he was linked to another local girl, Laura Williams.
NARRATOR 2: Who ended up having a baby a few months after Elsy gave birth to their third child, Sally.
NARRATOR 1: Sally would change her name to Sarah.
NARRATOR 2: We don't know exactly what happened to Elsy, but we do know that Bill was left with their three small children, Pauline, George, and Sarah, to raise on his own.
NARRATOR 1: Four children.
Bill had also taken in Nellie as well.
No wonder there's so much tumult in Bill's farm drawings.
NARRATOR 2: Hm.
(harmonica playing) ♪ ♪ BAILEY: when I look at Traylor's work, I see this, like, freedom of expressing or seeing what's going on around him, but also being very lyrical about it.
♪ ♪ Well, when I see them, I see movement.
I see, I see, I feel, I feel jazz.
I feel one with time.
Um... And thinking about... ...their past steps.
(tapping) NARRATOR 1: "It is the lack of symmetry "that makes Negro dancing "so difficult for white dancers to learn.
"The abrupt and unexpected changes.
"The frequent changes of key "and time are evidences of this "quality in music.
"The dancing of the justly famous Bo Jangles and Snake Hips "are excellent examples.
"The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry "are paradoxical, but there they are.
"Both are present to a marked degree.
"There is always rhythm, "but it is the rhythm of segment.
"Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole "is assembled, it is lacking in symmetry, "but easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed "to the break in going from one part to another, "so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo.
(tapping continues) TATE: When I look at those figures of people feverishly dancing, the abstraction of form, and movement there and the fact that some characters are, you know, they're tippling back, that takes me right into the juke joints, you know, of the South, they're hearing it all, they're dancing to it all.
SMITH: There's this formal vitality, that's kind of irresistible.
There's a tremendous amount of body language in them and body motion.
You know, you don't have little movement marks around Traylor's figures, but you feel them.
I mean, Friday, Saturday night, the most important days in the world for a sharecropper community.
Let go, release.
Be yourself, be among friends.
The music is, is essential to that experience, to that desire.
It's inspired by a conjuration culture, but... ...so is Louis Armstrong.
(tapping concludes) ♪ ♪ NARRATOR 1: After a few years trying to raise a house full of children on his own, Bill remarried, not to his former lover, Laura Williams, but to another Dunklin girl, most probably Elsy's kin.
Laureene, better known as Larissa.
If, as it's thought, Larissa was Elsy's kin, she most likely knew all about Bill who, despite that, it was clear he knew how to farm with the best of them and who stuck by his kids, whatever the hardship.
♪ ♪ UMBERGER: Traylor has certain themes that come up time and again in his work.
Certain themes such as the House, which we think probably refers back to the farm days, since that wasn't the kind of structure that he was really living in in Montgomery.
He also depicted animals very frequently.
Snakes definitely turn up.
Cats.
Birds.
Plants, some kind of animal, um, figure.
UMBERGER: Sometimes you could tell that he was experimenting, maybe with an animal that he wasn't very familiar with, and he only did it once or twice.
Other times, particularly with the dogs, you can tell that he knew that animal.
Sometimes they're attacking.
Sometimes they're witnessing.
Sometimes they're in conflict with other animal spirits, they're both hunted and hunting.
POWELL: The silhouette, the shape, how he feels in the space and then the space itself.
He's staging scenes.
UMBERGER: He learned how to do that.
And I think that he also learned how to make those images speak on multiple fronts.
Say one thing to a Black audience that might be seeing them, say something different to a white audience that might be more critical of that message.
Yes, there is something that we can recognize.
But then there's this other thing, something that really works inside of the head, and gets you to think about power, to think about tension, to think about energy itself.
He's speaking to just the fear that had been inculcated within the Black community.
People didn't feel comfortable even letting white people know they even had a thought about anything.
The meta narratives of of confrontation, of collision, of the racial dynamic that they are living and experiencing as they stand and look at this artist creating this work in front of white people.
During his time, there must have been some horrific instances.
Certainly I know he saw and possibly experienced some, some pretty bad situations.
I see pain in a different place in his work.
I see past pain, I see...
I see it more like this is the... his work is the pill from the pain.
That's... how I see it.
♪ ♪ NARRATOR 1: Things started to pull together after Bill and Larissa got married.
Larissa adopted Bill's kids as her own.
Bill moved up from working for wages as a simple farm laborer to renting his own land from the white Traylors and farming it on his own.
And Bill knew what he was doing.
♪ ♪ SHANNON: While others were planting cash crops like cotton, Bill diversified.
He used to say, "You could have that building over there full of money, but you couldn't eat it."
NARRATOR 2: Traylor raised foodstuff as well as cotton and kept on raising animals of all kinds.
SINGER: ♪ You've got to get up, get out... ♪ So even though depression in hard times had hit most of Alabama, Bill kept the farm and his family above water, working hard and clearly drinking, which by his drawings looked like an endless source for celebration and despair.
MAN: When you hear the tone, it will be exactly... (tone chimes) ♪ ...Time to get a drink ♪ ♪ Just a little drink ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Any little drink ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Will do ♪ SHANNON: Bill said many times that drink ruined his life.
Drinking will get you in trouble.
Drinking will make you lose your wife.
Drinking will send you to the penitentiary.
He said what little sense he had, whiskey took away.
He knew drink from the inside.
He once said he drew some people with duck lips, you know, to show the tingle you get from that first drink.
NARRATOR 2: But even at their most inebriated, his drinkers still move with grace and a certain dignity.
Bill loved imperfection, anomalies, and making something remarkable from the abandoned, discarded, and flawed.
I see these images as kind of a translated freedom, a way of being your own person.
And whether that meant that you were free to do something important and powerful or you were free to mess up and not do the right thing, it was still a certain... certain personal freedom that was important to have.
SINGER: ♪ Join us in a drink ♪ ♪ Or two ♪ ♪ Or three ♪ ♪ Or four ♪ ♪ Or more.
♪ (tapping) UMBERGER: Traylor seemed to really prefer pieces of board that were found, that were worn.
TATE: Discarded cardboard, and boxes, and backs of posters.
Cast-off materials, whether they're industrial or from nature.
SMITH: Everything is used.
And it's completely parallel to the way he's using the cardboard.
You know, he's getting everything he can out of that.
UMBERGER: Tears and stains and marks, they kind of carried with them the story of the road they had traveled.
Probably the use of cardboard and stuff would be considered more conceptual today.
We call it recycling.
And he's just doing it.
SHANNON: He liked drawing on dirty boxes, I think because the smudges, crack, stains, and the irregular shapes of his boards generated visual activity that he responded to.
For example, he found a counter display card with staples in it where men's handkerchiefs had been attached.
Another window display card had a thin slot in it, and Bill drew a figure peeking into the slot.
And in "Brown House with Figures and Birds," the way the figures are pulled and tumbling back into the bulge at the left and the birds are sweeping up the right hurling edge of the board back into the center of the picture, one feels that had to be in response to the shape of the given space.
POWELL: He's 80.
He's, he's seen a lot in his life.
But, but I really feel that these are works that have a kind of an insistence.
I think that's why we like them so much.
That's why we're so moved by his work is that they don't have this kind of desire to teach us a story or a lesson.
What we're confronted with is what we see.
And there's such strength and such beauty and such poetry in, in what it is that we engage with.
It's more powerful than being taught.
I think it... the power lies in... self, knowing self.
Not being taught self.
♪ ♪ (person vocalizing) SHANNON: Bill said to me the reason he left the plantation was, as he put it, "My white folks died and my children scattered."
However congenial or genuine, the relation between the Black Traylors and Marion might or might not have been, there was clearly a personal bond there, And when Marion, who was in charge, got sick, his son, George Boyd Traylor took over.
It's said that he was tough on the laborers.
So, not just Bill and his family, but all the Black Traylors on the farm after three generations in one place up and left.
SINGER: ♪ Nothing but... ♪ NARRATOR 2: Bill wasn't just moving his family from one anonymous white-owned farm to another, Traylor was moving from land he knew intimately, land he was raised on, that, that he worked most of his life as his father had done before him.
For the first time in his life, Bill Traylor was without a home.
♪ ♪ Traylor and his family eventually settled 50 miles away where Bill rented land and continued farming.
While there's no information about the quality of the new land, or the terms of the new landlord, records make clear that the Traylor family kept growing.
By the time the Traylors set up in Montgomery County, there were nine children living under the same roof.
Four of them Bill had with Larissa, one possibly with Laura Williams, and another four outside children Bill apparently had with other women.
NARRATOR 1: However many other women Bill had or hadn't had, by 1910, after 20 years, Laura Williams is listed as his common law wife.
What became of Larissa is unclear.
♪ ♪ WOMAN: Say, honey.
MAN: Uh-huh?
WOMAN: Where did you stay last night?
MAN: Where, where did I stay last night?
WOMAN: You heard me.
MAN: Honey, y-you'd be surprised.
WOMAN: No, I won't be surprised.
You'd be surprised... UMBERGER: When we look at the relationships he depicts between men and women, we have to be careful about putting a contemporary overlay on what was the reality of his time and place, which was very much about shifting family structures and making do.
MAN: ♪ We've been married about one year ♪ WOMAN: That's too darn long.
MAN: ♪ But it seems like... ♪ UMBERGER: It's something that we can't really go back and understand and have to give a lot of latitude to the reality that survival was day to day.
And it happened both on practical fronts and emotional ones.
WOMAN: ♪ I'm a woman.
♪ SMITH: Traylor's subjects are very specific and local in a way, but part of their power is that they're...
I find them completely universal.
The ones that intrigue me the most are the arguments between couples, like you can just see some... a couple standing on the street and he knows exactly what's going on.
And he can, he can depict that.
WOMAN: ♪ Right and left.
♪ UMBERGER: When they're fighting, everybody is pointing in a different direction because they have their different opinions, And she's pointing that way, and he's pointing that way.
And they're just like... they are not on the same page.
WOMAN: We women can be anything that you men can be.
MAN (chuckles): ♪ But you'll never ♪ ♪ Be the father of a family ♪ WOMAN: ♪ Now I'm a woman ♪ MAN: ♪ Yes, and I'm a man ♪ BOTH: ♪ So you can't do that to me.
♪ ♪ ♪ NARRATOR 2: By the 1920s, the Traylors moved again in response to the worsening conditions-- physical as well as economic.
It's seems the rheumatism that would eventually cost him his leg had laid him low.
For the first time since the post-Civil War census began, Bill was no longer able to plow or plant, and his occupation was now listed as none.
Laura was no longer working either, and their sons, Willie and Clement, appeared to be supporting them until they also quit the land, first joining their sister, Nellie, in Birmingham, where young Willie-- said to be Bill's favorite-- married and started a family of his own.
All of Bill's children and Laura Williams had moved away.
Alone in his 70s, cut off from everything but memories, Bill Traylor headed to Montgomery sometime in 1927, '28.
MAN: ♪ Well I done got old ♪ ♪ Well I done got old ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ I can't do the things I used to do ♪ ♪ 'Cause I done got old.
♪ ♪ ♪ STAFFNEY (dramatized): When my grandfather lived for a time in a little shack on Beale Street in Montgomery, he worked as a shoemaker for a private family.
He drew with charcoal and hung his works for sale on the fence around his shack.
Us grandchildren would also bring him our shoes for repair.
When he was done with that, we'd sit and watch the trains, and sometimes he'd draw me.
And then, because of the pain in his legs, he couldn't work anymore.
NARRATOR 2: Unemployed and homeless, Bill had only one place to go-- uptown.
There he placed himself in what may have been the most central location in the city of Montgomery: Monroe Street.
ROBINSON: One of the things that that people talk about when you go to a New York City is that it's The City That Never Sleeps.
That's the way they talked about Monroe Street.
That there were always people on Monroe Street, that it was a hub for entertainment, the Pekin Theater, it was very prestigious.
It offered Black people in Montgomery an experience to go to the theater.
It has an orchestra pit.
It's a really top-rate theater.
And then, of course, the drugstores, which were really central.
Dean's Drug Store was communication hub also.
Everybody knows where it is.
People went to that drugstore to find out what was happening.
The types of materials that Bill Traylor would have found would have been consistent with Black businesses trying to reach the most, the most people.
And you could do that at these drugstores.
The Black business class had a vested interest in working with, and being seen as working with, and being responsive to the Black community.
So Traylor would have been... would have benefited from that type of largesse.
SHANNON: It seems like the whole neighborhood-- Black merchants and white-- took care of Bill.
The Jewish grocer next to where he sat gave him food.
They fed him and let him wash up in the back of the store.
The owner's son, (indistinct), used to bring him sandwiches when he'd been out there smoking his pipe and drawing late into the night.
And many of the local merchants had this thing going where they'd put up indigents overnight in their businesses and shops.
Bill slept in the coffin room of Ross-Clayton Funeral Home for so long, that was where the government would send his relief checks.
$15 a month, I think it was.
It seems like everyone in the neighborhood liked Bill.
NARRATOR 1: Not everyone.
For over a generation now, American Blacks were trying to unite and define themselves as people.
The key words being define themselves.
Urban Blacks, north and south, were on a crusade to get as far away as possible from the racist stereotype that Blacks, by definition, were shiftless, lazy, immoral, and dirty.
And here was Bill Traylor, sitting there as unapologetic as you please, representing everything the nascent Black middle class despise.
You can see it in the faces of the women who saw him as they passed by.
But sit there he did, re-imagining iconic symbols of white power and cultural supremacy alive in the built environment of Montgomery.
And what better monument to use over and again than Montgomery's Greek revival court square fountain topped with a statue of Hebe, the cup bearer to the gods and goddesses of eternal youth, and festooned with classical cherubs, and elegant, regal birds.
(record scratch) (lively jazz playing) (jazz continues) (music ends) (birds twittering) POWELL: What makes Bill Traylor key for a lot of people is his moniker of the primitive.
♪ ♪ During the Harlem Renaissance, we have academically trained artists who have gone to art schools and have studied in Paris.
But the only way that their works can be embraced by the critics is that if the critics see something that comes from the soil, that is vernacular, that is "primitive."
And many artists play with this idea who recognize the power and the potential of an aesthetic sensibility that is not from the academy, but comes from the blues, that comes from folk life.
SHANNON: During that time, a group of like-minded friends and artists rented a meeting place and called it the New South.
UMBERGER: They were definitely taking a cue from the Harlem Renaissance, looking at African American art and culture as this really powerful thing that should be celebrated and looked at and was valid in its own right.
SHANNON: It was the third floor space in the downtown building consisting of a few rooms originally used for cotton sampling.
It was here that we hung Bill Traylor's first show.
We showed maybe a hundred pieces, and on the cardboard cover of the catalog, we used a silkscreen reproduction of Bill's drawing "The Sea Cow."
The inside pages of brown wrapping paper contained a short essay and linoleum block prints of two more Traylor drawings.
RICHARD OOSTEROM: I never felt Charles Shannon spoke for Bill Traylor.
The only thing that I might say was speaking for Bill Traylor was the comment that they had put together the exhibition in the New South.
And that Bill Traylor didn't recognize his own work.
being hung on the wall.
I took it at the time as meaning now that it was formally presented, some of the life had been removed from the work.
Not that he didn't really recognize his own work.
It came up and went down within the span of a month.
But... people took photographs and documented a lot of the works that were made in... within that first year that we know he was working.
And so it provides a very valuable sort of lens into what he was doing at a very specific moment in time.
SHANNON: The newspaper wrote a little something, but nobody bought anything, and few people came.
So I decided to travel to New York to see if I could find someone to take care and protect Bill's work.
I carried a large group of Traylor drawings to New York to show to friends, one of whom directed me to a man employed at the MoMA.
The man was interested in the work.
Later, Alfred Barr and his staff were shown the drawings.
But, the truth is, no one was seeing the genius in Bill Traylor that I witnessed.
Without ever consulting me as to whether or not I wanted to sell the work, or if so, at what prices, I simply received a check with a letter telling me that Mr. Barr and staff had agreed to pay two dollars a piece for the larger drawings and one dollar for the smaller ones.
"Hope this meets your approval."
Taken aback, I returned the check, and demanded immediate return of my drawings.
The work remained in storage till the mid-'70s.
POWELL: A lot of Black folk stayed in their communities in the South.
Bill Traylor seems to be one of those people for whom Montgomery in Alabama was kind of his place, was his land, was his turf-- his turf, you know.
NARRATOR 2: During the war, the government discovered that Bill had family to care for him, and they threatened to cut off his relief money unless he got off the streets.
That's when Bill moved in with his daughter, Sarah Traylor Howard, and her husband.
SHANNON: I knew Bill had relatives up north in Detroit, and other places, but he never mentioned any family in Montgomery.
My name is Frank L. Harrison, Bill Traylor's great grandson.
My name is Antoinette Stephanie Beeks, and I am the daughter of Myrtha Lee Traylor Delks, and she is the granddaughter of Bill Traylor.
My name is Myrtha Delks.
My children call me Ma Dear.
Willie Traylor was my father.
When I was born, my father didn't think I was his, and they gave me up for adoption.
It doesn't hurt, but it, it just had something that happened.
I'm Nettie Jean Trayler Alford.
I'm the great-granddaughter of Bill Traylor.
My father was the grandson of Bill Traylor.
Clemmie Traylor was my father.
Starlene Trayler Williams.
I am the great-granddaughter of Bill Traylor.
In Philadelphia as a young boy, you know, being a boy, my grandmother would threaten me with putting me in what she called the owl closet.
In that closet was Bill Traylor's artwork.
They had it up on a top shelf.
I never saw an owl, a picture, a painting of an owl.
But I do remember a pig.
Eight years old, having to look up, you know, already in a frame of mind.
(laughing): I don't really want to go in here, so you know.
(laughing) Well, I'm... 69, but I was a young kid.
But I remember a lot of, you know, times we was over there.
And so I used to draw on the back of his pictures playing tic-tac-toe.
I didn't know, you know, that they were going to be famous paintings.
We thought it was scratch paper.
Bill Traylor, his art, his life.
When I was 17, I said I was going to go and find my family in Montgomery.
I found out that my grandfather was still alive and that was Bill Traylor.
Met him for the first time, he was wearing a hat.
He was sitting out there all day, I remember, there in Aunt Sarah's backyard.
That's the way I met him.
ANTOINETTE: My mother said that when she would go down to our niece's house, several of his drawings would be tacked on the wall with a nail.
And she said she asked him several times, "You know, what child drew these pictures?
(laughing): Whose... what kid?"
And she said...
He got very, very, very, very upset with her, and said, "Look, those were my pictures my daddy drew."
NARRATOR 2: Traylor moved to live with his daughter, Sarah Traylor Howard.
SHANNON: Soon after I came back from the war, I went to visit him on Bragg Street, where I found him sitting under a big tree in the backyard.
He had drawing materials beside him, but nothing much was happening.
MARGARET (dramatized): I remember when they took his leg off.
He cried every day.
When his leg was healed, he went back to his drawing board.
He drew all kinds of animals and men and such.
♪ ♪ SHANNON: I didn't save any of the work he did after he returned from up north.
Clearly, Traylor's best work was behind him.
NARRATOR 2: It's a shame, but so much of Bill Traylor's work is gone.
Even when folks saw his drawings and tried to save them, even then, much of it was lost.
Probably because of the fragility of the materials Bill liked to work with.
Makes what we do have so precious, especially as that old world dies away.
UMBERGER: When we think about the many, many mules and horses that Traylor drew, I return time and time again thinking about one where his remark about the picture was turned him out in the pasture to die.
I think it would be overly simplistic to... understand that simply as a mule and not as a greater metaphor for something.
He is chasing ghosts.
He's trying to quantify that life and give meaning to it and also look ahead at what's coming and be celebratory of that and also understand that he won't be a part of it.
"It's because you are young.
"You do not understand.
"But we are old as the jungle trees "that bloomed forever.
"Old as the forgotten rivers that flowed into the earth.
"Surely we know what you do not know.
"Joy of living.
"Useless of things.
"You are too young to understand yet.
"Oh, build another skyscraper touching the stars.
"We sit with our backs against the tree "and watch skyscrapers tumble and stars forget.
"Solomon built a temple and it must have fallen down.
"It isn't here now.
"We know some things, being old, you do not understand."
SHANNON: I still had the letter he had someone write to me.
"Dear sir, I am asking you to come to the Fraternal Hospital "42 Dorsey Street, Montgomery.
"I want to see you at once.
Yours truly, Bill Traylor."
The place was a large two-story house with a wide hall down the middle, rooms off to each side.
I went down the hall and it was the last room on the left.
Very big room, like a ward with cots lined up.
There must have been a dozen other people in the room.
It was an awful place.
Bill could hardly talk, and I remember kneeling down beside him, and he could barely speak.
I can't even remember now what was said.
That was the last time I saw him.
(bell tolling) NARRATOR 2: He died at Oak Street Hospital.
He was buried in an unmarked grave near where his daughter Sarah would eventually be buried.
In 1966, when Easter died in Detroit, the family found a trove of drawings Bill had done up there.
Sarah immediately went up and brought all the work back with her.
When Sarah died in 1974, no one claimed any of her possessions, and the realtor threw all of her belongings-- including all of Traylor's work-- into the trash.
HARRISON: The only time that I can remember vividly actually coming to Montgomery was for the burial of my great grandfather, Bill Traylor.
My real reco... you know, remembrance is physically standing at the gravesite with my grandmother and other people.
And, uh... (sniffles) (birds twittering) I would have been right in here.
Big Ma would have been about here.
And it was comical in a sense, but very frightening, you know, because she... she lunged toward it.
Yeah... (voiceover): She was very emotional.
Yeah.
Well, she just wanted to go with him.
And that scared me.
(voiceover): A long time ago, I remember standing here.
(laughing) There's no question.
(birds chirping, geese honking) Wow.
MAN: ♪ I don't mind waiting ♪ ♪ I don't mind waiting ♪ UMBERGER: Bill Traylor came to artmaking on his own, and he found his creative voice without guidance.
His existence was divided almost equally between two centuries.
The family he was born into was enslaved, and his life thereafter spanned multiple worlds.
The headstone that will now mark the place in which his body was laid to rest is long overdue, but from here forward, will honor him as an important part of both Alabamian and American history.
(applause) (man continues singing, indistinct chatter) And so today we see that the character, Mr. Traylor, though dead so many, many years, still lives on.
It reminds me of what Henry Longfellow said, "That when you live this life, you in fact leave footprints on the sand of time."
One day it will be you.
What footprints will you have left?
(footsteps) (man singing indistinctly) (footsteps continue, no dialogue) NARRATOR 1: "And all along there was Old John De Conquer, "fighting a mighty battle without outside showing force "and winning his war from within.
"Really winning.
Well, he was winning "with the soul of the Black man whole and free, making a way out of no way."
SINGER: ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ NARRATOR 2: Bill Traylor wasn't just a chronicler of some distant time and place.
He was bearing witness to a community in an ever-changing now.
And in doing so, teaching the future: persevere, rejoice, endure, remember.
He's, he's getting his reward.
Now, now, now, now.
And, and, and I believe that he... that he knows it.
He still says what he says the way he says it.
He's like the person who walked in off the street and made a nod at you, and walked away.
SINGER: ♪ Oh, we have a lot of freedom ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, we have a lot of freedom ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, we have a lot of freedom ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, God gave to us ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, God gave to us ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, God gave to us ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, all in the church ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, all in the church ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, all in the church ♪ ♪ We're gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, this little light of mine ♪ ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Oh, this little light of mine.
♪ ANNOUNCER: Funding for Afropop: The Ultimate Cultural Exchange is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the MacArthur Foundation.
♪ ♪
