won’t you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

from Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me”

In the 1930s and 1940s, the world was responding to the aftermath of the Great Depression, the uneven development of capitalism, and the rise of authoritarian regimes. In Spain, the battle between the Republicans verses the Nationalists ended in the defeat of the former and the rise of the authoritarian, Franco. Mussolini’s black shirts kept tabs on the comings and goings of dissidents in Italy while, in Germany, brown shirts cleared streets, businesses, and housing of Jews, gays, blacks, and Jehovah Witnesses.

The grotesque rhetoric of pompous-sounding dictators raving and stirring fear in the masses justified the theft of resources to raise armies and to build prison encampments. The object of fear, the unwanted and despised, met their fate behind prison walls, or within concentration camps where starvation or disease eliminated thousands if not millions in the crematoria or by the forced inhaling of Zyklon B.

World War II begins on September 1939. More chaos and bloodshed.

In the US, more refugees and immigrants from the hellhole that is Europe are arriving and at some point during the jostling for living space and employment, the newest ones settle down and become American.

Becoming an American during the 1930s and 1940s is significant in that the US practice legalized segregation as African Africans were effectively disenfranchised citizens—living marginally but central, nonetheless to the ways the supposedly “original” founders of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity in the New World distinguished themselves from the pale pigmentation of the newly arrived from Europe. Jim Crow spread from New Orleans where the pale pigmentation, that is, blacks and whites co-mingling in a slightly freer atmosphere, disturbed brethren Southerners, still wheeling from the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865.

In 1891, four years after Florence Price is born, in Little Rock, the legislators of her home state of Arkansas vote to remove the statue of George Washington and replace it with that of Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy.

By 1931, Price, seated at her piano, is composing. Classical music. In fact, she already has sketched four symphonies. Having fled a violent Southern landscape and an abusive husband, Price settles down in Chicago to raise her daughters, Florence Louise and Edith, teach, and compose classical music.

By 1943, in a letter to composer and conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Price express frustration at the way this culture “defines” composers. “White, male, and dead,” she writes. It’s difficult, she adds, to “make headway.”

But in maelstrom of chaos and violence, Florence doesn’t cave in.

As I listen to Price’s music, I can only imagine her in an oppressive atmosphere, creating and perhaps resigning to the possibility that her music is for listeners yet to come.

It’s 2009 and Vicky and Darrell Gatwood, renovating an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, find a “pile of musical manuscripts, books, personal papers, and other documents.” As the New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes, all this material luckily was found in a part of the house that remained dry.

Among the material, a name continued to appear again and again: Florence Price.

Through their own research, the Gatwoods discover that Price was a “moderately well-known composer” who, in Chicago, died in 1953. An archivist at the University of Arkansas where Price’s papers were already filed away, informed the couple that they had found Price’s Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2, (1952), along with dozens of other scores.

As for the “dilapidated” house, it had once been owned by Florence Price—the first black woman in the US to be recognized for her classical compositions.

In the pile of manuscripts were Symphonies Nos. 1, 3, and 4, along with the unfinished Symphony No. 2. At the premiere of Price’s Symphony No. 1, George Gershwin is in the audience, and that premiere takes place at the World’s Fair, in 1933. This symphony by an African American woman is “without precedent” at the time. In addition, the find discovers some 100 songs, including orchestral suites, choral pieces and several musical poems set to her music in collaboration with the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Some 300 completed works this woman produced in her lifetime!

I love the quiet but all-encompassing, historical sweep of “Ethiopia’s Shadow in America” (1932) and “Mississippi Suite” (1934). There in her music is a musical narrative of world history that centers on the transporting of black people, forcefully, to the New World. As an African American woman, I hear in these short pieces what American culture would rather forget and leave rotting in that house in Illinois.

So much of American culture pivots around the devaluation of the human potential to rise above the destructive impulse—one individual at a time.

After Jefferson Davis rides again at the state capital and anywhere his admires cared to have him contradict reality and appear triumph to terrorize African Americans, the income of many African Americans hit bottom—opportunities to work and create shriveled. Many lost their homes. What Africans Americans accomplished during the Reconstruction era vanished.

Florence’s father, a dentist, lost his paying, that is, white patients, as Ross notes. Demanding money for services from economically poor blacks wasn’t an option. In that home, the young Florence would have sat at her parent’s table while they entertained Frederick Douglass. The adult Florence Price will correspond with W.E.B. Du Bois.

In the meantime, the 14-year old Florence, studying the piano under her musically talented mother, graduates from high school in a state where she’s not allowed to pursue her passion or a livelihood in music, is forced to apply to a conservatory in the north.

Becoming only one of two African Americans at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Florence is a trailblazer as she is one whose personal experience reflects the larger culture’s practice of exclusion and marginalization of black life. Nevertheless, Price keeps working as if the world were normal, democratic. Humane. Making headway as if her work mattered.

And it then and still does today.

**

In her essay, “Looking for Zora,” writer Alice Walker, some years after locating the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston’s grave, recalls arriving in Eatonville, Florida on August 15, 1973 to begin her search for Zora.

Eatonville, writes Walker, the birthplace of Hurston, “has lived a long time in my imagination that I can hardly believe it will be found existing in its own right.” When Walker lands and meets up with her companion in the search for Zora, the two stop in front, Walker writes, two signs. One sign read, EATONVILLE POST OFFICE. The other sign read, EATONVILLE CITY HALL.

Walker writes of how difficult it is, in the essay at least, to convey to the reader what it was like to find the place Zora had put on the map. Zora lived here!

I wondered if anyone recalled Florence Price composing, let alone, living in her summer home in St. Anne, Illinois. Had anyone?

At the Eatonville City Hall, standing before a young clerk, Walker asks, “‘Tell me something… Do the schools teach Zora’s books here?’”

No, the woman answers. She herself read some of Zora’s works, but she adds, “‘I don’t think most people know anything about Zora Neale Hurston, or know about any of the great things she did.’”

Walker asks an important question. It’s not just the “discovery” of works by African American women or their weed-covered grave sites, but also black women’s sacrifices to be creative, in literature, music, science, for example—the lived experiences of these women working despite authoritarian regimes—should become a part of Western culture’s collective memory. The Eurocentric/White American agenda, with a sprinkling of black, Latina, Indigenous women’s narratives, garnering progressive-looking displays of books and music and film during black or Hispanic history months, then forgotten, is no more progressive or democratic than the “white, male, and dead” culture Price experienced during her lifetime.

Hurston lived in poverty. Possibly suffered from malnutrition. But no one knew that the woman in living in a “‘block’” house was Zora Neale Hurston who depicted African American women as more than mules of the world.

Historical oppression—such as the disenfranchisement of African Americans—lingers long after the legislation ended legalized segregation. What has been repressed, lost, abandoned must be found and, in the case of black contributions to the history and the culture of this nation, inculcated into the knowledge well reflecting a more democratic union from which to understand ourselves and all that we, as a nation, had to overcome.

There’s the shock of white America when informed about the cruelties of racial segregation in American culture, cruelties inflicted as-matter-of-fact, beyond signs reading “Whites Only.” There’s the shock that Florence Price managed to produce creatively in a segregated and all-male genre (even today!), despite the insistence (even today!) that African Americans are inferior. There’s the shock that is at best disingenuous in that today, the miseducation of younger generations of Americans into believing black women are a recent phenomena, excelling only in what’s valued as a commodity for the capitalist mindset.

Like Zora Neale Hurston, her contemporary, Florence Price carved her own path.

**

Florence lives! She lived “a life of quiet tenacity and resistance,” writes Er-Gene Kahng. But Price didn’t have any models to follow; yet her work inspires women of color, including Kahng, violinist and professor at the University of Arkansas has performed and recorded many of Price’s works, including the Violin Concerto Nos. 1 and 2. Samantha Ege, pianist, studies and performs Price’s compositions for the piano. Price’s Piano Sonata in E Minor has been performed by Michelle Cann, and Yolanda Rhodes sings “Night” with Deanne Tucker at the piano.

What about those symphonies?

In a 2018 New York Times article, “Welcoming a Black Female Composer Into the Canon,” the Micaela Baranello asks the same question, that is, What orchestras will perform Price’s symphonies? Her orchestral suites? Along with her recordings of Price’s Violin Concerto Nos. 1 and 2, Kahng has performed Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Arkansas Philharmonic. But there are hundreds of works. In a letter to another conductor, Price states that she has accumulated “hundreds of unpublished and unsubmitted manuscripts.” She worked right up to her death.

Prices’s legacy, writes Baranello, “incompletely preserved,” has been “reconstructed piece by piece.” Yet, as late as 2017, a group of local musicians challenge the Boston Symphony “to diversify their programming.” And the orchestra responds in the negative. Or as I would note, the Boston Symphony responds to the supply and demand of predominately white, older, and affluent audiences.

We can’t! As the Boston Symphony, we must respond to what our audiences prefer to hear, “specifically the universal masterworks composed between 1600 and the mid-1900.”

In other words, “white, male, and dead” composers!

 But, in the 21st Century, we are listening.

For more information and to hear a sampling of Florence Price’s amazing work, go to: wqxr.org