Original subtitles

I'm the great-granddaughter of Bill Traylor.

My father was the grandson of Bill Traylor.

Clement Traylor was my father.

That's how I got to know Bill Traylor was somebody.

You know, really, really somebody.

Traylor's an inspired visualist.

That's the only way you arrive at work that's that distinct,

that esoteric,

that visually elegant and refined.

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 is 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.

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.

The sign of High John de Conquer

was a laugh,

and his singing-symbol was a drum beat.

No parading drug-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.

Local art historian Miriam Fowler documents

that Traylor got his blue poster paint

from a white teenage sign painter.

That was Jay Leavell,

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.

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 sketch pad.

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

on 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.

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.

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.

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.

Rats, cups, shoes, all arranged neatly in rows.

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.

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.

Shannon saw the brilliance of composition,

of textural choices.

And I think he was bowled over

by the fact that Traylor just made the work,

he didn't think the work.

He was enamored with it.

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 kind of

an academic approach and tradition.

And Bill Traylor's work is some ways

the antithesis of that.

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.

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 inside of his head.

I always felt like my studio was church,

you know.

I have all my books.

I have my Bill Traylor books,

and I read and I try to go back, um,

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,

'cause I get a better sense.

I mean, it's kind of like

I want to go back to all those past experiences.

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.

Throw me anywhere, Lord

In that ol' field

Throw me anywhere...

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 Benton, 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.

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.

February 25th, 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 named Bill and wife Sally

with their children and with their future increase,

be kept together...

And when he died in 1850,

that's the way it happened.

People from 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 developed 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 environment of slavery.

It's not surprising then

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 10,

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.

It was, in fact, Union troops who brought the chaos of war

into young Bill's life.

In the final days of the Confederacy,

Union General James H. Wilson staged

the largest cavalry raid of the war,

in a final push to break the South.

Some of the stragglers came by the Traylor place.

They walked through his house

and took the meat from the smokehouse.

They burned his cotton gin and 100 bales of cotton.

As one story has it,

when the Yankees rode through the Benton plantation,

Bill brought his slave owner's young son Marion with him

when he hid out in the woods.

The orders were to ride as quickly

to shut down the munitions work at Selma,

not to liberate the slaves.

Despite efforts to dissuade them,

Negroes still flocked after Wilson's horsemen.

The Seventy-Second Indiana

was trailed by a large group of "contrabands":

There were Negro men, women, and children on horseback,

ass-back, mule-back, cow-back;

in carts, wagons, wheel barrows,

and every other way you could think.

They seemed to be perfectly happy,

thinking no doubt that the year of jubilee had come.

The soldiers tell us after the war

that we get food, clothes,

and wages from our masters 'fore we leave,

but there was very, very few that ever got anything.

Old master says he's not going to pay us anything.

'Course his money was no good

but he wasn't going to pay us it if it had been...

Them was bad times, yeah, them was bad times.

I know folks think the book tells the truth

but they sure don't.

Us niggers had to take it all.

Then, after the war was over, we was afraid to move.

Just like terrapins or turtles after emancipation.

Just stick our heads out and see how the land lay.

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 continued 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.

Post-Civil War,

the blues emerges as a form of entertainment

on the plantations.

Those troubadours are kind of moving in between stations,

between plantations.

Often people would make a reference to Yves Klein

because I use a certain blue.

And it was just 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.

I'm gon' tell ya what the blues is really all about.

You got to participate in the blues,

sing the blues,

dance the blues,

play the blues,

and this will keep the blues offa you.

So now, if you don't want to participate in the blues,

then the blues gon' be on you,

so this will help get the blues offa you.

'Cause if you ain't, you goin' around every day

with the blues, sad, feelin' low,

look like nothing goin' your way.

But you start to howl you some blues,

and man, you can feel them blues

just gettin' in the wind,

gettin' the blues offa you.

So now, that's the way I get the blues offa me,

keep the blues off me.

'Cause, 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 and whatnot, yeah.

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.

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 can talk about any artists

who are working in this combination

of from memory and from life.

I think the two were very closely knit for him.

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 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.

Well, I mean, the iconography tells you

he's the conjure man of the work.

I mean, these are all a part

of the Black Southern storytelling tradition

and the Native American tradition

that it kind of formed a syncretism with as well.

The people who are 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.

And anybody who's spent time

with Robert Farris Thompson's work knows the connection

between the way it was done in Africa for thousands of years

and then the way it reasserted itself

in the Americas in the 19th and 20th Century.

If we're talking about hoodoo,

if we're talking about conjuration,

we're talking about the realm of mystery.

Hambone, hambone, where you been?

Round the world and back again

There are certain elements in the work,

the use of animal spirits and plant spirits

and there's hybrid people,

there's were-people,

but all 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.

If that wiggly snake gets smote

There are times when people have these implements.

We look at the picture of Chasing Ghosts

and that figure seems to have an axe.

Is that a ghost or is that a representation

of the wife's lover?

The mystery prevails throughout.

Around the world and I'm going again

Now ham

Now ham

Now ham

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.

Close to the time when he's 18, 19,

young fellow feel like he's a man.

I know I was feelin' my man, gettin' up close to grown.

Nature will teach you like it teaches a stallion

to jump a fence; you ain't goin' to 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 fellow

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,

tamperin' with women.

While most of Bill Traylor's relatives

seized the opportunity to farm on their own,

Bill, living at home with his mother,

worked for day wages as a field hand.

By 18 7 0, Bill and his younger brother, Emmitt,

moved out of their mother's house

and into their own place next door.

And then, a year later,

he married a neighbor, Elsey Dunklin.

Years later, he was linked to another local girl,

- Laura Williams. - Who ended up having a baby

a few months after Elsey gave birth

to their third child, Sally.

Sally would change her name to Sarah.

We don't know exactly what happened to Elsey,

but we do know that Bill was left

with their three small children Pauline, George, and Sarah,

to raise on his own.

Four children.

Bill had also taken in Nellie as well.

No wonder there's so much tumult

in Bill's farm drawings.

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 f... I feel...

I feel jazz, I feel one with time

and thinking about their past steps.

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

Bojangles 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.

When I look at those figures

of people feverishly dancing,

the abstraction of form and movement there,

and the fact that some characters are tippling back.

That takes me right into the juke joints of the South.

They're hearing it all, they're dancing to it all.

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

were the most important days in the world

for a sharecropper community.

Let go, release, be yourself, be among friends.

The music is essential to that experience,

to that desire.

It's inspired by conjuration culture,

but so is Louis Armstrong.

After a few years trying to raise

a houseful of children on his own, Bill remarried.

Not to his former lover, Laura Williams,

but to another Dunklin girl,

most probably Elsey's kin Laurine,

better known as Lorisa.

If, as it's thought, Lorisa was Elsey'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.

So, on August 23, 1891,

during a lull in the planting season,

Bill and Lorisa took a wagon 40 miles down and back

to the Hayneville courthouse

in the heart of what was once

one of the nastiest places in Alabama,

Lowndes County, and got married.

Things had always been bad around Hayneville,

but in the last few years they'd gotten even worse.

In March, 1888, there'd been a shootout

between some white drunk named Gresham

and a Black field hand, Theo Calloway.

Now, Theo was one of the Sandy Ridge Calloways

that might well have been kin to the Benton Calloways.

Related or not, everyone in Lowndes knew the story.

Most everyone in the country

heard about how Theo was arrested

and how the town sheriff accidentally let 200

of Gresham's closest friends have the jailhouse keys.

Theo Calloway was lynched.

His body was used for target practice

and left hanging for two days

in front of the Hayneville Courthouse.

His parents had to ask permission

to cut down the body.

Local Blacks fought back, troops were called out,

and over the next ten years,

Bloody Lowndes earned its nickname ten times over.

Armed skirmishes and armed retaliation

between Blacks and whites became a way of life,

until Black church leaders called on Booker T. Washington

to step in,

saying that if God wasn't answering their prayers,

maybe Mr. Washington would.

And then the story took

an unexpected turn for the better.

Sometimes that happens.

So Booker T. Washington travels to Lowndes

and calls on N.J. Bell,

the richest landlord in the area.

And by the end of their little meeting,

Bell had donated ten acres to the Black community

to build their first school in Lowndes.

It appears that not only was "the Wizard of Tuskegee"

a persuasive force of righteousness,

but Bell apparently so disliked his boorish neighbors,

giving the land for a Black school

was a great act of spite.

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 figure.

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.

Well, sometimes they're attacking,

sometimes they're witnessing.

Sometimes they're in conflict with other animal spirits,

they're both hunted and hunting.

The silhouette, the shape,

how he fills in the space, and then the space itself.

He's staging scenes.

He learned how to do that.

And I think that he that 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.

These are things that you look at,

and you say, "yeah, that's a dog fight."

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 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 pill...

His work is the pill from the pain.

That's how I see it.

Things started to pull together

after Bill and Lorisa got married.

Lorisa 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.

Now there are different kinds of tenant farming.

If you didn't own your own horse or mule or tools,

you could rent them on credit from the landlord,

which often led to a debt

and almost slave-like obligations.

If, on the other hand,

you didn't have to borrow the means of your livelihood,

you could grow whatever you wanted on the land,

and farm it pretty much as your own boss,

if you knew what you were doing.

And Bill knew what he was doing.

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."

Traylor raised foodstuff as well as cotton,

and kept on raising animals of all kinds.

You've got to get up, get out, go on

So even though depression and 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.

When you hear the tone, it will be exactly...

Time to get a drink

Just a little drink

Any little drink

Will do

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.

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 imageries 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.

Join us in a drink

Or two

Or three

Or four

Or more

Traylor seemed to really prefer

pieces of board that were found, that were worn.

Discarded cardboard and boxes

and backs of posters and castoff materials,

whether they're industrial or from nature.

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.

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.

He liked drawing on dirty boxes,

I think because the smudges cracks, 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 a given space.

With Traylor in particular,

the mystery really is,

just how did that come out so quickly,

so clearly?

And you feel like it was in him for years.

He's 80, he's seen a lot in his life.

But I really feel that these are works

that have a kind of 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 what it is that we engage with.

It's more powerful than being taught.

I think the power lies in self... knowing self,

not being taught self.

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.

Nothin' but peace in that...

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 he'd 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 Lorisa,

one possibly with Laura Williams,

and another four outside children

Bill apparently had with other women.

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 Lorisa is unclear.

Say, honey

Where did you stay at last night?

Where... where did I stay last night?

You heard me

Honey, you'd be surprised

No, I won't be surprised

You'd be surprised...

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.

We've been married 'bout one year

That's too durn long

But it seemed like heavenly

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.

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 just see a couple standing on the street

and he knows exactly what's going on

and he can depict that.

When they're fighting,

everybody's pointing in a different direction,

because they have their different opinions,

and she's pointing that way and he's pointing that way.

They are just like... They are not on the same page.

We women can be anything that you men can be

Yeah, but you'll never be the father of a family

- Now, I'm a woman - Yes, and I'm a man

- So you can't do that to me - So you can't do that to me

Hey, hey, boll weevil

By the time Traylor and his family

started farming in Kendell, Montgomery County,

the hard times that plagued the South got even worse.

The boll weevil infestation decimates

the cotton industry for several years.

Then there are other places around the world

that can pick up that slack.

And so you see Black people

leaving the rural area,

not just because of rural violence and segregation,

but also because of mechanization

and lower demand

and the lower prices relative to cotton.

By the 1920s, the Traylors moved again in response

to the worsening conditions, physical as well as economic.

It 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.

That is until 1928 when he was brutally shot down by police.

My grandfather Bill Traylor went to Birmingham

to identify the body.

He felt unending sadness at the loss of Willie.

Whether they knew it at the time,

Bill Traylor and his family were enacting

one of the central rituals of African American life

in the early 20th century.

Squeezed out and yet locked in by a Southern world

that both reviled and needed them,

Blacks were leaving the rural South for cities,

mostly in the North, where jobs were more plentiful.

By the time of Willie's death,

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 192 7-'28.

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

When my grandfather lived for a time

in a little shack on Bell 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.

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.

One of the things that people talk about

when you go to New York City, it's a city that never sleeps.

That's the way they talked about Monroe Street,

that there were always people on Monroe Street.

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 drug stores,

which were really central.

Dean's Drug Store was a communication hub also.

Everybody knows where it is.

People went to that drug store 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 people,

and you could do that at these drug stores.

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 benefitted from that type of largesse.

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 Nace used to bring him sandwiches

when he'd be 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.

Fifteen dollars a month, I think it was.

It seems like everyone in the neighborhood liked Bill.

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 despised.

You can see it in the faces of the women who saw him

as they passed by.

But sit there he did, reimagining 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 cupbearer to the gods and goddesses of eternal youth,

and festooned with classical cherubs

and elegant regal birds.

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.

During that time,

a group of like-minded friends and artists

rented a meeting place and called it The New South.

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.

It was a third-floor space in a downtown building

consisting of a few rooms

originally used for cotton sampling.

I t was here that we hung Bill Traylor's first show.

We showed maybe a hundred pieces,

and on the cardboard cover of the catalogue,

we used a silk-screen 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.

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 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.

A 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.

Before I left on my trip to New York in 1941,

we took up a collection so Bill could get off the street

and visit family.

He headed north to visit his daughter Easter

in the Black Bottom section of Detroit.

Eighty-six years old

and Bill Traylor had spent his whole life

in a 40-mile radius of Montgomery.

He was now joining the migration

that he had resisted for a lifetime.

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

$2 a piece for the larger drawings

and $1 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.

I didn't get any sense that Shannon

was upset by the dollars,

it was that he had brought the work in for review,

and rather than getting a review, he was getting money.

When I got back to Montgomery,

I found that Bill had returned also.

I never thought I'd see him again,

but there he was in his usual spot.

Said he hated the trip.

The bus driver wouldn't stop to let him use the bathroom.

And then, the war came.

I was drafted in the summer of '42 and duty called.

Bill left Montgomery at the same time

and went north to visit family.

As he had before, Traylor soon returned to Montgomery.

And when Shannon went into the service,

his wife Blanche went to buy pictures from Traylor.

Meanwhile the war brought

the defense industry to Montgomery.

The face and skyline of the city changed.

Charles Shannon was back in New York,

where he spent the final years of the war

as a picture editor for the Army Information Division.

He returned to Montgomery for good.

And in 1946, after four years, Shannon sees Traylor again,

but they do not stay in touch.

Now back in Montgomery for good,

Traylor undergoes surgery a second time,

to amputate his left leg.

A lot of Black folk didn't leave.

A lot of Black folk stayed

in their communities, in the South.

Bill Traylor seems to be one of those people

for whom Montgomery and Alabama was kind of his place,

was his land, was his turf, you know.

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.

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 Staffney 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 Muhdear.

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's just 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.

Clement 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 painting of an owl,

but I do remember a pig.

Eight years old, having to look up,

already in a frame of mind,

I don't really want to go in here.

So you know...

Well, I'm... 69.

But I was a young kid, but I remember,

a lot of times we were over there,

and I used to draw on the back of his pictures,

playing tic tac toe.

I didn't know that they were going to be famous paintings.

We thought it was scratch paper.

This is quite nice because you see his use of the brush here.

The purchasing of images by Blanche left Shannon

with a large collection of Bill Traylor's work.

I imagine...

In 1992, at a Traylor family reunion,

his relatives, many hearing about Bill for the first time,

showed an interest in owning some of the work.

This led to a lawsuit and eventually a settlement

was made to provide drawings to the family.

Bill Traylor: His Art, His Life.

When I was 1 7, I decided I was gonna go

and find my family in Montgomery.

I found out that my grandfather was still alive

and that was Bill Traylor.

I met him for the first time, he was wearing a hat.

He was sitting out there all day,

and he was in Aunt Sarah's backyard.

That's the way I met him.

My mother said that when she would go to Aunt Easter's house,

several of his drawings would be tacked on the wall with a nail.

And she said she asked her several times,

"What child drew these pictures? What kid?"

And she said Aunt Easter got very, very, very upset

with her and said, "Look, those are the pictures my daddy drew."

I was working for the IRS at the Detroit computing center.

And a co-worker brought a newspaper clipping in

and she asked me, "Well, Nettie,"

by my last name being Trayler,

even though we spell ours with the "e"

as opposed to the "o,"

"Are you any relation to this guy?"

So she made a photocopy

and gave it to me and I took it home.

Well, Uncle Bubba was living in the house

with my mother and my father and us,

and I asked him, I said,

"Uncle Bubba, do you know who this man is?

Everybody's asking about him."

He said, "Yeah, that was my daddy."

And that was all he said.

Bill didn't stay with Sarah long

before he headed up north a third and final time,

back to Easter's boarding house.

He visited children in Detroit, Chicago,

New York, Philadelphia,

and Washington D.C. during these years.

After losing a foot and then his leg to gangrene,

Traylor moved back to Montgomery

to live once again with his daughter,

Sarah Traylor Howard.

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.

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.

I didn't save any of the work he did

after he returned from up north.

Clearly, Traylor's best work was behind him.

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.

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.

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.

I still have 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,

a 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.

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.

A few days later I got a letter from Sarah

saying that Bill had died and would I please pay her

the $25 I was holding for Bill

from a drawing of his I sold to a man in Chicago.

But Bill hadn't died.

He lived on another two years.

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.

The only time that I can remember,

vividly, actually coming to Montgomery,

was for the burial

of my great-grandfather Bill Traylor.

I vaguely remember that the grave-site,

there were no graves behind me.

It would be like here, here,

it would have been on the edge.

Certainly there was nothing beside it.

My real remembrance

is physically standing at the grave-site

with my grandmother and other people.

And...

I would have been right in here.

Big Ma would have been about here.

And it was comical in a sense,

but very frightening,

because she lunged toward it.

Yeah.

She was very emotional.

Yeah.

Well, she just wanted to go with him.

She was very frightened.

And it frightened me because what she said is,

"Papa, I want to go."

And that scared me.

Long time ago, I remember standing here.

There's no question.

Wow.

After Bill Traylor passed,

and before my grandmother Lillian died,

it's something that she had just said,

"Buddy, you know this was your great-grandfather's.

Why don't you keep it?"

And I said, "Big Ma, what is this?"

And she said, "Well, it's a pipe holder."

And I said, "A pipe holder?"

I didn't smoke, you know, so I didn't realize.

I've had it for decades

and it's, you know,

the same patina is in there.

You know.

He's pretty cute.

I'd like to have his paint brushes, you know.

I'd like to have his boots.

You know, yeah, yeah.

But this I'll keep in the family.

Yeah, yeah, this is great.

I don't mind waiting

I don't mind waiting

Bill Traylor came to art-making on his own

and he found his creative voice without guidance.

On you, Lord

His existence was divided almost equally between two centuries.

The family he was born into was enslaved,

and his life thereafter spanned multiple worlds:

Black and white, rural and urban,

old and new, as well as the crucibles

that indelibly shaped America.

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.

It is not an overstatement to say

that Bill Traylor was an American original

and that his body of artwork that he left behind

is an American treasure.

In honor of Bill Traylor,

and the gift he used to share invaluable insights

of his life experiences,

do hereby proclaim March 2 7, 2018

as Bill Traylor Day in Montgomery, Alabama.

How great is our God

Sing with me, how great is our God

All will see how great

What a momentous moment.

How great is our God

God's been good,

that those who once picked cotton

were able to pick a president.

What a befitting moment for us to be here today,

to celebrate one who's dead,

but yet to celebrate his works.

Let everybody sing

And so today, we see that the character of 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.

Mr. Traylor today has left a footprint.

I want to encourage all of us, because one day,

one day, it will be you.

What footprints will you have left?

This little light of mine

I'm gonna let it shine

This little light of mine

I'm gonna let it shine

This little light of mine

I'm gonna let it shine

Let it shine, let it shine

And all along, there was ol' John de Conquer,

fighting a mighty battle without outside showing force

and winning his war from within.

Really winning,

for he was winning with the soul of the Black man

whole and free.

Making a way out of no way.

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 reached this moment when he knew

that he could put down his story.

So when you put it all together,

it is this very deep well of memories.

It's just a trove.

What is humanity but a story, a history,

about engagement or disengagement,

or collision.

And we get this from his work.

It doesn't get tired, it doesn't get old.

What I see is a very strong man.

Wow, very strong man, had to have been.

He's a major figure,

and there's nothing like him really.

He's getting his reward.

Now, now, now, now.

And I believe 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.

I'm gonna let it shine

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine

Going downtown

I'll be drunk

Don't like it, you can move your trunk

Hey, hey, hey

Hey, hey