George Lewis: A Jazzman from New Orleans

By Tom Bethell

George Lewis, one of the great traditional jazz clarinetists, was born in 1900 at about the same time that jazz itself first appeared in New Orleans. And by the time he died, on the last day of 1968, New Orleans jazz had pretty much run its course, too. By then a jazz museum stood on Bourbon Street, and a cultural center was under construction where Globe Hall had Stood. Lewis's life thus paralleled that of New Orleans jazz, and in his later years hew as the best known standard bearer of his city's music. He came to the attention of the jazz world at the time of the so-called "New Orleans Revival" of the 1940's, when veteran trumpeter Bunk Johnson was recorded by a number of jazz enthusiasts, notably William Russell. In this new biography, Tom Bethell challenges a favorite myth of the history of jazz: that the music became moribund in New Orleans after the legal red light district, Storyville, was closed in 1917, resulting in most jazz musicians going "up the river." In fact, Bethell shows, many more jazzmen stayed in the city than left, and the musical style continued to develop and grow. Thus the jazz fans who arrived in the city in the early 1940's did not encounter a "revival" of an old style so much as an ongoing tradition, with clarinetists like Lewis having been influenced by Benny Goodman and the Swing Era in addition to Lorenzo Tio and the Creole School. After Bunk Johnson's death in 1949, at a time when many other social changes were beginning to be felt in the city, the New Orleans jazz tradition began to go into a decline. It became increasingly rigid and repetitive, and was often designed to please what one observer called "Dixieland fans yelling for their favorite members." The book is based on lengthy research in New Orleans, including interviews with George Lewis shortly before his death, and unpublished material from the diaries kept by William Russell on his visits to New Orleans between 1942 and 1949. It also includes a statement by Lewis on jazz and the best way to play it and a complete Lewis discography. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520311022

Tom Bethell

At the time of original publication, Tom Bethell was a Washington Editor of Harper's magazine.

Book preview

George Lewis

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1977 by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-03213-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-3872

Printed in the United States of America

Designed by Dave Comstock

To my parents

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The City Was Filled with Music

I Just Admired the Clarinet

’Twenties: A Natural Livin’

Man, That Was Some Band

’Thirties: I Played Because I Loved to Play

Discovery: He Mentioned George ‘Strode’

Climax: You Won’t Be Disappointed, Mr. Russell

American Music: The Band Really Swung…

Stuyvesant Casino: "Bunk Had His Ways..

Transition: No Colored Dance Hall Operating

’Fifties: Dixieland Fans Yelling for Favorites

’Sixties: The Appeal Is Largely Visual

Death: Move the Body Over

Appendix One George Lewis talks about New Orleans-Style Music, the different instruments, clarinets and clarinet technique, reeds, and other matters …

Appendix Two George Lewis Discography by Tom Bethell, George W. G. Hulme, Graham Russell, Tom Eassie

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the many who helped with this book. First, to those who granted interviews: Carolyn Buck, Sid Davilla, Frank Demond, Cie Frazier, Nick Gagliano, Bob Greene, Robert Greenwood, Avery Kid Howard, Earl Humphrey, Percy Humphrey, Allan Jaffe, Edna Kelly, Louis Keppard, Shirley Lewis, Mildred Major, Peter Papin, Joe Rena, Beale Riddle, Dorothy Tait, Lawrence Toca, John Ventress, Joe Watkins, Johnny Wiggs, Chester Zardis, Emma Zeno and, not least, George Lewis himself.

My thanks also to Richard B. Allen and the staff of the William Ransom Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University, New Orleans, for their cooperation. And to E. Lorenz Borenstein, who for years has acted as an unofficial patron of the arts in New Orleans.

Many thanks to those who answered letters: Louis Armstrong, Rudi Blesh, George H. Buck, John van Buren, William E. Jaynes, Stanley Kubrick, Jack Lewerke, Ken Grayson Mills, Norman E. Pierce, Robert Reinders, Dr. Edmond Souchon.

Especial thanks to my discographical collaborators: Tom Eassie, Ed Lewis, George Hulme, Graham Russell. And to two photographers: Dick Tolbert, Leo Touchet.

I am grateful to my editor, Alain Hénon, whose numerous suggestions considerably improved the manuscript.

Above all, I would like to thank William Russell, who provided access to his unpublished diaries recording his trips to New Orleans in the 1940s, and much other useful information and advice.

T.B.

Introduction

The name of George Lewis first became known to me when I began to listen to traditional jazz bands, primarily Ken Colyer’s, in England in the mid ‘fifties. The clarinetists in these groups were said to be strongly influenced by someone in New Orleans called George Lewis.

The best of the Lewis records, I was told, had come out on an obscure label called American Music, issued by an apparently eccentric gentleman in America named William Russell, who only pressed the records in tiny quantities, and wouldn’t re-press them when they ran out. At that time in London, it seemed that everyone was trying to get the American Music records—exotic ten-inch LPs made of red vinylite.

Eventually I bought some acetate dubbings of these records at Dobell’s Record Store in London. I listened to them with amazement. Here was a music nobody had told me about: a rather complex yet free polyphony, played with such swing, such relaxation, by some rather elderly Negroes in New Orleans who, one learned, couldn’t even read music. Who were these people? What was this music? The clarinetist on most of them, playing an extraordinarily agile contrapuntal part with a wonderful tone, was this George Lewis, apparently also a stevedore.

A few years later, in January 1959, I met Lewis while he was staying at the Imperial Hotel in London. He had come over with his band for a European tom. A small frail-looking man, thin, faultlessly dressed, with dark overcoat and leather gloves, met me in the hotel lobby. He was infinitely courteous, with the manners of royalty. He drew on a cigarette from a tapered holder. He was also infinitely reserved—as inscrutable as a diplomat. We waited for two of his bandsmen to join us, Slow Drag Pavageau, his bass player, and Joe Watkins, drumer. Presently they came into sight, negotiating the staircase with the caution of Alpinists. Then we went outside to a cafeteria next door to the hotel.

Lewis had three mouthfuls of egg and chips and resumed his cigarette. Slow Drag, who uttered hardly a word, produced a pipe and gazed serenely into the middle distance. Joe Watkins remarked on the New Orleans-style brass band that had awaited them, so far from home, at London’s Euston Station. George Lewis remained an enigma, with very little to say about the music he played. There were hardly any dance halls left in New Orleans, he did say. Most of them had been turned into churches. Choiches, he pronounced it.

A week later I spoke to him again at the hotel, with his manager Dorothy Tait standing by his side and emanating an ill-defined hostility toward all who came near her charge. George answered questions as skillfully as a lawyer. His specialty seemed to be telling people what they wanted to hear.

A few years later I went to New Orleans and became better acquainted with George, recording him a number of times myself, and eventually embarking on this biography. George remained, to the end—even on his death bed—cordial, polite, and friendly, but the personal reserve never left him. It was always understood that the book would be about him, yes, but not really in any personal way. Not why his marriage to his first wife did not work out (he would have been shocked had I asked him that); but, perhaps, why his partnership with Bunk Johnson did not work out.

In a sense, then, this is a symbolic biography.

George Lewis’s life perfectly illuminates the rise and fall of New Orleans jazz in its hometown, which is my real subject here. The new musical language appeared abruptly, unexpectedly, at just the time he was born, and by the time he died nearly seven decades later, it too had run its course, with a Jazz Museum installed as its monument. The music had also come to a peak (as I believe) at about the time of his discovery, and the recordings he made then—the American Music records I had first listened to—also happen to demonstrate Lewis playing at or near his personal peak.

In the early decades of this century, a remarkable number of men began playing in this new style of music, all born within a few years of one another, all living within a few miles of one another in one medium-sized, otherwise unremarkable town. About ten such individuals, including George Lewis, have already been the subject of full length biographies, and no doubt a dozen more studies will be written. Quite clearly, then, these practitioners were the beneficiaries, above all, of the time and place of their birth.

The new musical language, for a while, possessed great strength and radiance, rapidly traveling across the globe. It was transmitted by musically untutored men, who had no theories about what they were doing, who explored the new idiom unconsciously. More than anyone, George Lewis embodied these characteristics; more than anyone, he personified the music.

The City Was Filled with Music

George Lewis was born in New Orleans on July 13, 1900, at a time when racial relations were deteriorating all over the South. New Orleans was no exception. A few days before Lewis’s birth a race riot (the Charles Riot) had broken out in the city, leaving twelve persons dead. Blacks were rapidly becoming disenfranchised, and following the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, legitimizing the doctrine of separate but equal facilities for the races, numerous Jim Crow laws were passed limiting the civil rights of blacks.

These changes would have an important influence on the new musical language of jazz that was abruptly and quite unexpectedly developing in New Orleans at the time of George Lewis’s birth. The thirty-five years that had passed since the end of the Civil War were years in which blacks had much greater educational and social opportunity than they would have again for the next half century.

The early jazzmen—those who were young men at the turn of the century—had in nearly every case received substantial formal musical education. By contrast, those of George Lewis’s generation were not taught to play music. Instead they copied what they heard around them—by ear. They quickly learned to improvise. And so the formal marches, the polkas and the mazurkas, were transmuted into something new.

Recent research in New Orleans, particularly that of Henry A. Kmen at Tulane University, suggests that a number of widely accepted propositions about jazz origins and history are now in the process of revision,¹ and this book belongs to that revisionist school. The new findings, it should be added, are generally in line with what other historians (notably C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow) have found in contemporaneous but non-musical research into social history in the Deep South.

First of all, condensed into a paragraph, here is the old view that is being challenged: in the nineteenth century and earlier, blacks were brought to the United States as slaves, but in New Orleans they were allowed to perpetuate their African tribal dances in a public meeting place called in French Place Congo or Congo Square. Following Emancipation, then, jazz swiftly emerged as a manifestation of the new civil liberation of blacks. Thus it was an Afro-American form of music that was admittedly primitive in its early stages—it could hardly have been otherwise because the early jazzmen were not far removed from those who rattled the jaw bones of oxen in Congo Square. In any event, jazz swiftly grew more sophisticated (producing in short order technically accomplished musicians such as Jelly Roll Morton), until the hometown development of jazz was dealt a severe blow by the closure of the city’s legal red-light district, known as Storyville, in 1917. At that point, jazz moved up the river to Chicago and other spots, and thus New Orleans’s role in jazz history more or less came to an end.

The revisionist thesis may be summarized as follows: by the turn of the century, when jazz was first heard, the African past of blacks in New Orleans and elsewhere was extremely remote—much more remote, in fact, than the European past of most white Americans. The slave trade had been declared illegal in 1808, and recent studies of plantation papers, New Orleans newspapers, and other documents indicate that very few new slaves arrived in the United States from Africa after that date.

Secondly, the Congo Square gatherings stopped far earlier than has hitherto been claimed in almost every book about jazz, including Gunther Schuller’s widely acclaimed history.² Henry Kmen has nailed this point down firmly in a recent article entitled The Roots of Jazz and the Dance in Place Congo: A Re-Appraisal. He notes that sometime shortly after 1835 the Congo Square dances ceased.³ This is fifty years earlier than had hitherto been claimed. The mistake may be easily traced to the uncritical repetition, in book after book, of one misleading account published in 1939 in Jazzmen, the pioneering jazz history.

Thirdly, interviews with the surviving pioneers of jazz, in addition to recordings and photographs, consistently refute the notion that the early jazzmen were primitives. Rather the reverse seems to be true. Almost to a man, the earliest jazzmen received musical training and were note readers. This has been definitely established in the case of Buddy Bolden, for example, who is reputed, probably correctly, to have been the leader of the first jazz band. The jazz came, then, not in the liberation from slavery but in the liberation from the European approach to music—that is, playing from a score. In this light then, jazz may be simply viewed as an American rather than as an Afro-American phenomenon.

Furthermore, the closure of Storyville had a minimal impact on the course of New Orleans jazz, as Al Rose has shown in his recent study of Storyville.4 Not that Storyville really closed, of course. After 1917 prostitution was no longer legal within its confines, and this may have thrown a few piano players out of work, but that was about the extent of it. It is true that an outward migration of New Orleans jazzmen was underway, but a majority stayed behind. Story- ville’s saloons and dance halls were still open, as they were all over the city.

Finally, the claim is made in this book that New Orleans jazz continued to develop stylistically until the 1940s. The New Orleans revival of that decade (which is explored in detail in later chapters) was not a revival of anything musical in the sense of a repetition of something that had gone before; the music heard in that decade was, quite simply, new music. After the 1940s the jazz in the city continued to change, but, it will be argued, the change from about 1950 on was merely deterioration, not stylistic development.

It may be noted that two widely accepted views of jazz history are not disputed in this book: that New Orleans did indeed play a major role in the emergence of jazz; and that almost without exception, all the great New Orleans jazzmen were black. It is this second view which has probably resulted in the misconception of jazz as a form of Afro-American music. In view of the remoteness of the African roots and Congo Square activity, the Afro-American theory seems to depend tacitly either on the mysterious action of race memory, or on genetics (blacks having a better sense of rhythm and so on). Both views are rejected here. There is a much simpler way of looking at the matter.

In the early days of jazz in New Orleans there were, in fact, about an equal number of black and white jazzmen, but just about all the good ones were black. Why? For the same reason, I submit, that nearly all the great boxers have been black: the black jazzmen were hungry fighters, hungry in their case for recognition, and jazz being the one artistic channel open to them—in short, one of the few careers they were not obstructed from pursuing—they were determined to make the most of it.

The new mood of racial intolerance at the beginning of the century, then, may well have provoked an artistic response from blacks. There were many things that they were not allowed to do, but they were permitted to play music. It would become a profession, then, for many, but perhaps more than a profession: a solace. As a result, it seems, the black musician often had something more significant to say than his white counterpart.

Big Eye Louis Nelson, an early New Orleans clarinetist who exerted some influence on the young George Lewis, may have subconsciously recognized this. At the time of the Charles Riot of 1900 he was playing bass, his first instrument, at the 28 Club with Charles Buddy Bolden. Big Eye’s father was killed in the riot, and Big Eye himself was nearly caught by the mob.

I remember that night well, he said. It caused me to dig down deeper in my music, more so yet.⁵ He gave up the cumbersome bass and took up clarinet—an instrument it would be easier to run with if another mob was chasing him. My father will be buried on Monday, he said, and as soon after that as I can I’m going to look for another instrument to try out.⁶ Buddy Bolden was determined to carry on, too, buying another comet to replace the one that had been smashed in the riot.

On the other hand, Lorenzo Tio, Sr., the Mexican- born clarinetist who went to New Orleans in 1885 for the Cotton Exposition that year, and whose classically trained style was so influential that he may be said to have introduced the clarinet to jazz, reacted to the new racist mood differently. Around the turn of the century he decided to leave the city, never to return. George Lewis never heard him play. But Tio’s son remained in New Orleans, and he too became an important influence among New Orleans clarinetists.

Coincidentally, just at this time the new musical language of jazz was beginning to emerge as a distinctly new synthesis (just as ragtime was, further north—it was a period, as it were, of national creativity) and the new music was perfectly suited for a whole generation of blacks to use as a means of communicating their feelings.

The stage was set. An older generation, wellschooled, was available for the younger men such as George Lewis to listen to, admire, perhaps even take a lesson or two from. Their ancestral background may have been African, but the synthesis, the musical melting pot, was American; George Lewis’s ancestors came from Senegal, but to understand his music, and the New Orleans setting in which he was born, he should be thought of as having not an African but an American past.

George Lewis’s appearance suggested Africa, perhaps—with his dark brown skin, full lips, tightly curled hair, and slender build it is not difficult to visualize his Senegalese ancestors—but what is known about his past makes it clear that his African past was extremely distant. Most of what is known about his ancestry concerns his mother’s side of the family. Although the date is not known precisely, the slave ship that brought his mother’s great grandmother to New Orleans probably arrived during George Washington’s presidency, and certainly before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

As a result of extreme longevity on his mother's side, a few African memories are actually recorded at third hand in Lewis’s case. His mother, Alice Williams Zeno, died at the age of 96 and had an excellent memory, which did not fail her when she was interviewed two years before her death. Her recollections were based partly on her childhood friendship with her grandmother, Zaier, who died in 1910 at the age of 101. Thus Alice Zeno had access to a first-hand account of life in New Orleans as far back as 1820 or earlier.

As a child Alice would go for walks in New Orleans with Zaier, whom she admired. I'd follow every step she made, Alice recalled. She'd tell me, ‘C'est la rue du Canal,’ or ‘C'est Esplanade.’ And they had an old brick house, I remember, on Esplanade, on the side of the banquette, where the brick would fall in dust. And my grandmother told me: ‘You see, that is where they sold ‘niggers,’ where they traded slaves.’ I was only a child when she took me there.

Then Alice told about the time when Zaier talked about her mother (George Lewis’s great greatgrandmother), who was stolen from her country. Alice Zeno said: "Her mother was taken to that house, after she was stolen from her country, you see, when she say she was eight years old. But she couldn’t speak nothing at that time. And they had an old man here that bought all the Senegalean ‘niggers’ that he could, an old man that they called Pajacaud. He was a Senegalean, and he translated, and that’s where my great grandmother began to learn how to speak.

"Well, she say she was eight years old and they had gone to bed by the lagoon—not lagoon, ‘lagoon’ is Spanish—by the river anyhow. And she said they saw a man coming, and he had pretty things in his hand, and that must have been red beads and things, you know, like that. And he made them come to get some, and that’s how they brought her here. They

Alice Zeno, 1943 (William Russell) stole her from her country. She was only eight years old, my great-grandmother.

And then my grandmother, Zaier, was christened in St. Charles Parish, because her master was Charles Perrette, in St. Charles Parish. My grandmother was a slave, she was a slave you know. She was tall, but strong as a lion. She used to have to sell for her mistress, because they didn’t even have stores like they have now. They would make big bundles and go. Carry them on the head. She'd be gone sometimes a whole month. She was selling along the coast, because they didn’t even have stores. She was a hundred and one year and fifteen days when she died, my grandmother. She died on the fifteenth day of January, 1910.⁷

Alice Zeno remembers that she learned a few Sen- egalase words from her grandmother, "some words, because I used to be right by her all the time, and she could speak her mother’s language. I'd say, ‘Gagan, show me, tell me, yes tell me.’ And she would tell me. Sometimes she say, ‘Adabra.’ That means ‘good for nothing.’ That Senegalese. ‘Sal-le-come-sayrum, si-ye come-sayrum’ means ‘good morning everybody.'

"But my mother and aunt and them, they didn’t want to hear that. ‘Ooh!’ she'd say, ‘Go talk with Alice.’ And I loved it. I followed every step she made. She had so many grandchildren, you know, and she took such interest in her children. I liked what my grandmother cooked, too. It was fine. She used to make funny dishes, you know, her home dishes. Red beans and bananas, that comes from Senegal. And they had okra cooked with sweet potato. And my grandmother used to cook gumbo, too, and sweet potatoes. It was called ‘painpatat.’ They had that in Africa. That’s their food.

I miss my grandmother, Alice concluded. I wish she were here. You know, she was over a himdred when she died, so I know she'd be just like a monkey if she were, but I miss her.⁸

Alice Zeno’s knowledge of Senegal extended to one or two phrases and a few recipes; she knew nothing about the music. All she could say was that "they didn’t have music like they got now, in my grandmother’s time. They'd sing, sing all the time, and dance. No instruments. They'd sing and dance. Sometimes my grandmother would sing, but I don’t remember what; just that Song of Haiti, something about a revolution. I remember that."

Zaier, Alice’s grandmother, was a slave, as was her great-grandmother. But her mother, Urania (born about 1840), was not born into bondage, and when we come to Alice’s own life the tenor of her recollections changes abruptly from faint memories of Africa to the cosmopolitan world of Creole New Orleans.* She was born on St. Claude Street, on June 7, 1864— Oui, in 1864, she repeated. I was born in the month of June, and the war was over, everything was all right, settled by the month of April the following year. Shortly after Alice was born, her mother, who was doing housework for the Mazerat family in New Orleans, took the infant Alice with her to the Mazerats— as soon as she could go back on the job. Therefore Alice learned to speak fluent French before she spoke English, for the Mazerats were a cultured New Orleans family who apparently took responsibility for Alice’s education. "They had me in the house like

‘Some confusion surrounds the word ‘Creole. Strictly speaking, the word refers to a person descended from the original French or Spanish settlers of Louisiana. However, it is frequently also used, especially in New Orleans jazz circles, to describe a person of mixed Caucasian and Negro blood—that is, a mulatto. Among New Orleans blacks the word generally has this meaning, as it usually does in jazz books. In this book, the word Creole has this meaning. When George Lewis talked of Creoles, he meant light-skinned blacks.

a child—white child, Alice recalled. They didn’t want my mother to have anything to do with me. I was fully four, five years old when I spoke nothing but French. No Creole, no other language but French. That’s how I got it so good."

The next phase of Alice Zeno’s life takes us to an even greater remove from tribal Africa. When she was older, probably in her ‘teens or early twenties, George’s mother went to work as a maid for Grace Elizabeth King, the New Orleans author of Creole stories, Louisiana history, romances, and belles-lettres. The experience made a considerable impression on her; the Kings were one of the most cultured and prominent families in the city, and Alice Zeno not merely worked there but lived en famille, absorbing, in the process, an education more extensive than she would otherwise have received, as she herself pointed out. Charles Gayarré, the early Louisiana historian, was a friend of the family, and Charles Dudley Warner, another author, sometimes came to stay. The family and their circle of friends frequently went to the opera, then flourishing in the city, and more than anything else it was the popular arias of the day that Alice Zeno retained in her mind and sang for George as a child. Sometimes musical soirées were held in the King household, as when Charles Dudley Warner and his wife came to stay in 1891. In her last book, Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters, Grace King gives the following description:

Mrs. Warner was a musician of the highest class, even among professionals.… We gave her a musicale and invited some of our best local musicians to hear her play—a musicale that has not been forgotten. She expressed frankly her surprise and her pleasure in hearing what was entirely new to her, the Creole rendition of the classics, with an added sentiment and a variation of color different from the rather cold expression of the north.⁹

These polite musicales were, no doubt, considerably isolated from the extraordinary musical melting pot of New Orleans in the ‘nineties, but we are closer to the truth, nevertheless, if we picture Alice Zeno, if not in the music room, at least listening through the door and enjoying what she heard, than if we visualize her gyrating to the beat of a drum in Congo Square.

The King family, Alice Zeno recalled, lived on Rampart Street, between Canal and Common. They had Mrs. T. J. Semmes across the street, she said, Mrs. McCall, and Mrs. Morris, but then all those people moved uptown because the neighborhood had gotten to be so bad. I was the housegirl and maid for Miss Nina King. Nina was the youngest one. I don’t know if she’s alive now. I know Miss Annie died. But Miss Nina was a debutante then, and I was her maid, and did the upstairs work.

Later in life Alice Zeno surprised everyone who met her with her alert, well-educated mind, her collection of books in different languages whose contents she was familiar with, and her knowledge of history and literature. She went on to say something about how she acquired this education.

"When I was working at Mrs. King’s they had— well, it wasn’t a school. It was just like you and I are conversing here. If it was French that day, they had an old lady called Madame Girard, she was French, and Charles Gayarré. Well, you spoke nothing but French. And the next day it was maybe the Spanish class. Well, that was Capitan Escheviser. And they had Herman Gessner; with him it was German. They'd call me and they'd speak to me in German and ask me things in German—no other language but the language of the day. But when I was young, I was young and foolish. I'd laugh. And one day Miss Gracie told me:

"‘Ha! Petite fille! You have an opportunity of learning things you will never be able to pay for, and you’re there giggling and giggling.'

After a while I say, ‘Well, I think Miss Gracie is right. Let me stop giggling and pay attention to the opportunity that I have.’ So that’s where I began to catch on. A little German, a little Spanish, and, oh well, I know French good.

George’s education, by comparison, was less effective, and it was something of an embarrassment to him that his mother’s schooling, albeit informal, had been more extensive than his. Curiously enough, this was no isolated instance, but one so widespread as to be almost a general rule among George Lewis’s contemporaries. Most black people of George Lewis’s generation received a schooling that was sketchy at best and terminated at about the sixth grade, when they were sent out to earn a few badly needed dollars. This education gap between the generations may have been widespread only in relatively cosmopolitan cities like New Orleans, which had a sizable free Negro population earlier in the century; but in any event, it is a mistake to assume that the educational opportunity open to blacks has steadily improved since Emancipation. In fact, until recent decades, a case could be made for the reverse conclusion. We think we have it easy now, Alice Zeno commented in 1958. No, no, those were the better days!

In 1894 Alice married Henry Louis Zeno. Both were 30 years old. He had lived for most of his life near Mandeville, a small town on the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain, north of New Orleans. He died in his late fifties (probably in 1922), and not much is known about his life or family background, except that his father was a Negro slave and his mother a Choctaw Indian. Thus George Lewis’s racial background is one-fourth Indian. Henry Zeno seems to have been an independent, solitary man who preferred the Mandeville countryside to the social, urban milieu which his wife enjoyed and benefited from. He made his own living, before he came to New Orleans, trapping, hunting, working occasionally as handyman and carpenter, and living in a log cabin. We may guess that the Choctaw blood in him was dominant, and that he did not particularly relish life in New Orleans. He seems to have hankered after the piney woods of Mandeville, and after about eleven years of marriage, when George Lewis was five, he went back across Lake Ponchartrain and rarely returned. Alice Zeno scarcely mentioned him in recorded interviews, confining herself to