Saying Goodbye to Dr. Kuhn

Posted on December 12, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

“Self Portrait” by Copyright © 2015 Leslye Joy Allen. All Rights Reserved.

I am writing this tribute now, because I have to mentally recalibrate, take a brief break over the holidays and get back to work on writing my dissertation. Dr. Kuhn would not want anything less than that. Dr. Clifford Matthew Kuhn, Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University and the first Executive Director of the Oral History Association joined the ancestors the second week of November. He was 63-years-old…he was also my Dissertation Advisor…

He was…there is that word: was. You would think that as a historian I would be accustomed to the past tense. Yet, referring to him as anything other than vibrantly and intellectually alive is difficult. Preparing for the Georgia State University Memorial for Dr. Clifford Matthew Kuhn on December 13, 2015 is harder than I ever could imagine. I first met him when he was preparing the centennial of the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot back in early 2006…

Dr. Glenn T. Eskew introduced us because he recalled my telling him that my late maternal grandmother, born in 1886, was a 20-year-old student at then Clark Normal School (later Clark College, now Clark Atlanta University) when the campuses of Atlanta’s Historically Black Colleges became the refuge for so many of the Black victims of the Atlanta Race Riot. Dr. Kuhn was delighted to find a graduate student such as myself that had a personal story that I could tell about this particularly painful moment in Atlanta’s history. Dr. Clarissa Myrick Harris, who partnered with Dr. Kuhn, interviewed me while filmmaker Ms. Bailey Barash filmed it for posterity. I was proud and humbled to contribute my grandmother’s story.

Nearly everything I know about Oral History, I learned from Dr. Kuhn: how to get people to talk about their lives; how to make sure they know that they are not obligated to tell their stories; how to make sure that I, the historian and interviewer, did not and will not ever exploit their memories; how to truly listen. I remember everything he taught me.

One of the last things he said to me was that he was so proud of a brief and recent assignment I had in the Georgia State University Library’s Digital Collections where I conducted four interviews for the Planning Atlanta Project. He recommended me for that position and I was glad that I did well and did not let him down…

As I prepare myself, as best I can, to attend Georgia State University’s Memorial Celebration for Dr. Kuhn, I fondly recall a conversation where we discovered that both of us loved Jazz. Not long after that conversation, there were a few times when we were supposed to be doing something academic, but we drifted into a deep discussion about everyone from Duke Ellington to Nina Simone to Wayne Shorter to Ahmad Jamal. Yet, that is natural for us historians. WE have to be aware of everything, so we often look at and listen to everything. Our conversations were often mixtures of him talking lovingly about his wife Kathie Klein and his two sons Josh and Gabe Klein-Kuhn and History and Jazz. I will miss that…

So, below is one for the late, great historian and scholar Dr. Clifford Matthew Kuhn: a video of the great Jazz pianist Ahmad Jamal playing the classic “Poinciana.” When the percussionists in Jamal’s quartet go into full swing around the time 4:53, I found myself ferociously patting my foot to the infectious rhythms and crying at the same time. Àṣé.

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“Thanks” and “Giving”

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

This blog is going to be short and to the point. I do not have too many words of wisdom to grant to anyone reading this. You will either recognize what you have to be thankful for or you will not recognize that which should make you thankful. You will either thank the people that have made a difference in your life or you will not thank them. You will understand that it does not matter if your station in life is “I-am-to-the-manner-born” or “I-am-just-the-next-Joe-on-the-street.”

You will either give the talents that you have been born with and/or cultivated to someone or some entity or you will not give those talents. Every time I see a relative or a friend make the mistake of believing that their jockeying for “number one” is going to do them any good I want to scream. I cannot help them. I can only ask God to help them and then be grateful for being an only child.

Only children have never been much good at recognizing other folk’s competitive streaks precisely because we rarely engage in it. We are IT. When we lose our parents, when they are both gone, no one grieves like us. Yet, we gain clarity. We understand that no matter how full your life is and how filled with people your life is, that life is always a solo act. It is up to you.

You love, you work, you laugh, you cry. Yet, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is what you did that made a difference, and that made someone’s life better, that made your life better. Do you give thanks for being able to give; and do you give so that you might give thanks? Àṣé.

Guide My Feet…

Posted on June 22, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

“Guide My Feet”
(Traditional Negro Spiritual)

I am grateful that my late Mama and Daddy taught me our old African tradition of ancestor worship. That worship was as much a part of my childhood as was the old Western Judeo-Christian tradition…Now, for those who know me well, you know that I can be the most severe critic of ministers and organized religion(s) that too often fail to act in the best interests of the flocks they claim to serve, lead and protect. Yet, that is another blog. Save your breath. I am only responding to the message(s) sent to me…

I occasionally re-read the poem that my friend actor-poet-writer Charles Reese wrote immediately following the death of my nearly 92-year-old mother in early 2013. In homage to her, he referred to my Mama as “a Queen,” but he also referred to her as “our newest ancestor.” — Nothing in “Syble’s Poem” struck me as much as that line about her becoming an ancestor. For people who know my late Mama, they know that certain songs remained in her repertoire right up to the very end of her days here on earth.

I do not need to recount the tragedies that have happened to Black folk in the last few weeks or even over the last year. Yet, for the last couple of days I have been unable to get the old Negro Spiritual “Guide My Feet” out of my head. Composed and sung in the caldron of American chattel slavery and passed down from generation-to-generation by my people, I have been singing it and humming it off-and-on for the last couple of months. At first, I thought I was going crazy. I must confess that I had a similar experience with “You Gotta to Move,” a Gospel/Blues song composed by Mississippi Fred McDowell. A few months earlier in the year, I was singing “You Gotta Move” in an impromptu singing session that followed a gathering of my Sistahs that was a combination of good coffee, prayer, testimony, and truth-talking with each other at Dream Café…A few days after that meeting, I ran into a brother in a wheelchair who was singing the same song on a corner in downtown Atlanta. That had to mean something, I thought…

When I went to my cousin Dexter’s graduation from Morehouse College this past May 2015, the class Valedictorian and Summa Cum Laude graduate Jerek Sharrod Brown burst into “Guide My Feet” before he began his inspirational and spellbinding Valedictory address. His voice in song was an unexpected, but welcome and perfectly poetic pleasure. I felt something inside of me shift and move when Brown sang and when he spoke. I felt something shift again when my cousin Dexter’s name was called as a new graduate of Morehouse College. After all, I remembered when I first held him in my arms when he was still an infant…

Today I decided to see whether the lyrics to “Guide My Feet” would come up in a general search on Google. It did. Now, usually when something comes up in an internet search, I typically download it and then email it to myself just to make sure that I have a couple of copies of my research findings in two different places. Yet, something strange and beautiful happened after I performed my usual ritual…

When I clicked the email button to send my Google search findings to myself, the email did not pull up my personal email address. Instead, it opened my late Mama’s email address which was and remains a secondary email account affiliated with my own primary account…Sometimes the Creator knows that you need a little help. Sometimes the ancestors are talking to you…

There are moments when no matter how bad things are or may seem, you simply do not worry and you no longer expend energy on people who do not work in your and your own people’s best interests. I have reached that moment. More than we know or acknowledge, the ancestors speak to us in small but important ways if WE only listen, if WE only listen…So, Thank You Mama and Daddy and all the known and unknown ancestors and saints…Thank You Goddess…Thank You God…Peace and Blessings. Àṣé…

Guide my Feet,

while I run this race.

Guide my Feet,

while I run this race.

Guide my feet,

while I run this race,

For I don’t want to run this race in vain.

5 Memorable Comments Made to Me by My Teachers

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

Trying to pick five favorite quotes by former teachers and professors is a real chore. Blessed with some of the greatest teachers on this earth, I have no other choice but to acknowledge their intelligence and their wit. It is also impossible to remember what so many of them said to me verbatim. Yet, when I start to count my blessings, I can hear them. We may not be able to remember who won the World Series in 1990 or what film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2000, but we remember our teachers. On so many occasions I hear their wisdom and humor, loud and clear. So here are my favorite five; at least my “first” favorite five. This one is short and sweet. Enjoy.

1. “It was a joy to teach you!” – Mrs. Doris Prather, 7^th Grade English Teacher

2. “You are too intelligent for this!! If I catch you and Louis with Cliffs Notes again, I will call both of your mothers!!” – Sister Barbara Sitko, 12^th Grade English teacher

3. “The only good thesis and the only good dissertation is a finished thesis and a finished dissertation.” – Dr. Jacqueline Howard Matthews, Africana Women’s Studies Professor

4. “You write very well. But relax, you won’t hit it out of the ballpark every time.” – Dr. Waqas A. Khwaja, English Professor (when I received a grade of “B” instead of an “A” on an English paper)

5. “Scholars say that there was a heavy concentration of lead in the water back in Ancient Rome. They believe that the reason why so many of those old Roman Emperors went crazy was due to lead poisoning. But just between you and I, I think a lot of them were crazy due to all of that family inbreeding.” – Dr. Sally MacEwen, Latin Professor

Àṣé!!

One of My Mama’s Friends

Posted on May 9, 2015 by Leslye Joy Allen (Ayọ)

by Leslye Joy Allen

I have lived over fifty years and I have never really met and never really dealt with a Black woman who was passive. My experience may not be the same as everyone else’s, but as a young Black girl growing up in Atlanta, Georgia, there simply was no such thing as an uneducated, passive and do-nothing Black woman; and my late Mama and her friends have been that example. Mama’s friends have been a blessing to me while she was alive and a boon to me in her absence…

I will only share a little bit about one of them here…

Her full name is Mrs. Bendolyn Handspike Ricks. Her nickname is “Peaches.” The house she has shared with her husband of more than forty years has always been one of the homes in the neighborhood where all the kids went to just hang out and be kids and clown around. Even though she insisted that I call her “Peaches” well over twenty years ago, I had to reach the age of fifty before I could call her anything other than “Mrs. Ricks.” Being raised to be extra respectful to adults, I simply could not call her by her nickname until after I passed the half century mark. But here is what I learned from “Peaches.”

Make your voice heard! Everyone at City Hall, the Mayor’s Office, and the local police department knows her. She will call them all day long if need be to get what she needs and what our community needs. I know….

because when a pipe from the street collapsed and created a plumbing problem for me, the City’s water department claimed that they could not arrive at my house for the next three weeks. So, I called Peaches…

and she told me the city council person I should call. So, I called them and the water department and crew arrived the next morning rather than the next three weeks…

When she is travelling out of town, she asks that our police department send extra police officers to cruise by and look after her house…

and this past week, while she and her husband were vacationing, I watched as one police car after another sat near her house…

I say this to make a point…

One need not be wealthy to get something done. One need only be persistent enough to demand what one needs and to fight for what one needs…

and one needs only to have the kind of Black women I know and grew up with…

On those occasions when I worry, I simply pause and remember my Mama and her cronies—some Baaaad Sisters who I can only hope to someday emulate…Àṣé!

Leslye Joy Allen

Social Commentary, History, Theatre, Jazz, and the Environment

Category Archives: African American History

“Thanks” and “Giving”