Music Credit: “NY” composed and performed by Kosta T from the cd Soul Sand, used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

Maestro W. H. Curry: Growing up, I not only played classical music, I played jazz. I played the string bass, the bass guitar, and the baritone saxophone. And I grew up with this incredibly deep love of jazz.  So, when I was offered a position as resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony, I was certainly going to try to work in as much jazz talent in that city into the programs. And I did. To me, jazz is classical music. And the best of it is great music. Mozart, Louis Armstrong, the two greatest musical apostles of musical joy.

Jo Reed:  That is Maestro Henry William Curry, composer, conductor and music director of the Durham Symphony Orchestra. And This is Art Works, the Weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed.

Maestro Henry William Curry is a man of incredible talent, tenacity, and, as you’ll hear, enthusiasm. His love of music is infectious and informs his rigorous approach to conducting. He grew up in Pittsburgh in an African-American working class family with a musical lineage—his maternal grandfather organized and sang in a Black opera company while his paternal grandmother was an organ major at New England Conservatory. Although neither of his parents were musicians, Curry’s brother has been a cellist with the Cleveland Symphony for over 35 years. It’s not easy for African-American classical musicians and it’s especially difficult for African-American conductors. And Maestro Curry has met numerous challenges even as he has found great success. Studying at Oberlin Conservatory, Maestro Curry has served as resident conductor  and Summerfest Artistic director for the North Carolina Symphony for twenty years. He was also resident conductor for the New Orleans Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Indianapolis Symphony, St Paul’s Chamber Orchestra and has guest conducted with major opera houses, ballet companies, and symphony orchestras across the country and around the world. Currently, he is the music director and conductor of the Durham Symphony Orchestra where his innovative programming with its commitment to American music disrupts the idea of classical music as elitist. Maestro Curry is also the only African American to ever be music director of a symphony orchestra in the southern United States.   For the Maestro, a fierce lifelong determination is matched, in fact, bolstered, by his utter and complete lifelong passion for music.

Maestro W. H. Curry: Now I grew up in an era where everyone owned a piano. I mean, poor people owned a piano. My mother and father were born five years before the beginning of radio, radio networks. So the entertainment centers was the piano. So everyone in the home played the piano a little bit, some by ear, some light classics, some popular songs. So we couldn't afford a piano but my parents' friends always had a piano and as soon as we entered their home I would make a beeline for the piano bench and you couldn't get me off it. But I'm sure it broke my parents' heart that there just wasn't any money for a piano and lessons.

Jo Reed: When did you begin formal music lessons?

Maestro W.H. Curry: I grew up in an all-Black neighborhood, went to an all-Black elementary school. And this is 1960s, early 1960s, and I guess I needn't add that of course financially speaking, the school was underserved. There were only the basics. All the teachers, except one, were white. There were no music programs, no singing, no art classes until they started to change things a bit when I was in sixth grade and there was a Jewish gentleman, Eugene Reichenfeld, who noticed there was this Black school over here, a suburb of Pittsburgh that had nothing. And so he offered his instruments and his lessons at this all-Black elementary school for free. It was a lucky break for me because he was also a conductor. And long story short, eventually he had me conduct his community orchestras when I was about 14, 15-years-old.

Jo Reed: Oh, my goodness. And conducing was something you had wanted to do?

Maestro W.H. Curry: Conducting was a secret fantasy of mine because I was a painfully shy introverted kid, but I did want to be a conductor. I didn't tell anyone that. But after one of my viola lessons, I was a violist more than any other instrument, he said, "Bill, I think you would make a good conductor and I'm going to let you conduct my community orchestra next week in a rehearsal." And I said, "That's thrilling but I don't know how to conduct." And he said that old adage, "Conductors are born and not made." Now it took me 20, 30 years to realize what he meant by that because I've known some genius violinists, just to mention that category, that once they try conducting and they will get paid to conduct because they're stars and can put butts in seats in these concert halls, they're terrible. They never get better. But me, after six months, was doing better than the local high school teachers. So there is a certain gift for it, the gift of connecting the mind to the body to the hands. But I did conduct this orchestra the next week and I'm sure I was terrible, but I remember I couldn't stop smiling at the end of the rehearsal. So he invited me to conduct half of a program about four months after that. So I made my conducting debut when I was 15-years-old.

Q  What did you conduct?

Maestro W.H. Curry: Well, this gentleman, Eugene Reichenfeld, was really smart in that he allowed me to choose my selections. This is something that doesn't even happen in the professional world anymore. You have a thing called an artistic administrator that hands out pieces to conductors and if you don't accept them you're not a team player. Every conductor has their favorite pieces, their favorite genre of music and then there are pieces by certain composers that I don't get at all. I recognize they're masterpieces, like the Mendelsohn "Italian Symphony." I mean, if you want to hear a really badly conducted Mendelsohn "Italian Symphony," I will lend you my recording.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Maestro W.H. Curry: I mean, it's not like I can't do a professional job, but I don't get it. It's like certain friends of yours. You say, "Wow. Despite their flaws, I love them." And this person, I didn't know what, some kind of psychic personality glitch, but he let me choose my own music. And this was important in that I had an out of body experience when I was in eighth grade playing in a youth symphony the "Overture to Wagner's Die Meistersinger." I had never had an out of body <laughs> experience before. I felt like I was floating around the room while we were playing this overture. So needless to say, I became a Wagnerian from that point on and one of the peak experiences of my life was when I was not feeling well on a school day and my mom, unusually so, let me stay home from school. Usually it was, "Get out of here. You'll be fine." But I guess I was looking kind of blue that day or purple. Any rate, I had taken home from the library the four records of the complete recording of Tchaikovsky's ballet, "Swan Lake." I had never heard anything from "Swan Lake." And so that afternoon playing all eight sides of these four records was one of the dozen highlights of my life. I just completely fell in love with this piece. So I conducted the Suite from "Swan Lake" and music by Wagner on this program. He knew that if I loved music that I'd be free to express my emotions rather than to be stiff and self-conscious about the affair.

Jo Reed: Yes, that's smart. And you went to Oberlin, which is one of the great music schools, and you continued studying the viola but then you also studied conducting. And I'm curious what that experience was like for you.

Maestro W.H. Curry: I couldn't study conducting until, what, my junior year. It was something about the Oberlin program. So I was a viola major and I told my viola teacher straight out on the first day, "Look, I don't want to play a viola. I want to be a conductor." There was a conducting teacher there, Robert Baustian, who was also one of the principal conductors of the Santa Fe Opera. And he knew from watching me conduct that I didn't need any lessons in conducting technique because I had been conducting since the age of 15 and the great thing about Eugene Reichenfeld is he had no less than three orchestras that he was Music Director of, so I was conducting them all the time. So I had much more experience as a freshman in college than a graduate from college. So he knew, yeah, I could control the orchestra, no problems. But what he saw was I was, you know, young conductors are very enthusiastic they're jumping up and down, you know, but they're not listening carefully.

Jo Reed: Right.

Maestro W.H. Curry: And part of your job is to be like a doctor with a stethoscope with a body and to find out what's wrong. So you have to be clear and objective. And so I remember I did a rehearsal of something, and I felt very, very full of myself, how great I was. And he handed me seven yellow legal pads of instructions. "You didn't notice the trumpet wasn't playing here. You didn't notice the basses were flat.“ et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  And that's what he gave to me. It takes ten years of conducting before you actually hear clearly. It's a mish-mash of sound. You're lost in it. But in order to be a good conductor you have to be a technician, so you have to calm down and listen carefully and be the doctor that the orchestra needs.

Jo Reed: You went to the Richmond Symphony after Oberlin but somehow it was via the Cleveland Symphony. Can you tell me about that journey?

Maestro W.H. Curry: Well, I was at the Oberlin Conservatory, I think as a junior then. And the Cleveland Orchestra would come to Oberlin a couple times a year to play and on one truly memorable occasion, the Music Director at that time, Lorin Maazel, was conducting Mahler's Symphony No. 5. Wow.  Unforgettable. So the performance ended and my roommate said, "Look. We should go backstage and meet Lorin Maazel." I said, "Are you crazy? I'm too shy to do that." He said, "Look, but we have an entrée. We know his parents." His parents ran the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony and me and my roommate had both been in the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony. So he said, "Look, we'll go backstage. We'll talk about his mom. He'll like us."

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Maestro W.H. Curry: So he dragged me backstage and we told him we knew his parents. And then he asked me what did I think of the Mahler. I don't remember what I said. I know I felt like it was a gigantic novel in five big volumes. But then the evening ended and the next day, Lorin Maazel called up my conducting teacher and said, "What's this Curry kid like?" And Robert Baustian must have said something very positive because the next day I was invited at age 19 to be part of the Cleveland Conductors Symposium that Lorin Maazel and the Cleveland Orchestra had. Now it was incredibly complicated. You had to play an original composition on the piano. You had to play your principal instrument. He would play a crazy 12 tone chord at the piano then change one note, play it again and ask you to sing the note he had changed. I mean, it was unbelievable. And he had every conductor, I think there were eight of us, choose one movement from a symphony to conduct and the deal was you had to be able to write out from memory that entire movement.

Jo Reed: Oy.

Maestro W.H. Curry: Because this is Lorin Maazel with his photographic memory. So I went through this entire ordeal and I conducted the orchestra in the First Movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 2. and afterwards, some of the players found me in my dressing room and said pretty much, "You're green. You're green. You're green. But stick with it." Lorin Maazel was extremely complimentary. I mean, we all need validation from our elders to say the least. In the hall was the conductor of one of the Midwest orchestras. His name was Thomas Ricchetti. His sister was the Executive Director of the Richmond, Virginia Symphony and so a year later when they needed an Assistant Conductor, Tom Ricchetti called up his sister and said, "You should look at this kid, Curry." So I was then in my senior year trying to do a five-year program, bachelor's and master's, in four years and I did audition for the orchestra for Assistant Conductor and they offered me the job. I went back to Oberlin and I said to Mr. Baustian, "What do you think I should do?" He said, "Well, I can't tell you what to do but I've had," he said, "Ten conducting students in ten years and none of them are working as a conductor." That was enough for me. So I left Oberlin. I got there and the Executive Director told me within a day, "By the way, thank you for being here, but we're not going to give you a title." I said, "What do you mean? I left college to be Assistant Conductor." "Well," she said, "You are from Oberlin and your predecessor, a young man, was from Oberlin, too. And he didn't work out very well. So the board of directors had said we're going to deny you a title. You'll still get to conduct the chamber orchestra but not the symphony orchestra." Now this sound like nonsense, to use a nice word. I didn't find out until I had left Richmond that once the board of directors, who are generally a more conservative group, progressive, socially progressive, no, compared to the orchestra, when they found out they had hired their first African-American conductor in the capital of the old Confederacy, they said, "Hell, no. Let him conduct but you're not going to give him a title." I didn't know this. Now fast forward to the end of the season. The season is ending with Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. I had a great relationship with the Music Director. After all, he had hired me. And he didn't tell me about the board of directors' problems with me. At any rate, the dress rehearsal was on a Sunday night of Beethoven's Ninth comes. And this is a very youthful, energetic 40-something conductor and he's seated, which he had never done. And he looked pale. That night I went home and I said, "If he is sick for the performance tomorrow-- Nah, that won't happen. That won't happen." So I started anyway to look at the score. Fell asleep at midnight. The next morning 8:15, ring, ring, ring. "Good morning. How are you?" "I'm fine." I knew what had happened. "Have you ever conducted," the Executive Director asked, "Have you ever conducted Beethoven's Symphony No. 9?" I lied, of course. I said, "Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I had, yeah, certainly I had. Certainly. And da-da-da-da. And yes. Yes." "Well, you're going to have to conduct it tonight. The conductor is sick. There's no time for an extra rehearsal for you. So it's show time at 8:00." So here I am, 21-years-old, beginning my professional career with arguably the greatest symphony ever written. Now, why were they letting me conduct? This is what happened, and again, I found this out a year after that. Emergency call at midnight to the board of directors, "The conductor can't conduct." And the board said, "Well, you're not going to let that Black kid conduct." And they were stuck. So somehow someone called a manager in New York who had the number of Antal Doráti. Antal Doráti was the Music Director of the National Symphony which is located in Washington, D.C. which is a two-hour drive from Richmond. That's why they thought of Antal Doráti. So they woke him up at 2:00 AM. "Maestro Doráti, we have an emergency, Beethoven 9. No time for a rehearsal. You certainly have conducted it. Can you please help us out?" And he said, "Do you have an Assistant Conductor?" And they said, "Well, sort of." And he said, "Well, let him conduct," and hung up on them.

Jo Reed: <laughs>

Maestro W.H. Curry: So when I got this call at 8:15 AM, the call ended with, "Oh, by the way, we're going to give you a title because, 'We have to tell the public and the media who the heck you are.'" So now I'm Assistant Conductor finally. And of course when you're 21, you don't have any fear at all. You're like a young Siegfried fighting the dragon. I had no fear at all. <laughs> And so the performance was electrifying. Standing ovation. The review the next morning was like my mother had written it from heaven. And long story short, I was able to parlay that into an audition for a full-time professional orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony. And that's how my career began.

Jo Reed: You know, it's not easy to be a conductor, period. But it had to have been particularly difficult to be an African-American conductor, certainly now, but really, even more so then. And this can't be the only time something like this happened to you in your career.

Maestro W.H. Curry: Well, any African-American classical artist will tell you, we don't talk about this in interviews because we're afraid of being misquoted. Andre Watts schooled me on this, great African-American pianist. "Don't talk about the issue because for one thing, something will be taken out of context; and number two, you will seem like you're Head of the Grievance Committee." "Oh, woe is me," the self-pity thing. But let me tell you one story. Lorin Maazel mentored me. At this time, I was, like, 24. He was at this time the conductor not only of the Cleveland Orchestra but the Music of the Vienna Opera, arguably the greatest opera company in Europe. So he saw me conduct a second time and was wonderfully flattering. And he said, "What you need now is management. I'm going to get you in the office of the Harold Shaw in New York." Harold Shaw was amongst other things, the manager of arguably the greatest pianist of the 20th century, Vladimir Horowitz, who was still alive at the time. So this was 1980. I get into the lobby and he has me cool my heels for 45 minutes. Finally, I'm escorted into the office and within about two minutes he said, "You know, I can't do anything with a Black conductor." Now there's a thing called the glass ceiling. There's also a thing Black people call the "N" word wake-up call where you suddenly realize as a young person you have a problem or other people have a problem with you and you were too young to look at this clearly but now you had your head broken on the glass ceiling and you know reality. Even though Lorin Maazel, one of the five great conductors of the world, has gotten you into this man's office, because you're Black you've got to, like, get out of his office. So, yes, that's just one story.

Jo Reed: It’s very telling. And what did you find in Baltimore? It’s a great orchestra. I live outside of Baltimore, so I think of it as my orchestra now. What was your experience like there?

Maestro W.H. Curry: It started off badly and great in the same time. Remember, I'm very green. I'm 22. So they again, because I'm so green, gave me a weird title of being Guest Conductor. A guest conductor is someone that stays for one week and they're gone, but I'm there the whole season, and again, it was a one-year contract. So I knew in order to get rehired I had better have a great concert before Christmas. They offered me a choice of a couple programs, one which included Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10. When you're a young conductor, there are certain pieces you can do as well as an old conductor if you feel it. It's like an actor that says, "I know that character. I know Hamlet. I know King Lear. I know Archie Bunker." Whatever. You know that. I felt Shostakovich's Tenth. I felt this was almost like my autobiography. So you can only imagine how carefully I prepared that score and how passionately I conducted it. The performance was just hard to describe. I can only say that my best friend, Dan Euband,  was at a party some years ago in Baltimore, Baltimore Symphony members, and the principal horn player was retiring. And I guess his name was Dave Packard.  And he had been with the Orchestra something like 30 years and they asked him, "What was the most exciting performance you ever did with the Baltimore Symphony?" And he said, "When Bill Curry did Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10.

Jo Reed: Wow. High praise, indeed.

Maestro W.H. Curry: Now here's the bad part.

Jo Reed: Oh.

Maestro W.H. Curry: I didn't know the Music Director was in the hall. Oddly enough, he never told me that he had been at the performance where the orchestra was cheering me when I would come onstage. Two days after the performance, one of the trumpet players, Rob Roy McGregor, comes to me and says, boy, you're in a lot of trouble. I said, what are you talking about? I thought the Shostakovich went well. He said, it went too well, because now the orchestra thinks you're better than the music director, and that's going to get back to him. Which it did. And that man, for all of his talent, let's say it was a bad son bad father relationship from that point on. Though they did offer me a title of resident conductor. I replaced the legendary Leon Fleisher in that role, and I had a great run with the orchestra, because the orchestra saw me as this still-green talent, but they saw me as their favorite son or nephew, and they figuratively put their arms around me. And they gave me the greatest constructive criticism. One, the oboe player, Joe Turner, principal oboe, then. I was seated next to him on the orchestra bus, going to a concert. He said, look. Remember. The orchestra will play for you as long as it appears to be that you love the music at least as much as yourself. Too many conductors, it's like a vanity thing. It's an ego thing. It's a bully pulpit, as it were. But if you love the music as much as yourself, then you'll be fine. So, they put their arm around me, and it was a blissful experience that was the perfect entree for me to go into the professional world.

Jo Reed: Well, you've worked with so many symphony orchestras… Indianapolis, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. And so on and so on and so on. And you were also resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony. And I'm so curious about that, because New Orleans has such a rich musical tradition, and I was wondering if you were able to bring that to symphony programming, if people were open to that. If that was something you wanted to do.

Maestro W. H. Curry: Well, yes. Great question. And growing up, I not only played classical music, I played jazz. I played the string bass, the bass guitar, and the baritone saxophone. And I grew up with this incredibly deep love of jazz. When I was very young, I got to conduct Benny Goodman and Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. I mean, can you imagine?

Jo Reed: No. No.

Maestro W. H. Curry: George Shearing. I mean, unbelievable. They were elderly, and I was very, very young, and I got a chance to work with them. So, I revere jazz. So, when I was offered a position as resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony, I was certainly going to try to work in as much jazz talent in that city into the programs. And I did. I discovered a brilliant young saxophonist, Nicholas Payton. I worked with the Neville Brothers. I've worked with the Marsalis family-- Wynton Marsalis, Brandon, the patriarch Ellis Marsalis was one of my friends. I lived about a block from him. So, yeah, I used all of these people that I could find. Al Hirt. Pete Fountain. I mean, they had never been asked to collaborate with a symphony orchestra. But, to me, jazz is classical music. And the best of it is great music. Mozart, Louis Armstrong, the two greatest musical apostles of musical joy. So, it was a one-year run, then the orchestra went bankrupt, but I believe I changed the idea about jazz not being classical music, at least for that decade in New Orleans.

Jo Reed: Then, you went to the North Carolina Symphony Orchestra, and you were there for 20 years. And there's just so much I want to ask you about this, and we do have time considerations, but tell me about what you and that orchestra gave one another, to sustain a relationship for 20 years.

Maestro W. H. Curry: You know, you're the first person to ask that question. And it's a perfect question, because, as you know, the industry standard these days is you better start looking for another job after six years as conductor. Because the orchestra hates you, or some elements of the orchestra hates you after six years, no matter how good you are. The management says, well, we need a new image, a new billboard, Now, how did we manage to have, instead of the six to eight years-- I mean, Alan Gilbert was in New York, what, seven years?

Jo Reed: And I love Alan Gilbert.

Maestro W. H. Curry: Well, he was a great conductor. I mean, but as far as me, I can say that the week I was offered the resident conductor position with this orchestra, the very same week, I was offered a position as associate conductor of the Atlanta Symphony. Now, of course, being in this city with this huge upper-middle-class Black population--and I would have been the first African American staff conductor, was hugely tempting. And I loved the orchestra. I was there for a whole year as the interim associate conductor, until they offered me a two-year contract. But, truth to tell, there's-- I had a love affair with the North Carolina Symphony. It was chemistry. And conductors that guest-conduct a lot, as I have, you can feel the chemistry or the lack thereof within about one minute. And you have to be yourself, and it is what it is. And so, the first time I conducted the North Carolina Symphony, I think it took me about four bars before I said, this would be a great home for me. And they felt the same thing. So, as somebody said at year 18, when I was there, how could it be? This was someone in the orchestra said, how could it be that the orchestra still loves you after 18 years? The orchestra met me more than halfway. I've conducted some orchestras where I felt like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill, you know? But this orchestra met me halfway and more. And they knew. Well, one time I was in my dressing room, and it was right next to the men's locker room, orchestral players. And I could hear them talking about me through the door. And one gentleman said, you know, sometimes Curry is a pain in the whatever. But, tonight, at this concert, there's the strong likelihood that he's going to remind me, as he often does, of why I became a musician in the first place.  So, there was some kind of magical marriage, chemistry, love, respect, between me and the orchestra. And it truly was an honor to conduct a great orchestra where my perfectionist instincts could run riot. With a great orchestra, you can be a perfectionist. And so, because our programs are often recorded, I still enjoy hearing some of my archival recordings of these performances, because it's very obvious the orchestra and I are like one, like hand in glove.

Jo Reed: Well, you retired, which could not have been easy after 20 years. But even though you're retired, you're still the music director and the conductor of the Durham Symphony, and there was an overlap between there and the North Carolina Symphony. And the Durham Symphony prides itself on being an orchestra for the people, and you play this breadth of music. So, tell me about the way you program a season at Durham Symphony.

Maestro W. H. Curry: As an assistant, associate, and resident conductor, I never had the-- or rarely had the programming input I wanted to, as far as the selection of the pieces. This was not true of when I was the music director of the North Carolina Symphony summer season, where they pretty much let me have my head. Otherwise, you've got to work with people, people, people, and sometimes it's a compromise, sometimes you wind up doing pieces you have no feeling for, like, dare I say, the Mendelssohn Italian symphony. But with the Durham Symphony, I decided, now I can finally do the things that I think would make a symphonic experience much more interesting and less elitist. The ritual, nowadays, is overture, or some kind of dreary modern piece, and then the concerto, with the, of course, foreign-born soloist, and then the Maestro comes on and does the "New World Symphony." That's the formula. Very predictable. And how about the lack of American music being on the programs of American symphony orchestras? This is a national disgrace. So it was a couple years ago, I looked at the top ten American orchestras to see how much American music they were doing. Chicago Symphony on tour of Europe. Nothing. One orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue." Another orchestra, Ives' "Variations on America," that he wrote when he was 17. Now, maybe this is changing a little bit in this woke era, but there are many composers that are lost to history. It used to be, there were things called newspaper music critics in cities that held the conductor's feet to the fire to make sure they did American music. Even Toscanini had to conduct American music in his 80s, when it's very hard to learn a new piece. So, the Durham Symphony, for 12 years, on every last program has had at least one piece by an American composer. Are we not an American orchestra? Do American audiences love American music? Yes. So I can do what I can do. Every program has had at least one piece. We are only the second orchestra in the history of America to do this for more than one season.

Jo Reed: Which is shocking. And you are a champion of African-American composers.

Maestro W. H. Curry: Oh, this has been one of my missions. Of course, American composers have been neglected. But African American composers have been especially neglected. So, if you were to look at the videos of our repertoire from our concerts, you'll see Scott Jopin, William Grant Still, Florence Price, salutes to Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis. So, we are unique. We call ourselves the People's Orchestra. Just two days ago, I was at the Durham celebration of Juneteenth. We were the only classical performing arts organization there. And we had a booth. I got to talk to hundreds of people, and we handed out our brochures. And they were stunned-- mainly these were Black people. They were stunned to hear that I am the only African American music director of a symphony orchestra in the history of the American South. We did the research. I know it's hard to believe.

Jo Reed: Moment of silence for that. Oh my lord.

Maestro W. H. Curry: But I am the only one. And so, my decisions about music making, about programming, of course are going to be a little bit different.  You hear my passion and my ire about this. American audiences love American music. It should be heard.

Jo Reed:  I completely agree. And you, yourself, are a composer. And I really want to touch on that, before we run out of time completely.

Maestro W. H. Curry: You know, composing is the most difficult thing in music. My mother, the principal influence in my life as a parent, said, if it's easy, don't bother with it. If it's difficult, go straight for it. I was the understudy for Aaron Copland when he conducted a concert with the Baltimore Symphony in 1980. I was 26,  he was 80 years old. And I had a precious half an hour with him in his dressing room. And great, great gentleman, and I wish I had written down everything he had said to me, obviously. But I remember one thing. I said to him, Mr. Copland, you know I'm a conductor because I'm here as your understudy. But my secret dream is to be a composer. I had written a little bit in my mid-teens, but at the Oberlin Conservatory, I decided to drop composing because I didn't want to be a jack-of-all-trades, master of just one. And Copland thought for a second and he said, you know, as a conductor, you're in competition with every living conductor. I said, well, I guess I can kind of understand that. He said, but, as a composer, you're in competition with the living and the dead. Shall we put on this program Mozart or Curry? Tchaikovsky or Curry? Bruckner or Curry? That is the standard. And unless you're serious about this-- and, as Mahler said, if you're not writing masterpieces, why-- you know, why bother? So, that didn't make me want to compose, what Copland said, but I began to practice writing melodies. Because I wanted to write music that was melodic and warm and romantic. This was the era when melody was out. I mean, if you dared write a melody at the Oberlin Conservatory in 1975, you'd be ridiculed. And I'm very serious about that. This is before Philip Glass and the return to tonality. So, I began to compose in the 1990s, and just stuck with it, and had great success with a piece called "Eulogy for a Dream," using the speeches of Martin Luther King, much like the Copland "Lincoln Portrait" using the words of Lincoln. And this piece has always received a standing ovation.

Jo Reed: And you had a recent debut of a piece in April, "Dark Testament." Tell me about that piece.

Maestro W. H. Curry: This was a commission for a string orchestra piece from UNC Chapel Hill, and I love African American spirituals. And I'm of a certain age where I see a lot of the things that I loved in my youth disappearing, like African American spirituals. So, I decided to write this piece, based on either existing spirituals, or write my own. And it's a three-movement piece. Each movement is a tribute to an African American female icon. The first movement is a tribute to Mahalia Jackson, who was called the Queen of Gospel. She was a household word-- name, as the Queen of Gospel, as I was growing up. Incredible. So, the first movement is based on "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around." "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around." Great spiritual. Which means just what it says. I'm going to do this. It's like when Harold Shaw told me he couldn't do anything with a Black conductor, I could have crawled back home and gave up. Ain't nobody gonna turn me around has been the story of my life. The second movement is a tribute to Pauli Murray, Durham's hero. She was an incredible Renaissance woman. A lawyer-- first African American female priest, an author, a poet, a civil rights activist. And I read her autobiography, and one chapter was about never knowing her parents. Never knowing her parents, because her mother died young, and her father died in an asylum. So, for this movement, in honor of her, I used "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child," which she surely was.

Jo Reed: Yes, that’s perfect.

Maestro W. H. Curry: And then, the next movement is called "The Underground Railroad." It is a tribute, of course, to Harriet Tubman. And, in this piece, I use some of my own music, based on spirituals. The piece is dedicated to the first Juneteenth that was a federal holiday, which, of course, was just a few days ago. So, the piece has received a rapturous reception. I'm stunned by it. I've never had so much fan mail in my life. And I'm very, very proud to have written it, and I'm very flattered to have been commissioned to write it.

Jo Reed: Gosh. We are so pressed for time, So, perhaps, briefly, I want to know what it's like to rehearse and then conduct your own work.

Maestro W. H. Curry:  Well, first of all, number one, it's terrifying beyond words. What did Copland say? Shall we do Tchaikovsky or Curry? Hm. So, these are high standards. So, before a first reading of a piece, I am almost hallucinating, I'm so scared. And this is not unusual for composers. You read about Brahms being upset before a first reading. But, when the orchestra starts to play the piece and it comes into the world for the first time, after it's been trapped in your head, It really-- there's nothing like this experience, to hear your piece being birthed into the world. It is-- it's so warm. And because of course it's your own music, so you become extremely emotional. How can you not? You're conducting music you've wept over when you were writing it on the paper. So, you have to control yourself, not to jump up and down for joy, and not to cry at certain passages that, when you played them on the piano, you knew they were good. So players tell me my face looks different when I'm conducting my own music. Like I am lost to the world. And do I love conducting my own music? Oh, yeah.

Jo Reed: Do you think about legacy? I'm assuming you do, and if you do, what would you like your legacy to be?

Maestro W. H. Curry: How could it be that I've never been asked that question? Of course, I don't want to be lost to history.  Stephen Sondheim said you either have to have children or create art. I would like to think some of my compositions will survive me. One of the great moments in my life, and I don't know how to tell this story briefly. Let me try. I had been hired to be the resident conductor of the New Orleans Symphony by Maxim Shostakovich, the son of Dmitri Shostakovich, and I got to know him pretty well. And he told me that his father, when he was growing up with him, always had a packed suitcase by the door. That's because Dmitri knew the KGB would come to get him eventually, as they did his friends in the theater and in the intellectual world. So he knew his days were numbered. So, he said, if I had a packed suitcase by the door, at least I'll have some pencils and music paper when they send me to Siberia. When he was writing his famous symphony, "No. 5," he was thinking at any moment, they're going to come and get me. So, I was conducting a youth symphony in Shostakovich "5th Symphony," a piece that more defeated them than challenged them, as far as the technical issues. And finally, I got upset, and I said, put down your instruments. Let me tell you what this piece is about. This is about a man whose life was on the line, and this was the symphony that was meant to save his life. How do you tell the truth and yet be true to yourself in this symphony? And I told them about the packed suitcase by the door that was there when this symphony was written. And so, I said, now, let's play this again. You wouldn't believe, they played it 80 percent better, because they were freed from the technical challenge, and they were suddenly in tune with the message of the music. They knew what it was all about. Fast forward to about eight years later, I'm conducting a concert for young people with the North Carolina Symphony, and I always talk to the kids in the auditorium beforehand, just to have fun with them. And one young lady came up to me and said, Mr. Curry, you don't remember me. I said, I don't. She said, well, I'm Rebecca, and I was in the orchestra when you conducted Shostoakovich "5th." And because of what you said, and because of what you did that day, with that piece, I decided, that day, to become a music teacher. I have to say, that may be the highlight of my life, the fact that my love for music touched someone so deeply that they will pass on that spirit. That is a legacy, passing on your love for music.

Jo Reed: And I think that is a great place to leave it, Maestro. Thank you so much, and thank you for giving me your time. I so appreciate it.

Maestro W. H. Curry: Thank you so much for these great, probing questions, and giving me a chance to talk about that. I appreciate that, thank you.

Jo Reed: Thank you. That is Maestro William Henry Curry, composer, conductor and music director of the Durham Symphony Orchestra. You might want to check out his blogs at durhamsymphony.org—just look for the Conductor’s Corner. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed—stay safe and thanks for listening.

Jo Reed: It's not easy to be a conductor, period. But it has to be particularly difficult to be an African-American conductor. That’s certainly true now, but it had to have been even more when you were starting out.

Maestro W.H. Curry: Well, any African-American classical artist will tell you, we don't talk about this in interviews because we're afraid of being misquoted. But let me tell you one story. Lorin Maazel mentored me. At this time, I was, like, 24. He was at this time the conductor not only of the Cleveland Orchestra but the Music of the Vienna Opera, arguably the greatest opera company in Europe. So he saw me conduct a second time and was wonderfully flattering. And he said, "What you need now is management. I'm going to get you in the office of the Harold Shaw in New York." Harold Shaw was amongst other things, the manager of arguably the greatest pianist of the 20th century, Vladimir Horowitz, who was still alive at the time. So this was 1980. I get into the lobby and he has me cool my heels for 45 minutes. Finally, I'm escorted into the office and within about two minutes he said, "You know, I can't do anything with a Black conductor." Now there's a thing called the glass ceiling. There's also a thing Black people call the "N" word wake-up call where you suddenly realize as a young person other people have a problem with you and you were too young to look at this clearly but now you had your head broken on the glass ceiling and you know reality. Even though Lorin Maazel, one of the five great conductors of the world, has gotten you into this man's office, because you're Black you've got to get out of his office. So, yes, that's just one story.

Jo Reed: Welcome to Quick Study, the monthly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts.  This is where we’ll share stats and stories to help us better understand the value of art in everyday life.  And I'm co-piloting Quick Study with Sunil Iyengar.  He’s the Director of Research and Analysis here at the Arts Endowment.  Hey, Sunil.

Sunil Iyengar: Hey, Jo.  How’s it going?

Jo Reed: Pretty well, pretty well.  Listen, I know today you wanted to talk about a recent study called the Arts Advantage and it’s about the impact of arts education on Boston students.  Why don’t we begin with who conducted the study and what were they looking at?

Sunil Iyengar: Yes.  Researchers from the Texas A&M University and University of Missouri actually teamed up with the Boston Public School System, the entire school system and they also brought in a bunch of other arts organizations, local foundations, and even worked with the Boston Mayor’s mayor office to learn whether sustained access to arts education, this is K-12 arts education could improve social, emotional, and academic outcomes of students.  They also wanted to understand how K-12 arts education affected parent and teacher perspectives about the school as a place to learn.

Jo Reed: A couple of questions about process.  Were they able to track students over time?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah.  That’s what’s great about the study.  There’s actually not much data that is out there that’s longitudinal.  But this study tracked not only what happened to those kids who had participated in arts education versus those who didn’t, but it also looked at outcomes for the same students over time.  So in other words this allowed researchers to understand how taking arts education affected student outcomes at particular points in their lives compared to when they didn’t take arts courses.

Jo Reed: And what about diversity?  Were they able to look at a real cross-section of students of diverse populations including racial, but also economic diversity?

Sunil Iyengar: That’s a great question.  Many studies of arts education right now are hampered by the difficulty of tracking students over multiple years, and actually getting those large and diverse student populations so we can know how different groups react to the programs we’re studying.  For example, it’s common for the most resourced to schools, those in high income neighborhoods often have more arts education offerings.  And so you could say that the students there already have an advantage and that may be their access to the arts education is just one part of their advantage.  But what this research team did, and this is Daniel Bowen and Brian Kisida had access to school records and surveys for more than 600,000 students that covered a period of about 11 years.  This was a student group where 41 percent were Hispanic, 36 percent were African-American.  Nearly 30 percent of these kids were English-language learners.  And 76 percent of these students came from economically disadvantaged households.  And also, just to let you know the data included about 171 public schools.

Jo Reed: Before we go on to the findings you know I interviewed Brian back in 2014 about another study he conducted I think it was in Arkansas. And he wrote about it in the New York Times with this catchy title, “Arts Makes You Smart”.  So I wonder what this study uncovered.

Sunil Iyengar: Well, this study actually found positive effects on student attendance.  So when enrolled in arts courses students who otherwise were chronically absent were seen to attend school for one additional day compared to when they were not enrolled in arts courses.  That doesn’t mean that that additional day was in the arts.  The point is that their overall attendance was improved.  Another way of thinking about this is that if you have a classroom of about 25 students’ arts’ education translated to nine more days of instruction per teacher.  Another big indicator was not just attendance but school engagement.  Now, this was true for both students and parents. It seemed to have gone up including sense of student belonging and engagement with learning as these kids continue to take arts courses.  For middle schoolers there were increases in test scores, in fact, for English language arts and math, but it was particularly strong for English language arts as a course.  So, you know, there’s some academic improvement but definitely seems to be through the data school engagement and student attendance improvement. 

Jo Reed: What about outside the classroom?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah, outside the classroom is interesting not so much from this study per se.  But the previous studies by this very duo Bowen and Kisida, and in fact, the study we’ve supported as the NEA they looked at issues like compassion and empathy and sort of psychological constructs-- you know, those psychological constructs.  And they saw that school engagement but even values like compassion and empathy were observed to have increased in this large study. And this was done down in Houston with support from the NEA as I said.  But it was a study that tracked outcomes from Houston’s arts access initiative, again dealing with a large school district there, the Houston Independent school district.  And that was a randomized controlled trial which is often considered a gold standard in research methodologies covering over 10,000 third to eighth graders across 42 schools. 

Jo Reed: Briefly, have you thought about some of the ways this study can be put to good use?

Sunil Iyengar: Yeah. I think it can because a lot of times anecdotally we often think, those of us who have children or deal with schools, know that arts and arts education in addition to having its own intrinsic take value and impact really seems to be tied with kids being more engaged generally in school and wanting to learn.  And we’re not even talking here about some of the data that’s been seen through neuroscience but just understanding patterns, behavioral patterns.  And over time, if this is true, and we’ve seen this in other data, too that school arts seems to be linked with school engagement and community engagement.  And so if that’s the case, certainly you could improve people’s likelihood for attendance which is a major indicator of academic success of course.

Jo Reed: Well, obviously, this is something we’ll keep watching Sunil.  Many thanks.  I’ll talk to you next month.

Sunil Iyengar: Thank you, Jo.  A pleasure.

Jo Reed: Always. 

That was Sunil Iyengar.  He’s the Director of Research and Analysis here at the National Endowment for the Arts.  This has been Quick Study.  The music is “We Are One” from Scott Holmes Music.  It’s licensed through Creative Commons.  Until next time, I'm Josephine Reed.  Thanks for listening.

<crew talk>

Kaitlyn Greenidge: It is so fascinating to me, and I will never be able to understand how people who were literally one or two years out of enslavement did these extraordinary things, of setting up whole towns, hospitals, schools, newspapers, mutual aid societies, parties, just everything, you know? And when we were talking sort of earlier about that question of trauma, people who had lived through amounts of trauma that are indescribable, not really understandable to most of us alive today, still had the wherewithal to sort of build these things, it's absolutely extraordinary.

Jo Reed: That is novelist and 2016 NEA Literature Fellow Kaitlyn Greenidge and this Art Works, the weekly podcast from the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed

We’re celebrating Juneteenth with a conversation with Kaitlyn Greenidge about her novel Libertie.  An historical novel, Libertie is inspired in part by the true story of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward who in 1869 became the first Black female doctor in New York and then co-founded of a hospital for women in Brooklyn.  Greenidge sets her novel before, during, but primarily after the Civil War and Dr. Steward is transformed into Dr. Kathy Sampson—a widow who is raising her daughter Libertie.  Coming of age in a Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, Libertie is in awe of her formidable mother and the work she accomplishes as a doctor and a stop on the underground railroad.  But as she grows up, she rebels against the pressure to live up to her mother’s expectations—to live the life her mother has mapped out for her as a partner in her medical practice. Kaitlyn Greenidge parallels Libertie’s struggles with autonomy with the ways Black people sought to enrich their lives and their communities in the aftermath of slavery and traces the ongoing discussions they had about the very definition of freedom.  As the story moves from a free Black community in Brooklyn to the first free Black republic of Haiti, Libertie continues to run up against gender roles, colorism and class expectations.  Here’s author Kaitlyn Greenidge –with a little more about the actual history that inspired Libertie

Kaitlyn Greenidge:  The novel is based on the life of Dr. Susan Smith McKinney Steward, who was the first black female doctor in New York State. She had a daughter who married the son of the Episcopal Archbishop of Haiti, moved to Haiti, fell in love with the country, but her marriage was very troubled. For most of her time of her relationship, she wrote letters back to her mother, saying, "Please help me sort of get out of this situation." And then, finally, her mother helped her make a really dramatic escape from Haiti. She moved back to the U.S., lived there for the rest of her life, told her descendants how much she loved the country; but also, for the rest of her life, received these letters from her in-laws, sort of saying, "You've-- not only have you broken up this family, but you have brought shame to the entire project of black liberation, by ending this marriage."

Jo Reed: Good God.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: And so-- <laughs> yeah. So, I heard that story. I did an oral history with one of her descendants, and I was struck by that story. And I wrote a fictionalized version, with dates and names sort of changed around, but that's the basis of the story.

Jo Reed: It's an extraordinary story, in and of itself, and what you do with it is really-- it's wonderful. And there is so much in your book, I'm really not sure where to start. So, why don't we just begin with the book's title, which is the name of the protagonist, Libertie? Because this book is so much about not just attaining freedom, but knowing how to live in freedom.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, the-- it's a little heavy-handed, but her name is Libertie. You know, in the novel version of this, her mother and father-- her father has passed away, and her mother and father have met at a lecture where, sort of, they're discussing what should happen to free black people in the U.S. So, I should say the novel's timeline goes from right before the Civil War, through the Civil War and Reconstruction. And, of course, before the Civil War, there was this huge question of what would happen, if you were to free enslaved people, where would they live? There was a sort of-- I mean, it's taken as a given now that we would be a part of the U.S., but before the Civil War, it was a really pressing question, because white people did not want to live beside free black people, and assumed that wouldn't work. And so, even within free black communities, there was this question of, "Should we stay in the U.S., or should we go?  You know, they established the country of Liberia, originally in West Africa, as a colony for emancipated black Americans. And Libertie's name is sort of an homage to that place that her father wanted to go to, and her mother decidedly did not.

Jo Reed: Well, it also speaks to the trauma of slavery, because we see in characters like Ben Daisy, who had escaped from enslavement, but had been so damaged by it, he just doesn't recover. And you bring this up, which isn't something we often think about. We don't think about trauma and how it lasts, not just through a person's emotional life, but intergenerationally.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Yes, exactly. You know, I worked for many years in black history museums. That's where I first heard this story that Libertie is based on. I worked for many years in black history museums, particularly ones dedicated to black abolitionists, and I was so struck by, within those sort of stories of triumph and incredible bravery and courage, we often didn't talk about the real emotional toll of living through enslavement, and then also the emotional toll of fighting against a structure as whole, dominating, just all-encompassing, as slavery was in the U.S. to-- it was obviously difficult to be a slave, but even to be an active abolitionist took an incredible emotional toll on the black people who did that political work. And so-- and we know that from sort of reading their diaries. You know, I think Sojourner Truth is probably the most famous example. She struggled with alcoholism and alcohol dependency her whole life, understandably, because of the sort of intense traumas that she lived through. But when you would try to include that part of her story-- oftentimes, when I would try to include those parts of the story, when speaking with the public, the response was like, to talk about that is to somehow denigrate that person's memory, or to somehow cheapen the history, to recognize the toll. And to me, that always felt so backwards, because the struggle is part of what makes these stories part of our legacy: that people did have these issues. People did try and reckon with trauma, came up with different coping mechanisms, some of them helpful and sustainable, that we still use today, and some of them not so much, that we still use today. And that is a part of sort of the larger human experience that was slavery. It's not outside of human experience or human understanding. Those things are very, very much a part of humanity.

Jo Reed: Exactly. It's like history. Of course history influences the present. How do you stand outside of history? Where is that place that's outside of history?

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Exactly. Exactly.

Jo Reed: Well, mothers and daughters, and the complexity of that relationship, is very centered in this book, as well. And Libertie is an only child. Her father is dead, and her mother is her world. It is the world to her. And this is also very much a coming-of-age story. Remind me how old Libertie is when we first meet her.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: She's about seven years old at the start of the novel.

Jo Reed: Yeah, so she's really young. And I have to say, personally, I'm an only child. My father died when I was very, very young, and I really understood that closeness she has with her mother. And then, as you grow up, you have to self-define, and part of that is pushing away the person who was your life. And you really, really nailed that, but it's also so complicated, because of who her mother is. My mother was just a mom, you know, but Dr. Sampson was a formidable woman. She was exceptional. And I think-- if you don't mind reading a little bit, because I think the opening of the book really sets the table for who Dr. Sampson is, and how Libertie sees her.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Of course. Sure, I'll read the first couple paragraphs.

 "I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. 'It still didn't help him much, my love,' she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That's how I knew she was magic. The time I saw Mama raise a man from the dead, it was close to dusk. Mama and her nurse, Lenore, were in her office-- Mama with her little greasy glasses on the tip of her nose, balancing the books, and Lenore banking the fire. This was the rule in Mama's office-- the fire was kept burning from dawn till after dinner, and we never let it go out completely. Even on the hottest days, when my linen collar stuck to the back of my neck and the belly of Lenore's apron was stained with sweat, a mess of logs and twigs was lit up down there, waiting. When the dead man came, it was spring. I was playing on the stoop. I'd broken a stick off the mulberry bush, so young it had resisted the pull of my fist. I'd had to work for it. Once I'd wrenched it off, I stripped the bark and rubbed the wet wood underneath on the flagstone, pressing the green into rock." That's-- and I'll stop there.

Jo Reed: Well, again, how she remembers her mother. The first sentence: " I saw my mother raise a man from the dead." That is some legacy to try to live up to.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, it's-- I really wanted to sort of play with that superhuman understanding of a parental figure that a small child has; and how, in a small child's imagination, that seems completely possible, that your parent has some sort of say over life and death. And part of growing up is realizing that's not the case, and letting that fantasy go. It's a really alluring fantasy to give your parental figure much more agency in the world than you have, and that a normal person has, because it takes a lot of responsibility off yourself of having to figure that stuff out, if you continually tell yourself, "Well, my mother was great at everything," or, "My mother was always able to do it." And part of what is becoming an adult in the world is recognizing the gaps in that, and letting go of that narrative to make space for yourself to grow, and for your parent to grow, as well, in your relationship with them.

Jo Reed: And again, in the case of Dr. Sampson, she truly is an exceptional person. There are very few Dr. Sampsons that are going to walk this world. And that really complicates things so much more, because Libertie is raised to be like her mother, to become a doctor. But it's not what she wants, as much as she loves and admires her mother, and wants her approval.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Right, yeah. Part of the novel is really looking at this narrative of black exceptionalism that's often closely tied to black identity in the U.S. And we-- even black people, ourselves, we sort of oftentimes buy into the myth that only the exceptional of us are worthy of respect, and that we constantly have to prove ourselves to this level of excellence that is unsustainable for all of us.  Obviously, everybody is unique, but if everyone is exceptional, in a materialistic sort of understanding of the word, that's not possible. And to expect all of us to do that is setting us up for failure, and to peg our very, sort of, just basic survival on being absolutely exceptional is a real torturous kind of bargain. But it's a really seductive one, you know? It's a seductive one, to tell yourself that you and your children are going to be the ones to sort of beat the legacy of racism in the U.S.; that somehow you are going to be the exception to the rule; that somehow you'll make it so that your kid doesn't have to deal with it, but maybe everybody else will. That's such a seductive narrative in our culture, and it's really hard to not respond to it.

Jo Reed: And, of course, this is then further complicated by skin color, because Dr. Sampson could pass for white, which is partly why she was able to become a doctor. And Libertie takes after her father, who's much more dark-skinned than her mother. And that presents different sorts of constraints on the child.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, one of the things that I really wanted to look at was this question of colorism, which comes up in our culture, I feel like, every 10 or 15 years or so. What often happens when we talk about colorism is, we talk about it sort of in terms of incredibly personal terms. You know, people tell the story of, "I was either too dark or too light for this particular group of people, or set of people." And we don't necessarily talk about it in the ways that it structurally affects people, and we definitely don't talk about it historically. What I'm so fascinated by is how subjective colorism is. Even though it dictates, really, down to rates of marriage, and people's earning ability, and the type of healthcare they receive, it's still extremely subjective. People who-- unless you're talking about someone who is extremely white-skinned with Eurocentric features, or someone who is very, very dark, like I am, in the middle there's a whole range of shades that, in some contexts, will be considered light-skinned, in other contexts will be considered dark-skinned, and yet we act like these terms are set in stone. And that psychological aspect of it is so interesting to me, and I wanted to write a novel in which it's a part of the characters' lives, but it's in a natural way. Libertie's mother is light enough to pass. She absolutely adores her dark-skinned daughter. She thinks her daughter is a prize, is sort of the best thing that has ever happened to her in the world. So the question of colorism isn't necessarily within her love or respect for her daughter, but it definitely drives a wedge between the two women, because they are being fundamentally treated in very different ways, as they move through the world. Even though both of them are having to live through being black women in the 19^th century, they're having very different experiences of what that is.

Jo Reed: It's really interesting, because a lot like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, we really are seeing this through the eyes of... well, through Libertie. I mean, it's definitely through her eyes, but it always is happening within a black community, within a black family. Clearly, there's larger white oppression and white violence. There is also the horrible riots -- race riots-- in New York, that we see from a distance. But your story is centered on the black community and their interactions with one another.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to-- that was sort of like a formal challenge to myself, was to set a novel in the 19^th century, with black characters, about blackness, in which whiteness was really going to be really peripheral. And they live underneath sort of the really harsh systems of white supremacy, but really, the conversations are between black people themselves about what blackness was actually going to mean, and how you create communities for ourselves. I'd written a novel-- my first novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, which was about a black family that moves to a nearly all-white town to teach sign language to a chimpanzee-- and that novel was really about blackness coming right up against whiteness: What does it mean to sort of come up against whiteness in sort of this white, liberal space, where no one really wants to name or talk about race? It was really about those issues. And when I was touring with that book, I went to a high school, actually, in Boston, and I spoke with some METCO students, so students who were part of Boston's busing system, so black students who were in sort of this all-white school. And I spoke with one of them. She was about 15 years old, and she said, "Oh, this novel isn't about race." And I said, "What do you mean? Why do you-- how can you say that?" And she said, "Well, if it was about race, then I would know who was right and who was wrong, because whenever we have discussions about race in school, they try to make it seem like it's really cut-and-dry, really sort of easy, and it's good versus bad." And I thought, "Oh, my goodness. That's such a... that's such a deep understanding of all the wrong ways we have conversations like this, <laughs> and all, sort of, the wrong ways that we try and approach this subject." And it really sort of started me thinking. As I was thinking about what I was going to do next, I was thinking, "What would it mean to write about black people in the U.S., and just take that part of it away? And it's still about blackness, but why do we assume that novels about blackness"-- and I will say this purely in a literary fiction space; I don't think this is true in other artforms-- "but why do we assume that novels about blackness, or novels about race, are immediately about black people and white people together?" Which is just so strange, when you actually sort of dig down into that base assumption.

Jo Reed: Well, the other thing, because this is set a little bit before and during the Civil War, and then most of the novel is set after the Civil War, and it was obviously a very difficult time for formerly enslaved people, who came away with nothing, but it was also a time of real possibilities. And I really got that from your book. And also, the amount of work done by black people for black people was extraordinary.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Yeah. I love the Reconstruction era for that reason. I think it is so fascinating to me, and I will never be able to understand how people who were literally one or two years out of enslavement did these extraordinary things, of setting up whole towns, hospitals, schools, newspapers, mutual aid societies, parties, just everything, you know? And when we were talking sort of earlier about that question of trauma, people who had lived through amounts of trauma that are indescribable, not really understandable to most of us alive today, still had the wherewithal to sort of build these things, it's absolutely extraordinary. And I think Reconstruction is such an interesting era because, as many people have pointed out, it really does mirror our own, in that there were these extraordinary moments of black achievement, and then there were these moments of increasing white resentment, white violence, backlash, and just a fomenting of a new order of white supremacy that was going to, in a really few years, really announce itself as taking over. And because that takeover was so successful, we forget that there was that sort of brief moment of real possibility. One of the really touching and astonishing things that I read in my research was I was reading these black newspapers from Washington, D.C., which have this extraordinary explosion of a black middle class during the Reconstruction. And so there were a bunch of black newspapers coming out of that community, and in the newspapers, they were saying things like, "Oh, we just have to wait for this civil rights bill to pass"-- the 1876 civil rights bill. "We just have to wait for this civil rights bill to pass, and within a generation, the white racists will die off, because we are being educated. White people are being educated. White people are seeing what we're capable of doing. Once they see this, there's no way that racism will last past the next 15 or 20 years." And it just sounds so much like the things we've been saying for the last 100 years, <laughs> and I-- you know, that can be depressing in one light, but it can also just be, really, just tell you where the culture was at, in terms of a really sort of significant turning point, where it did feel like that was possible.

Jo Reed: The last third of the book takes place in Haiti. Libertie marries a medical student of her mother's, Emmanuel Chase, whose family is very prominent in Haiti. And Haiti had a lot of resonance for African Americans during this period. Tell me about that, and tell me about the research that you did about 19^th-century Haitian politics.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Yeah, You know, when I was looking at the story that was the historical basis for this, I saw that their family had been connected to this black expatriate family in Haiti, and I thought, "That's really interesting." And then I was doing more research, of course, sort of looking at this question of what free black people would do in the U.S., Haiti, of course, came up again. Throughout the 19^th century, Haiti was sort of like a threat that some white people saw as what, kind of like, the worst could happen if black emancipation happened, but it was a promise to black people. It was sort of like, "This is what could be possible if we have freedom." And, of course, the sort of tribulations of Haitian history were playing out during that whole 19^th century, so people didn't necessarily know where it was headed, but they could see the promise that Haiti had. And the fear that Haiti sort of struck in white slave owners, especially, was really potent. And so, again, when I was reading those newspapers from Washington, D.C., during Reconstruction, it's all about Haiti. They're all talking about what's happening there. They're really excited when the Haitian ambassador comes to D.C. Everybody's fighting over who's going to host him for balls. They're talking about Haitian fashion. They are in it. They are part of <laughs> following that culture. And so I just loved that, as a space of imagination that I don't think, in the last 50 or 60 years or so, we've sort of lost in African-American culture. And especially in the last couple years, when I've seen online, in online discussions of the black diaspora, there's been sort of a nationalistic tone that's taken on, that is super strange to me, where people try to make an argument that somehow slavery in the U.S. was worse than slavery in the Caribbean, or people in the Caribbean didn't have slavery. Crazy arguments go on online, where I'm like, "This is just-- I don't even know where this is coming from, but it's clearly from a group of younger people who don't even know this history of the black diaspora, and how much our communities were in conversation with each other, and how people understood from the start that organizing across national borders was a necessity to defeat white supremacy, and to defeat slavery, in particular."

Jo Reed: Well, in your book Libertie, we have the story of the Chase family in Haiti, and suddenly we see a whole new set of complications: African Americans who emigrated to Haiti, basically assuming the role of colonizers, looking down on Haitian customs, culture, religion. Colorism blooms there, and a really entrenched patriarchy. Not that there wasn't one-- and isn't one-- in the United States, but it was definitely happening there. And that was to Libertie's surprise, because Emmanuel had told her, "We'll be companions."

Kaitlyn Greenidge:   Yeah, I was really lucky, in that when I started to do this work, this historian at Vanderbilt University, Brandon Byrd, he published a book on black expatriates going to Haiti during Reconstruction and after. And there was a whole movement, led by black Protestant churches, to move to Haiti and convert as many Haitians as possible to different Protestant faiths. There was a real worry that democracy wasn't going to work in Haiti; Haiti wouldn't be self-governing, as long as it was a Catholic country, and as long as people there practiced voodoo. So voodoo was sort of, maybe, lesser known by, quote/unquote, a "brand name" in the 19^th century. I think, sort of throughout the 19^th century, people are sort of making up the myth of it, as opposed to how people are actually sort of having it in their lives. But there was this over-unding [sic]-- there was a group of black elites in the U.S. who took in all the language around U.S. nationalism; that the reason why the U.S. was so stable was because of this Protestant work ethic. All of that sort of mythology around whiteness, they took that in and sort of made a black version of that, and tried to export that to Haiti, and really move there, and did not necessarily take the country in for what it was. And the letters back are really extraordinary. I read this one letter from this woman who was writing about going to the markets in Port-au-Prince, and seeing Haitian women in the markets. And to her, instead of sort of seeing, "This is how commerce is done here, and work is done here," she writes home, and she's like, "It's-- I worry about this country, because I see the women doing so much manual labor, and for people to be civilized, women have to be at home. And so how can we make sure that Haitian women understand they have to be just at home all the time, and it's the men who should be doing physical labor?" So, really, just sort of drinking wholesale from all of the worst <laughs> ideas of history, and trying to impose it on this culture. And I just found that so fascinating and so heartbreaking, and also just-- like I said, just a part of history, I think. In sort of that ongoing quest for a space for black freedom, that free black people have had throughout this country, either setting up colonies in other countries or setting up all-black spaces within the U.S., there is always that tension of, "How much of the larger white mainstream culture's values are we going to take with us? How much of this are we going to try and do, but just with black people at the top? And is that really liberation? Is that really freedom, or is this a chance to imagine something completely new and completely better?" And I think that tension is ongoing. I think we have that tension today, in 2021, really, in so many of our issues about what we're going to do around police reform, around voting, around wealth, around what it means to gain wealth within the black community. That question underlies all of that, and we don't really-- it's a continual question that we'll never really have a full answer for.

Jo Reed: Well, the voice of Libertie herself is so particular, and the pacing of the book is so particular. I mean, it has a cadence to it. And the language is so evocative of that time, or at least a time long ago. I mean, it was so clear I was reading a novel that was set two centuries ago.

Kaitlyn Greenidge:   <laughs> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I thought a lot about language. A real sort of quote that guided me was this-- there's a Toni Morrison interview in Black Woman [sic - should be Women] Writers at Work, where she talks about parabolic language, so those words that we use constantly, that sort of the meaning has rubbed off; words like love or peace or freedom or happiness; words that when you-- if you were just to write them on the page, they just sort of sit there, because they're so blasé, and thinking about how to arrange those words onto a page or in a sentence, where you can get a reader to think up-- to come across them as if they were brand new, to come across them as if they've never heard them before. And so I don't think I-- I'm not Toni Morrison, so I do not always succeed at that, but that was sort of the... that was the guiding philosophy for a lot of it. And I read-- to that end, I read a lot of poetry, as much poetry as I could. I read the Song of Songs from the Bible a lot, and sort of thought about that for structure and image, and for certain cadence of certain lines, to try and get the language to feel both of that time, but also not sort of staid or button-up in any sort of way.

Jo Reed: Well, mothers and daughters are so central to this book, and in some ways it corresponds with your own motherhood journey. You were birthing your daughter as you were birthing the book.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Yeah, I found out I was pregnant on the day that I handed in the first draft, and then she was born when I handed in the edits. So... or I went into the hospital to have her on the day I handed in the edits. And so I was not-- I hadn't yet become a mother when I was writing it, so I was sort of having to imagine that part of it, and sort of think about what motherhood and mothering means.

Jo Reed: It's interesting. Well, your own family-- your birth family-- is pretty exceptional. You have a sister who's an historian, another who is a playwright. And your mother is a social worker. Tell me about growing up in that family of women.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: You know, I'm super close with my family, and I would say that we were given the freedom, growing up, to have really big imaginations. Nothing was off limits to imagine or to play around. And so much of our play with each other was based on storytelling and imagining and just building, sort of, worlds. So I feel really grateful and lucky to have had that, as a small child, that that was sort of just a given; and that that intense imagination was understood as an asset in life, and not something to be embarrassed about or to sort of set aside as you grew older.

Jo Reed: So, was it very early on that you decided you were going to be making a life as a writer, in both fiction and nonfiction? Because you're a nonfiction writer, as well.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: I think that it was really difficult to imagine how I would make a life as a writer. When I was younger, I was super aware of the economics of it, and how precarious they were, and I did not want to live that life, having grown up in a lot of precarity. I was really-- I did not romanticize starving artist's life at all. I was not interested in that narrative. So...

Jo Reed: I'm right there with you.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: <laughs> Yeah. So... so, for me, it was always sort of like, "Well, how do I have that creative life while making sure that I have the security that I did not get to always enjoy as a kid?" And so I held off, really, on being a full-time writer for a long time, or calling myself a writer for a long time. And it's really only in the last five years, since I published the first book, that I have sort of consistently written this much. And I published my first book when I was 35, so I had a whole life of not writing, even though, sort of, I was writing for myself. But I had a whole life of not publishing and not publicly living as a writer, and definitely not making a living as a writer, so it feels a little bit strange to claim that title now.

Jo Reed: So that's about when you were able to quit the day job and just devote yourself to writing, about five years ago?

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Well, yeah. I was really lucky in that I won a Whiting Award for my first novel, and so that felt like a jolt of confidence in the world, that people were interested in what I had to say, and that I had the space to sort of work on it. And I was still-- I still taught. I was teaching. <laughs> But-- and I was also doing my nonfiction work. But it sort of felt like, "Okay, people... there is an audience somewhere out there for the things that I'm writing, and for the things that I'm interested in," which did not always feel like it was the case, for the first decade that I was sort of thinking about writing, and thinking about the things that I wanted to write about.

Jo Reed: Well, you also received a 2016 NEA Literature Fellowship. Congratulations.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Thank you.

Jo Reed: What did that allow you to do?

Kaitlyn Greenidge:  It allowed me to do my research around Haiti. I was able to take the trip to Haiti with that money. I was also able to have a little bit of a cushion as I figured out what... as I figured out the transition from full-time work to doing nonfiction work and teaching. Really, it was like another jolt of confidence to be able to do that.  I cannot stress enough. You know, I'm not the type of writer who writes runaway bestsellers, or writes really super-viral articles, or things like that. I write things that are really idiosyncratic and sort of to my own weird, demented tastes, and so it's really wonderful to know that someone thinks that that has value and is important.

Jo Reed: And then, finally, what's next?

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Oh, that's a great question. I’ve just finished a story about a woman who, during the pandemic, she goes to a sex party in Brooklyn, and she's the oldest woman there. And it explores what that means, and what's she's doing with her life.  And it was really fun to write. It's Departure from Libertie. It's set in the present day. It comes out with Scribd, which is a subscription story-based service, and it'll come out in July. <clears throat>

Jo Reed: Well, I look forward to it. Kaitlyn, thank you. Thank you for writing this book. I'm a pretty quick reader, and I kept putting the book down, because I just wanted it to... I wanted to savor it.

Kaitlyn Greenidge: Oh! That's the best compliment. Thank you so much. <laughs> I love to hear that. <laughs> Thank you.

Jo Reed: Not at all…thank you!

That’s author and NEA Literature Fellow Kaitlyn Greenidge –we were talking about her novel Libertie You’ve been listening to Art Works produced by the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed—stay safe and thanks for listening.