Chapter Two
Ethel Waters was conceived at knife point when John Waters, a young mulatto, raped twelve-year-old Louise Anderson.
Hurt and bewildered, the young unwed girl was unable to tell anyone what had happened to her. Her mother worked long hours to support the family. And when her pregnancy became obvious, her church, which was so important to her, excluded her. She suffered ridicule but kept her feelings inside.
Louise was all alone at her Aunt Ida's home in Chester, Pennsylvania, when her baby entered the world at 9:15 A.M., October 31, 1896. The woman next door heard her cry out in pain and came to deliver the bright and alert baby girl Louise named Ethel.
It was only natural for Louise to resent this baby born against her will. Fortunately, the young mother lived to see the product of her tragedy of rape reach stardom. Later she also saw how God used her seemingly worthless sparrow to reach many people for Christ.
Louise's mother, Sally Anderson, took over and actually raised Ethel,
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and it was her grandmother Ethel called "Mom." But with Sally working as a live-in housekeeper, Ethel was moved around from one broken-down shanty to another in the slums of Chester and Philadelphia. She never knew a secure and stable home life, learning to sleep and eat when and wherever she could. Sometimes she lived with her aunts; often she was completely on her own. Sometimes her mother would get angry at Sally and show it by taking Ethel to live with her. At various times the only home Ethel's grandmother could afford was in the red-light district.
"Sometimes I'd have to sleep on the steps," she recalled, "because my aunts would forget to leave the key in the door. I'd only have a new pair of shoes to try on in the store. The next day they'd go to the pawn shop."
To make sure Ethel was fed, her grandmother would sew pockets inside her apron and fill these with food scraps from her white employer's table. In between these "meals," Ethel learned to survive by stealing. The prostitutes taught her how. "I used to swipe milk from other people's stoops," she later admitted. She was also adept at going out and shopping with a quarter and coming home with a whole meal! She never knew what it was like not to be hungry. At one period, she would get one meal in the evening at a saloon where the people knew her grandmother. Or she'd walk eight or ten blocks to eat fried fish and potatoes for ten cents.
Ethel adored her mother, in spite of being merely tolerated as a daughter. Louise never cuddled or displayed affection toward the young Ethel. "I never belonged," Ethel said of her childhood. "The tug in here wanted to be with her 'cause she was my mother. I always wanted to break down that thing that I felt — that if I could get to know her and she'd get to know me better, she'd like me. That was the childish thought I had." Later she realized that each time her mother looked at her, Louise remembered the most frightening and embarrassing day of her life.
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Materially Ethel was more or less getting by. Emotionally she was starved. "I never had a shoulder to cry on or a lap to sit on," she said. "I never got the affection I so desperately wanted." Not even her grandmother, the one person she loved the most and who she knew loved her, ever kissed or hugged her. She rationalized this lack of physical demonstration of love as caused by her large size. Even at ages four and five she was taken for much older, and at eleven the men started to be interested in her. She was tall and big-boned, though slender and attractive. She was eager for people to like her and longed for their attention. When she didn't get understanding, she hid her deep hurts and built up defenses of toughness and an exploding temper.
Toughness and temper were almost necessities in order to get along in the ghettos of Philadelphia, Camden and Chester. Alcohol, dope, sex, violence, death — all were a part of that world as Ethel learned about them all. "I got a pretty good education," she recalls, "because anything went in the alley after dark — and I'm not talking about cats and dogs! That way I got my schooling — you know, the school of life — and I'm still attending!
"I was always intelligent. Usually big children are sort of stymied — their intellect doesn't come with their size. I happened to be a pretty big brilliant child!" She had a tremendous memory — "an elephant memory" she called it — and a great capacity for learning from her experiences. The result was that alcohol and drugs were two things she shied away from all of her life. But she became a street child, a dead-end kid, self-reliant, brash, aggressive and wild. No one could beat up on her or put anything over on her.
"Growing up in the red-light district," Ethel confessed later, "I knew all the answers. You couldn't get out of line with me in a minute that I didn't let you know I knew the score. That protected me. I wasn't shy or demure or naive. I let them know I knew." She may have looked like a child angel,
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but "I could cuss like a sailor — and I have to pray about that even now! (I never use the Lord's name in vain, but I have a lot of good substitutes.) When you got me mad enough to blaspheme, I was ready to kill you!" She could hold her own with the big kids in the neighborhood because of her size and her profanity.
However, she never resented or was embarrassed by her upbringing. She she could use it to her advantage, getting sympathy because she was a "bastard" — or being defiant because of it.
Ethel found her first understanding and affection at the age of nine when her grandmother, who was a staunch Catholic, enrolled her in a Catholic school in Philadelphia. In an attempt to shield herself from the rejection and hurt she had come to expect, Ethel had built walls of hate between herself and teachers. In this school she immediately set about to establish her reputation as a menace. But this time her contemptuousness and defiance were met with love, her badness and meanness with patience.
The nuns discovered that she wasn't eating lunch. "I never had lunches to carry because there wasn't that kind of food in my house. I'd raise holy hell because I was too embarrassed to go downstairs for lunch knowing I had nothing." The nuns began to find chores she could do for them so they could reward her with part of their lunch — often the only decent meal she got during the day.
The atmosphere of warmth and friendliness that met her from these servants of the Lord gradually changed her. She began to want to behave herself, and she started searching for a closer relationship with God. As she put it, "That was the beginning of me being tamed down and giving serious thinking to the Lord." She learned to pray and to go to confession, though at first she was afraid that her honesty would shock the priest, because "I wouldn't tell a lie. And I wouldn't cheat on the penance even if it took four hours to
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do the stations. But I made up my mind I wouldn't do that sin again. It was good psychology."
Unfortunately, school occupied only a short part of each day. When she returned home, nothing had changed. The two aunts she was now living with were alcoholics who yelled at her and even beat her when they were drunk. "There was a battle royal then," Ethel remembered, because I'd learned, from them and others, how to defend myself. I was a good absorber." Her uncle was a kleptomaniac.
At a Methodist Quarterly Meeting in Chester, a very mature twelve-year-old Ethel, who thought she knew it all, found the only One who loves without reservation. Ethel Waters experienced God. She had gone to the first day of the meeting because of the food. Then the gang she hung out with persuaded her to go to the children's revival. Reluctantly, Ethel agreed. She went forward every evening, but nothing happened. The preacher held the meetings open an additional three nights for the children — particularly for Ethel. On that last night Ethel went forward again to the mourner's bench at the closing invitation. Kneeling on the hard floor she cried out to God, "Lord, I don't know why I'm here. I want to know you. I want something, but I don't know how to find it. If I don't get it tonight, I'll never come back."
That night she "came through." God touched her. Ethel Waters knew she had found a Friend, and the people around her knew that she was changed. She was just radiant when she got up, they told her. She knew God loved her and she wasn't alone.
"He let me know there was something," she recalled. "I wanted to hug it. I didn't feel bad about things that hurt me from my childhood that nobody had a chance to know — how lonely I was, how much I wanted affection. I found I had something I could cling to."
But the world she lived in didn't change, and Ethel found herself
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facing the dilemma that all Christians do. That is, being in the world but fighting not to be of the world. And when a girl in that church taunted her and accused her falsely, and then raked her face with her long fingernails, Ethel got so enraged that she walked out and never went back. She couldn't honestly go to church with hate in her heart toward that girl. She began the up-and-down continuum that was to be typical of her life for the next fifty years.
"My heart was heavy. Up until the time I rededicated my life, I always had that heaviness, regardless of my success. I was always saying, 'Lord, I know I've failed you. What can I do to get back?' "
When she was thirteen, Ethel married twenty-three-year-old "Buddy" Purnsley. She was coerced into the marriage by her mother, who simply wanted to get rid of her. Purnsley beat Ethel repeatedly and refused to allow her to see her school friends, in order to keep her from finding out about his unfaithfulness. She was a child agewise, but as she told it, her mind was so "old and raw" that she knew the marriage wouldn't last. Although she had "deep religious scruples" against separating from her husband, she did leave him and began to fend for herself. She found work in hotels and apartment houses as a substitute dishwasher, waitress, and cleaning woman. She was such a hard worker that she embarrassed the permanent help.
When she worked as a substitute chambermaid, she'd finish a room fast, then lock the door, and become an actress in front of the mirror. She would dance and sing and imitate the acts she had seen at the local clubs and theatre. Singing and dancing came naturally. "Whoever teaches the fish to swim and the birds to fly taught me to sing. I can't ever remember having a lesson. I had a body and I knew how to use it, doing the shimmy and the shake."
After a couple of years of "just barely making it" with hotel jobs,
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one Halloween, her birthday, she was given a chance to sing at a Philadelphia nightclub. "Best present a girl ever had," she said.
The result was that she was hired as a singer and billed as "Sweet Mama Stringbean." One of the songs she wanted to sing was "The St. Louis Blues." When she found out it was protected, she wrote to jazzman W.C. Handy and got his permission to sing it, thus becoming the first woman ever to do so.
Her first performance of "The St. Louis Blues" was at the Lincoln Theatre in Baltimore, where she was billed with the Hill Sisters. The performance was a success, and the money rained down on the stage after her number.
"But the ten dollars a week that looked so good at first got small a few weeks later when I found out that the two boys who got me the job were getting twenty-five dollars a week to manage me," she later recalled.
Her response was to leave them and go with the two Hill Sisters on their own successful tour. This was Ethel's characteristic way of handling injustice. She never stayed in and took it, but stood up to change what she could, and often left to do better somewhere else. She knew that the people liked her way of singing and dancing, and that she could please them. As her reputation grew, so did the crowds. Her absence from a show proved her point to promoters when they failed to get the anticipated profits. And her presence guaranteed a sellout crowd.
Her reputation, however, didn't grow overnight — it took years of appearing in smaller nightclubs on the East Coast or traveling over the country, often with the black Theatre Owners Booking Association. "I worked from nine to unconscious," she said. "But it was fine. I made enough to give up chambermaiding" — though for a time she kept the promise of a job open in case she didn't make it as a performer.
With her career as a professional entertainer/performer launched,
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Ethel didn't forget where she was from. She began sending money home to her family, a practice she continued throughout her career. She later said that helping her family was the great satisfaction she got from show business. It was too late to help her grandmother. Sally Anderson had died of cancer in Ethel's arms the year that Ethel was married to Buddy Purnsley. As she was dying, she asked Ethel to sing her favorite song, "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." But Momweeze, as Ethel called her mother, and her aunts, needed her help.
In Harlem between tours, Ethel found work at some of the popular places of that time — Edmond Johnson's Cellar, the Cotton Club, as well as the Plantation Club where she made her first big hit of "Dinah." (Years later an unknown white singer copied Ethel's rendition of "Dinah" for an audition. The show's director, not remembering the young lady's name, kept calling her Dinah. The singer then took that name as her stage name, and as Dinah Shore she became a favorite of millions.)
Ethel's popularity increased and she began to record her singing, first with Black Swan and then with Columbia Records for nearly ten years. In the early 1930s Ethel was practically the only Negro star vocalist on records. "There was just something about me and my style that the people wanted to hear." She was able to capture and project emotion — any emotion — in her singing, drawing on her own experience and deep feelings.
She was heard on radio each week from the Cotton Club, where she was backed by the Dorsey Brothers' orchestra.
Her first Broadway appearance was in the all-Negro revue Africana, in 1927, and she followed this with other revues — Lew Leslie's Blackbirds in 1930 and Rhapsody in Black in 1931.
On with the Show was her first movie, which she made for Warners in 1929.
At the Cotton Club in 1933, Irving Berlin heard her sing
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"Stormy Weather" and signed her for his successful musical As Thousands Cheer. The first Negro performer in an all-white cast on Broadway, she sang three of his songs, "Heat Wave," "Harlem on my Mind" and "Suppertime" — a song about a Southern woman whose husband had been lynched. In that song, Ethel portrayed the grief and anguish she had shared with a Negro family years before in Macon, Georgia, when their son was lynched.
In 1935 she performed with Beatrice Lillie in the revue At Home Abroad.
When Ethel started being billed as a "name performer," she had a little trick she would use when she didn't want to do a performance. She would ask for what she thought was an exorbitant salary. In the end, however, it only served to boost her salary and make her a very highly paid performer in later years.
Despite the recognition and acclaim she received, Ethel wasn't fulfilled. Her life, successful though it was, was a repetition of her youth, with no place to call home, living out of suitcases and keeping irregular schedules. What she wanted most was a sense of order, a nice quiet place to sleep, clean surroundings and good meals at regular times. Particularly in the early days, she used to dream about traveling around the world as a lady's maid to a kind and generous boss. In the meantime she continued to sing — her dream of an orderly balanced life had to wait.
Her tumultuous emotional life didn't make for orderly living either. She was often in love, almost always with unsuitable or untrustworthy men — but only one man at a time. Ethel's hot temper often flared in these relationships.
Ethel didn't escape racial prejudice, even when she became a well-known star. She encountered it everywhere she went: in hotels, on Jim Crow railway trains and in nightclubs. Yet faced with blind bias and hatred, she never turned bitter or angry — she only felt pity for races that had to live in
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terror of each other. "I've never been sorry I'm colored. Suffering isn't prejudice. Just because a person is white doesn't mean he doesn't have trouble too," she once said.
Even as a well-known singer and entertainer, she wasn't elated about performing for a white audience. She was afraid they wouldn't grasp her distinctive delivery of the blues. When her own people liked her, it was obvious. "They'd scream, stomp, and applaud until the whole building shook," Ethel remembered. By contrast, the white folks were quiet and subdued with their clapping. Later, after years of singing to white audiences, Ethel changed her mind. Negro audiences upset her with their noisy response and the ribald shouts and cheers.
At the top of her career Ethel was performing at such elite nightclubs as the Embassy club in New York City. Her clear, vibrant voice was singing such songs as "Go Back Where You Stayed Last Night," "You Can't Do What My Last Man Did," and "Heebie Jeebies." "No one could do the shimmies like I did, but I was never vulgar," she recalled. "In fact, although the shimmy was banned in Atlantic City, they let me do mine."
Ethel was always generous to her family and to people she loved. At one point she offered to take in the eighteen-month-old baby of a friend who could no longer care for the child. With no legal obligation involved, Ethel and the girl's mother agreed to allow Algretta to choose whom she wanted to live with when the child was old enough to make up her own mind. Ethel cared for Algretta until she was twelve, and later she supported in some way about twenty girls.
Ethel found the role of mother very satisfying and fulfilling. Years later she said in her autobiography, His Eye Is on the Sparrow, "My ambition was to bring Algretta up so everyone would love her as I'd never been loved as a little girl . . . . Being a mother is what makes a real life for a woman, not applause, your picture in the paper, the roses
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and the telegrams you get on opening night. A great many people who think of themselves as poor have the richness in their lives. You are a person of the greatest importance when you are a mother of a family. Just do your job right and your kids will love you. And for that love of theirs there is no satisfying substitute."
In 1939 Ethel became the first Negro woman to star in a dramatic play on Broadway. At the Empire Theatre, where so many great actresses had played, Ethel played the part of Hagar in Mamba's Daughters. The character of Hagar was so similar to her mother, Louise, that she could easily identify with her. The response on opening night was thunderous — seventeen curtain calls.
Back in the dressing room, Ethel recalled in His Eye Is on the Sparrow, "I burst into sobbing as I humbly thanked my God. Because even if no one else knew it, I had been no actress that night. I had only been remembering and all I had done was carry out His orders. And I had shown them all what it is to be a colored woman, dumb, ignorant, all boxed up and feeling everything with such intenseness that she is half crazy."
The critics praised her to the skies — all except Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times. In response her friends — who included Judith Anderson, Tallulah Bankhead, Cass Canfield, Dorothy Gish, Edwin Knopf — got together and took out an ad in the Times praising her performance:
"We, the undersigned, feel that Ethel Waters' superb performance in Mamba's Daughters . . . is a profound emotional experience which any playgoer would be the poorer for missing. It seems indeed to be such a magnificent example of great acting, simple, deeply felt, moving on a plane of complete reality, that we are glad to pay for the privilege of saying so."
The result was that Brooks Atkinson saw the play again and changed his mind!
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"Being Hagar softened me," Ethel continued. "I was able to make more allowance for the shortcomings of others. Before that I'd always been cursing outside and crying inside. Playing in Mamba's Daughters enabled me to rid myself of the terrible inward pressure, the flood of tears I'd been storing up ever since childhood."
Another time she commented about her acting ability: "I'm an actress who doesn't just learn a role. I just turn a page of memory and portray something from life. I act instinctively. That's why I can't play any role that isn't based on something in my life."
After Ethel and the company took Mamba's Daughters on tour, the role of Petunia, the loving and faithful wife in Cabin in the Sky, came her way in 1940. It was in this musical she sang the song by Vernon Blake, "Taking a Chance on Love," as well as the title song. Critics called it the best performance of her career, and said so again when she played the part for director Vincente Minnelli in the film version.
Ethel loved the feeling of owning — of having a place to call her own, and while she was in Hollywood in 1942, she bought a house in Los Angeles. She always lived simply, but she enjoyed the comforts of fur coats, jewelry, and big cars, insisting that her fans expected it of her.
Before Cabin had been released, she had made her Tales of Manhattan and followed that with Cairo, using what little time was left for wartime radio performances with the USO. However, during the 1940s Ethel's movie career began to slide. She still had engagements at nightclubs, but no one offered her parts in plays or movies, and any that came her way fell through. She began to get depressed. But in 1949 she played the role of grandmother in 20th Century Fox's Pinky, for which she received an Oscar nomination.
Her next big break came in 1950 when she got the dramatic part of the cook in The Member of the Wedding, which also starred Julie Harris and Brandon DeWilde.
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For this again she received much acclaim and the New York Drama Critics Award. She was nominated for an Academy Award for the best supporting role of the film version in 1955.
In the play and the movie she sang "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," and the song became her trademark. However, as the play was originally written, the cook, Bernice Sadie Brown, was a hard, bitter woman and was to sing a Russian lullaby. But Ethel refused the part unless there was God in the play, and she was free to put her own interpretation on the part, which included changing the song.
Recalling the pre-play discussions in To Me It's Wonderful, Ethel commented, "I had never heard tell of a colored woman, especially from Georgia, who had ever sung a Russian ditty to a child!"
What song would she sing? Carson McCullers, the playwright, asked her.
Ethel warned her it had the name of Jesus in it, which some people didn't like, but she'd be willing to omit the verse and sing only the chorus.
" 'Will you sing it all — now, please?'
"I started to sing, right there where I was sitting, and went all the way through 'His Eye Is on the Sparrow.'
"When I finished, including the verse with the name of Jesus in it, there was a long silence in that room, except that Carson McCullers had crossed the room and was in my lap, crying."
After her success with Member, Ethel was offered the opportunity of getting in on the ground floor of a new medium — television. She was given the starring role in the weekly series, "Beulah." But the series died and film parts became scarce again. Her career seemed finished as ill-advised investments, tax problems, and untrustworthy agents led to her suddenly being out of demand as an entertainer.
"Where I come from," she explained, "people don't get close enough
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to money to keep a working acquaintance with it . . . so I didn't know how to keep it."
She made The Heart Is a Rebel for World Wide Pictures, and her last film, The Sound and the Fury, was made in 1958. She appeared occasionally in television roles for such programs as "Route 66" and "Daniel Boone."
At the lowest point in her career, when she felt she had had it all and lost it all, Ethel went to see her mother. For the first time Momweeze really encouraged her. Ethel recounted their conversation in His Eye Is on the Sparrow.
"My mother looked at me with love in her eyes and said, 'Ethel, I'm glad you've come. I want you to know that, even if you never see me again. You've been a good girl. You know God and He has His arms around you....
" 'You really took a beating. But don't you worry none, because you're coming back . . .'
"That was the acceptance and the fulfillment I'd been dreaming of winning all my life . . . For the first time I knew then that Momweeze loved me."
Momweeze was right. Ethel was to come back better than ever!
