a family answers the call: anita scott coleman, literature ... · coleman’s february 1943 letter...

V E R N E R D . M I T C H E L L

A Family Answers the Call: Anita Scott Coleman, Literature, and War

Sisters-in-law Anita Scott and Ida Gonzalez Scott,on the Scott ranch, near Silver City, NM. ca. 1915. All photographs courtesy of the Scott-Coleman family.

War, Literature & the Arts302

Anita Scott Coleman (1890-1960), born in Mexico of African American parents, enjoyed a contemporary reputation as one of the most distinctive and prolific of the Harlem Renaissance writers. Coleman spent

her life in Silver City, New Mexico, close to Ft. Bayard, and in Los Angeles. Her writing career spanned nearly thirty years and culminated in Reason for Singing, a collection of poems published by Decker Press in Prairie City, Illinois, in 1948. Coleman came from a military family and her poetry and fiction often explored issues of concern to veterans such as war, peace, post-service employment, and the definition of patriotism. Although hailed by the Harlem Renaissance journal The Messenger, as “one of the best of the Negro writers and a winner of many prizes for short stories,”1 Coleman’s publications on war and peace have been virtually ignored by critics. A primary aim of this article, then, is to begin to fill out a gap in the scholarship regarding Coleman and her contribution to the literature of war and peace.

Coleman’s February 1943 letter to her son Spencer, then stationed at Ft. Huachuca, AZ, captures both her talent as a creative writer and her pride in her family’s lengthy, distinguished record of wartime service. In 1943, Spencer, his brother James, and their cousin Robert Scott answered their country’s call to service during World War II. In doing so, they followed the precedent of their grandfather, one of the famed nineteenth-century Buffalo Soldiers. In her letter, Coleman asks, “what are you learning aside from being good soldiers?” She then passes along news from home, reporting that “Bob Scott was to go a week or so ago, but can’t say definitely if he has. They are taking ’em pretty fast now.” Coleman’s nephew Robert Scott, or

“Bob” as he liked to be called, served as a US Army Lieutenant in the Philippines, one of only a handful of African American commissioned officers. His cousins James and Spencer Coleman were among the several thousand black soldiers who trained at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, prior to shipping out for the battlefields of North Africa and Italy.

In her letter to Spencer, Coleman urges him to capture his military experiences in writing and summarizes her own artistic philosophy: “Writing,” she says, “is simply transferring to paper all your thoughts and impressions of things coming under observation.” After suggesting that he use his “letters home” as practice creative writing, she compliments him on his amusing descriptions of “the Sergeant who drank too much” and his account of a hike through the Arizona hills, and explains: “after all, writing is just the same as talking to someone you meet on the street or telling a story at home.” With characteristic modesty about her own work she adds: “You just want to imagine that it is something hard to do. It is not hard at all.”2

Apparently writing was not very hard for Coleman. In 1909, she graduated from the New Mexico Normal School in Silver City. The class poem, published in the

International Journal of the Humanities 303

yearbook, contains the first public reference to her literary career: “Annie, so good in the Literature class / Found out in geometry, it was hard to pass.”3 Fulfilling this early promise, Coleman’s fiction and essays enjoyed critical success throughout the twenties when they were published in Harlem Renaissance journals such as Opportunity and The Crisis. Based in New York and underwritten by biracial civil rights organizations, these magazines provided a forum for African American artists through literary contests, public awards ceremonies, and publication. Beginning in the fall of 1925 with her second submission to The Crisis, Coleman won five Opportunity and Crisis awards. Literary critic Arnold Rampersad calls the Harlem Renaissance “that dramatic upsurge of creativity in literature, music, and art within black America that reached its zenith in the second half of the 1920s.”4 In addition to Coleman, contributors to the movement included painters Aaron Douglas and Hale Woodruff, musicians Louis Armstrong and Alberta Hunter, and writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.

As one of the very few voices from the Southwest writing in black journals, Coleman took the opportunity to translate her region’s diversity, meanings, and mores for her readership in the large Eastern cities. Her work combines lyrical descriptions of nature with factual data on the unsung contribution of African Americans to American history. She describes Estevan, the African slave who guided the Spanish explorers; identifies the hunters and explorers, George Parker and John Young, who eventually became wealthy mineral mine owners; reveals two all-black towns (Blackdom and Vado, New Mexico); and introduces the region’s black cowboys. She is most interested in the contributions of the Buffalo Soldiers and Black Seminole scouts who guided wagon trains and patrolled the Mexican borders in search of Pancho Villa.

Coleman’s own experiences and family history inspired the references in her work to discrimination against and underemployment of black veterans; to the treatment of the Seminoles in the Florida Everglades; to the post-bellum migration westward of old Southern families; and to the opportunities the West provided to black soldiers. In her 1926 essay, “Arizona and New Mexico—The Land of Esperanza,” Coleman is one of the first to assert the contribution of the Buffalo Soldiers in the settlement of the West. She claims that “Negroes have fought and struggled over all the vast stretches . . . [of] one-time Indian Territory, the Panhandle, New Mexico and Arizona . . . these honorably discharged Indian war fighters . . . thought that ‘here’ was as good as ‘way back there’ to settle down and rest after [a] long, arduous campaign.”5 Although Coleman does not say so, she is clearly thinking of her father William Henry Scott as she writes these words.

A Virginian, Scott enlisted in the US Army in 1879 and served with the Ninth Cavalry throughout the Southwest. After the Civil War, Congress created the Ninth and Tenth US Cavalry Regiments. Although blacks had fought for


the US since the Revolutionary War, the men of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, commanded by white officers and called “Buffalo Soldiers” by the Apache, were the first to serve during peacetime. Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper, West Point’s first African American graduate (class of 1877), was a member of the Tenth Cavalry.

In May 1887, while he was stationed at Ft. Elliot, Texas, William Scott married Mary Ann Stokes in nearby Wheeler, the County Seat of the Texas Panhandle. Mary, a descendant of Seminoles and African American slaves, was from Tallahassee, Florida; she worked as a laundress for the military and received a salary and one meal a day. Coleman’s poem “Hands” pays homage to her mother and to the many women who labored as “camp followers” at military installations throughout the West:

Hands, brown as snuff, Wash-tub hands, Curled like claws from clutching and squeezing.6

In 1888, Mary gave birth to a son, William Ulysses. The following year William Henry retired from the military, after ten years of service. The family then moved from Camp San Carlos, Arizona, to Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. We do not know why Scott left the United States, but one might conjecture that difficulties finding employment after his military service contributed to the move. Certainly the family’s material circumstances improved in Mexico; no longer a laundress for the military, Mary was now able to employ a domestic helper. On 27 November 1890, the Scotts’ daughter Anita was born.

In 1893, when William Ulysses was five and Anita three, the Scotts boarded a train along the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway and traveled back across the border to New Mexico. They settled in Silver City, near Ft. Bayard, where many African American troops saw military service. Silver City also supported three tubercular sanatoriums, including the largest one in the country, which would have made it attractive to William Henry, as Anita suffered from pulmonary ailments. Anita’s fragile health had in fact precipitated the family’s departure from Mexico, a journey she later described in her short story about World War I veterans,

“El Tisico” (The Consumptive). Judging from Coleman’s writing, Silver City was a friendly, welcoming

community. Anita and her brother attended the local public school, and blacks lived throughout the town, as there were no restrictive covenants. William Henry and Mary participated in the town’s civic life, since he was an active member of the local Prince Hall Masonic Lodge. The Lodge organized religious, benevolent, and social functions and drew a number of its members from the veteran community. A photograph shows William Scott and nine of his Masonic brothers dressed in


full regalia. William especially enjoyed entertaining military veterans and soldiers from nearby Ft. Bayard, who were frequent visitors at the Scott home. In this sense, he was rather like the father in Coleman’s 1920 story “Rich Man, Poor Man”:

Day in and day out, her father’s friends had gathered in her home of evenings to partake of old Daniel’s hospitality. They played cards at times, but the main business of these little gatherings had been to talk—and how they had talked. Sometimes politics, sometimes religion; at times a long drawn-out tale of Indian-war days.7

Not unlike most veterans, old Daniel and his friends clearly enjoyed reminiscing on their glorious “war days.” But their main topic, writes Coleman, was the “Race Question [which was] discussed again and again and over and over.” In reading the newspapers, they often encountered “some atrocity done a Negro—always some unknown, far-off Negro; but the little band of black men gathered in the Evans parlor were wont to discuss it pro and con in subdued and sorrowful voices.”8

The references in Coleman’s texts to notorious “race haters” like Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman and South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman show that she listened carefully to the political discussions in her home. Her father often used irony and “true American humor” to diminish such enemies of the race and Anita would join in the laughter at “their piteously self-belittling antics.”9 Anita inherited her father’s use of irony as a way to treat racism and discrimination in America. Although her stories portray positively the pioneer spirit of cooperation and respect among various ethnic groups in the Southwest, she does not minimize the racial violence and the destructive presence of discrimination that mar the American landscape.

Coleman, her brother William Ulysses, and his future wife Ida Gonzalez, all graduated high school in Silver City. Where Anita enrolled in the New Mexico Normal School (now Western New Mexico University) and became a school teacher, William and Ida married young and started their family. In August 1917, William left Ida and the five children (Bob Scott was age one) on the family ranch and enlisted in the US Army. After basic training, he served in France, initially in the Medical Department, 523rd Engineers.10 Anita’s oldest child Willianna “Billie” Coleman, born 6 September 1917, was then a newborn. In her autobiography, Billie, Willianna paints a poignant picture of her uncle’s departure: “On about the tenth a large jolly man came in; he was Billie’s uncle, coming on a leave of absence to see her, before he sailed for France and War.”11

Two years later William, then assigned to the Medical Department, 1st Provisional Company, Fort Bliss, Texas, received an honorable discharge from the Army. He


was awarded the World War I Victory Medal and the World War I Victory Lapel Button. Despite his admirable wartime record, William had difficulty finding work in New Mexico after his discharge. He labored for some time as a cook in a Silver City sanatorium, but he eventually sought work in Los Angeles. There he was able to establish himself professionally as a banker, a job he held until his retirement in 1970.12 Coleman’s criticism of the treatment of black veterans echoes W.E. B. Du Bois’ outspoken accusations, but also reflects the experiences of her father and her brother.13

Coleman’s father, William Henry Scott, was one of the famed Buffalo Soldiers of the US Ninth Cavalry. He served in the military from 1879 to 1889.


Coleman’s brother, William Ulysses Scott, in military uniform during World War One.


Coleman’s sons, Army Sergeants Spencer and James Coleman, with their award-winning boxing team during World War Two.


In the fall of 1926 Anita and her husband, James Harold Coleman, a printer and photographer, left the Scott ranch and moved to Los Angeles, seeking employment and educational opportunities for their children. Their fifth and final child, Harold, was born in Los Angeles in 1928. Busy rearing five children, Anita no longer worked outside the home, but she did manage to continue writing. Her essay, “The Dark Horse,” won a second prize in the 1926 Opportunity contest. In the accompanying biographical blurb, she writes: “I am an ex-school teacher; am married; live on a ranch; engaged in raising children and chickens.”14 Being a wife and mother of four on a ranch and later in Los Angeles during the Depression did not leave much of “a room of one’s own” for a woman writer. This perhaps accounts for her gradual drift away from fiction and the essay to poetry, a genre in which she also won acclaim. She is one of only a very few writers to win awards in all three genres. In April 1940, “Baptism” won first prize in the Robert Browning poetry contest, sponsored by the University of Redlands and open to all California poets. The poem was published in The Chicago Defender.

As with her fiction, Coleman’s poems display an impressive range, both in theme and in form and technique. Lyric and narrative poems like “Melissa—Little Black Girl,” “America Negra” (Black America), and “The Shining Parlor,” all of which deal explicitly with questions of race, are best known. Her martial poems, in contrast, generally contain no references to race and are virtually unknown. None have been reprinted or anthologized since they first appeared in the thirties and forties.

It is a pleasure to present three poems, all about World War II, from a woman whose family served for generations in America’s different wars, battles, police actions, and border skirmishes. Although the poems address a similar subject, they display a wide range in voice and vision, from a mother praying for “sons of every nation”; to men quarreling pleasurably about peace; to a widow dealing, as best she can, with loss of husband and sons. Anita Scott Coleman’s is a realistic, distinctive perspective, one which enriches the body of American Poetry.


Awareness

The sacrifice was made for menBut not until awareness splendidCaused me to heed the beneficeDid His Spirit loving, tender,Rise from the tomb to dwell in me.

Patriot I, of humble mein, who sawWith pride, great silver airplanesRide the sky, who marked with griefMost reasonable, a million youthGo forth to war. Yet not untilThey marshalled my sons, did myHeart strive with the combat.

’Twas then I sought the Councilor,’Twas then I went to Him and cried, ’Twas then I learned the ageless truth: That my Lord, the Savior, died that weThrough ravages of war and scourgeThrough death and trial and times like theseCould watch in peace, the ceaseless turmoilCould hope in faith, while all is chaosCould ask in prayer, in trust believingThat valiant sons of every nationBe buckled well and shielded ever,And though, they fall in heat of battle,Shall not die, because God lives.


Peace Talk

Today, down at the theatre they talked about peace. Maybe, you know that when folksy folk fall to arguingTheir voices rise and rise into crescendos of

“I knows’”, and “I remember’s” and “I’ve seen’s”Or else settle into sustained expressions of “Ifs” or

“Musts”It was, oh, so enlightening the ways and means by whichPeace was relegated to a politic platform of behaviorismby these good theatrical folk. Big Jim Barber got upand said: Peace is an essence, fellows. In the name of God Don’t try putting a bit and halter in its mouth, And a saddle on its back. You and nobody else Can straddle peace and go riding. Peace is like The air we breathe, untrammeled and inexplainable. It just is, when it is, and we have to attain it.


Peace Item

Her pastor often told his congregation,“Sister Alkins was Job clothed in femininity.”She made no lamentation when her four sons Marched off to war. And no complaint whenTheir crops failed, because her John had lostThe knack of putting his shoulders to the taskWithout the aid of his sons’ strong arms.John Alkins died at the year’s end. Sister Alkins bowed her head in acquiescence, And went about her daily chores humming a melody A hymn-tune which dear John had loved, The same one she had used for lullabies, Completely unaware that peace, Like death, goes ever undisturbed.


Notes1. The Messenger, May-June 1928, 111.

2. Cynthia Davis and Verner Mitchell, eds. Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance: The Life and Writings of Anita Scott Coleman (Norman: Oklahoma UP, forthcoming).

3. Ibid.

4. Arnold Rampersad, introduction to The New Negro, by Alain Locke (New York: Touchstone 1999), ix.

5. Davis and Mitchell.

6. For the entire poem, see Davis and Mitchell. For an informative account of laundresses attached to military installations, see Cynthia A. Wood, “Army Laundresses and Civilization on the Western Frontier,” Journal of the West, 41.3 (Summer 2002): 26-34.

7. Anita Scott Coleman, “Rich Man, Poor Man,” in Davis and Mitchell.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Military Personnel Records Information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

11. Willianna Coleman, Billie: An Autobiography (1931, N.p.), 3.

12. “Double Celebration,” Herald American and Call-Enterprise, June 14, 1970. The article announces 82-year-old William Scott’s birthday (May 24) and retirement after 28 years of employment with Capital Bank.

13. In Coleman’s “Jack Arrives,” Jack Derby learns that “his nut-brown face, his black friendly eyes and his big brown smiling mouth were more potent than leprosy, in chasing away the jobs that might have been his.” For the entire story, see Davis and Mitchell.

14. Opportunity, June 1926, 188.

Verner D. Mitchell is a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and Rutgers University. A prior contributor to WLA, he is currently Director of Graduate Studies in English at the University of Memphis.

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