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Forgotten Black Poets of WWI Era Featured on New Website

The nation’s first and only building memorializing African American veterans of WWI is located in Kimball, W.Va. and Thursday evening a celebration of Black History Month will take place there that highlights the work of two previously unrecognized poets from the era.

The two poets were sisters from Beckley who at age 17 and 18 attended the West Virginia Colored Institute, which is now West Virginia State College. An 83 page hard back book featuring their poetry was published in 1919.

Discovering the Book

In the late 1970’s Jean Barnes Peters found a copy of War Poems sitting on a bookshelf in her house in Charleston, W.Va. The authors, Ada and Ethel Peters, were half-sisters to Jean’s husband, Joseph Cromwell Peters.

“And he said I can’t tell you about this book, those young ladies would have been 20 years older than I am,” Barnes Peters said.

Joseph Cromwell Peters, who is now deceased, never met his two half-sisters and didn’t know anything about them because their mother and his father divorced before he was born.

The little book fascinated Jean Peters and she would occasionally pick it up a read some of the poetry, which she describes as long, long narratives.

The preface in the book reads:

The sole intention of the authors in writing these poems is to show the Negro’s loyalty to the stars and stripes in the war with Germany and to show the need of unity of all men in the fight for democracy.

“But eventually I started to scrutinize what they were saying and it was protest, which seemed unusual for teenage girls in 1919 in rural West Virginia to be even knowledgeable in WWI just before and just after and how badly Black soldiers were treated,” Barnes Peters said.

Sharing the Book

The fifth poem, written by Ada Peters, is called The Slacker. It was this poem that caused Jean Peters to bring the little book to the attention of Joel Beeson, West Virginia University visual journalism and new media professor, and his students.

Mrs. Peters was invited to attend an event back in 2011 at the Kimball Memorial for an exhibit the students created on World War One soldiers.

“And there was a poster that said ‘The Colored man is no slacker,’” Beeson said. “And she said there’s a poem in this book I have called The Slacker.”

The poem begins:

God forbid ere man was born To crush honor beneath his feet That the light of day should dawn Upon one, who from duty flees While on Freedom’s Bleeding Alter, His Noble Comrades have bled But he stands idle a slacker Disgraced before living and dead.

“These young women who are 17 and 18 were commenting very intelligently on their times,” Beeson said. “And the things they were saying were protest, they were asking for civil rights and this was back in 1919 before the internet, before television, before radio.”

So Beeson and his students took on a new project that includes an interactive web site called War Poems where you can page through the book, read the poetry, learn about its history, and the story of how Jean Barnes Peters found it on the bookshelf in her house.

Beeson said one goal is reaching young people through new and interactive media.

“That’s the language and that’s the medium that young people use,” he said. “So hopefully this is a site where we can get young people enthusiastic and inspired about these two young women whose voices were kind of left in the past and we’re trying to bring that to life.”

Engaging the Public

An event took place Thursday evening from 7-9 p.m. at the Kimball War Memorial that included a demonstration of the web site and presentations from Beeson, Barnes Peters and some of the students who worked on the project.

Beeson’s class is also worked with classes at Mountain View Middle and Mountain View High Schools Friday, where students learned about the War Poems site and Kimball Memorial. They also participated in a poetry contest in which they Tweeted poems from the web site.

W.Va. Courthouses are Living Monuments to Democracy

The Wood County Courthouse, the Wetzel County Courthouse and the Kanawha County Courthouse look strikingly similar. Each are tan stone block buildings…

The Wood County Courthouse, the Wetzel County Courthouse and the Kanawha County Courthouse look strikingly similar. Each are tan stone block buildings with deep red roofs built in the Richardsonian Romanesque style popular in the 1890’s and 1910’s when they were designed and constructed. That’s just one thing you’ll learn when browsing through the pictures of a new book about West Virginia’s courthouses. “West Virginia’s Living Monuments: The Courthouses” is a product of the West Virginia Association of Counties and was just published this year.

“West Virginia’s Living Monuments: The Courthouses” was published in 2013 by the W.Va. Association of Counties.

“West Virginia’s Living Monuments: The Courthouses” was written by Debra and Richard Warmuth and is published by Black Tie Press of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Book of ghost stories from Berkeley Springs writer lands in time for Halloween

Today is All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, which traces its roots to Gaelic culture when it was believed on this day the boundaries between the living and dead overlap.

It’s also a great day to read a ghost story, which is why Berkeley Springs writer John Douglas made sure his new book, A Fog of Ghosts: Haunted Tales and Odd Pieces, was published this month.

Douglas is the former editor of the Morgan Messenger newspaper and he started writing ghost stories in the mid 1970’s. Every year he’d pen one for the paper’s Halloween edition.

“And people loved them, the years I didn’t do it they asked where it was,” Douglas said.

Douglas made some of the stories up and some were based on local legends and stories he heard about haunted houses. The book contains about a dozen previously published ghost stories and several new ones.

Two chapters focus on a 1950 cold case in which a red headed woman was found dead. One chapter talks about police efforts to identify the woman and solve her murder. The next chapter is Douglas’s fictionalized version with a possible answer to who killed the woman and why.

Some of the stories have a Civil War theme, including one Douglas created for the newspaper about a young woman who was fascinated with Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson. The woman hid in a creek along the side of a country road hoping to get a glimpse of her hero. Instead she was accidentally shot and killed by a soldier who mistook her for a rabbit and, the story goes, she still haunts that stretch of road today.

“It’s funny, there was a Michigan college professor who was doing a Stonewall Jackson tour and he was doing some legwork to figure out where he was going to take his people,” Douglas said. “He called me up a couple years after the story was in the paper and said ‘all the old people out there on Winchester Grade Rd. tell me about this old story about the girl being shot who wanted a glimpse of Stonewall Jackson.’”

Douglas had to tell the professor that he made the story up for the newspaper.

JohnDouglasReading.mp3

Hear John Douglas read a ghost story from his book that's based on a tale from Morgan County, W.Va.

But, does Douglas believe in ghosts himself? Not really.

“I think there are things we can’t explain, but I don’t know that I believe in ghosts,” Douglas said. “We carry things around in our mind and we superimpose our own minds on the places we are.”

Stories from the Lost River Valley

Stories and photographs from the Cacapon and Lost River Valley are featured in a book just released by West Virginia University Press.

Listening to the Land features the stories of several owners throughout the watershed who have chosen to preserve their land through the Cacapon and Lost River Land Trust.

“When we signed some of the first easements that the Land Trust did, people started sobbing, literally, in the easement signing in the attorney’s office,” Nancy Ailes, executive director, said. “And I started realizing that there are these great stories behind those tears.”

Ailes wrote a grant proposal and received $50,000 from National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to produce the book. The Trust hired documentary writer Jamie Ross and photographer Tom Cogill to traverse the valley documenting the people, their land and their stories.

“The land is beautiful, I think this valley could be a national park,” Cogill said.

Cogill is primarily a portrait photographer so he approached the landscape the same way he would if he were capturing an image of an individual. There are photos in the book of teenage girls hauling in a deer they shot, scenes of farms, livestock and hay, as well as the highway and power lines bisecting the land.

Cogill is particularly fond of a photo that shows a weathered wood plank wall with graffiti scratched in it.

“It’s the two page spread for the section called ‘The Pull of Home,’” Cogill said. “Probably 100 people have written their name and the date, just kind of scratched it on the wall, some of them have extended stories, others it’s just initials and dates.”

“It’s a portrait, it’s a short story, it talks about the people who live here without showing any of them,” he said.

While Cogill shot photos, Ross interviewed people. The Land Trust chose about 30 whose stories might be interesting, including those who still live in the valley as well as those who grew up there and moved away.

The 150 page book documents families like the Hahn’s, Mongold’s, Slonaker’s and Mills as they participate in activities such as hunting, farming, enjoying meals and gathering mushrooms.

One of Ross’s favorite stories is that of Josh Frye, who comes from a long line of Frye’s who have worked on the family’s farm near Wardensville since Colonial times. Frye’s father and two of his brother’s died in farm accidents.

“And still they could not bring themselves to sell the property,” Ross said. “And part of that too goes with all the funny stories that go along.”

The book details how Frye’s mother was embarrassed when her husband bought a hearse that he parked in the field so he could sleep there and keep an eye out for predators trying to eat the turkeys raised on the farm.

“And Josh speaks so warmly about farming when people used to move from farm to farm to accomplish the task,” Ross said. “They would do haying as a group and move from one place to the next.”

Another profile features Bobby Ludwig from Baker, who the book says went off to college in New England and built a lucrative career on Wall Street.

Ludwig no longer lives full time in Hardy County but he’s bought and preserved thousands of acres of farmland to prevent developers from building houses on it.

Ross said Ludwig had a good comeback when officials wanting to widen the state highway near his farm suggested he could just go buy another piece of property in exchange for the one they’d take.

“And he said ‘well how about I take your girlfriend and spend the night with her and you just go get another one,’” she said. “It’s not just the attachment it’s the wit and wisdom and everything.”

Ross said there were two thoughts she heard over and over again as she interviewed people: it’s important to leave the land better then you found it, and your word is your bond.

West Virginians are encouraged to read Kentucky Poet Laureate’s book

The West Virginia Library Commission is hoping folks across the state will read Kentucky Poet Laureate Frank X. Walker’s book Affrilachia. The book is this year’s choice for the One Book, One West Virginia program.

During an appearance at the Martinsburg Berkeley County Public Library Wednesday morning Walker read Clifton 1, the first poem in the book. It tells the story of Walker and his father visiting Clifton, Ky., where his father grew up.

Walker’s parents divorced when he was about four. Walker, who is director of the African American and Africana Studies Program at the University of Kentucky, told the small audience gathered at the library that he was a teenager before he started to get to know his father well.

Walker grew up in Danville, one of 11 children raised primarily by their mother in a home in the projects, where religion and reading were emphasized. All this is reflected in Affrilachia.

“So in that poem you can hear my mother’s influence, the choir singing songs, that personal family history with the divorce and still trying to find a way to make it work,” Walker said. “That reverence for the land and this special place that was not just about land was also about water because he grew up in a place called Clifton that was at the edge of a cliff and that water was the dividing line to the next county.”

“Interesting enough the other county was the official demarcation line for Appalachia,” he said.

An old black and white photograph of Walker’s parents standing in front of a car with two of his sisters graces the book’s front cover. Walker is in the photo, barely, his hand, tinted in red, sticks out from behind one sister. He said it’s the only photo he has of his parents together.

Susan Hayden, West Virginia Library Commission adult services consultant, said everyone in West Virginia is encouraged to read Affrilachia this year.

“We want to just imagine how wonderful it would be if everyone in the state read a really wonderful book and to have a fabulous conversation about it and the connections you would make with your community members and that’s the goal of One Book One West Virginia,” Hayden said.

Hayden said for the past few years One Book, One West Virginia has collaborated with Shepherd University’s Appalachian Writer in Residence program to select a book. While Affrilachia is rooted in Walker’s Kentucky upbringing, Hayden believes West Virginians can relate to the messages it conveys.

“I think it speaks of humanness, I think it speaks to our creativity, our joys and love but hardships, our pain,” she said. “I think its universal, it talks not only to a Black Appalachian, a Black West Virginian, but also all the other races in West Virginia, its universal.”

Walker said he’s flattered that his book was chosen.

“I think that it says more about what our two states have in common,” he said. “About what the region has in common, and about this singular idea behind Affrilachia, that it kind of forces people who have accepted the stereotypes and the caricatures to really rethink what they believe and really know about the region.”

Former W.Va. reporter sparks national interest in 'The Butler'

In most cases, a novel or biography inspires a film. But for journalist and author Wil Haygood, the sequence has been dramatically different. A November 7^th, 2008 article by Haygood in The Washington Post inspired the Lee Daniels film The Butler and then Haygood went back to write the book, The Butler: A Witness to History.

Growing up in Columbus, Ohio and graduating from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, Haygood took his first job in journalism as a copy editor at The Charleston Gazette. It was while here in West Virginia where Haygood began focusing on arts and human interest stories. Eventually, he went on to jobs in larger markets like Pittsburgh and Boston before winding up in the nation’s capitol at The Washington Post.

While on the presidential campaign trail in 2008 following then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama, Haygood turned his attention to other timely and culturally relevant topics.

“I wanted to find somebody—an African American—who had worked in the White House during the era of segregation because I thought that story, juxtaposed against the story of the first African-American president in the country, would be a pretty powerful story,” he said.

So Haygood launched a nation-wide search to find a subject that could illuminate the historical gravity of what he saw as Obama’s impending victory.

“I was essentially looking for a ghost, because I didn’t have a name. Eventually somebody in Florida mentioned the name of Eugene Allen and told me he lived in the Washington D.C.-Maryland region and I tracked him down,” said Haygood.

Unraveling the story of the now famous butler took a special level of care Haygood had rarely—if ever—experienced before.

“My grandparents raised me, so I lived in their house as a kid and knew the value of being patient. Mr. and Mrs. Allen were elderly people by the time I reached them, so I kind of had a sense that it might not be the best thing to sit down and try to grab information from them,” said Haygood.

“They wanted to watch a couple of TV shows—game shows—before we actually got the interviews underway. There were several hours before he took me down in the basement and showed me this room with all sorts of memorabilia.”

By the end of the day that his original article was published—a mere three days after Obama’s win—calls began to pour in from Hollywood executives. Haygood said it was partly a matter of timing mixed with a cultural and historical juxtaposition too important to ignore.

“Here was a character that had seen vivid American history up close. He lived at the most powerful address in the country, yet in the ‘50s and early ‘60s he could go to his native Virginia and have to use a segregated bathroom,” he said.

“So, the twin engines of those two narratives—Obama winning and Mr. Allen’s life story—I think proved to be a real magnet for Hollywood interest.”

Haygood was enlisted as a researcher and associate producer for Lee Daniels’ film The Butler. He said the experience of working with Oscar winners like Forrest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey and Robin Williams was difficult to believe.

“I don’t think anyone can ever say that they dreamed of being on a movie set with six Oscar winners making a movie based on a story that they wrote. It’s just too unreal to think that. There’s some mornings that I still have to pinch myself,” explained Haygood.

As production on the film began, Haygood decided to put together a full-length written treatment of Eugene Allen’s incredible story. Haygood’s book, The Butler: A Witness to History, was released in June and Lee Daniels’ film adaptation of the story was released in August.

Through it all, Haygood said he cherishes the opportunity to meet and tell the story of the White House butler who endured eight presidencies and witnessed the moments that shaped our nation and culture.

“It was a pretty astonishing find to come across a man that nobody knew about who had almost had this Forrest Gump-like life. He was there during all of these epical moments of White House history for 34 years. It was just a special, special story to do,” he said.

Haygood has also written award-winning biographies on the enigmatic New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and famed member of The Rat Pack Sammy Davis, Jr. His latest book, Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, is currently in the developmental stages for a film.