Sissieretta Jones: "The Greatest Singer of Her Race," 1868-1933

1: Rhode Island

: 4 : 8 1 Rhode Island Sissieretta was born Matilda Sissieretta Joyner on 5 January 1868,1 three years after the close of the Civil War and seven months before the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave black Americans the rights and privileges of citizenship and provided them equal protection of law. Her birthplace was a house with two apartments on Bart Street in Portsmouth, Virginia, between Chestnut and Effingham Streets.2 Her father, Jeremiah “Jerry” Malachi Joyner, had been born into slavery in 1833 in North Carolina. At the time of Sissieretta’s birth, he was a carpenter as well as pastor and choir leader of the African Methodist Church in Portsmouth.3 He could read and write. Sissieretta ’s mother, Henrietta, was an illiterate washerwoman, also from North Carolina. She was born about 1845, making her twelve years younger than her husband.4 They married in October 1862.5 Henrietta was an exceptional soprano and talented musician who sang in the choir at the nearby Ebenezer Baptist Church, the first black Baptist church in Portsmouth. Sissieretta, whose family called her by her first name, Matilda, or her nickname, “Sissy,” was the oldest of three children born to Jeremiah and Henrietta. From an early age, Sissieretta enjoyed singing, often climbing on chairs or tables in the house to sing before her mother chased her out.6 Sissieretta’s sister, Isabella, born in August 1869, died a year later of “teething,” according to Portsmouth death records. Her brother, Jerry Jr., was born in March 1871, but he died 10 October 1876 at the age of four and a half from an “abcess [sic] in [the] bowels .”7 After Jerry’s death, likely in late 1876, the family moved to Rhode Island in search of a better life.8 Even though Virginia had been readmitted to the Union in January 1870, the state still suffered the aftermath of the war and Reconstruction. Most black residents of the South were poor, were subjected to inadequate schooling, lived in substandard housing, and had limited economic opportunities and health care.9 Jeremiah had been offered a ministerial position at an African American church in Providence and probably seized on this opportunity to improve living conditions for his family. 5 : Rhode Island In 1876, the year the Joyners moved to Providence, the United States celebrated its one hundredth anniversary as a free country with a Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Ten million people visited the thirty thousand exhibits during the six-month run of the exposition, where Alexander Graham Bell personally demonstrated his telephone. The exposition, with themes of unity, strength, and prosperity, featured machinery, agriculture, horticulture , arts and crafts, and cultural displays all centered around middle-class life—white middle-class life. African Americans had no exhibit of their own, and there were no African American women featured in the exposition ’s Women’s Building. The only time blacks were included was when they appeared in stereotypical roles singing plantation songs and playing banjos in concessions named “The South” and the “Southern Restaurant.”10 Although the Civil War had freed African Americans from slavery, it had not guaranteed that whites would accept them readily into American society. By 1876 the Reconstruction period in the South was coming to an end. Federal troops were withdrawn the following year, leaving southern white leaders free to impose their control once again. Segregation returned, lynchings increased , and intimidation and terrorism by white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan became more prevalent. In the North black citizens maintained their legal rights, but most whites made sure African Americans “knew their place” and kept to themselves. When the Joyner family arrived in Providence, they found a thriving, vibrant capital city whose population and wealth had doubled in the decade of 1860–70. The profitable sugar and slave trade of the 1760s and early 1770s had been replaced by industrial wealth, with big gains coming from textile and manufacturing industries. For fifty years following the Civil War, Rhode Island was an attractive place to live. “For the state, it was the beginning of a fabulous era of wealth and middle-class comfort.”11 Providence, a city of residential neighborhoods and businesses, had an urban transit system with horsecars on rails linking various parts of the city. Racial segregation of the public schools had been abolished in 1866 throughout Rhode Island, making it possible for seven-year-old Sissieretta to attend Meeting Street Primary School and later Thayer Street...