A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice (review)

230Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober A Photographer of Note: Arkansas Artist Geleve Grice. By Robert Cochran. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+144. Photographs, index. ISBN 1557287368. $39.95, clodi.) A Photographer of Note, oh no! Not another coffee-table book. After the first few photos, however, one realizes diat this book is an important contribution to the study of African Americans in Arkansas. Cochran's choice of photos and the accompanying narrative are a compelling look at African-American life and culture through Geleve Grice's camera, which seemed to be everywhere in Pine Bluff (where Grice still has his studio) at the same time. Grice was a son of die rural South; like so many others, he left the sharecropping world (in his case, Tamo, Arkansas) and moved to the city (Little Rock) in die1930s because of a white man named Price. Grice's father was a school principal and farmer who moved his family as the depression grew harsher for African Americans in die Arkansas heartland. Active in sports, Grice lived in a black world where his teammates , coaches, and athletic opponents were all black. In 1943 Grice graduated from Dunbar High School (the high school for African Americans in segregated Litde Rock) and served in the military during World War II. In 1947 he entered Arkansas Mechanical and Normal College at Pine Bluff. During the 1940s and 1950s, athletes at black colleges were seen as community heroes and symbols of African-American intellectual and cultural advancement. The college's Golden Lions had two of the best players in the Southwestern Athletic Conference: right end Geleve Grice and all-conference fullback John Edward "Big Boody" Watson (this reviewer's father). Both men were veterans seeking the promise of a college education that would change their fates. It was during his time at Pine Bluff that Grice, doubling as a campus photographer, began to practice his lifelong craft of capturing the important moments in African-American culture in Arkansas. The photos in this collection are clear and crisp reminders a forgotten era in the rural South. Through his lens, Grice brings familiar, poignant, and haunting images into focus. There are pictures of African-American celebrities like Joe Louis, Cassius Clay (before he became Muhammed Ali), and musical greats TBone Walker, Bobby Bland, and Satchmo, all from the so-called "Chittlin Circuit." There are also photographs that extol rural social life, the juke joints, and Friday nights at the fights. This is one of the only photographic records in existence that captures the essence of black life in Arkansas. It is a particularly important record because Pine Bluff provided the intellectual training and cultural backdrop for the men and women who changed the state of Arkansas. Grice shows that there was a vibrant, tragic, and powerful community that has been largely overlooked and almost forgotten by well-meaning historians who have concentrated on the Central High School crisis and the Civil Rights era. Robert Cochran does a commendablejob of selecting and editing the photos for this collection. This reviewer recommends the book without reservation. It should serve as a model for future works. The pictures are compelling but 2??8Book Reviews231 not overwhelming and the narrative is easy to read. The work is eloquently understated. Grice, now over eighty years old, still approaches his craft as a photographer much like a predator seeking to embrace its prey. If you get a chance to travel to Arkansas go to Pine Bluff, find Grice, ask him to take your picture, and thank him for his contribution to the histories of photography and Arkansas. Texas State University-San ManosDwight D. Watson Rock Beneath the Sand: Country Churches in Texas. By Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless; photographs by Clark G. Baker. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003, Pp. xx+197. Preface, acknowledgments, photographs, map, table, photographer's note, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 1-58544250 -x. $35.00, cloth.) The United States is unusual among developed countries in that a high percentage of its citizens are churchgoers. This varies regionally, but in Texas, religion is a significant part of peoples' lives. According to one popular expression, Texas is the buckle of the Bible...