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68 The African House Murals This is Clementine Hunter’s story in her own terms in her own time. —de Teel Patterson Tiller, National Park Service (retired) The monumental African House Murals epitomized the breadth of this gifted artist’s vision. —Lee Kogan by the summer of 1955 clementine hunter had been painting for at least fifteen years. She had developed the major themes that would dominate her paintings in the years ahead. François Mignon persuaded her to create a series of paintings that could be permanently displayed on the second floor of the plantation outbuilding known as “African House.” The murals, as he envisioned them, would provide a panorama of plantation life at Melrose and incorporate her major plantation-inspired themes. Hunter had never seen a mural, but when Mignon explained to her, she accepted the assignment as “something she wouldn’t mind doing.”1 African House stands today, an extraordinary structure both historically and culturally (see Plate 1). Records indicate it may date from the 1820s. Louis Metoyer, the third child born of the relationship between Marie-Thérèse and Pierre Metoyer, possibly ordered construction of the building, but that cannot be stated conclusively. E. Eean McNaughton, a New Orleans architect who taught architecture at Tulane University and is an authority in historic restoration , studied African House for many years. He says, “The form of African House with its steep hipped roof and deep unsupported overhangs on all sides is like nothing else at Melrose or for that matter in all of Creole Louisiana.”2 Other students of historical architecture claim African House is more French chapter 7 69 The African House Murals than African in design.3 For a hundred years it was called both “Casa Verde” and “Mushroom House.” According to François Mignon, he was the first to call it “African House” when he named it in response to questions from a Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) representative who visited the site in 1940.4 The hundreds of tourists who visit Melrose annually are told that enslaved carpenters built African House. When Hunter started painting the African House Murals, major changes had already begun to take place in plantation life. The labor force, so critical to a plantation’s success, had begun to erode after World War II, as workers moved north for more opportunities. Laborers came home from World War II with a realization that a chance for a better life might lay beyond the hand-tomouth reality of sharecropping and tenant farming. Concurrently, the laborintensive farm jobs were declining rapidly as more and more jobs traditionally done by hand were being done by machines. For the second time in a hundred years African Americans left the southern farms in search of better jobs in the auto plants, the steel mills, and the factories of the North and Midwest.5 As the artist began her work that summer on the mural panels, the South was in turmoil and undergoing change. In 1954, the year before Hunter’s work began, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, had unanimously agreed that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional. As Hunter toiled away on her colorful, nostalgic pictures of the Old South, the civil rights movement nudged America toward a New South. In December of the same year Hunter finished the murals, Rosa Parks’s refusal to obey James F. Blake’s order that she move to the back of a city bus launched the Montgomery bus boycott, and blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to ride the city buses until they could sit wherever they wanted. Hunter seemed to have little awareness of growing racial unrest in America. Melrose, even in the mid-1950s, was still geographically remote, and no one, certainly not the illiterate artist, could imagine the dramatic social changes that lay ahead. The idea to paint murals for the second floor of African House came to François Mignon on a late May morning, “a perfectly lovely day in these parts.” He mentioned his inspiration to the plantation manager, James Hampton “Jady” Henry, the oldest son of the late Cammie Henry. Henry agreed to buy the lumber needed for the project. Mignon then told Hunter about his idea. “Anyone else would have been appalled by the extent of the murals I have 70 Clementine Hunter envisioned for the painting,” Mignon wrote.6 Hunter agreed without hesitation and reportedly told Mignon that painting...

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