Sunday, Jul. 05, 2009

East St. Louis poet Eugene Redmond donates decades of historic photos to SIUE

It was an accident that put Eugene Redmond in an honors English class.

Redmond enrolled late in 10th Street Tech -- what is now called the SIUE East St. Louis Campus. It was 1961 and Redmond had just had an operation on his knee, repairing damage from a wound he received in the Marines.

Because he was late, Redmond was accidentally put into the honors English class taught by Ted Hornback. Hornback at first told him he would have to take an oral aptitude test to stay.

"I went right back the next day," Redmond said. "During class, I spoke to him in Latin and Japanese."

Those were languages he'd picked up in the Marines -- and there was more he'd learned as a voracious reader. His fellow soldiers would loan him textbooks, and he taught them how to shine shoes.

That honors English class forged a friendship with Hornback, who became his mentor, and Redmond was one of the last people to speak to him before he died in 2005. It was Hornback who first encouraged Redmond to read E.E. Cummings and Langston Hughes, for Cummings' "typographical trickery" and Hughes' use of African-American dialect. "Those are two people who stayed with me all my life," Redmond said.

Now known as the poet laureate of East St. Louis, Redmond, 71, is a poet and a scholar, a teacher and a photographer -- and it is the latter skill that led him to donate last month more than 200,000 photographs to SIUE. They range from his candid portraits of great civil rights leaders to the artistic elements he finds in the world around him.

"I was called a picture poet when I first started writing," he said. Redmond began as a journalist, taking pictures to capture a moment. "But the way you see things through the camera transliterates to the page, to the poem, to the article. It is fascinating how more color will come into your writing, more specificity and perspicacity. It's like developing the poem from the negative to the photo. The step between that, between the poem in the air and the poem on the page, is the photographic sense."

Redmond's photographs are a reflection of his life.

He was active in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, traveling with famed dancer Katherine Dunham and the Black Panthers. At the New York City airport in 1968, the tour bus was snowed in place for more than two days.

They were only 200 yards from the airport, Redmond said, but could not get free. "We had an expeditionary force go out, a few of the more muscular, macho dancers tried," he said. "People died around us, their cars completely covered with snow."

Only a short distance away, Diana Ross and the Supremes were snowed in at the same airport and performed an impromptu concert for the travelers. But things were less musical in the bus outside.

"We had Hershey bars and potato chips," Redmond said. "We reached out of the window and we ate snow."

The photographer in him came out after a friend, Joseph Harrison, died in 1981. Harrison had been a photographer, and when Redmond came to the funeral, a mutual friend gave him Harrison's camera.

"He said, 'The camera is going to change you as a writer,' then he winked and drove back to Philadelphia," Redmond said. "I wondered what he meant. Now I know. For one thing, it's an addiction -- you have to consciously say, 'Leave the camera here.' You begin to look at your friends through the camera."

Before, Redmond had been a snapshot photographer, even using the then-popular Polaroids.

"But then you're sitting in a room with four or five of the greatest writers or painters or politicians or activists or inventors or actors in the world," Redmond said. "Maya (Angelou) is not the same Maya sitting there telling jokes as when she's being observed through the lenses."

Redmond became a professor at SIUE, teaching generations of aspiring writers. He formed the Eugene Redmond Writers' Group of East St. Louis, which continues today.

In later years, he befriended Coretta Scott King, Andrew Young, Oprah Winfrey and Angelou. In one photo, he is standing between King and her daughter Yolanda, a photo he cherishes as both are now gone.

"It was great to see Mrs. King let her hair down,' he said, recalling a moment during Angelou's 70th birthday party when he watched King dance with Winfrey's long-time companion, Stedman Graham.

When asked about the photos that stay with him, he speaks mostly of portraits, of the photos capturing the essence of the people he knew:

* "Maya Angelou in black and white in a huge straw hat at the Nico Hotel in Chicago. It feels like I captured ... her soul. I sort of went inside her and brought her spirit up to her face, to me."

* "(Katherine) Dunham on her 92nd birthday. She had beads the size of marbles -- it looked like a lei -- and she has a mike in her hand, her hair is really short and natural."

* "The photo of Clyde Jordan, the late patriarch of East St. Louis. Clyde posed for photos, he was always ready. But a couple of times I caught him by surprise."

Redmond remembers photos of children in Africa, of boys playing on the road when he was walking to his office at a Nigerian university. "They would come together, just the way people see themselves, as clowning or styling," he said. "But the images they get are different, because the mirrors they look into are different."

And there are photos of famous people "not in their best light," he said. There's a photo of writer Margaret Walker barbecuing in her back yard wearing a housecoat and curlers. "She said, 'Boy, if you show anybody that picture I will kill you," he said.

Passion for art for social change is something activists, writers and artists need, Redmond said.

"What are you living for? What is your purpose on earth?" he said. "Writing in the American tradition has always been coupled with activism ... Don't allow the message to clobber the art, the beauty and power of language, but don't let the language stand there prettily without having any meaning."