Upside Down

I am not sure I have the right to tell this story, but I want to record something that my children's father may not tell them.

I was married to William M. "Billy" Tenery on June 6, 1963. We initially lived with his parents, Mary and William B. "Bill" Tenery, on East Avenue in Hayward, California. I was not working in those first few weeks, but 'Billy', my husband, was selling shoes in a San Leandro shopping mall part time. We both were students at Chabot College and the spring semester finals were occuring during the same week we were married. We spend some time on our weekend 'honeymoon' studying for these tests.

We had a friend, John Odell, who was a fine arts major at UC-Berkeley in 1963. John was living in a sort of communal house in Berkeley on High Street.

Much of our early married social life revolved around spending time with these sorts of long time high-school friends of my husband. John had squatter's rights to the enclosed back porch area of the house on High Street. And all the folks living there knew my husband. Billy had free access to the porch (and its matress) even when John was not at home.

Two weeks after we were married, John called up and invited Billy and I to come to the Berkeley Folk Festival (June 26-30, 1963). We could get in free if we volunteered to take down the folding chairs after the show and before the folk dancing session started.

We drove up to Berkeley in the two-toned Chevy that Mary owned but that Billy practically co-opted anytime he wanted to go anywhere. (There were some insurance savings involved if 19-year old Billy did not 'own' the car. "Assigned Risk" insurance was outrageously expensive in those days.) We circled the gymnasium area for several minutes before we found an elusive unmetered parking space.

Let me interject a little history here. In the San Francisco East Bay in the early 1960s, Berkeley was considered the in-in-insiders place to party for the late teen crowd. Jazz, dancing clubs, coffee house poetry and folk singing were the things to do. We were too young for the show bars, taverns and comedy clubs of San Francisco with their Barbery Coast or North Beach two-drink minimums.

The darkest secret in Berkeley was the location of the nocturnal Teton Tea Party. Those in the know would pass the word to trusted friends and the floating pot party was always sought after. Pot was given freely to all who showed up, there was no cover charge at these get togethers. Friends did for friends, as the saying goes. Teton was named for the Wyoming Mountains, a beautiful "high" place.

By attending the Folk Festival, it was a shoo-in to continue the night's entertainment by going with John (Our Berkeley Insider) to the Tea Party afterwards.

Thus, our mind on free drugs, we scampered up to the doors, told the bouncer-ticket takers to find John and we were passed in as part of the concert work crew. We found chairs in the back, got a folder that was the program listing and sat back in the dark to listen to the blues, jazz and folk music.

When the lights came up for a small intermission as they reset the stage for one of the musical acts, Billy looked over the folder.

He got excited.

He whispered in my ear -- "Look, I know this guy -- Mance Lipscomb. He is brother to Easter who was the cook on my grandfather's farm in Navasota, Texas. He used to do work on the Baker Farm and made money on the side playing music for dances on Saturday night. My Great Great Grandfather Baker owned his family as slaves."

Ouch. I was twisted up learning this. I was just married into this Texan family and was not sure of their stance on civil rights, black liberation and the freedom and voting rights movements. Billy sounded so proud saying "We used to own their family".

Bodyglyn "Manse" Lipscome was born on the Baker Farm near Navasota, Texas in 1895 according to I say me for a Parable, the oral autobiography of Manse Lipscomb, Texas Songster as told to and complied by Glen Alyn in 1993 by Da Capo Press in New York. Billy's mother was Mary Louise McGinty, sister to Grimes County Sheriff Jack Baker McGinty.

Navasota is northwest of Houston, Texas near the Brazos and Navasota rivers. My husband Billy, born in 1942 had lived with his grandparents on this farm as a small child during WWII while his father, in the Navy, was stationed in Chicago and his mother lived up there to be with him.

Billy was not stupid or insensitive, but he did come from a tradition of cultural pride. Texans were boisterous and loud in their praise of their 'homeland' and their Texan 'ways'. Some of these ways clashed diametrically with the zeitgeist of the time - liberation and self determination, first for the blacks and then in the 70s for women.

Billy loved to play up among his friends the role of being Texan and cowboy-like. These were only verbal stances for him. He never wore a cowboy hat or cowboy boots, preferring a more Elvis Priestly sort of hair style and swagger and a three piece well-cut suit. He dressed well and looked pretty sharp compared to the average teenager.

After the war, growing up, Billy and his best friend David Depta played in their Dallas suburb while Bill (Sr.) and Carl (? - David's father) were neighborly and build their friendship - both engineers. Bill took an assignment to Mexico City in 1957 and the whole family (Mary, Bill, Cecile and Billy) lived in a luxary suite in a downtown Mexico City international hotel for a year while Bill was the Structural and Civil engineer for the Mexico City airport. This experience was important in the development of Billy's tastes for food, style for dressing, dancing and charismatic ability to rise like cream to the top of any social experience.

When they came back to Texas, the Depta's were just moving away to California. Carl Depta had been recruited to work at the Berkeley-Livermore National Laboratory (top-secret).

Bill took a contract working for the Scaliosa family of Dallas, doing some lighting for a large new house they were building. The FBI were watching this mob-connected family and spotted Bill Tenery working there.

They decided to look a little closer at him. The Internal Revenue Service was cued to audit his tax returns for the time he was working in Mexico and to attempt to claim that he owed back taxes as a method to squeeze him into informing on anything he knew about the Scaliosa family.

Bill hired a tax lawyer and decided not to 'play' the IRS/FBI game. He didn't know anything, but he didn't want to risk being forced into a position where he would have to get to know anything, either.

He decided to pull up stakes and migrate to Northern California where his friends the Depta's had moved to. Although the Depta's had settled in Livermore, Bill first found an apartment in San Francisco and a job working in an engineering firm there.

Cecile continued and Billy started high school in San Francisco and both played the piano. Billy took up the cello and played with the San Francisco Youth Symphony his first year there.

Living in "the City" was a challenge. Costs were high and Billy was making friends with the wrong sort of element. His friend Victor, a Russian immigrant had stolen a car and the two boys were caught in the car and arrested. Victor was let off because of his horrifying life experiences in Russia and Billy was let off because Victor had sworn that Billy didn't have a clue that the car was stolen. Bill and Mary were loyal to Victor feeling pity for him, but they knew they had to get Billy out of the City or he would end up in jail.

They found a house in Hayward and Bill commuted into the City everyday. Billy graduated from Hayward High School in 1961 and started college at Oakland Technical College and worked part time. In 1962, Chabot College in San Leandro opened and he transferred there to be closer to home and work.

Billy had a flock of friends in high school and at one time or another most of them lived with the Tenerys due to family issues in their own homes -- John Odell (mother died), Don McCarthy (alcoholic mother), Jim Gorrie (father died), Phillip (a high school alcoholic), Bobbie McG??? (mother died) and David Depta (Texan friend). Mary mother'd them all.

Anyway enough of the history and background. Suffice it to say, I was nervous about seeing and meeting this Mance Lipscomb that Billy was so excited about.

Mance sang, I was impressed. He was very good in a sort of folk culture way -- accent thick and texan twangy, songs sad and black-bluesy, acoustic guitar picking beyond competent, well into the virtuoso realm. When the show was over, Billy went off to find Mance and John and I started folding up 8,000 folding chairs and stacking them twenty deep on the side walls.

We were clearing the space for the folk dancing to follow the concert and people who were staying after the concert took off their shoes so as not to scratch up the gymnasium floor. They put the shoes in purses or tied them and hung them around their necks and then pitched into help fold the chairs. In about a half an hour, the job was done and John and I went looking for Billy.

We found him outside having a cigarette among the small crowd congregating around the black performers and their handlers. Billy said - "We are going over to a party where Mance is staying in Oakland." We got the address, found our car and took off for the party. John knew where the place was and we found a parking place (always a problem in Oakland or Berkeley).

It was a little old shack of a house in a black neighborhood. It had a small porch and small living room. We joined the crowd sitting on the floor and listened to Mance play for hours. I know he must have been tired after the concert. He was in his late 60s. But I think he felt he owed his 'public' his music. His public this night was a room full of white teenage couples, sitting on the floor, humming and swaying to his music.

Mance introduced Billy to the crowd by saying -- "This white boy and I share some thing in common. We have eaten the best biscuits in the world. They are made by my sister Easter." It was a generous and kind thing to say, and he made the familar connection between the long standing friendship between the two families in Navasota, TX.

Easter and Mance Lipscomb's relationship with the McGintys in Navasota was probably typical of the time and their places in society. Mance was familar with Billy. He took him fishing, sort of watching out for the little boy. To me, looking from the outside, I saw the easy familiarity of speech and 'ways of doing'.

But there was also a divide between them. Billy was a white boy. And when a black man said those words, there were years of servitude and servility echoing in them. Billy was a 'free white boy' and Mance was a black man of years. The gulf between them was immense.

Billy and I went home that night and told Mary and Bill about meeting Mance. They had many stories to tell in rememberence of Mance and Easter.

Billy went on to college and received his degree in Psychology and Black Studies from California State University at Hayward. He walked into classes in Black Studies and forced the militant black teachers to admit that white Texas boys could know something about great Blacks and their contributions to literature, culture and political thinking.

Often, Billy was the only white person in class and the hostility was high, these were the days of the Black Panther Party and intercity riots. Black Studies was 'their' subject, and white interlopers were not welcome. But as I have said before, Billy had a certain charisma. He could charm pants off a snake. He walked out of ALL his Black Studies classes with straight A's. He never had to break a sweat to study. I was green with envy for him as I bled through my college math courses.

That spring of 1963, Bill Sr. got a job offer for the Livermore National Lab too, and the Tenery's and Depta's continued to stay friends for years. David married Charlene who lived three blocks up on the same 140th Avenue that I grew up on in San Leandro. David and Charlene are the godparents to my children Michael and Diana, and Bill and I are godparents to their youngest daughter.

Mance died in 1976. I have a book and a video tape of a documentary on his musical life -- A Well Spent Life by Les Blank. He is remembered as the Texas Songster. Songsters are noted for having a wider repetoire than just singing the blues.

They say there are six degrees of separation between all the people of the world, but I think this relationship was of the first degree type.