Tommy Whitehead: I'm Tom Whitehead.
I live here in Natchitoches, Louisiana.
I first came here in 1964 as an undergraduate at the college in town, Northwestern State.
Then, went to graduate school in Boston, came back here in 1969, and I have been in Natchitoches
ever since.
Over those years, I've had the opportunity to experience Melrose Plantation and the different
cultures and the people associated with it, especially my friend Clementine Hunter.
This is Melrose Plantation, a unique place in American history.
Three different cultures came together, the African-American culture, the black.
There's also a European, white culture, and there's also a Creole culture developed.
And that Creole culture has made this a unique enclave of a society that exists very few
places in the United States.
It's all associated with the Cane River, which used to be the Red River.
A great deal of culture, history, and the arts have all developed at Melrose over the
past 250 years.
This is the Yucca house at Melrose Plantation, the original structure built by Claude Thomas
Pierre Metoyer and his descendants and grand-pere.
This is where the culture began, in this small cabin.
It is made out of a material called bousillage.
You can't use stucco here because of the moisture causing mold.
This house has been restored a couple of times over the years and it originally had just
two rooms then there were four rooms by the time they finished.
Part of the porch was made into a bathroom, and the other was made into another bedroom-office
combination.
Melrose Plantation has one of the most historic structures in the Yucca house as well as the
barn that is next door.
It is called now the African House.
People, over time, particularly the man that lived here, Francois Mignon, tended to name
things.
It was actually for years, everyone called it the barn, but Francois decided it sounded
better calling it the African House.
So for the last 75 years, it's been known as African House.
It is a barn and it is a structure two stories, and the story goes that the upstairs did not
have steps and they could put materials up there.
Nobody could get up there to steal it.
You had to go through quite a bit to put a ramp up to roll things down or to get it out
of the attic.
It also has now housed the Clementine Hunter murals.
Probably the most famous piece of work that Clementine Hunter did are these murals that
tell the story of life on Cane River, pre-modern revolution of agriculture.
Cammy Henry is famous for having invited all these famous people to come to Melrose, writers,
and authors, and artists, but she also collected buildings.
There were structures she could find on Cane River she would move here to the property
to be multiply re-tasked for different purposes.
This was a little cabin on the river she moved here, and one of the writers stayed in there.
It was always called the writer's cabin.
Then, next, is the Clementine Hunter House, which has been moved here in modern times
from across the road.
Then the third building over there is what everybody... Francois named buildings.
He called that the Ghana House.
It was a little cabin from down the river, and the heyday of the Clementine painting
in the 1950s and early '60s, they painted murals in it.
This is the Clementine Hunter cabin Melrose Plantation.
It was moved here in the late 1970s, but no restoration work was done on it until about
three years ago.
The house has now been restored to tell the story of Clementine Hunter and her paintings.
The house itself was originally across the road in a field, and she lived there from
about late 1940s, early '50s, until 1977.
She had never owned a piece of property or a house, so she bought her a house trailer
and moved up the road and lived the rest of her life in a house trailer.
This house sat it Melrose until about three or four years ago, around 2014, and restoration
work began on it.
Now, it is being used to tell the story of Clementine Hunter's work.
Also, there was a building across the back where there was a bathroom and a kitchen,
and that was not moved.
It was actually an add-on to the cabin across the road.
This house is basically intact from the way it was when Clementine Hunter lived here at
Melrose Plantation across the road.
We do not know her date of birth, but we do know that she was christened in 1887.
In the church records, it says at the age of three months.
Her mother and father were not enslaved.
Her grandparents were.
So she was not born into slavery.
We know very little about her youth.
She did tell the story that she went to a Catholic school.
They had a Catholic parochial school and that every Friday they couldn't break meat.
They couldn't eat meat on Fridays.
The sister, the nun who would run the place would come look in their lunch bucket.
One day, she looked in Clementine's and there was some meat, and she went through it over
the fence and Clementine ran away from school.
Her story was that she never went back.
I don't know.
Her mother tried to get her to go back, but she'd never go back.
When she was about seven years old, that's what she said, her father moved to Melrose.
He had been a sharecropper out at the plantation out on the Red River about 10 miles from here,
Hidden Hill.
Then, he came to Melrose.
He was a tenant farmer.
He was a person who got paid to work.
It was a much better source of income.
She came here, and she spent the rest of her life somewhere here in the environs of Melrose
Plantation.
She had no schooling, no academic training, and she also had children.
She had her firstborn child just died at birth.
We don't know all those stories.
One of first two children died.
Then she had a son, and then she had a child outside of wedlock or two.
Then she married Emmanuel Hunter later and had some children.
So we think she birthed seven children and only four lived to adulthood.
There was one son, Frenchie.
Frenchie died.
He came to her house sick, and he was very sick and we didn't know what was wrong and
he died.
Then she painted this amazing painting of Frenchie going to heaven.
It's a picture of him coming up out of the grave and going to heaven.
I mean, my opinion was it was a spiritual release.
By painting that picture, she put Frenchie in heaven.
But she was very close to her family, and there were grandchildren.
There were always kids run around out over there when she lived across the road because
there were lots of kids in the neighborhood.
But very interesting, we haven't mentioned this, is that besides painting pictures, she
sold homemade popsicles.
She had a freezer out here on the back in her kitchen, and a kid would come ring on
the bell and say, "Mama [Tebay 00:07:13], Mama Tebay."
She'd get up and the kid would give her a nickel, and she would go get a homemade popsicle
out of the freezer and sell it.
So she was painting pictures and selling popsicles at the same time.
She was a delightful person.
She did though sleep late in the morning.
You knew never to go out there before 10 o'clock, and you might find her in a bedclothes at
10 o'clock.
But she'd stay up real late and paint, which is kind of an unusual pattern.
But she did it.
She was a delightful conversationalist.
If you just went out there and tried to talk to her, she didn't respond well.
But we knew sort of which questions to ask to get her to talking.
And then you kind of led her down to what you wanted to talk about.
She was a very good storyteller.
Of course, she told stories about pictures too.
Her paintings are really picture stories.
Most every painting has a story, and she told those stories verbally as well as by her paintbrush.
Think about this.
There were very few people living her life, African-American, elderly, that had the ability
to read or write.
Some did, but there were access to cameras and recording devices.
Clementine took up a brush and painted those memories and documented them from her insider's
perspective.
Very few people did that down here.
She would always tell me, "My favorite thing in plantation was picking cotton."
I said, "I couldn't imagine anything worse than going down that hot field in the sun,
picking cotton, packing the cotton."
She said, "We sang songs."
She said, "It was really fun to pick cotton."
I thought, "Oh my goodness."
It was great storytelling.
My favorite Clementine story was one day I was at her house and some lady, I don't know
who she was, a tourist came up and rang the doorbell, banged the bell.
There was a bell out there.
She said, "Oh."
The lady said, "Is Clementine Hunter home?"
Clementine looked out the door and said, "No, she's not home."
So she did things like that all the time.
I thought, "Oh my goodness."
But she was a fun person.
We were going somewhere in town with another lady, Mildred Bailey, and Clementine said
to us, "Do you know why I've lived so long, why I'm so old?"
I didn't know how to answer.
I said, "No, what is it?"
She said, "I had a dream one night that when I woke up, there was going to be a pill by
the side of my bed.
And if I take that pill, I'd live a long life."
She said, "When I woke up the next morning, there was a pill there and I took that pill
and here I'm still going.
I'm still alive."
She had a degree of supernatural, but I guess that's a part of the culture.
She was a person that had multiple layers.
She had no education, formal education, but she was a brilliant person.
I often wonder what she could've done with education and her bright mind.
The best we can tell, she lived up the road a piece, another group of peat cabins up to
grow here.
And in 1952 or '53, we have photographs of her standing outside that cabin.
And then when she moved over here, it was about 1952 or '53, and she stayed here until
she moved up the river later in her life.
That house is still up there, and we tried to find it and it's not there anymore.
We went and looked for it.
We have a picture of her in front of it, but the house, we can't find one that looks like
it.
It's a cabin.
This house had been sitting over there as a tenant cabin.
It was just the four rooms.
It had an outhouse.
It didn't have a bathroom.
So she put in a bathroom and the kitchen, but the house is basically a four-room house
cabin it was what it was till she moved in it.
Most all of these houses did not have indoor plumbing then in the early 1950s.
They had outdoor plumbing, outhouses.
All right, the house functioned.
This room here, during her lifetime, when I came out here, was like a combination.
This is where she painted.
She literally painted here by that fireplace.
You could come here and visit in June and it was hot like it is today, and you get there
and she'd have a fire going.
She'd have a little fire going and we'd just all go, "Oh, it's so hot."
She had a room added across the back when she moved into it.
It had a bathroom and a kitchen in it.
Then, this room where we're sitting is the room where she painted.
It was a dining table here, and there was some hutches with China and dishes and stuff.
The living room was the front room of the cabinet, and she had TV in there.
I remember vividly coming out here in the afternoon, they were running reruns of the
old Beverly Hillbillies TV series and she would sit there and watch them.
She would identify with the granny character.
Then, the other two rooms were bedrooms.
Later in her life, and I don't know how long, but she would always sleep in this room, the
first room.
And the second room would be where a grandkid would sleep.
Somebody would sleep here with her in the house.
We do know that in the 1940s, there was a young girl that was a child of a widowed couple.
I don't know what happened to them.
She lived with Clementine for a couple of years, but she would not let anyone live here
with her.
She wanted to be by herself, but she'd let somebody sleep here with her at night.
Well, we moved it because it was going to be demolished across the road.
The people that bought the property wanted to have pecan orchards.
Pecan orchards, they don't want a house there to interrupt pecan picking.
So they were going to tear it down.
One of the ladies in the Historical Association, Maxine Southerland, went to Alexandria and
got a company to move the house.
The company that owned the property was glad to get rid of a historic structure that everybody
wanted.
They didn't want to become the bad guys for tearing it down.
So I have a photograph of them moving this house on the trailer over here.
But it sat here then for 25, 30 years before we did the restoration work.
No. basically, in fact, this room that we're talking in today, the wallpaper, we saw a
fragment of it in a photograph.
And then a company in Dallas copied the wallpaper.
This is copies of the original wallpaper.
The other rooms had just a simple white type of vinyl, not vinyl, but a netting type wall.
We decided to leave them natural because we didn't want to put pictures up.
We wanted to just tell Clementine's story in the other rooms.
Her works can be divided into we say really four categories.
There are scenes of work with the cotton and the pecan picking.
There are scenes of play.
There's Saturday Night at the Honky Tonk and various things.
Work, play, and religion.
Religion is she was a very devout person.
But interestingly, in her life, she was born Catholic then converted to Baptist and then
in late in her life, she went back to Catholic.
We're not real sure that late in life Catholic was very much, but she was Catholic at the
time of her death.
Besides work, play, and religion, there's also a kind of a catchall category we call
other, such things as flowers, still life�s and she did great flowers.
My favorite paintings, I don't want to say favorite, but one of mine are flowers.
She could really paint zinnias.
She took a dabbing technique and dabbed the paint to make it look like pedals.
There's been a big effort by some criminals to forge her work, and you can tell the forgers
because they did not dab the paint the way she did.
This past year, the Smithsonian Institution of Museum of African American Art did an exhibit
of her work.
They had a panel discussion about her career.
Nowadays, many of the major museums that have folk art collections, they have her works.
Now, we're saying that Clementine may be painting folk art, but she is really an American artist.
That's kind of an interesting question because when she was painting pictures, local folks
were getting them and they were uncomfortable with it because they showed things that they
didn't talk about very much.
People would actually put them in storage.
Now, they pulled them all out of storage since they've become these iconic figures in American
art.
Her paintings now have a lot broader appeal when it just wasn't her painting her pictures.
There's story here of African-American culture, and life, and on the Cane River communities.
This community here had three different components we talked about, black, white, and Creole.
That's very unusual here in the country, that she was able to take that and capture that
on the paintings in a very good way.
A quick story was a friend of mine, the Brittain family here, they had seven children in their
family and they were really close to Clementine.
In fact, one of her moves was to a house they owned on the river.
They had a family portrait made, and they left a copy of it to her, a photograph, and
said, "Clementine, if you ever feel like it, paint it."
Well, a couple months later, she calls them, "Come get this thing."
They went and got it.
Ann Brittain, the woman, was a large woman but she was not huge, but Clementine looked
at her as the most important person.
And her husband, who had played college football, and her son, who was playing college football,
are these little characters and there's a great big Ann Brittain in the middle of it.
Now, of course, they all love it, but it did show how she sized the person based on their
importance.
Ina Sthapit: Yes.
Tommy Whitehead: Yes.
She didn't like priest or preachers very much so oftentimes, they were small characters.
Basically, her paintings reflect her life, every phase of it, from religion to family
to work to community.
Nowadays, people that live out here when she was painting, we don't think that some of
the local people that lived here thought that much of it.
They kind of a invasion of privacy-type thing, but now she's become an icon of recording
and documenting African-American culture from the insider's perspective.