THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 1, 1996 TAG: 9602030287
SECTION: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN TODAYPAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Special section
SOURCE: BY CHARLISE LYLES
LENGTH: Long : 264 lines
Tears slipped down the man's reddish cheeks. Embarrassed, he pursed his lips and lowered his silvery head.
What was it about the life of Annie Willis that would make a white man who never knew her weep nearly 20 years after her death?
``She is an inspiration to me,'' he says quietly in the dining room of a comfortable, waterfront home, the likes of which Willis never knew.
She was just a stout, piano-playing, gently scolding, humble school teacher who inspected her students' hands for cleanliness.
But from her grave, she has taken his heart and hand, leading him on a quest to understand one human being's goodness and grace.
Willard C. Frank Jr. first heard about ``Miss Annie's'' school years ago.
His Unitarian-Universalist church in Norfolk had asked the Old Dominion University history professor to write a church history.
Traces, a sentence or two, of Annie Willis ran through just about everything he read.
Willis was the daughter of Joseph Fletcher Jordan, among Hampton Roads' first black Universalist ministers. The denomination's equalitarian philosophy appealed to him - this denomination's God didn't believe that whites were all good and blacks bad. In 1885, while many white churches ignored the needs of Jordan's people, a Universalist convention pledged a mission to blacks in the South.
Eight years later, money was raised to build a two-story school- house in Suffolk.
Meanwhile, Jordan completed Universalist theological training. His sermons and diligent propagation efforts in Norfolk won the approval of Universalists based in Massachusetts. In 1904, he was assigned to the Suffolk Normal Training School.
Stern-faced and direct, he scoured the rows of 74 students, looking for an unkempt head that might need to consult with the comb in his pocket.
Long after his death, ``Professor Jordan's comb'' would remain handy on a lavatory shelf.
In the classroom by Jordan's side, no taller than his knee, was 11-year-old Annie, running errands, erasing chalk boards, sharpening pencils and learning how to teach.
Angel-faced and serious, with daddy she went in the evenings, to talk with field laborers whose children were absent from school in October for peanut-digging time.
Poised and well-mannered, little Annie watched as her father engaged in civic affairs and reached out to his neighbors. By 1919, school enrollment rose to 213.
Ten years later, Jordan died and bequeathed his work to his daughter. With the scraping, hollow-belly days of the Great Depression bearing down on her, Annie B. Willis, age 36, took the principalship.
And she stepped into history, joining a legion of pioneering African-American educators in Hampton Roads.
They include her own father, and a whole flock of exceptional teachers at Norfolk's Booker T. Washington High School - Aline E. Black in chemistry; Fannie Mallory Jones in English; John Winfred Baker in government and history, and James P. Archer in science. The names of so many others have slipped from history, said Celestyne Porter, who attended high school in the mid-1920s.
They saw education as the only sure defense against a white man hell-bent on beating down the ``Negro,'' now that he could no longer own him.
From the turn of the century through decades of separate and unequal public education, these instructors uplifted a race and trained the hands that would build black civilization in America.
They instilled pride in a people diminished by the deep, psychological scars of slavery and Jim Crow. Each used his own philosophy or faith to counter society's lash - some, Christianity; others, Marcus Garvey's back-to-Africa ideology; others, Booker T. Washington's.
In the tradition of her father, Willis employed the Universalist doctrine.
``Miss Annie treated everyone special,'' comes the chorus from teachers, students, her own daughter and others she may not have even known. But they knew of her.
This is what causes the tears to course from Willard Frank's eyes.
``What really counts is that every person is unique,'' says Frank. ``And she nurtured the whole child, developing, drawing forth the character of the kids so they would have a solid sense of who they were. They're 70 and 80 years old now. But just listening and talking to them, I know they still have it.''
Miss Annie's students became trauma surgeon L.D. Britt, Suffolk's vice mayor and activist, the late Moses Riddick, Suffolk Circuit Court Deputy Clerk Eula Williams, teachers, lawyers, beauticians, electricians, preachers.
Their foundations were laid right there in Miss Annie's crowded classroom with its crude wood stove, uneven floor boards and an unusual voice giving tender, loving instruction.
The two-story, wood-sided building on the corner of Tynes Street and Johnson Avenue stood in the shadow of a peanut processing plant. Cracking and shelling, many blacks would labor there for a lifetime of low wages.
The white fence surrounding ``Miss Annie's'' stood like a partition to separate her beloved students from such a life, at least for a while.
At the chalkboard, now tall and bespectacled like her daddy, hair parted and pulled in a bun, she looked out over rows of wide eyes, fidgety feet and a few dresses stitched from rags. But Annie B. Willis saw teachers, community servants, good workers, ``diamonds in the rough.''
She would do the cutting and polishing.
When she called the roll and heard no wee reply, she knew her student might be somewhere working a field.
Six, 7, 8, Miss Annie loved little ones the most. The peanut plant's two shifts ran 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. That gave her a preschool class of 3- year-olds long before the word ``preschool'' was invented.
The day began with devotionals. ``Dear Lord. . . '' ``Yes, Lord. . . ''
Teacher Doris H. Jones played the second-hand piano, a gift from Universalists up North impressed with the ``Negro'' school's good reputation.
Good morning Mary Sunshine
Why do you wake so soon?
You scared away the stars
And shined away the moon.
Then came lessons, ABCs, reading, arithmetic.
Too much fussing and no focus might force Miss Annie to defer to her ``Sugarpie.'' ``You had to respect the Sugarpie; that was her little persuader,'' remembers Jones.
``She had the sweetest, nicest way of saying, `You're special, and the things that you're doing are not representative of that special person.' ''
``I never seen anybody in my life who could discipline children and they still love her,'' says Dorothy Williams, Willis' great-great niece and former student. ``But they love Miss Annie. If we only had someone like her today.''
The May ``School Closing'' ceremony was so popular that the festivities went on for four evenings of dramatic recitations, song and dance like some ancient Greek gathering. The event even doubled as a fund-raiser. Folks started arriving at the Broadway Theater on East Washington Street two hours early just to get a seat.
``It was out of this world,'' says Williams. ``I had a new hairdo, Shirley Temple curls. Every year I would either sing a song or tap-dance.''
Soon, 5 cents a week was too much to ask pocketbooks emptied by the Depression. The local Universalist funding agency could barely raise $1,000 to pay the staff of four. A teacher was let go. Inspectors found the building in disrepair.
Black churches gave what they could. Boxes and barrels of clothing, toys at Christmas, school supplies arrived from other Universalist congregations.
``Send them on to school anyway,'' the teacher told desperate parents.
And Miss Annie wasn't about to let anybody go hungry. Sometimes her small quarters inside the school building housed needy children. Everyone got a decent meal every day - milk and a sandwich, at least. Too often, her own meager earnings paid for it.
In the neighborhood, Miss Annie and her school were respected like a mayor and city hall. Drunks straightened as she passed, then stumbled on their way. Police claimed juvenile crime was lower in Suffolk's black area because of a certain upright woman known as Miss Annie.
Word spread throughout the country, influencing the very way Universalists viewed African Americans. ``Replacing white discussions of the `Negro problem' w ere lessons on the black artists depicting the accomplishment of the Negro race,'' Frank would write later.
Miss Annie's pupils even had white pen pals. So began friendship exchanges between black and white churches. One in Rochester produced a play on Negro uplift efforts at the ``Suffolk School.'' At a Pennsylvania church, a boy was asked to speak about grandparents born slaves.
Despite the hard times, the school was clearly worthy of investment. A renovation built ``Babyland'' for the 3- to 5-year-olds. Miss Annie's husband Richard Willis built the furniture. And a new library was opened to the whole community, long locked out of the public facility by Jim Crow.
By the 1940s, public education for blacks had begun to improve as civil rights efforts gained momentum. Some parents favored sending children to Booker T. Washington or East Suffolk elementary schools. Others knew they'd never get the nurturing of Miss Annie there. Enrollment declined.
Universalists set a new direction for the school, social services. By 1942, all eight grades had been phased out, and it was renamed the Jordan Neighborhood House. A prenatal clinic and counseling center opened.
Only Miss Annie's kindergarten survived.
Oh, all the hands she used to hold.
Fifty years later, Eula Williams remembers.
The feel of her little fingers in Miss Annie's soft palm, carefully painting tiny eyes and noses on pecans.
``I thought it was stupid, but she said, `It'll help your fingers work for you.' ''
Some days, a long line of Miss Annie's charges wound through the neighborhood. Folks waved. Around the peanut plant, past houses, fields, then back to the school yard.
``We collected leaves under a big old tree that I couldn't get my arms around. She made people creative. She used everything,'' says Williams, still amazed at Miss Annie's instruction in ingenuity. ``Anything eligible for the trash could be made into something. I made a grass skirt out of newspaper.
``The people that worked for her became very resourceful people.''
And Williams can still hear it, that voice, sweet as the yams Miss Annie had students give to donors, sweet as the chocolate milk sipped at recess.
``Not a twang, not a twine, but high-pitched and sooo soft, she talked just like she was whispering to you. So distinct, like Rochester's voice'' on ``The Jack Benny Show,'' says Williams.
Back in class there was role-playing. ``I'll let you be art teacher today.''
``She knew birthdays, everybody's, things that people pass off as nothing,'' says Williams.
``There was a left-handed fella, and his mother used to make him put things in his right hand. Miss Annie said, `That's the hand that God gave him to use, so that is his right hand.' And she would take that pencil and put it back in his left hand.''
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the kindergarten graduation from Miss Annie's remained a major extravaganza. The Suffolk News Herald covered it. Come May, the students marched down the aisles of the biggest hall in town, a processional of brown faces under white paper hats, each tassel swinging with satisfaction.
A few white and Jewish faces shone in the line. Miss Annie's reputation spread way across the tracks. Color wasn't going to stop some folks from taking advantage of it.
But in the early 1950s, just as Brown vs. the Board headed to the Supreme Court to end school segregation, the Universalist Service Committee had ruled that the school should become self-supporting. Tuition rose to $1.50 a week.
Her neat bun silvery now and tall frame slightly stooped, Miss Annie stayed focused on her students.
By 1965, the coming of the Great Society-era poverty programs brought the STOP organization and 70 Head Starters to Miss Annie's school. It was only fitting that she should teach the first generation.
The Jordan Neighborhood House became a sort of social service and cultural clearinghouse. Universalists, now merged with Unitarians, debated over funding and administration. In the early 1970s, there was talk of more black-community involvement in decision-making.
Good morning Mary Sunshine
Why do you wake so soon?
You scared away the stars
And shined away the moon.
Every morning at music time, Miss Annie jauntily pounded out a tune on the piano, her soprano chiming with chirpy kindergartners. You would never have known that she had retired in 1974.
But she allowed retirement to take her no further than the school- house apartment where she had lived nearly half a century.
The school's new director Lorraine Skeeter went to visit Miss Annie in the hospital the night before she died in 1977. ``Watch out for my children,'' were the last soft words that oddly sweet voice said.
``You couldn't help but love her,'' says Skeeter. ``She just had that teacher's touch.''
The Jordan Kindergarten ended in 1984. When Willard Frank Jr. went looking for Miss Annie, he found a building that was eventually sold to the Christian day care center, which now occupies it. About $20,000 in proceeds went to the Jordan/Willis college scholarship fund. And he found an empty space for a planned memorial marker to Joseph Fletcher Jordan and Miss Annie's school.
He had to know more.
``Her story was just something that I couldn't let go of,'' says Frank, beginning to weep. ``Because she did it. She lived that idea that God doesn't play favorites, that he loves all people equally.''
ILLUSTRATION: Photos courtesy of Willard C. Frank Jr.
Annie Jordan Willis and her students at the Suffolk Normal Training
School. ``Miss Annie treated everyone special,'' says those who knew
her.
Annie Willis' father, the Rev. Joseph F. Jordan, was principal of
Suffolk Normal Training School. After his death in 1929, it was
renamed the Jordan School in his honor.
The Suffolk Normal Training School in 1912. It was located at 179
Tynes St.
Annie Willis' class in 1935. Upon her father's death, she became
principal. By now, everybody simply called the school ``Miss
Annie's.''
Annie Jordan Willis and her granddaughter, about 1943.
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