DATE: Tuesday, July 22, 1997                TAG: 9707220100

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY JANIE BRYANT, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH                        LENGTH:  148 lines

A TRIP INTO 1920S PORTSMOUTH JEFFREY WILSON'S COLUMNS ARE INSPIRING A LOCAL LIBRARIAN'S RESEARCH.

As a Norcom High School librarian, Mae Breckenridge-Haywood has heard the students talk about ``J-Dub.''

That's teenage slang for Jeffry W., as in Jeffry Wilson, the public housing neighborhood across the street from the school.

It bothers her to hear students shorten the man's name and use it in some negative labeling of a community.

She's on a mission to change that. That's because in the past two years, the man for whom the neighborhood is named has become her best guide on a journey into the life of Portsmouth's black community of 70 years ago.

Jeffrey Wilson - as the man's name was spelled before the name was misspelled many years ago on city documents - died 11 years before she was born.

Now, Breckenridge-Haywood is doing research for a book she hopes to write on everything from the social life among blacks to black women's contributions, centered in Portsmouth's past.

Her diligence has earned her a $1,000 summer teacher-scholar fellowship from the University of Virginia.

She has visited graveyards, courthouses and libraries from Portsmouth to Washington.

Most Saturdays, she can be found at the Portsmouth Public Library, painstakingly copying each of Wilson's columns from the pages of The Portsmouth Star. The columns, written in the 1920s, were called ``Colored Notes.''

In 1926, in a letter to the paper, a man wrote ``the Star has been to me as a magnet. The first place I look for is the last page for the Colored Notes.''

Seven decades later, Breckenridge-Haywood couldn't agree more.

The column was a small portion of the newspaper, and it was tucked away at the bottom of the page after the comics, the librarian said. But it was one of the first real efforts the newspaper made to publish news of the black community.

``Thank God for that step because I have found that the `Colored Notes' had the heart and the pulse of the black community,'' Breckenridge-Haywood said.

Wilson wrote of achievements and celebrations, and he wrote of illnesses and deaths.

Breckenridge-Haywood was thrilled the day she came across one of his columns, one about her mother and oldest brother, both deceased now, taking a ``motor trip'' to North Carolina. Neither she nor her brother, City Councilman Bernard Griffin, had been born at that time.

Wilson wrote about social clubs, and he wrote about churches, especially his own beloved Emanuel AME Church. He noted in one column that as a young man he had helped to carry the bricks and mortar for that church.

Breckenridge-Haywood has traveled to Ettrick, Va., several times to talk to Wilson's daughter, 83-year-old Blanche W. Bridge.

Their growing friendship has resulted in a partnership of sorts. Breckenridge-Haywood is making copies of all of Wilson's columns for his daughter. And the daughter has given Breckenridge-Haywood copyright privileges for a 1913 diary her father wrote a decade before he started sharing his missives with the local newspaper. The daughter also has allowed her to copy old family photos; the librarian hopes to publish them with the diary.

In 1913, Wilson was living in the former Lincolnsville community and working as a court bailiff in Norfolk.

But he had been born a slave.

Before the Civil War he served the family of George W. Grice, the first mayor of Portsmouth when it became a city. Grice was a Confederate major and, as his manservant, Wilson accompanied the Portsmouth leader to war, the librarian said.

``My views about the Confederacy have softened since I looked at his account,'' Breckenridge-Haywood said. ``I'm more receptive to listen to (different) points of view, because I was just astonished to find this bit of information about the manservant who was a servant to a Confederate soldier, and after the war there was no malice.''

She said Wilson's daughter has told her how he used to say, ``I loved my master and they loved me.''

``That's what I keep saying is so amazing,'' said the researcher. ``Here he was enslaved. He says it was unfortunate, but that was what happened. It's over. I can put this in my past. Let us move on. And that's a recurring theme that I get from that.''

She believes, through her research, that Grice's first wife, Margaret Edwards Grice, may have been the one who taught Wilson to read and write.

She could not have found a more grateful student.

Wilson's daughter told her she remembers her father writing every night.

He would start each journal entry with a short biblical quotation, followed by a comment on the weather or some mention of his relatives and their health.

He wrote about large blessings - the baby son he loved in his old age - and he wrote about small blessings - a fountain pen a woman had given him and the spectacles he was able to purchase.

Once he began writing for the newspaper, he used the space for everything from historic notes to encouragements for other African Americans to better themselves.

Bridge, his surviving daughter, is a retired nurse; his sons included a doctor, a lawyer and a minister.

Wilson was not afraid to use his print podium to gently take the white community to task for some injustice.

``I think that is why the people respected him so,'' Breckenridge-Haywood said. ``People relied on him. People went to him as an authority because of his years.''

His name meant something - and that's something the librarian wants to make sure no one ever forgets. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by Vicki Cronis/The Virginian-Pilot

Mae Breckenridge-Haywood's research...

Color photo

Jeffrey Wilson was the first black columnist for the Portsmouth Star

Side Bar

These are excerpts from some of Jeffrey Wilson's 1926 columns in

The Portsmouth Star:

A white lady of our acquaintance and with a heart of the spirit

of Abou Ben Adhem, upon seeing me Monday evening wending - our way

to our lonely home, hailed us at the corner of Court and London

Streets, handed us a legal tender and told us to apply it where we

saw fit in our church. Being a steward in old Emanuel of course it

will go to that department of the church. The lady remarked that

her late father was a M.E. steward. She is a member of our mother

church, Monumental. We return thanks.

Sixty-one years ago we were living in South Carolina waiting to

be sent home. We had just been freed and was waiting for Major

Grice. . . . He divided his little with us and sent us away to this

place from which we had been absent four years. Thieving Yankees

then robbed us of the little we had. . . . A southerner was too high

toned even if poor to take unjustly anything from a slave. Though

we were held in bondage for a long time we had no ill thought for

the people of the south. They thought it was their inalienable

right to contend for what seemed right to them - slavery. The war

was fought and slavery was ended. No one would have it back.

Some of our people are complaining because the ferry people are

neglecting the colored section in painting up, while they are doing

painting. The writer hadn't noticed the omission, but since our

attention has been called to it we begin to take notice, and we hope

the authorities will give us equal accommodations as to neatness,

etc. It is bad enough to have to run across automobiles and horses

and the like.

Slaves as a rule took their surnames from their - masters and

were always known by it, and some are known by it still. But at the

advent of freedom most all ex-slaves changed their names. Ye scribe

didn't. He had the name of his father's owners. We had no name when

the first cargo of chattels were landed here over 300 years ago. Why

quibble about it now? There is nothing in a name. KEYWORDS: PROFILE

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