Piecing the story together

I'm spending some time sorting through my notes and have come across a few things I wrote down which I wanted to share here.

Firstly a snippet from a 1989 newspaper article; the Charleston Messenger on Saturday 7th May reported about the new industrial buildings on Jenkins' farm ''where criminals and little vicious boys can be put to work for themselves and be made to earn their own bread by the sweat of their brow... it makes one feel that God is conducting the whole affairs of the Jenkins Orphanage'' - sadly a view reflected by many white people at the time, and ironic that the Reverend Jenkins himself was such a religious man and strove so hard to give these children a better chance in life than the hand they'd been dealt.

Jenkins was a very humble man and thanked 'good white and colored citizens, one and all' for their help in his achievements in the orphanage. One thing I came across in several different articles/reports was his concern for children's lungs and their health: he thought, and was probably correct, that children learning wind and brass instruments would strengthen their lungs and so make them less susceptible to lung-related illness.
'I promised God when I started out to build an orphanage that I would give the boys and girls plenty of corn bread and molasses, and other things whenever I could, and make them work for a living.' (Charleston Sunday News and Courier, May 16th, 1926). Nobody can deny that he achieved these promises. In 1895 the orphanage was damaged in a storm and Jenkins took some band members North to raise funds for repairs - he said 'I felt that I had rather die than return to Charleston without the money to cancel the debt.' (John Chilton, A Jazz Nursery: The Story of the Jenkins' Orphanage Bands).

If anyone has a Time magazine subscription, there is a great article on Daniel Jenkins here from August 26th, 1935 - http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,748914,00.html

I don't unfortunately so can't read it again, but I was able to read a photocopy of the article in the Avery research center in Charleston.

In the same year the Times article was written, an Associated Press sports writer called Edward J Nell wrote an article which again paints a clear picture of the orphans. He said 'a negro jazz band rolled up to Max Baer's camp at Speculator the other day and insisted on serenading him... there were fifteen of the funniest looking darkies you ever saw. They were from the Jenkins Colored Orphan asylum in Charleston, South Carolina... the truck was coming apart and the wheels were falling off... the negros played their hearts out. They were very happy.' - another stereotypical, mildly but probably unintentionally racist account written by a white man which portrays the poor conditions the orphans live in, but also the way they had been brought up by Jenkins to be grateful for what they had.

Chilton described Daniel Jenkins as a very striking man over six feet tall with a blue-black complexion.  He called the children his 'black lambs' which has been used in many articles and references to the orphans.

Jenkins' life was not an easy one, as anyone might imagine. He was arrested in London in 1895 for creating a spectacle of himself by bringing over an all-black orphan band to play in the streets, and was accused of illegally exploiting children. (Sometimes these old laws surprise me how they could arrest a man for 'exploitation' and yet not too long before kept slaves themselves. The age-old irony.) His wife Lena Jenkins was very ill by the time a new secretary, Eloise Harleston, came to travel with the band as a secretary and publicist: a scandal was created when Eloise became pregnant with Jenkins' baby. She had to move to the UK to have the baby, a little girl named Olive. Eloise and Daniel married in 1912 after his wife Lena passed away. The band were also stranded in England for several months in 1914 when the first world war broke out and travel in and out of England was temporarily halted. Jenkins ended up lending some money to some fellow Americans who could not get home either as they were not allowed to use their foreign paper money until wartime relations settled.

And then there were scandals within the bands themselves: one member was imprisoned in 1919 after stabbing another man in the neck. Some very touching stories from the orphanage have been told by John Dowling, who had his hat spat in by a white man when he offered it round for collections. He remembered ''Now, we were schooled in every way and geared up for anything that might happen. I can remember the tears coming in my eyes as I tried not to cry. But I took my handkerchief, wiped out my hat, and turned to walk away. The man reached out and tugged my coat. When I turned around he put five dollars in the hat.''

I've found so many more of these stories and memories that give glimpses into the lives of these orphans, and of the music they they charmed so many hearts with.

'Born perhaps of the dire conditions in which they found themselves in, the orphans' music was infused with a kind of soulfulness that was not lost of the casual listener.' (The Jenkins Orphanage Bands Viewers Guide). 

As I continue my research, I will write another post soon on the music the band played, their influences, and how they in turn have had a largely unacknowledged impact on the development of Jazz music in the rest of the US and the world.