Leslie did most of the crying. She wouldn’t sit still for the shoot by famed baby photographer Constance Bannister that day in the early 1960s.
Usually, her brother Kevin, about 5 years old, could get her and twin sister Lynn to settle down by making them laugh. On this day, Leslie wasn’t having any of it. So, she cried and Bannister photographed her bawling and in tears.
The identical twins and their mother, Doris, were at Bannister’s studio in New York to be photographed for one of her international date books. They were among the first African American babies photographed for the books, which featured whimsical shots with cute captions that had wowed parents for more than a decade.
I came across Bannister’s name some years ago when I bought one of her white dolls at auction. I learned that she was an internationally known baby photographer, so naturally I wondered if she photographed black babies.
Lynn McCartney Johnson came across my blog post and emailed to tell me that she and her sister had sat for Bannister when they were about a year old. She obviously doesn’t recall anything about the shoot, and her recollections are those of her brother, her mother and an aunt.
“By the time we got to the shoot we were very difficult,” said Johnson. “As he (her brother) put it, we were acting like divas. We were babies, but we were so into us that we weren’t responding to Constance or anything in the studio. But he said the studio was like heaven for a kid. She had all these props and toys, and she was trying so hard to capture (us).”
The family was living in New York City (during her childhood, they lived in Harlem and Queens), and they had come to an open call by Bannister. The photographer saw their mother pushing them in a stroller and asked her to bring them to the studio.
“She had a gift with children, capturing them, but she couldn’t get us to sit still and stop crying,” said Johnson. “We were being very difficult. So, she had to call on my brother because we always responded to him.”
The girls were featured in Bannister’s 1962 date book, and Lynn was on the cover. In fact, she’s featured several times alone in the book, and Leslie shows up once in tears and in another photo with the two of them, no tears. The book shows a diverse group of babies: white, black, Latino and Asian.
Johnson’s copy of the book has been cherished and well-used. Its edges are torn and some of the pages have slipped out. Cellophane tape holds together the spine.
Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), was the impetus behind this honor of being a Constance Bannister baby. In the foreword to the book, Height wrote that it was published to help finance a memorial on public land in Washington, DC, to Mary McLeod Bethune. She was a noted African American educator, civil rights activist, and founder of the NCNW and Bethune-Cookman College (now university) in Daytona Beach, FL. The council also wanted to erect a center to hold an archive featuring the contributions of African American women.
A bronze memorial statue honoring Bethune was unveiled in the nation’s capital in 1974.
According to a statement by Bannister on the back of the book, this was the second year it had been published for the council. Bannister’s daughter, Linda, is now shepherding her legacy so Bannister and her babies will not be forgotten.
The book includes dates for holidays, along with wedding anniversaries and birthday gifts. It also included a dire reminder of the times: air-raid instructions for U.S. citizens. The instructions told them what to do if they heard the signals, either at home or work, on the streets, and even what to do if their children were at school. This was the Cold War period between the United States, the Soviet Union and their allies, and all feared nuclear annihilation at the hands of the other.
Bannister’s babies represented the good in the country. The McCartney girls were born into a family of twins. Their mother Doris and her sister Lois were identical twins who married brothers. Doris was a teacher who was also a registered nurse, Johnson said, and helped develop the New York City Board of Education’s first health career curriculum. “She was a very notable and distinguished educator,” she said.
Their father, Lewen, was a creative assistant at Avon, assisting with its product line and catalog book, she said. He was also an actor, appearing in off-off-off Broadway plays.
Growing up as twins, Johnson said, she and Leslie were always into each other, speaking to their parents in one and two words but communicating with each other in a language they shared.
“Even if you watch twins, we have an unspoken language, and my parents were a little concerned because we didn’t speak to other people until we were 4 years old.
“One time my father was talking, and he was like, ‘you don’t talk to other people,'” she said. “I remember as a child I would (say), ‘Me talk.’ ‘Cause Leslie and I were talking among ourselves in our own way. We were able to communicate. We just chose not to.”
They learned from their mother that they were Constance Bannister babies. “I saw the book around,” Johnson said. “My mom used to have so many. All of the family members had it and they’re like, ‘that’s you.’ I always knew that was me, but I don’t think it actually sunk in that my sister and I were Bannister babies until maybe about 5 or 6.”
Added Leslie McCartney Childs: “It was very exciting as far as what it did for me now. It gave (me) a sense of worth. You don’t articulate it at that young age. It made you feel a little special and different. It made you feel good.
“I was in college. I must have been in my 20s. We walked into a store in Philadelphia, a card store. That’s when cards were big and there we were on a card. That blew our mind.”
Both of the sisters are accomplished women who give back to the community. They went to the same college to become dentists, but Lynn got married, got pregnant, dropped out and had planned to return to her studies at the NYU College of Dentistry.
Then she found her calling and spent 25 years as a high school biology teacher in the Philadelphia School District. Like her mother, she was a distinguished teacher, racking up awards for her ability to make biology engaging, she said.
“(My) dentistry background helped with teaching,” said Johnson. “You can’t tell anyone how to teach. I think teachers are born. Having that knowledge – the confidence in the knowledge – helped me to concentrate more in the delivery, to simplify it so others could understand that higher order, the higher vocabulary and the higher thinking. I was able to break it down so the students could really understand it and really come away knowing biology. I never really felt as fulfilled as I did when I was teaching.”
Leslie has a doctorate in dentistry, but she does not work as a dentist. Like Lynn, she became a teacher and now works with high school students on the science section of the GED test in the Brooklyn (NY) public schools.
Johnson officially retired from teaching in 2017 after contracting Cogan’s Syndrome, an auto-immune disease that affected her eyesight, walking and hearing. “I literally woke up and could not hear, woke up and could not walk,” she said. Now, she is an ambassador for the Vestibular Disorders Association after supporting and inspiring others with disorders of the inner ear and brain.
“No matter what happens to you, your purpose is not derailed,” she said. “Your gifts find another outlet.”
