Memories of Augusta Savage in Saugerties

A few years ago, I went to the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival in Saugerties, NY, with some friends. One of those friends had told me about it because she knows I love garlic, and had always wanted to go to the famous Gilroy Garlic Festival in California.

We spent a weekend in Saugerties, nestled about 100 miles north of New York City in the Catskills Mountains. Just before we headed back to Philadelphia that Sunday, we took a drive east to the town of Woodstock.

Little did I know then that there was another landmark I should have visited: The home and studio of African American sculptor Augusta Savage. We were about three miles from the place she slipped into in 1945 and stayed for 15 years.

  
Why Saugerties, I wondered, but could not find an answer. Her black artist friends were all in Harlem, creating masterpieces and living it up as stars of the Harlem Renaissance. The town was not overflowing with like-minded people that she could mix it up with. In fact, there apparently were few black people in Saugerties.  

But Harlem’s loss was to be one little girl’s gain.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Savage and her sculpture “The Harp,” which was displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, after finding a box of filmstrips from the fair. I got an email from a woman who had lived in Saugerties and knew another resident who actually spent some time with Savage as a child. The woman’s name was Audrey.

“She was a a wonderful, wonderful storyteller,” said Audrey, 70. “Like with a parent, you wish you had listened better. She told many many stories. I spent my summer vacation behind her house. We would climb hills and small mountains.”

Audrey also sent me the outline of a book – these were actually some very delightful stories – culled from the memories of her youth and adolescent years. These stories are her oral history of life with the woman she respectfully called “Mrs. Savage,” Flannery-O’Connor-type tales of picking berries, eating chicken foot soup and harvesting squabs.

These are snatches of Augusta Savage’s life as a poor woman struggling to survive with little money, just like Audrey’s family of her parents, three brothers and a sister. Audrey met her in the spring of 1948 when she was 8 years old. Savage was living in an old farm house with a second building that was a chicken coop and a barn, Audrey said. Today, the old house and studio are on the National Register of Historic Places. And there’s a road named in Savage’s honor.  

Here are Audrey’s written recollections, along with information from my interview with her:

Savage’s fear of cows

“In the spring of 1948, very close to my 8th birthday, my brother Johnny and I ventured across the field behind our house, wandering amongst the grazing cattle, to our neighbor’s house.

Mrs. Savage, (the neighbor), had a great overwhelming fear of the cows. To hear her tell the story, as she watched us cross the field, she was filled with terror that something would happen and she would have to go into the field with the ‘dreaded’ cows and rescue us. She breathed a great sigh of relief when we crossed her ‘stile’ over the fence and entered her yard through the vegetable garden. She had built the stile as a quick escape out of the field in case a cow should somehow get near her. ”

Adventurous treks

“We would roam the hillside and fields (when the cows were elsewhere), fish in the little stream, tend her pigeons and chickens. We would often cook over an open fire made in the yard.  Sometimes we would pick berries, look for ‘puffball’ mushrooms. It was great when we found a good size one, we would slice it and fry it in butter. She would throw corn, just picked, still in the husk into the coals. Sometimes they would burn, but we would eat them anyway. We would cook the fish we caught in the fire also. I don’t believe there was any extra money for ‘aluminum foil’ (if there was such a thing at that time), so we must have used a frying pan for the fish.”

Plants, birds and flowers

One plant Audrey remembers was dolls eyes. “They were scary,” she said. “The plant put up a stem with white berries with black spots that looked like a doll’s eyes. I remember her impressing on me never to put the berries in your mouth. Because of her, I’ve always been interested in plants and birds.

“Mrs. Savage had a flower garden, which was a wild array of flowers, very beautiful and appealing to me. No order to it at all. I still have an iris that I believe came from her garden. She also had a good size vegetable garden. This was much neater. She canned many, many jars of vegetables and fruit (all on the wood stove) for the winter. (Her house had a root cellar that was ‘dark and damp and cool’ where she kept her canned food, said Audrey.)

A few times she gave me a sip of her homemade wine. I was not to tell my parents. She did not think they would approve.”

Chicken foot soup

“She would cook up a bunch of chicken stew type stuff and can it also. One thing she made by huge pots full which made a large impression on me – not a good one – was chicken foot soup. It was the yellow legs and feet of the chickens cooked until everything fell off the bones. I guess it might have tasted OK , but the pieces of scaly yellow chicken leg skin just turned my stomach. I would dread it when she made it and served it to me for lunch. I would try to eat it and not let her know how I felt.  She loved it and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings and show how I loathed it.”

Tending her squabs

“Mrs. Savage raised pigeons to sell for ‘squab’ in New York City. When they were the perfect size they had to go right away. It was always a big day to capture them and pack them in crates for the trip. Feathers flying, squawking, it was very exciting. Another big deal was when we cleaned and redid the pigeon house or the chicken coop. Everything was torn out and new, clean boxes put in. I loved the tearing out, did not care for the putting in. It was much too time-consuming and tedious. Mrs. Savage would always call on me to come and help her for the ‘bullwork’ type jobs of ripping up and tearing down. The other jobs she knew I would not be much help for long. The pigeon house in particular was very exacting on how it must be done or the pigeons would not nest.

When the time came, we worked liked dogs (Audrey was about 10 or 12 years old) to get them out to New York.”

The move to Saugerties

“She said she moved to Saugerties to her little house tucked under the hill to escape ‘communist’ pressures and other pressures of living in NYC at the time.”

(Savage had helped form an organization called the Vanguard in the 1930s to discuss politics, the Scottsboro Boys case (a cause supported by the Communist Party), the New Deal, Marxism and the Soviet Union. The Communists wanted the club to recruit Harlem intellectuals, but it apparently did little of that. Theresa Leininger-Miller, an art history professor who is writing a book about Savage, said in a newspaper interview that the club became Communist-controlled and Savage was accused of being a Communist. Savage left the club, which was disbanded after a few years.

Her reception in Saugerties

“My entire family was close to her. When we first moved here, my parents took her to church with them. I don’t know what was said or done to her. My family left that church and never went back. We went to another church.

There was prejudice (in Saugerties). There were not many black people. There was one black girl in my grade and others a couple years or two older. Most were from a few of the same families.”

Everyday living for Savage

“She had a hand pump in the kitchen, which had to be primed. She had a wood stove for heat and cooking, kerosene lamps and lanterns for light, and an outhouse. She kept her bed in the kitchen when it was cold. She got electricity in 1958, the last 3 to 4 years of her life.

It was quite an education to visit her and, visit her I did, often. There was always an adventure awaiting. You didn’t want to miss a day in good weather. 

When she needed to kill a chicken to eat she would wind it up over her head, holding it by the head and then snap its neck. She would then throw it down the hill and let it flop around until it stopped, slit its throat and let it bleed out. It was quite a show.

She was very very poor. She had a (rattle) trap car. Her lane was full of ruts and potholes. She would be rattling down the main road in an old Pontiac. It was one of those cars – the back was a slope, everything from the front windshield to the back sloped. It was the color gray. She carted everything in it like a truck.”

(Interestingly, some of Savage’s sculptures have attracted heavy bids at auctions. One of the plaster versions of “Gamin (1929)” sold for $40,800 at Swann Auction Galleries last year. Another was on sale at the gallery last week, but no one acted on the opening bid of $14,000.)

Fun times with her

“She once told me she wished she had named herself ‘Helen Augusta Wind’ instead of Augusta Savage. So, I am not even sure what her real name was. We got great amusement out of her wished-for name. Such innocent fun we had. We also would play cards by the hour. I was grudgingly allowed to do that at home occasionally, but not on Sunday.”

Feed-sack dresses for Audrey

“We were very, very poor when we moved to Saugerties. I remember Mrs. Savage decided I needed a few dresses that were mine alone and not hand-me-downs from my cousin. She ordered chicken feedbags in printed fabric. She would try to get two bags with the same print so there would be no scrimping on the dress. She would hold the material up against me and cut. No pattern, not much measuring. I thought she was a wonder. I used to regularly want to run away from home and go live with her. 

She was very accepting of a person’s failures, and I remember her trying to build up my tender ego when I felt unlovely. She would tell me I had classic beauty and that I would have been considered fabulous if I had been born in the right era, that I had wonderful bones, great shaped head, etc. I guess it must have helped since I still remember it almost 50 years later.”

Working to make money

“Whenever Mrs. Savage needed money for something special she would find a job. One job she had was in the laboratory (for cancer research) for a very wealthy family in the area. She took care of the laboratory mice. One day she brought me home a black mouse with a white tip on its tail for a pet. It had a nice wire cage and a watering bottle. It never did become much of a pet and I do not recall its end. My mother was not really excited about it.”

Watching her sculpt

“Sometimes she would find a commissioned sculpting job. She had a big block of clay (on her kitchen table) and she had me sculpt something, too, so I would be quiet so she could have some peace and quiet (to work). I was a model for the daughter of the man who owned the laboratory (Herman Knaust). Mrs. Savage thought my body was shaped like hers. I would sit for 10 minutes, no more.

I remember her designing penguins to sit alongside the pool. Another job she took was to design zodiac signs for jewelry. This was the first time I had ever heard of zodiac signs so I was quite intrigued by the whole thing.”

Audrey said that Savage did plaster busts of her 20-year-old sister Lois and 5-year-old brother Wesley. These were done as surprise gifts to her parents. The bust of her sister (photo above) is signed.

Lois’ daughter Karen also has a sculpted horse (photo below) that was a gift from Savage to her mother, who was also close to the artist, who took her once to what Audrey says was a raucous party in Harlem. Karen recalled playing with the horse sculpture as a child. It is unsigned.

Savage created at least eight sculptures and a pastel portrait of friends and neighbors in the town, according to a catalogue for a 2000 exhibition by the Saugerties Historical Society.

Lessons learned

“To this day I remember many of the ‘lessons’ she taught me – identifying birds and plants, life stories with a moral. One of the most memorable was the day I innocently recited ‘eeany meaney miney moe, catch a n– by the toe.’ It is the only time I ever remember Mrs. Savage being mad at all, and especially mad at me. She wanted to know where I had heard such a thing, and then lectured me on never saying it again if we wanted to remain friends. 

I remember being mortified since I never even considered what I was saying, did not realize the connotations of it, and I loved her so much I would never ever do anything to hurt her feelings. She said I should say catch a monkey or some other animal by the toe if I must repeat that rhyme. I could say a person was Negro, African or black, but not that bad word. To this day the rhyme and word make me very uncomfortable.”

Gifts from Savage

“I have several books given to me by Mrs. Savage for my 10^th birthday. She also gave me an ivory bookmark and an ivory pendant of a dog. These were personal belongings of hers as she had no money for gifts. In a better year she gave me a tiny sewing machine for my birthday. And I remember when I was a ‘young lady,’ she gave me a subscription for a fashion magazine so I could see proper clothing, hair and makeup. She sent it to ‘Audra’ because she liked that name better than Audrey. She said I should pronounce my name ‘‘au – dray,’ not ‘aud-rey.'”  

Postscript

Audrey envisioned a movie made about her time spent with Savage:

Opening scene: Two blond-headed kids struggling across a field of cows, a brown-skinned woman watching them.

Middle: Savage telling Audrey stories about her life.

Closing scene: Savage and Audrey climbing mountains and hills, and being adventurous.

“Everybody who knew her really loved her,” Audrey said. “You always wished you were like her.”

Savage moved back to New York near her daughter in 1960 and died on March 26, 1962.

Here’s a 1930’s snippet of film – dubbed with jazz – of Savage in her studio. It was clipped from a 15-minute silent film called “A Study of Negro Artists” showing sculptor Richmond Barthe, photographer James Allen Latimer, painter Aaron Douglas and Savage at work in their studios. The film is from the Prelinger Archives. Here’s amateur film, also from Prelinger Archives , of the sculpture “The Harp” that Savage made for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Forward to time stamp 7:49-8:20 to see the piece erected in the court of the Contemporary Arts building.