The Making of Barbara Jordan
I looked over Jordan, and what did I see?
At night Dowling Street is one of the toughest streets in Houston. From its ramshackle bars and flophouses bursts a surging stream of sex and energy that can easily explode into violence. But during the day Dowling is one of the main thoroughfares of the Third Ward, the cultural and intellectual heart of black Houston. Black artist Edsel Cramer has lived at the corner of Dowling and Wheeler for 25 years. To this brick bungalow, nestled amid convenience stores and bars, Barbara Jordan came in the spring of 1973 to sit for a portrait. She was just beginning her first session as a member of the U.S. Congress, and her former colleagues in the Texas Senate, still flush with affection for her, had decided on the unprecedented step of commissioning her portrait to hang in the Texas Capitol alongside portraits of Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, Lyndon Johnson, and Jefferson Davis. She made six visits to Cramer’s studio, always arriving precisely on time and staying exactly two hours.
Cramer has spent years studying the faces of his subjects, searching out the planes and angles, the subtleties of bone structure and coloring, that define appearance and character. He did the same with Jordan, isolating the elements of her face and putting them back together on canvas. “Studying her up close you see exactly how intense she is,” Cramer remembers. “There are fine lines etched around her eyes, the sort of lines that mean stress, hard work, and determination. Her head is like a bull’s head; across her brow is a lump of bone that stands out like the forehead of a bull. That look of bull-like strength is part of her character. But the most impressive thing about her is she is simply so big—both in size and personality. I just couldn’t paint normal scale no matter how hard I tried, even though I prefer to keep the scale of my paintings down. But her painting just kept coming out too big; I couldn’t help but make her larger than life.”
Cramer seemed to consider this some professional failure on his part, as though his hand had failed to restrain his brush. If it’s some consolation, Barbara Jordan’s images have always had a way of becoming larger than life. For example, here are some verbal portraits painted of her lately by journalists and other politicians: “a genius”; “a hero”; “the best politician of this century”; “the salvation of American politics”; “a mythic figure”; “the main inspiration for a troubled time”; “a woman of high destiny”; “a cross between Lyndon Johnson and Mahatma Gandhi.” Her reception at the Democratic National Convention in New York City this summer dwarfed that of every other politician, with the possible exception of Jimmy Carter. A legitimate American hero like John Glenn was given short shrift by a crowd eager for her magic, like an audience impatient with preliminaries and ready for the main event. When her filmed introduction began, and her disembodied voice was heard saying, “If there are any patriots left in this country, then I am one,” the convention roared into life. This was the woman whose eloquent speech (“My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total”) for the impeachment of Richard Nixon elevated that grave process to the level of a national rite. To a country wracked with the longest war in its history, torn by racial division, unsure of its institutions and its future, she furnished clear hope. A Southern woman from the race of slaves, she dramatically affirmed, in spite of slavery, civil war, and segregation, her faith in our original ideals. She inspires the belief that one day the burden of race may be set aside. The first black state senator since 1882, the first black congresswoman from the South, now bandied about as possibly a U.S. senator, and—who knows?—perhaps the first black president, she has established her place as the symbolic trailblazer of Texas politics.
On the other hand, she says she does not want to be a symbol, the first black this or the first black that. She wants to be seen for her performance on the playing field. “I am neither a black politician nor a female politician,” she says. “Just a politician. A professional politician.” But no amount of insisting that’s all she is seems to work. People don’t want to see her as a politician. If she were white, perhaps then they would. Then the ambition would shine clearly through the rhetoric; then the opportunism in her political alliances would be obvious; then she, not John Connally, would be seen as the true heir to Lyndon Johnson’s wheeling and dealing skills. To a good politician the symbolism of Jordan’s position—being Southern, black, and female—would be prime political capital, not to be risked on quixotic causes, but to be invested wisely for political ends. Among the greatest of political ends, of course, is personal advancement. And not only does Jordan continually remind people she is a politician, she also doesn’t make a big secret about wanting to go places. For those who believe her symbolic position as a black woman with power imposes the grave responsibility to consider issues over advancement, this personal ambition does not always sit well. “I have watched Barbara Jordan for almost ten years,” says one critic. “And I have yet to see any evidence she is interested in anything beyond the advancement of Barbara Jordan.”
Now politicians have been accused of sacrificing principle to ambition and expediency since long before Julius Caesar. In Jordan’s case this accusation is made mostly by whites—and a few black militants—who think she isn’t doing enough for liberal causes or her people. On the other hand, even her most skeptical black constituents seem to applaud not only her performance but also her ambition. They say they are tired of political kamikaze pilots who crash and burn against the warships of the establishment. They want someone who can hold his own with the toughest movers and shakers, someone with staying power. Barbara Jordan has staying power. Although they can point to few concrete examples, they continue to believe she is using the establishment, and not the other way around. This gap between what she says she is and how she is perceived is a paradox; almost everything about Barbara Jordan is. That’s what being larger than life is all about. Her personality ranges from frosty, devastating dignity to warm, humorous folksiness. Her distinctive voice seems without root or place. Personal details about her are few and closely guarded. Much of her time seems spent in rehearsal for some future role, but only she knows what it might be.
GONNA BE SOMEBODY
The best place to begin understanding Barbara Jordan is with a brief tour of black Houston. The primary black neighborhoods are Third Ward and Fifth Ward. Barbara Jordan had her portrait painted in Third Ward, which is just west of the University of Houston and southeast of downtown. Fifth Ward is north of the Ship Channel, northeast of downtown. Until the Elysian Viaduct was built in 1955, Fifth Ward was connected only tenuously to Houston. It was the poorer neighborhood, the brawn to Third Ward’s brains. Like black communities in every Southern town, it was built and owned primarily by whites, who expected at the bare minimum a 20 per cent return on the block after block of shotgun houses (so called because you could fire a shotgun through the front door and hit everything in the house). Since the city fathers proceeded on the dubious assumption that blacks paid no taxes—and since until 1945 fewer than 5 per cent of the city’s blacks were registered to vote—paved streets, street lights, sewers, and other municipal services were slow in coming.
Even the cramped poverty of black Houston shone like a beacon for the rural blacks of East Texas and West Louisiana. From 84,000 blacks in 1940, it grew to more than 350,000 in the seventies, more blacks than Atlanta, more than New Orleans, the largest black population in the South. There are more blacks in Houston today than the entire 1940 population of the city. The old black neighborhoods were steadily swallowed up into the larger boundaries of the expanding black city. And as Houston grew by annexing the white suburbs that surrounded it, blacks took over virtually the entire east side of old Houston. From well north of Fifth Ward, threading across the Ship Channel and warehouse district to Third Ward, then spreading south to Sunnyside and beyond, black Houston stands like a large expanding hourglass in the center of Houston, cutting the city north to south and separating the more prosperous west side from the industrial east side, the port, and the chemical plants of the Ship Channel.
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