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AFRICAN -AMERICAN ARTISTS OF LOS ANGELES

John Riddle

Interviewed by Karen Anne Mason

Completed under the auspices

of the

Oral History Program

University of California

Los Angeles

Copyright © 2000 The Regents of the University of California

COPYRIGHT LAW

The copyright law of the United States (Title 17, United States Code) governs the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material. Under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research. If a user makes a request for, or later uses, a photocopy or reproduction for purposes in excess of "fair use," that user may be liable for copyright infringement. This institution reserves the right to refuse to accept a copying order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would involve violation of copyright law.

RESTRICTIONS ON THIS INTERVIEW

Portions of this interview are restricted until January 1, 2025, without interviewee's written permission.

LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the University Library of the University of California, Los Angeles. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the University Librarian of the University of California, Los Angeles.

This interview was made possible in part by a grant from the UCLA Institute of American Cultures in conjunction with the UCLA Center for African American Studies.

CONTENTS

Biographical Summary vi

Interview History viii

TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One (September 5, 1992) 1

Family background- -The Carter G. Woodson collection in the Atlanta library--Woodson' s connection to the Riddle family — Father's employment as an architect and specifications writer — The decline of a sense of community among African Americans--Riddle' s religious background-- His murals for a Black Christian Nationalist church in Atlanta- -Racial discrimination in Los Angeles .

TAPE NUMBER: I, Side Two (September 5, 1992) 30

Induction into the United States Air Force- - Discrimination in the military--Reasons African Americans seek employment in the military and the postal service--Riddle' s tour of duty in Japan- - His perception of the Japanese people--His early interest in art--Studies earth science at Los Angeles Community College--Receives a B.A. from California State University, Los Angeles, in education and art- -Reasons Riddle works in several media--His interest in found objects-- Sketching the police station at Pico and Rimpau.

TAPE NUMBER: II, Side One (September 5, 1992) 60

Meets Noah Purifoy and Ruth G. Waddy--Walking railroad tracks to find discarded objects for sculptures--David Smith's influence on Riddle's work- -Acquiring the skill of finding useful material for his artwork--Genesis and evolution of his Employees Only assemblage- -His Malcolm X and Nixon: The Twentieth Anniversary, Busted pieces--Reasons Riddle prefers sculpture to painting--His M.A. thesis on spirit and technology- -Constructing the assemblage Bird and Diz.

Ill

TAPE NUMBER: II, Side Two (September 5, 1992) 90

More on the assemblage Bird and Diz--Riddle' s wife Carmen's family--African American artists in Los Angeles- -Carmen Riddle's mother--Dan Concholar and David Hammons--The nature of black art--Ernest Herbert and BAAism--Alonzo Davis and the Brockman Gallery- -Suzanne Jackson and Gallery 32--The founding of Art-West Associated--Saturday art critiques at the Brockman Gallery--Patronage of African American art in Los Angeles — The racism of United States foreign and domestic policies -

TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (September 5, 1992) 130

The incidence of drug and alcohol use among artists and musicians--Dif ferences between artists in Atlanta and those on the West Coast-- Riddle ' s brief sojourn in Trinidad--Elite control of and profiteering from the Olympic Games- - African American artists' use of color--Riddle' s painting The Olympic Stand--His Clubs Is Trumps-- Images and techniques he uses in his art.

TAPE NUMBER: III, Side Two (September 5, 1992) 161

Riddle's desire to avoid repeating himself artistically — The commitment and dedication required to be an artist--Riddle ' s definition of success .

TAPE NUMBER: IV, Side One (June 26, 1993) 165

Riddle's collaboration with John W. Outterbridge-- More on his murals for a Black Christian Nationalist church in Atlanta--More on his collaboration with Outterbridge- -Anthony Hill-- Competition and cooperation among Riddle ' s artist friends--How the Watts riots united African American artists in Los Angeles--Dif ferences between black and white critics ' approach to African American art--The public's preference for soothing, nonconf rontational art--United States involvement in the drug trade in Central America-- The human costs of drug use in African American communities--Crime as a source of profit in American society.

IV

TAPE hajMBER: IV, Side Two (June 26, 1993) 198

The problem of black-on-black violence--Raising African American consciousness through art-- Impact of the middle passage on Riddle's art--His goals in teaching children--The injustice of United States immigration policies--The importance of persevering in art regardless of the market--The need for African Americans to support African American businesses--White liberals' attitude toward blacks--The impact of racism worldwide.

TAPE NUMBER: V, Side One (June 26, 1993) 227

More on the impact of racism worldwide--Riddle' s appreciation of jazz--The African American art tradition — Riddle's idea for an artwork portraying Huey P. Newton- -America ' s recent decline and its causes--Riddle' s proposed artwork on the drug trade--Ronald W. Reagan--Riddle' s reasons for becoming an artist--Producing art while holding full-time employment.

Index 254

BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

PERSONAL HISTORY:

Bom: March 18, 1933, Los Angeles.

Education: A. A., earth science, Los Angeles City College; B.A., education and art, California State University, Los Angeles; M.A., California State University, Los Angeles.

Military Service: United States Air Force, 1953-57.

Spouse: Carmen Garrott Riddle, married April 24, 1953, six children.

ART COMMISSIONS AND ACTIVITIES:

Sculpture commission. Expelled Because of Color. Georgia State Capitol grounds, 1976.

Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority commission. Tenth Street Midtown Station, four walls sculpture, 1984.

Georgia Council for the Arts commission, ten color lithographs created for the Governor's Art Award Program, 1985.

Artwork used on the set of the television series In the Heat of the Night, (MGM-UA), 1988.

Painting commission, Hartsfield Airport, Georgia, Olympics hundredth anniversary, 1996.

Sculpture commission, Seagram's Company, Spirits at the Gate, 1999.

Consultant, California African American Museum. AWARDS

Two Emmy Awards, for Renaissance in Black: Two Artists' Lives, 1971.

VI

Governor's Award, Visual Artist, State of Georgia, 1981.

Fulton County, Georgia, Visual Artist of the Year Award, 1987.

Vll

INTERVIEW HISTORY

INTERVIEWER:

Karen Anne Mason, B.A., English, Sinunons College; M.A., Art History, UCLA.

TIME AND SETTING OF INTERVIEW:

Place: Riddle's home, Atlanta, Georgia.

Dates, length of sessions: September 5, 1992 (219 minutes); June 26, 1993 (130).

Total number of recorded hours: 5.8 hours.

Persons present during interview: Riddle, Mason, Riddle's wife. Carmen Riddle, intermittently.

CONDUCT OF INTERVIEW:

This interview is one in a series on African American art and artists in Los Angeles. This oral history project gathers and preserves interviews with African American artists who have created significant works and others in the Los Angeles metropolitan area who have worked to expand exhibition opportunities and public support for African American visual culture.

The interview is organized chronologically, beginning with Riddle's childhood in Los Angeles, California and continuing through his activities as an artist in the Los Angeles area. Major topics discussed include Riddle's individual works of art, African American artists in Los Angeles, the effects of racism, and Riddle's philosophy of art.

EDITING:

Steven J. Novak, editor, edited the interview. He checked the verbatim transcript of the interview against the original tape recordings, edited for punctuation, paragraphing, and spelling, and verified proper names. Words and phrases inserted by the editor have been bracketed.

Riddle did not review the transcript but provided selected names when queried. As a consequence, family

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names and some acquaintances remain unverified.

William Van Benschoten, editor, prepared the table of contents, biographical summary, and interview history. Ji Young Kwon, editorial assistant, compiled the index,

SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS:

The original tape recordings of the interview are in the university archives and are available under the regulations governing the use of permanent noncurrent records of the university. Records relating to the interview are located in the office of the UCLA Oral History Program.

IX

TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE SEPTEMBER 5, 1992

MASON: Hello.

So the first question we always ask is, when and where were you born?

RIDDLE: In Los Angeles, California, March 18, 1933. MASON: And who are your parents?

RIDDLE: John Thomas Riddle, Sr., and Helen Louise Wheeler.

MASON: Okay. Do you have any siblings? RIDDLE: Yeah. I have an older sister, Joanne Tyler Jefferson, Judy Keeling, and a brother, Paul Anthony Riddle.

MASON: Okay. Do you know much about your grandparents and your family background? RIDDLE: Yes.

MASON: Could you talk a bit about that?

RIDDLE: Well, let's see. On my mother's side, they lived in Bakersfield, California. That's my earliest recollection. Although my mother was born in Indiana, in Bloomington, we used to spend every summer in Bakersfield. That's a town about 115 miles north of Los Angeles, up Highway 99--used to be 99 in those days. It was always a pleasurable trip, and we would stay for the whole summer.

When I was young, I didn't realize my mother and father were actually getting a summer's vacation from us; we thought we were getting away from them. But I think, now that I have kids, they got the better deal. [laughter]

We always went up there usually for Thanksgiving. And my grandmother, Emma, she could cook. I mean, like everybody says grandmothers could cook. But she actually catered for restaurants and hotels right out of her kitchen. And it was always interesting. I don't want to associate it with food and swimming and just eating grapes and having a good time, but--

I had an Uncle George who was divorced and he had been in World War II and he had turned into an alcoholic. But he was like the classic "black wino" philosopher. I mean, he would sit and drink wine in the backyard and talk until he fell asleep. I slept out under the grape arbor with him in the summer, and I'd always listen to him. He had a lot of wisdom, but he had no respect. And he had a lot of frustration and--

MASON: You mean no respect for himself or other people? RIDDLE: Well, I mean, the fact that he was an alcoholic, he probably didn't have the greatest respect for himself, because that's a form of suicide. But he didn't get respect from the other people in his family because they were embarrassed by the fact that there was an alcoholic

in the family. He was kind of like a laughingstock. But because I was always out there with him at night, and he would tell me different things-- I mean, he had a lot of wisdom. But it's kind of like the street preachers. You hear them out there, and everybody's walking along about their own business. Nobody really pays much attention to what they're saying. And yet some of them could be geniuses if we stopped and listened.

MASON: It seems like every black family has one. And it's usually the case where they were really ambitious but, because of their race or because of something like that, their dreams were kind of thwarted and so they end up being really self -destructive.

RIDDLE: Yeah, that's true. I remember my grandfather [inaudible] Drisdom-- I don't know how many times my grandmother had been married, because my mother was a Wheeler and so was-- My Uncle George was a Wheeler. But my Aunt Suzy, who lives in Los Angeles--she ' s Suzy Johnson now--she was a Pinkney, and her brother Oliver, who is deceased, he was a Pinkney. And Mr. Drisdom, who was my grandfather that I remember-- So at least there's three names there. So she must have been married at least three times.

MASON : Yeah . RIDDLE: But he worked at the railroad. And he had like a

drawer ful of those pocket watches where the lids pop open. He had a whole drawer ful, and I always used to just be amazed to look in that drawer and see twenty or thirty of those really nice watches. I don't know if they all worked or not, but that's one of my memories. Just like I had a memory of how she had this chicken coop, my grandmother, and she raised chicks, and she cut off the chickens' heads when it was time to eat them and wrung their necks, and they would flop around in the yard. And we'd all look like, "Wow!" Chickens without heads trying to get that last flight. You know. So I remember those kinds of things. It was always hot, dry.

Then when I got older, I used to go up there and spend the summer. But she used to say, "Well, you're too old to sit around. You have to go to work." And we'd go work in the fields. The worst job imaginable. And I used to wonder then how did black people work in the fields for nothing, because I was making like five dollars a week and that was nothing. It was hot and long hours and picking onions and being-- Picking onions in 110 degrees and crying because you had to cut the tops off of them. And having so much onion juice and dirt on your hands, you couldn't wipe your eyes. You'd just be out there, "Boo hoo." And then people would take those onions home at night. I didn't want to see an onion I I think the last

time I spent the summer there, I was eighteen going on-- maybe, nineteen. And I came back to L.A. and went to school that fall and met Carmen Garrott, who I married and am still married to. We've been married thirty-nine years, now. But that's another part of the story. MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: Now, on my father's side, they had twelve kids. He's right in the middle. He was about number six. But I think the most interesting thing is, his father was a preacher, tall, about six foot five. I remember he had white hair and he stood as straight as a stick and he was real thin. And his name was C. Morton Riddle. And his wife--what's her name? I can't think of my grandmother's first name; she was just Grandmother Riddle. I know her name but I can't think of it. They had a little bit of everything in their family. They had a communist, I mean, which is really weird. One of my father's brothers was a communist; one was a very successful numbers racketeer and bookmaker. My father-- That was Edgar [Riddle] . Edgar and my father looked just alike. I mean, they looked like Indians. They had very straight hair and high cheekbones and a dark complexion like they were Native American Indians, not people from India. I always remember Edgar was always clean, and he always had on bad suits and tough shoes. But he was a very successful bookmaker and numbers

person in Pasadena.

My father grew up with the Robinson family. They were like Jackie's older brothers and all of that. They all knew each other. And one of my father's brothers, Ralph [Riddle] , was the first black policeman in Pasadena. Let's see: Dwight [Riddle] was the communist. Two of them, two of the daughters, never left home. They stayed with their mother until she died. I think one of them is still alive. Geraldine [Riddle] is still alive, and I think Flo [Riddle] just passed recently. I might be even getting their names mixed up, but they lived in Pasadena on Walnut Street. And we'd go over there a lot, too, because it was a lot closer. It was on the original freeway in L.A. , the Arroyo Seco. That was the freeway into Pasadena. That was the original. That was the only freeway in L.A. at one time when I was a kid. We used to go out there quite a bit. My grandfathers died in their sixties. My father's mother lived to be ninety-three, and ray mother's mother lived to be about eighty-four. So they lived a long time. But I think the most interesting thing was that C. Morton Riddle, my grandfather, was directly related by blood to Carter G. Woodson. And one of the things that was really funny for me was-- I can't think quite now of the name of Carter G. Woodson's book, his quarterly publication. It might have been the Negro

Monthly Digest or something like that. The Negro Quarterly Digest [Journal of Negro History 1 . MASON: Yeah, I know what you're talking about. RIDDLE: It's in the library downtown. There's a gentleman who died and bequeathed this huge collection. He tried to collect every black subject book and every book by a black author and every slave narrative out. So it's called the Williams Collection. It's on the fifth floor of the downtown library.

MASON: So he was going to be the southern Arthur Schomburg--?

RIDDLE: Yeah. In fact, they're rebuilding. We passed the building on my way bringing you here which is going to be the Fulton County research library. That's going to house his collection. They're going to move it out of there because too many people steal the books out of reference, which is a disservice to everybody who is interested to hoard-- But, then, the library is not good, because I read-- Now, this is a divergence right here. It's about the library and Carter G. Woodson. But I read Walter White's The Rope and the Faggot, which was the history of lynchings in the United States. At one time he was the head of the NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], Walter White. He's a white-looking man, also.

MASON: Yeah, blond, blue-eyed.

RIDDLE: Yeah. And so he was able to cross back and forth across the color line and get information, like the Spook Who Sat by the Door [Sam Greenlee] . I checked the book out because I wanted to read it, and it was a signed copy in circulation by Walter White. So I got to read it. I took it back to the library, and they said, "How did that ever get out?" Here it was an autographed copy by the author, you know? The library is not supposed to be circulating those. But anyway, they aren't that tight with control. So it might be better for the Williams Collection to be housed in a place that has better security.

I found out that on my father's side I was able to trace their history, that they came from Virginia, from West Virginia. From Virginia, first. It was around the time of Alex Haley and Roots, and everybody was looking for their genealogy. And I started going, looking up-- I could always look up my family, because all I had to do was look up Carter G. Woodson's name in Carter G. Woodson's books. I mean, I'd look up C. Morton Riddle, and maybe once or twice a year he'd write an article about his family. And then by finding my grandfather, I could get these other names, and I could go back through other volumes and look them up in the table of contents. When I

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had time, I could always go in there and read something about my family tree on that side.

The most interesting thing was that his mother was one of my father's great, or great-great, aunts on that side of the family. So there was this direct relationship between my father and Carter G. Woodson and my grandfather. So what I found out was-- Like, I started reading this, getting back further and further. And I read how in one episode where a friend of my grandfather smuggled them across the Saint Charles River and into West Virginia-- And he founded a church there because he was a minister. Then he left there and he went to Ohio, where my father was born, in Columbus. And then he got a pass to ship out in Los Angeles, which was Pasadena.

My father went to-- He was a very good athlete. He told me this when he was dying. I think it was in '81 when he passed. He had cancer or the thought of cancer-- I never knew whether he really had it or he believed he had it, because, you know-- But anyway, I went out to see him about three weeks before he passed rather than go to a funeral-- So I would sit out there every day, and he would tell me stuff. He told me that because of his Indian looks they had offered him a job to play baseball with the Portland Beavers. That was the Pacific Coast

League baseball team at the time. But he had to say he was Indian and he told them he didn't want to do that. Instead, he went to the Negro baseball league, and he played with the Negro baseball league. He went to Japan two times. It was a touring black baseball team. He used to have pictures in his drawer of him and these players and stuff. My mother used to say he could really play baseball, but he also was-- Between, I guess, 1924, '25, somewhere in there, and '27, he was on USC [University of Southern California] ' s football team. He was the fullback on their football team. MASON: He went on an athletic scholarship? RIDDLE: No. I don't know, because he graduated with a degree in architecture. So I don't know if they were giving up athletic scholarships then like they do now. MASON: Yeah, I was just wondering if he might be able to play sports- -

RIDDLE: I mean, it's big money now, so that's why they do it now. MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: Because if you get to play in one of these bowl games, it's worth one million dollar revenue to your school whether you win or lose. So they're talking about big dough for the athletic program. So now they need blacks to be competitive, which is a whole other issue.

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That's more closely related to my art and my times. MASON: No, I was just wondering if he went there to play football or if he went there to get an architecture degree. If there was even that distinction. RIDDLE: Well, I think, probably in those days the distinctions were blurred. MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: Because I think most people who went to college in those days got a degree. Probably, if I had to bet on it, there's probably a higher percentage of degreed athletes then than there is now. In fact, I think the demands, probably--practice and all that--were probably less then than they are now. I talked to a guy who went to UCLA, a Rhodes Scholar named Hal Griffin. He was there back in the early sixties. He said that it was 50 hours a week for football during football season, and 60 hours a week of academics to be a Rhodes Scholar. When you add it all up, it's 7 times 24, and you've taken 120 off of that. I mean, that's not much time to sleep there or eat or do anything else, because it comes out pretty close to the same amount of time. It's probably about 160 hours. So you've got 40 hours a week to sleep, over a seven day period to sleep and go do everything. So I mean it's like it took up all their time, essentially. MASON: You said your father studied architecture?

11

RIDDLE: Uh-huh. You know, my mother went to USC also.

That's where they met. She was a lawyer. She was the

first black women in the history of UCLA law school to get

a degree. She got her degree in 1927.

MASON: I'm sorry, she went to--?

RIDDLE: She went to ' SC also.

MASON: As an undergraduate?

RIDDLE: Uh-huh.

MASON: And then she went to UCLA law school?

RIDDLE: No, she went to ' SC law school.

MASON: Okay.

RIDDLE: She graduated from 'SC--I meant to say ' SC — with

the highest-- She's the first black woman to ever graduate

from 'SC's law school.

MASON: Okay.

RIDDLE: And another thing that they did-- I mean nobody

knows this, but when my father died, they did a lot of

research on him. My brothers and sisters sent me some

articles that I left at work. I wish I had brought them

with me. But she wrote the words to USC ' s fight song, but

they don't get any credit for it. She don't get no

royalties. But that "Fight on for Old 'SC"-- In this

article they wrote about my mother and my father, and they

said Helen Wheeler wrote the words to USC ' s fight song.

We didn't even know that. And my sister was talking

12

about, "Well, shoot. We ought to be able to sue for some royalties." [laughter] You know.

But anyway, they were at ' SC together. One last distinction about my father was he had the record, athletic record, for the most touchdowns ever scored by a USC player from the time he played until Anthony [T.] Davis scored five touchdowns against Notre Dame in '65. He was there that day, my father, because he went to every ' SC game, and they honored him over the mike that Davis had broken his record. He got to stand up, and all his old ' SC buddies- - Because I used to go to some of those games. And I mean all these old guys are sitting there, "Hey, Fred!" "Hi, Bill 1 " [laughter] So it was kind of funny.

And then generations are so bad. I think Ronald Reagan was governor of California. We went to the Rose Bowl to see 'SC, and Reagan walked out and people booed. And my oldest son, Tony [Anthony Thomas Riddle], he went. It was me, my father, and my oldest son, Tony. We went to the Rose Bowl and we were all in there and Tony starts booing. And my father was like-- He was with all his cronies, and he was like, "Shut up! Goddammit, Johnny! Can't you make him--? That's disgraceful!" It was like the generation gap. So then they stood up for the national anthem, right? So my son didn't stand up. Boy, that just knocked my father out. "Goddammit, Johnny! Make him stand

13

up! All my friends are here!" He's talking out the

corner of his mouth. "Can't you make him stand up? Jesus

Christ!" Tony was just sitting there. Since then, I

mean, me and Tony have laughed about that, and Tony kind

of feels bad because he shouldn't have dumped his protest

over on his grandfather. You know, but--

MASON: Because he had served in the war.

RIDDLE: Yeah, and Tony had a-- It was in the year of the

big naturals, Angela [Y. ] Davis and all that. "Power to

the people. "

MASON: So it wasn't necessarily--?

RIDDLE: My father didn't really-- See, he would have

joined the army in the First World War, but he was too

young. And I don't remember now if he didn't get to go

in, or he didn't go overseas. But he was either on the--

A little more than Bill [William J.] Clinton. You know,

but he's either on the periphery of the army or in, but I

don't recall that now. I just remember that he's very

patriotic and that he worked at Douglas Aircraft [Company]

during the Second World War as a structural architect on

Douglas's war planes and--

MASON: Yeah. Because I was going to ask you if he ever

got a chance to work as an architect.

RIDDLE: Oh, yeah. Before the war he worked with Paul

Williams. He was with Paul Williams, who is a noted Los

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Angeles architect. He was with Paul Williams's firm, and then during the war, he went to work at Douglas. And then, after the war, he went back with Paul for a while as a specifications writer. MASON: I'm not sure what that is.

RIDDLE: That's a person who writes what-- The specs are all the detailed things of what are the specif ications- If you're going to put these windows in this house, what size, what kind of hardware, what kind of windows. The specifics. What kind of nails. Because that's all laid out somewhere in the architectural plan for a structure. What kind of doorknobs. So if it's with plumbing, if you write plumbing specs, what kind of pipe, what size, where the bends occur, what kind of hardware you would use there. So that's, technically, the specifications. What kind of toilets. That's if you're plumbing. ^^Jhat kind of faucets. Anything related to plumbing, if you're writing plumbing specs.

So the rest of his life-- He always worked as an architect or a spec writer. So at the end of his life, he worked for a guy who used to work for him named Kerry Jenkins. Kerry Jenkins formed a successful architectural firm in Beverly Hills out on Wilshire Boulevard, and my father worked for him until he died. MASON: Can you think of any specific projects that your

15

father had been involved with?

RIDDLE: Well, one of the things that he used to always take pride in was up along those streets like Rossmore [Avenue] , some of those real nice streets that you can take as corridors to Hollywood. Like above Olympic [Boulevard], and you go up Rossmore. I used to know all of those streets. There's a lot of English Tudor homes and a lot of really nice homes there. Well, in that year, Paul built a lot of those homes. I mean, it was his design and stuff. My father used to go by and say, "We did that house." And then we'd go a little further and he'd say, "We did this one." And we'd go down another street and he'd say, "I remember doing this one." Between Vine Street and Wilshire, I'd say, they did a lot of houses in there that are still there. Some of the Spanish houses. They both basically did residential architecture. At one time, I guess, Paul was probably the most advanced black architect, maybe [not] in the world, but definitely in the United States, at one time back in those days, in the thirties, up until the war. And the weirdest thing is, my wife's family and my father's and my mother and them, they all knew the same people, Paul Williams and Delia Williams and all the different people. It's really weird.

In fact, it's so weird that when I was born--

16

There's a lady named Alice Garrott who was Carmen's grandmother. I was born two years before Carmen, but my mother and father moved into Alice Garrott ' s apartment. So the first two years I was born, I lived in that apartment of Carmen's, my wife's, grandmother. But I didn't meet her until I was fourteen. We have this picture at Ferndale, that park up there. It's part of Griffith Park, really, but it's before you get to Griffith. They have like a little creek and some crayfish and these beautiful ferns. And you walk down these paths. And people used to go there for brunches, and they had where you could cook out and have a nice lunch and stuff, you know. But there's a picture-- somebody took a picture. It has all the teenagers in junior high. And I'm on this end of the picture and, about eight or ten kids later. Carmen's on the other end, at the same picnic, in the same picture, and we don't even know each other. So we always laugh about that. MASON: Did you know all of the same people because of your class backgrounds and educational backgrounds and you just moved in certain circles?

RIDDLE: I guess it was like-- See, I guess in those days, in the black social circle, it wasn't so much education as it was, like you said, it was like families. Like, you know, there were postal people, all kinds of —

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[tape recorder off] Black community, the social community, it was like-- If you could mark the decline of it, it's probably the beginning of the so-called "year of integration." Because before, when it was like segregation, blacks had to depend much more on themselves and their organizations and their structures than they did after they say, "Okay, everybody's equal." Although that's always been a lie. The blacks abandoned their own entrepreneurship. One of the main reasons in every black city there was like a main black street was because the black businesses were on that street. That's what made it the main black street.

MASON: And in L.A., it was Central Avenue. RIDDLE: Yeah, right. And it was like the shoe stores. In fact, one of my best friends in high school, his father owned the Dunlap Shoe Store on Vernon [Avenue] and Jefferson [Boulevard] . I mean, Vernon and Central [Avenue] , right on the corner. You know, everybody went and got their shoes at Dunlap' s. I mean, everybody used to crack up because everybody had on a pair of Lorenzo ' s father's shoes at one time, because that was a very successful-- He had good quality shoes, but you could get them from a black person. You could try them on. Some of those stores, they probably wouldn't let you try them

on.

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He's just a good example that black businesses changed. I was in a barbershop this morning, and I was thinking, "Boy, if I ever had a barbershop, my barbershop would be called the 'Philosophical Barbershop.'" Because when I was a kid, that was a seat of knowledge and information and discussion, like in Eddie Murphy's Coming to America. I remember those kind of barbershops where you had to remember when you came into the barbershop so nobody could get their hair cut ahead of you. But then there was always conversation about politics and about the neighborhood and philosophy. And there were like almanacs, "Man, look in the almanac 1" "Willy's right. Nineteen twenty-four . " "Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling in March such-and-such, 1938." "Yeah, Fred, you right." But rather than just argue, they always referred to the almanac. And they always had an almanac. It was funny, because even as a kid, these men-- You couldn't jump in. But it was funny, all these different characters in the barbershop. Some coming to get their hair cut, some just coming to hang out, some just popping by and leaving. But there was always like this turnover in the barbershop.

But I was in the barbershop this morning and the barbers didn't come in the door and say, "Hey, hello." One barber out of four came in and said hello to the

19

people who were sitting in there. There's no interchange between the barbers; there's no interchange between the customers. It was like the epitome of American evolution to individualism, where everybody's afraid of everybody. Nobody talks to anybody. See, but that's transferred over to black people, too. And yet, we're basically a very verbal race of people, a very communal race of people at one time. We all came out of communal structures in Africa that had communal societies where everybody was related in activity to everybody else. You just didn't have a whole bunch of people who were in the particular communal structure who had no role, nothing to do, no purpose, just sitting around. You didn't have that. We didn't have that until we got to America, and it got abstract. I mean, there wasn't anybody just, "Man, Where's the rest of the tribe?" "Oh man, they just sitting down on some logs down in the woods just poking sticks in the ground and feeling sorry for themselves." I mean, all that stuff came-- It was a made-in-America label.

MASON: What was the religious background in your family? You have spoken of a couple of preachers. Or your parents, what were they?

RIDDLE: Well, I don't know. I can remember my mother going to the--I still remember what it meant--the AME,

20

the African Methodist Episcopal church. And when I was in Bakersfield, my grandmother's church was right-- I mean, she owned this piece of land. She lived on one corner, and there was a house full of these people known as the Tomlins. I mean, they were really poor. It must have been about thirty of them, it seemed like, and they just wore the house to the point where the house just fell down. So then there was this big vacant space. Then right across from that was this church on the corner, and that's my grandmother's church. So all she had to do was walk across the yard to get to church. And she would make you go to church every Sunday. All summer, you'd go to Sunday school. Then Sunday school was over and you came home and you had to hang around for about an hour and eat something and then she dragged you back to church. You sat in there for church, and those pews would be hard and just be flattening out your behind. You'd be fidgeting and the old people fanning. And you couldn't play cowboys on Sunday or play cards or go to the movies. You couldn't do nothing on Sunday. And then across the street from my grandmother was a Holiness church.

I hope that God forgives me, and the Holiness people, but my sister Joanne and I-- See, we used to like to always sleep outdoors. And when we slept on the front

21

porch, that was a favorite place to sleep. But the Holiness church went on all night. And they had like sextets and quintets and drums and, I mean, trumpets, just like a jazz group. They'd be playing those, and you could just hear those people clapping and stomping and these horns blaring. So we would always go over there. But when you went in the church, we'd sit near the back doors, because they always had the doors open because it was always hot. And the people would be jumping and shouting and be right with this music. And they would actually get to the place where they would start-- Well, we didn't know they were speaking in tongues, but they would transcend their existence and come over to the Lord. And we used to think that was the funniest thing you could see. And we would sit there, and we'd be trying to-- [stifles laughter] . And then when we just couldn't hold our laughter anymore, we'd just bust out laughing and run out the door. And nobody ever stopped us or told us that we couldn't do that, so that's a part of my church experience. We used to take all our kids to church. We used to take them to an Episcopalian church over on the east side, because we liked Father Moore. He always had these big things of incense and they'd smoke up the whole church, and we liked that. Then when we got older, we started taking our kids to a more modern church

22

called the Church of Christian Fellowship. His theology

was like current theology, how it related to people with

families bringing up kids in the 1950s and sixties.

MASON: So it was interdenominational?

RIDDLE: Uh-huh.

^4AS0N: Non-denominational?

RIDDLE: Uh-huh, uh-huh. So we went to that until we

moved. And then when we moved here I joined--all of us

joined for a minute--the Reverend Albert Cleage ' s Black

[Christian] Nationalist Church, the Shrine of the Black

Madonna. That's the first time I ever heard that God was

black and Jesus was black and it scared the hell out of

me at first, but then it made sense. I mean, because all

the happenings in the Christian era, the time of Jesus'

happening, there was black people. And then when they

were telling you about he had skin of copper and hair of

lamb's wool, that don't sound like no white folks. So

then they started pointing out all the other implications

and things about Abraham and different things where you

could see quite easily where it could be black. And so--

MASON: One of his concubines was African.

RIDDLE: Uh-huh, but--

MASON: Did you do a--? I think somebody told me you did

a commission for that church.

RIDDLE: Yeah. I painted the murals in the church.

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MASON: Where is the church located?

RIDDLE: The murals are there, but they dropped the

ceiling. They used to have one of those vaulted ceilings

like in the old theaters, like the old shows down in Los

Angeles, like the Pantages [Theater] . And then they had

the ornate theaters.

MASON: It would be like the Mayan [Theater] .

RIDDLE: Yeah, yeah. And this was an ornate theater here.

I think originally at one time it was called the Gordon

[Theater] back when that area-- That area was the first

suburban area of Atlanta, a white bedroom community area.

And they had this theater called the Gordon that had--

When the Black Christian Nationalists first took over the

church, it had these huge plaster reliefs of these Aryan

kind of semi -nude men and women, but they were white. But

they were more Aryan than Greek. They were like in the

old Greek statue kind of thing.

MASON: Yeah. It sounds like something they'd do in the

thirties.

RIDDLE: Yeah, but you could tell that they looked more

like the Hitler supermen and women. They definitely had

that European character. They were definitely pure white.

They were all-- You know, that was the decor. So they

took some chisels and just knocked all that out and

cleaned it all up and replastered the walls. So I painted

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four sixteen-by- twenty foot murals in there. And then

when I got through, my kids started dropping out of

church. They wanted my wife to be in charge of the

nursery, and here she had just had six kids, so she didn't

want to take care of no more kids in life. So she quit,

then I quit.

^4AS0N: What were the murals called and what did they look

like? They're still there, you said.

RIDDLE: No, they're covered up.

MASON: They're covered up.

RIDDLE: They're not painted over, but--

MASON: They dropped the ceiling down.

RIDDLE: They dropped the ceiling down. The place was so

tall, they could drop the ceiling down and still have

probably about a sixteen foot ceiling.

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: And it would still cover the bottom of the

murals.

MASON: I see. So they're there and they're not really

being taken care of?

RIDDLE: Who knows. But I didn't paint them to-- See,

this friend of mine, he painted his on plywood and put the

plywood up on the wall. He painted the pieces behind the

altar. And I painted mine right on the plaster because I

thought it was more--

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MASON : Permanent ?

RIDDLE: No. When the building goes, the art goes. I don't believe in saving art. You know, because I just thought when the building is gone--they tear down the building or it falls down--the art is gone, too. But that seemed more in the realm of the artist to make it permanent, because nothing is permanent anyway.

Then that was basically church. Except we used to dress up, clean up, wash up all our kids and put them in line and march them off to church every Sunday. I still have pictures of that in memory and in photo albums. But here as older people, we-- I haven't been to church in so long, I'd hate to confess how long ago it was. MASON: So, let's see. How was your family involved in, say, the civil rights movement? RIDDLE: Which one?

MASON: Well, say, in the fifties in Los Angeles around, I don't know, the Rumford Fair Housing Act and those kinds of issues -

RIDDLE: Oh, I was in between, because I had joined the air force in '53 and I got out in ' 57 . I was married and I had the beginnings of a family and I didn't really participate in anything. I mean, there was a lot of things that you saw, like--

You know, it really came down to what Malcolm [X]

26

said, "If you're south of the Canadian border, you're in the South." It didn't matter whether you lived on the West Coast, the East Coast, Michigan or Mississippi. I mean, again, to quote Malcolm, because he summed it up so well, "You catch hell in America because you're black, not because you're a Christian or a Republican or a Democrat or any of those other hyphenateds . " I mean, black people just have had a harder time.

Los Angeles has a slicker way of segregation and prejudicial treatment than, say, Louisiana. Because in Louisiana, they just put up a sign, "No niggers allowed." But maybe in California they didn't have a sign, but they had the same mental attitude. I used to go look for jobs, and one time I didn't know I was being discriminated against. But now, in hindsight, I look back on some of those visual remembrances, and I see all the white boys going to get jobs at Southern Bell [telephone company] in T-shirts with cigarettes rolled up under their sleeve and I was dressed in a fine suit from Meyer and Frank of Portland, Oregon, and I couldn't get-- They took my application and said, "Well, we'll let you know." I can still see those white boys who took the test with me walking on back in the back, going to phase two, and I was going to phase out. So, I mean, you know, it's-- That part's the same. It's the same then as it is now as it

27

was epitomized by Rodney King and the insurrection. There's nothing changed. I mean, we left-- The most brutal police that there ever were to me anywhere I've ever been were right there in Los Angeles. MASON: I agree.

RIDDLE: I mean, they were gestapo, you know? I mean, they would mess with you just to be messing with you. And traffic court--just like people came to say later--was Just us. Traffic court was always blacks and Mexicans. It's just a system that we paid to keep people employed. The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department], they were ruthless. They were ruthless before the Watts riots and ruthless after it and ruthless through Dead Wyler right up to Rodney King. I mean, they still sic dogs on black folks. I mean, that's cold-blooded. And with impunity. I hated the LAPD. I thought they were the worst people. And at one time, just before I left, they were averaging killing eighteen people a year under questionable circumstances, which is one and a half people a month. I can remember one time they almost killed me for nothing. I was running to teach night school at L.A. [Los Angeles] High [School], because I used to teach night school over there. And I was late, because my friend and I, we stopped and drank a pitcher of beer, which I shouldn't have done. But anyway, I did. I had three

28

hours to kill between the end of school and night school. So I parked my car and I slid across the seat, and I jumped out on the passenger's side. I was going to run across the athletic field because my ceramic room was right at the gate coming off the track, and I was late. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw this car park behind me. I thought it was somebody else coming to go to night school. And I saw those doors open. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw one man reaching for something. And I stopped. It was two plain-clothes police that said I had run a boulevard stop down on-- I forget the name of that street down on the other side of L.A. High, now. And they thought I had seen them and I was trying to escape and it was a stolen car. They shot at me. If I hadn't seen them and just kept running, they'd have shot me. And then they would have said, "Oh, we're sorry. We killed this man by mistake." And then when they found out I was a teacher and that I hadn't stolen the car, they said, "Oh, well, you'd better get on to class." But they felt guilty because they was going to kill me. So, I mean, L.A. 's like that. It was then; it is now.

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TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO SEPTEMBER 5, 1992

RIDDLE: That's the environment, you know. But I'm

getting up, on some levels, to the verge of art. So maybe

I should back off from that.

MASON: Okay. So you went to school before you joined the

air force, then? A little bit?

RIDDLE: Not really.

MASON: Okay.

RIDDLE: I mean, I just went to play bid whist and hang

out.

MASON : Okay .

RIDDLE: But then when I went in the service, I came out--

You could get the GI Bill if you got good grades.

MASON: Okay. Where were you stationed?

RIDDLE: We were inducted in Los Angeles. And we got on

this bus going up to San Francisco to a place called

Walnut Creek, which had this Parks Air Force Base, which

is where they had basic training. And, as black people

tend to gravitate towards each other, sit together and

talk-- Everybody had their orders in some brown envelopes

just like these. So everybody pulled out their-- The bus

hadn't been on the road ten minutes, and everybody is

pulling out their orders looking at their name. And you

30

see "Riddle, John Thomas, Jr." Then it has the AFC- -that was your air force identity. It's almost like your Social Security card. It said, "AF 1947 0629." The guy said, "You'll never forget that number." And you don't. I mean, like, because you say it so much--to get paid, to do this, to get tested on- -that you always remembered your number. Your rank, your number, and all that.

Well, anyway, after every black person there was this N in parenthesis. Even though I looked at mine individually, I think everybody's got one. I see it maybe ten or twelve times. But I'm new to all these people and I don't realize that all the N's is next to black folk. So it doesn't take too much of the stretch of the imagination to hopefully think that means Negro. So I said, "What's this? Eugene Simpson, N. What's yours?" "N. Say, man, that must mean 'nigger.'" We were fifty miles out of L.A. now.

Now, we're figuring they do that to all the blacks so that, putting the best light on the picture, they don't want to get too many blacks by natural selection process into the same group. I mean, you might have a group of forty men in the training squad or something like that. Maybe sixty-four, because I think it was sixteen to each group and there were four groups. And maybe they might have by just natural selection put nine blacks over here

31

and only two over here. But this way they can say, "Dut, dut, dut, dut, black, dut, dut, dut, dut, black, dut, dut, dut, dut, black." And they can spread the blacks out evenly, thereby having less of a problem by having too many blacks together. Because they might get together and figure out some other racist stuff that was going on, right? So, I mean, this is like fifty miles out of L.A. And everybody already knows this much about it and we ain't been in the air force but an hour.

So then you find out when you get to technical school-- I got out of basic. When you get out of basic, they give you a stripe if you haven't screwed up in basic. So you become an airman third class. Yeah. So you get out of basic and they send you somewhere. Now, it's usually to a training school. Now, I was willing to go to Biloxi, Mississippi to go to radio school because I wanted to be on flying status. That's why I went into the air force anyway, because I wanted to fly all over the world in airplanes and stuff. So I look up, and they're sending me to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Now, Cheyenne, Wyoming is a cowboy hick town. They had no blacks living in Cheyenne. No black men, no black women, no black families at that time. This was 1953. I got up to Cheyenne. That's where all of the menial service jobs are: supply school. That's where the school

32

was. All the menial stuff listed, all the no-rank. Now, the rank was down in Texas at aircraft and engines, air speed indicators. Everything, the technical, mechanical thing to make these planes fly, because that's what the air force is in business for. That's where the white boys went. I didn't know that until after I went through supply school, got my supply number. There was like a six digit number that said what your job was, and mine was in aircraft petroleum and lubricants. POL [petroleum, oil, and lubricants], or something like that. Anyway, that's [who] put the oil and the gas in the planes.

When I got to Japan, which was my next station, I'm out on the flight line, and all I see are white boys. You know, but I mean we'll talk to them, because I'm putting gas in the planes and stuff. And we're talking, "Where you from?" "I'm from Ohio, Mississippi," anyplace. You know, "Anyplace USA." "How long have you been in the service?" "Oh, I been in here eighteen months." You know, just basic talk. This guy's got three, four stripes on his arm. I only got the same two that I got when I got out of Cheyenne, Wyoming. I never got more than two the whole time I was in the air force. I used to look at these white guys--they'd be in-- But see, they want to keep you if you're highly skilled, because they spend a lot of money to train you. So they entice you with rank.

33

So all the rank is going to the guys who know how to fix the planes and do these technical things. But the people who do food service, make sure that the sheets and stuff get cleaned and all this menial stuff, they ain't going to get no rank. So they're giving all the rank to the white boys. All through the service I saw that.

And I'll end on my service by this: At one time, through the service, I was a veterans' counselor, and these black guys would come. This was the year when the navy and the air force and everybody was trying to purge as many blacks out of the service as they could. So they would offer these black guys general discharge, anything but an honorable. And they had these codes on your discharge forms that-- I mean, nobody knows that they're there, unless you have the discharge code book, which I had as a veterans' counselor. I had access to it at one time. They had the worst descriptions.

I mean, it would say K-3 in some little box. And all you see is you got a general discharge and you run out and say, "Man, look. I did my time. So give me a job?" See, because they would always say, "Have you been in the service?" And you'd say, "No." "Well, we can't hire and train you and we know Uncle Sam is going to draft you. You go take care of your service obligation and come back, and we'll give you a job!" That used to be the line

34

before you went in the service. That's what they would all say to you. These guys would come back, and up on here it would say K-3. And you'd look up in the book. And K-3 would be "homosexual tendencies." And this guy is walking around, and he may be homosexual, he may not be. But he's walking not knowing it says that. "Thief." I mean, it wouldn't be quite that bad, but it would be "distrustful, dishonest." And these employers could look and "Sorry, Mr. Jones. We don't have any work today." See now, they are shooting people down like that, and these people are running around thinking they got a good discharge.

Now, the service was doing that right up until the time where they said, "Let's have an all-volunteer army." I don't know if you remember that. Because it was a semi- peacetime. The white boys could make more money not messing with the service. The draft wasn't drafting people. So let's have an all-volunteer army. So blacks started gravitating towards that, because there's two things about the service: If you stay and you do your job, you're going to get promoted. And rank rules. A sergeant can tell a corporal what to do, a corporal can tell a private, a lieutenant can tell a sergeant, the captain-- I mean, it's there. It's the rank. And if you go against the rank, you get busted. You get put out of

35

the service for not cooperating. So here's a chance for some blacks to have a skill, have a guaranteed job--which is another hard thing for black folk- -and have authority over other people based on rank.

So blacks gravitated to the service, the same way they did to the post office. Back in my mother's time, she worked in the post office. The joke was, "Where can you find more Ph.D.'s than anywhere else in black America? In the post office." Because even though you might be a Ph.D., you couldn't get no job, so you had to work in a post office. You were a clerk. They weren't usually carriers, but they were usually the clerks, the people who cased up the mail and got the mail ready for the carriers to take out. And it was the same there, except it was reverse. Blacks had seniority. And then, all of a sudden, the next thing you heard coming out of the Pentagon, there's too many black people in the army, too many in the air force, too many in the marines. We've got to abolish this volunteer service, because blacks was overusing it. It scared the hell out of them white people, just like you said about the art.

Anytime the white people see the black people making progress, it scares the hell out of them. It shouldn't, but it does. If you complete your education, and you start making headway, it's going to be, "Oh, we've got too

36

many tenured blacks on our faculty. Isn't that--" You scare white people, because you beat the system. You're not in the prison system, you're not on drugs, you're not a prostitute, you're not on welfare. You can beat their system. That makes you dangerous. They've got to figure out how to pick you off some kind of way. "Well, how'd this Negro get through? Where did we go wrong?" [laughter] "Put out a study." [laughter] Those kinds of things. I mean, but that's America.

MASON: Yeah. Well, how long did you stay in Japan? RIDDLE: Two years. Twenty- two months, actually. MASON: Did you like it there? Or what did you get out of being in Japan, if anything?

RIDDLE: Well, I think the most memorable was the two seventeen-day ocean voyages to Japan. I look back and that was magnificent, being in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the middle of the night with the moon shining on the water. Everything was silent, even on a night when there was no moon and it was pitch black and all you could hear was the sound of the water against the ship and the ocean in general. I mean, you couldn't see nothing. That's spectacular: seeing the ocean-- We went through a storm, and seeing the ocean in a storm stage with huge waves and gray and misty and you couldn't see that far ahead of the ship-- The immensity of the ocean. It's a

37

good thing to put you in size and world relationship to your surroundings, to be just a little thing. I think about it now, and I think about-- That's one of my favorite things, is the middle passage. I think about how they used to talk about scurvy and beriberi, lack of fresh water and this and that. And then you think about those black people in the ship. But that was very memorable. The thing that I found out, too, it was the first time I found out how much black people think alike, although we don't admit it and we don't cooperate with each other. I remember walking down in Japan in a place called Fukuoka City--that's where I was stationed, down at Itazuki Air Force Base on the island of Kiushu, down in southern Japan. I hadn't been there maybe a month, and I passed this black soldier walking down one of these dark streets. And he said, "Hey, brother." I said, "Uh-huh, what's happening man?" We did the usual black greetings, you know. "Where do all the black folk hang out?" I always remember that. You know, black folk always want to find out when they 're in a strange place where do the other black people hang out. And then I noticed how many black people have mustaches and beards. And I used to wonder-- All black men have mustaches. You couldn't have a beard in the service, but they all had mustaches. "Why do blacks all have mustaches?" So I cut mine off because

38

I didn't want to participate in some blackness that I didn't know. I would just be carried along with the mass of black folk. Because I like to know why I do what I do, right?

I remember that. Then I remember that after you get over your initial culture shock about being in a strange place, you find out that the Japanese people didn't like us at all.

MASON: They don't like anybody who's not Japanese. RIDDLE: Yeah, that's true. They're like the French on that level. But the white people that I was with, they thought the Japanese loved them. MASON: They thought what?

RIDDLE: I mean, the white guys that were over there in Japan, a lot of them thought the Japanese people loved them. And yet, to me maybe because I have that-- See, we all have that antenna as black people. Anything racial and these little antenna come, and they be searching for the direction where the racism is coming from, you know. Overt, covert, still it would set off them antennas. I just noticed that they didn't like us. But I did notice that if you took the time to be involved in their culture, to learn their language to the degree that you were trying to deal with Japanese, to that degree they would accept you up to the point of what we call now in current jargon

39

the "glass ceiling." There was a certain barrier that you'd never cross over if you weren't Japanese. But they didn't see that. I used to always see this-- I still, when I think about Japan, I see this huge twenty- foot-high chain-link fence around the unapproachable parts of the Japanese culture that the Americans were not going to be involved in. So I remember that.

MASON: Were you interested at all in the art and architecture that was there? No?

RIDDLE: Uh-uh. [negative] The service is the dawn of my interest in art, though. When I left Japan, I went to Portland, Oregon, and I was a clerk. I sat at this desk right in front of this clock--although the clock was probably fifty, sixty feet away--but it was up on this wall. It was a big, old clock. And you could sit there and watch how much time you had left in the service. Tick tock, tick tock. And I mean, just sitting there I learned a lot of things. I learned that I smoked cigarettes every forty-five minutes. Because I was sitting next to this guy named Mudget, a white guy. He smoked every fifteen. Every fifteen minutes I could hear him rustling in his pocket, getting out his Lucky Strikes. And I was always looking at the clock, and I began to see that there was a correlation between 12:00, 12:15, 12:30, 12:45, and 1:00 and Mudget digging in his pockets. Then I started

40

noticing that if he was on a time frame, I was too. And I noticed mine was every forty- five minutes I lit a cigarette. So then I got to the point where I wouldn't smoke as long as I could last. And I got so I could get to 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00. Then I got to the place where I didn't have to smoke no more. So, I mean, I liked it for that.

There was a guy sitting over on this side. He was a staff sergeant named Tony Hoffus and he had been in the air force long enough to have been a prisoner of war in the Second World War. This was like '56 so, you know, he was a career soldier. He had a tattoo, one of those kind of prison camp tattoos that the Germans put on, like the Jews always show their number? See, they would actually take and tattoo with India ink a permanent number on you. He had one of those numbers from when he was in a prisoner of war camp. He had gotten captured by the Germans. But he was Dutch, so they didn't kill him like they might have a Jewish person. But anyway, he loved Rembrandt, and he was always looking at Rembrandt. He said, "John, John, look at this." And I'd look at Rembrandt. Then I started liking Rembrandt.

MASON: Was he a practicing artist?

RIDDLE: No, he was a connoisseur. He liked music and art. He was like the classic music appreciation person.

41

He felt that music, art was important in his life. He used to have my wife and I over to dinner, he and his wife, Katie. And they had like a Rembrandt --you know, it was a reproduction, obviously--of the girl with the broom in the half door. It shows this girl, she's leaning, looking out the half door, and there's a broom with her. And I liked that picture so much.

I mean, I learned from him a lot about art, but I also learned that in this modern age of black printmakers, for instance, and photo-reproduced artworks that everybody has-- That they're popular. Like Varnette. I mean, I know Varnette Honeywood, because she was a student when I was teaching at L.A. High. I never had her in a class, but I knew her then, and I still do. But see, black people will pay a lot of money for a reproduction of a print, not even a handmade one by the artist actually doing the work, but a machine-made copy in additions--like Ernie Barnes--of thirty thousand, right? And I learned from Tony that if you could go buy a reproduction of a Rembrandt for two dollars, that reproductions only have value aesthetically. They didn't have value of appreciation as art. They didn't have value of appreciation as an investment or any of that-- just appreciation of the work itself. And it's hanging in your house because you like it.

So, I mean, I learned a lot of things, but I didn't

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know that I was going to like art. Because I got out of the service and you could go to school on the GI Bill. I wanted to be a geologist, because I liked earth science. So I studied that through almost two years at LACC [Los Angeles City College] . The place where I used to go play bid whist, now, I was back at the same place studying. I got my first degree I ever got in any kind of educational institute. I didn't get a high school diploma; I didn't get a junior high diploma. I always hung with the bad kids, and I always managed to get kicked out of the school by graduation time. So the first diploma I ever got was associate of arts from L.A. City College over there on Vermont. And that was right at the time it was turning into-- The Cal[ifornia] State Pomona campus was on L.A. City College's campus. Then they moved out there, out San Bernardino freeway to where they are now. It's now Cal State University, L.A. MASON : Okay .

RIDDLE: But at that time, it was at City College campus. Then it moved out and started the campus that ' s out there now. A lot of my friends transferred, because they said they wanted to go to a state college. I stayed because it was cheaper. You could go to City College for six dollars a semester plus books. So you couldn't beat that. MASON : No .

43

RIDDLE: Plus, I mean, it was right in town, whereas you had to go way out there to the San Bernardino freeway to get to-- It seemed like a long way, but after I started going there, it wasn't that long a way anyway.

But I got an associate of arts, and it was the first time I ever got to wear one of those caps and gowns. That kind of was very influential, because when I got to the junior and senior year of college, I made the dean's honor list. So I had gone off from being what my mother and father wanted me to be like when I was in public school to finally what I should have been. But it took the maturity of the service. I don't know. I come back and all --not all, but a lot--of my friends were dead, a lot of them in jail, a lot of them whose lives was all screwed up. So it was good for me to get out of L.A.

MASON: You can get that way from playing bid whist all the time?

RIDDLE: Well, that was-- Well, yeah. See, we used to ditch school and play bid whist and go over to this friend of mine, where all the kids hung out, named Earl Tatum. Instead of going to high school, we would go hang out at Earl's house and play bid whist and get in trouble. But you know, the weird thing is that there was no incentive even then for emphasis on black males to become all they could be. The emphasis then, as it is now, is a kind of

44

self -destructive thing.

I remember I did a piece of art once called The Pre- programmed, and it was based on the fact that black youth were pre-programmed to do what they're doing now. Except the drive-by shootings and the murder thing wasn't in it when I grew up, but everything else was. It was just negative behaviour. Negative outlook. Develop your exterior. Have a front. Be cool. Be hip. Even if you don't have nothing, look hip. Look like you had everything. Walk like you had everything. Have a pimpstep in your walk. Talk plenty of stuff, and let all of that exterior-- Stand on the corner with the other men and hold your private parts to show you was a man. All those other black games that we still play that spin off into basketball and other things. You know? But black people have always-- Black men have always emphasized the exterior, the illusion that "Yeah, man, I've got it all." They ain't got nothing. And everybody else know you don't have nothing, but nobody said, "Man, you ain't got nothing." They said, "You bad, man." They know you ain't got nothing. Talking about you bad because you got on some $200 tennis shoes. So it was fronting then, and it's fronting now.

MASON: What medium was that piece that you were talking about?

45

RIDDLE: It was a painting. But I always have done-- Not always. I kind of wanted to just be an abstract painter. But then I remember when I read Seize the Time: [The Story of the Black Panther Party] in ' 68 and Bobby Seale said in there-- He's a got a line in there where he says, "Art ain't shit." And when I read that I was just completing nine years of night school, because I always went to school at night because I always had a family. It took me nine years from the time I went to City College to the time I graduated from Cal State with a B.A. in education. It took me nine years of night school to pick up four years' worth of credentials. But, I mean, I never quit. I used to think, if you quit-- Wherever you stop on any odyssey in your life, if you quit, that's where you'll be. Now, you may have to cut back from running to crawling, but you've got to keep making a little forward progress. You've got to do that. Because once you stop, it's harder to start it all up again. MASON: So what degree were you going for at night? RIDDLE: Well, I switched from geology and earth science to art. And then I was in art and English. I said I'd better get a job teaching school, because I had a family. And then I switched from geology to art with an art minor and an English major. And then art, I started liking it more. So art took over as a major, English took the

46

minor. By the time I graduated, I had a B.A. in education with an emphasis on being an art teacher. MASON: Did you have to pick a medium? Painting or sculpture?

RIDDLE: Actually, I started off painting, but I liked-- I found an interesting thing in school, because you had to take all the different classes. I can remember when I took ceramics just as an elective. And I remember one day sitting at the potter's wheel, and I was making-- Because they won't let you on the potter's wheel at first. They make you do hand construction, learn the theory and techniques and all of that, some glazes. The thing I remember was making a piece of pottery, and I lost it on the wheel. I took it off and I set it over there, and I started on another. I was centering and I happened to look over at this piece, and I realized that it was a three-dimensional blob. It created its own shadows, it occupied its own space. You didn't have to draw it because it was already there. You didn't have to try to render shadows and values and everything because they were already there. You didn't have to try to figure out where the opening in the piece would be, what they call the negative space, because it was already there.

I became intrigued with that. I said, "Well, I like sculpture better." Because even though I might not be

47

able to draw that exact edge that I want, I could take that clay and I could push it and bend it until I saw the formal relationship between what I was trying to do and what came in the next part. I could see that continuity because it was there. If you turned it real slow and it made sense over here, but you turned it over here and there was no relationship, then you had to effect some kind of change between this side and that side. And then you start thinking analytically, like, "What would an ant see if he crawled along the table and he looked up?" Because you've got all these views. ^4AS0N: Yeah.

RIDDLE: But you didn't have to draw them. Like, you try to sit up and draw six views of the same vase from one position. So you're only seeing one reality, the other five are your imagination. But if you put it on a turntable and you turn it slowly, you can use that energy that you're trying to imagine; you can put that direct energy into the transformation of concept to reality. So I liked that, you know. And so I began to think-- MASON: So you stopped painting, and then you went into ceramics? RIDDLE: Well-- MASON: Well-- RIDDLE: Sort of.

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MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: Yeah, in a way. And then a weird thing happened one time, because I like printmaking, too. Etching. But, I mean, you had to work like hell for an etching. You had to work the plates and you had to ink them and you had to soak the paper and put it in a blotter so it would be just right when you put it through the press. You had to wipe the plates where the highlights were supposed to be and all the ink was in the right place. You'd run it through the press and then you ' d take the paper and tape it up to the wall so the paper wouldn't get crinkled when it dried. Because it was really 100 percent rag--good paper. All of that for one print, and then you might not like it, you know. And I mean it was drudgery. But I mean, it was discipline. But it was a form, and I liked it.

Then one day I went to a faculty art show where all the faculty people had the chance to put their art up for the students to see. I think this guy's name was Mr. Fifer or something like that. Something with an F. Mr. Fiedler. And Mr. Fiedler, what had happened at that time, he was my printing teacher, but he had paintings. I always was familiar with his print work. And to see his paintings, I mean, it was like he had been completely unchained from the technical drudgery process to the direct process. If you want red, you stick your brush in

49

the red, hit the canvas. I mean, he had so much freedom and just energy and movement. And I was looking at his art. And I came back and said, "Mr. Fiedler, I noticed, when you don't make prints, you're so free." He said, "Oh, I feel so free. I may never go back to printmaking. " Because he had just discovered this.

So then I found out that art is boring. So I found out that if you switched from-- You did sculpture till you got tired of it, then you switched to painting, and then you switched to-- At that particular time, I could do painting, sculpture, and ceramics. They were all a different medium. But by switching and always seeing what I saw as the relationship, anyway, between the three, I always had a fresh media to work with. That way I didn't get bored and stressed out by the fact that I'm tired of this, you see. So that way I felt like I could keep a continual kind of growth going, and that's how I evolved into always switching media. So like, right now, I'm painting, but I'm thinking I've got to move to assemblage, because assemblage is the beginning of the manipulation of physical objects, even if they're painted. Still, you've got to start using nail and glue and other things besides brushes.

MASON: What was the first assemblage that you can remember?

50

RIDDLE: The first ones I really did were-- I mean, I

guess I had done some others. Well, I had been welding,

too. I used to love to weld found objects. I think all

my materials I wanted to come out of things that people

had discarded that I could reclaim-- Burnish up, polish

up. You always had to cut a piece or a part off. I had

this rule: you couldn't take the found object in its

exact context and stick it in some art. You had to cut a

piece off; you had to do something to it so it wasn't the

same as what you found. But it was still either

symbolically recognizable as being what it was or fit some

other purpose in the context of parts.

MASON: I think you have one picture of one of the earlier

weldings.

RIDDLE: Oh, yeah. Those are funny pieces.

MASON: They're what pieces?

RIDDLE: That's when I used to sweep stuff out of the

middle of the street .

MASON: Okay. This is from Black Artists on Art and it's

called Street Trial and it's dated 1968 and it's welded

steel.

RIDDLE: We were talking about how cold-blooded the police

are. And that was like the police arrested you, tried

you, and convicted you right in the street with their

guns. That's why that man had that big hole in him. But

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like all of these pieces-- I used to get up in the morning, like on Sunday morning, and take a cardboard box, a dustpan, and a broom, and drive and park.

I don't know how long you've been in Los Angeles, but at one time in Los Angeles they used to have these signs that the traffic department would put out and then pick them up every day. And they would say "No left turn." And they would put them right in the middle of the intersection. And they would be facing so that-- You know, what directions the people could-- If they didn't want anybody to turn left, they'd have two facing this way and two facing this way. So everybody saw "No left turn" during certain hours. Then they would come along with this truck, and a guy would pick them up and put them back in the truck. The truck would never stop rolling. He would just go real slow. He'd take them up and stash them somewhere till the next day. But now, in the center of the intersections, even after they stopped using that method of traffic control in Los Angeles, all the debris from the tires is pushed to the middle. It's still there.

If you drive through the middle of the intersection in the left-hand lane, [if] you get right in the middle, you'll see "od" from "Ford" where somebody hit somebody else and part of their grille parts had fallen off. Now, this was before everything was plastic, too. See, most of

52

the stuff in the street was metal. Now it's plastic and rubber, so it was harder to deal with. But there were always screws and nuts and bolts and bottle caps and all kinds of weird things that you would never expect. So I would go out and harvest the intersections . I'd sweep up five or six intersections, come home, dump the stuff out on a big table and sort the dirt. Because you'd get all the rocks and glass and everything, too. And if I found an interesting piece, I'd set that aside.

So I would have me this whole collection of just what I called fragments that I was going to turn into ghetto flowers. I was just going to take some brass rod and weld them, fuse them together by dripping. I used to have all kinds of methods. One time I took a hubcap. It didn't melt. I don't know what it was made of, but brass wouldn't stick to it. I could just put ghetto parts in there from the intersections, and they'd all kind of gravitate to the concave surface. And I could just use that and drop molten brass rod in there, and that would stick all these different parts together. Then I would have something that was shaped like the inside of the hubcap. But it was all these different fragments. So I put a stem on it, and it was a ghetto flower.

But then when I got more interested in the prison and in the police and all that, I started making people. But

53

these people actually evolved from ceramics when I used to do ceramics. This is probably a machine cut out that was kind of bent. And this is a glob of something that was in an intersection. I used to just go around just looking.

One of the most interesting-- I don't know if you know Bill [William E.] Pajaud? MASON: Yeah, we interviewed him.

RIDDLE: Me and Pajaud-- He was at Atlanta Life. He was a curator for their art collection. He was an artist, but he had quit doing art though. He said, "Man, art's too hard. I quit. I ain't doing it." So I used to go get him on Saturday and drag him. "Come on, Pajaud. We're going to do art." And he would go sketch, and I would go sketch. But we sketched totally different things. But every Saturday morning I'd go get Pajaud and I'd sweep up some intersections and go to the junkyard and we'd hang out for maybe three or four hours .

I talked to Pajaud yesterday. He's in Las Vegas, now. I found a picture of his father [William E. Pajaud, Sr.]. His father was a musician in the Eureka Brass Band. He used to always do those Eureka Brass Bands. And I was in the library researching--that ' s one of the things I freak out on. I'd rather do research than the art. So I was in there researching one day, and I saw his father's picture in an old book of New Orleans jazz musicians. And

54

I said, "This has got to be Pajaud's dad," because his name was spelled the same, and I remembered Pajaud said his father played trombone. He was in the hall of fame in this book. So I xeroxed that page, and I want to send it to Pajaud. So I got his address yesterday.

But Pajaud and I would go out. I got to the place where I used to call it--it's a word that starts with an "R. " I can't even think of it now. But it was like going out and finding junk. One of my games I used to love to play was-- Over on the east side there were still some railroad tracks, and some of these railroad tracks led to places where they ground up cars, smashed them up, ground them up into little bits--little twisted, gnarled, rusty bits of metal . They would ship them in these boxcars over to Long Beach. They had this big conveyor- - because I followed the trail one day, and they had this big conveyor. All the metal scrap would go up this conveyor and you'd see it dropping off, making noise by falling in the hull of this ship. This was like in the real early seventies, late sixties, between '65 and '70. All these ships had Japanese names: the Nara Maru, the Suzi Moru. the Ekudu Moru. All these ground-up car parts were going to Japan to come back as Toyotas, Datsuns, all these cars. But at the time, the Japanese hadn't come back. See, the Japanese just made compact cars originally.

55

MASON : Yeah .

RIDDLE: Little gas mileage cars.

MASON: Yeah, because we have better steel than they do. RIDDLE: Yeah. And they ground up our cars, took the ground-up parts to Japan, created these little tinny, thirty-mile-a-gallon cars, when we were getting sixteen and twelve, called them compact cars. It killed us. You could drive those from suburbia to Los Angeles. It saves huge amounts on your gas bills, because at the same time our cars were evolving to the big fins, and they were getting more and more gaudy. The gaudier they were-- The big headlights and ornaments. And here the Japanese were making these little compacts.

I did a piece of art about this. This is a divergence. But I remember one time there was a police station that's gone now. It was up on Pico just by Rimpau. In fact, that's the street I almost got shot on, was Rimpau . MASON: Oh, yeah.

RIDDLE: It was right next to a Sears store up there on Pico. It sat right out on the sidewalk. It was a classic police station. It had the steps going up and glass balls on the little lampposts and you could look in there and see what was happening. So I used to like to go sketch in front of the police station. But it was in

56

the days of the Black Panthers and all that, and they thought that I was some kind of revolutionary drawing diagrams. They used to send people out to ask me what the hell I was doing and all this. And I used to like it after I got used to it. Because at first, they'd always send out some little rookie, and you could tell because his hat was all down on his ears. "What are you doing, fella?" You'd tell him and he'd be confused and he'd go back and they would send a more senior person out. And you could always get them to talk about the Jews . I was teaching in Beverly Hills, so it must have been '70, about then. You start talking about the Jews, and those old racist crackers would forget what you were there for. They'd start talking about the Jews, too. Then you'd let them run off about the Jews and anti-Semitism for four or five minutes. They'd say, "Well, see you later, buddy." And they ' d go on back and leave you alone . MASON: You were a friend after- -

RIDDLE: Uh-huh. That's how I knew how to get rid of them.

So anyway, I was doing two kinds of sketches. I just wanted to sit there and look at the police department. Now, this was the Vietnam era, too, and the police they were recruiting were Vietnam veterans. They still were wearing their crew cuts and they had the-- I

57

remember one night I'll never forget. It was changing shifts and these cops came, they were going into the police station. There was about six of them, and they were kind of playing because it wasn't their routine. They got in line and one guy said, "Hut, two--" and they went marching in just like they were in the Marine Corps. But the other thing I saw was they all came in Datsuns and Toyotas. So I put that in my picture. Because, see, all the police at that time-- Not all, because-- Just like they were in Simi Valley, you know, where they tried Rodney King. They were all in Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Huntington Beach, all down the coast, which meant they had to come a hell of a long way to get to this police station in the black neighborhood up on Pico, to do their eight hours of occupation duty. And they drove these little compact cars, because they had a sixty-, seventy-mile round trip. See, I was looking at all that. That ' s how I remember when the Datsuns and the Toyotas were just little teeny cars. That's how I see that relationship through art. That's why, to me, I can see a lot of social relationships, which goes back to the beginning of this long discourse on Bobby Seale saying, "Art ain't shit. " MASON: Okay. You know, I should stop you here, because

58

the tape is going to run out and I don't want you to get started and then we have to stop. RIDDLE: Okay.

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TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE SEPTEMBER 5, 1992

MASON: You were around the police station and Bobby Seale and--

RIDDLE: You know, I was right at a place where I met my first black artist--who I consider my first black artist: Noah Purifoy. I knew Ruth [G.] Waddy. I was out of school then, but I was at a crossroads when I read what Bobby Seale said. I didn't really want to do social commentary as much as I wanted to just do great big abstract, expressionistic pieces that let you have the freedom to splash color and do all those kinds of things. MASON: Is that how you had been painting in school? RIDDLE: No, I had never even done it. I had never considered it. I mean, it was just-- It was like I still got the urge for it. Maybe I'll never do it; maybe I'll never get the courage to just be abstract, because it takes a different courage to stand on a reputation of color and form and that kind of expression devoid of classic subject matter. You can get a reputation off classic subject matter. You can draw like Charles [E.] White: over and over are different images, but it still becomes Charles White's style.

So anyway, that's another thing. It was right before

60

the Watt riots, and I met Ruth Waddy.

MASON: How did you meet her?

RIDDLE: I don't remember. It's like when you meet people

that you always have known and liked. Sometimes it's real

hard to remember because maybe the meeting was so

inauspicious that you just don't remember, you know. But

you remember some of the things that came after.

I remember Ruth didn't live too far from me up ■ Western [Avenue] . I lived at Western and Twenty- seventh [Street] , and she lived just above Venice [Boulevard] on Western. So we were neighbors of sorts. I remember one time Ruth called one Saturday. It was a cloudy Saturday, kind of like this, except it was a little more threatening looking. And she said, "John, I want you to meet somebody. Could you come by and pick me up?" I came by and picked her up. She took me over to Noah Purifoy's house .

He lived on La Brea [Avenue] , somewhere between Adams [Boulevard] and Washington [Boulevard] , or Washington and Venice. Somewhere right in that part of it. We went over there, and here was this man living in this little house in the back. He had made everything in the house: the couches, the rugs, the beds, the paneling, the door. It was the most artistic thing. Everything had the stamp of Noah Purifoy: collector of odds, ends, scraps, discarded

61

stuff turned into really elegant things. So he talked and

we talked and we got to be friends. It was probably '64,

because when the riot came I was into collecting this

junk.

MASON: That was Noah Purifoy's influence, then?

RIDDLE: Yeah. Well, I mean, he was an assemblage person.

I liked assemblage, too, but I was getting ready to like

it more than I had ever liked it. Because when the riots

came, all these burned-out buildings were there. There

were charred remains and this and that. What was really

weird was I met some black artists poking through the

ruins. And I was in there with my little box, poking

through the ruins just like they did. That cash register

was like-- I found a burned-out cash register.

MASON: This is called The Ghetto Merchant.

RIDDLE: The idea was to take a cash register and

dismantle it with screwdrivers and stuff till I got to the

part where the part I liked was left. And I just put some

legs on it and called it The Ghetto Merchant.

MASON: Where did you get the--? Is all of this part of

the cash register that you dismantled? Or--?

RIDDLE: No, it's junk. Now, see those others? Like that

thing up at the top?

MASON: Uh-huh.

RIDDLE: I was telling you about when I went off on a

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divergence about the Toyotas and the Datsuns and the little bent-up metal-- I used to love to walk up the railroad tracks, and I used to play this game. I'd take a box--I had this box that had a handle on it so I could carry it--and I'd walk as far as I could walk up the railroad tracks, picking up only those things that caught my eye. Because you saw a whole myriad of things, but you got to the point where your eye would see the thing you wanted out of forty things. Because you do it every day. You don't know what you're going to use it for in art, but you're walking and you pick up that. You could only walk as far as you knew you could carry that box back when it was too full and too heavy to carry. Now, if it took you longer to find interesting things, you walked further. Just grabbing up everything you saw, you couldn't walk as far because the box got heavy, and then you'd have to walk back to your car and throw the box in the car. So every day on the weekend I would do that, you know.

I used to go down alleys, industrial alleys, anywhere where I thought I might see something. Then I got to a place where, if my instincts told me to turn here, I'd go. I'd find things like the legs on that Street Trial. I found this place that did castings. And here, that man's legs were dripping from the foundries. I guess they dumped the drippings, and somebody picked them up.

63

I used to love to go to places that did fabricating. They had these big metal things [and] the trash truck would come and pick up the whole thing. I don't know if you've ever seen one. They have these long things-- They're made so that a truck can come and scoop them up, and it turns into part of the truck. They just haul the whole thing away. But people who do metal fabricating, they throw [out] all of their punch parts, bent parts, things like this thing. They throw out things like that that they've actually fabricated something out of. But I like them because the cut outs were clean, made by great big break machines where it would just punch a hole right through a piece of metal a quarter inch thick. So you get a nice clean hole rather than if you had to try to cut it out yourself with a torch. It would be ragged, and you'd have to file it. So you got minimalism with minimal effort. So I liked them for that. MASON: Where did the legs come from?

RIDDLE: Oh, with some other junk I have. I used to have a junk pile in my backyard. In fact, when I left L.A., it took my pickup truck about five, six trips to the junkyard to resell this metal. And I was getting like eighty, ninety dollars a trip. ^4AS0N : Wow ! RIDDLE: So I ' d take my truck-- They'd always weigh your

64

truck with the junk on it. You unload the junk, then you

put your truck back on the scale. They weigh it again,

and they owe you the difference.

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: So I was like making these trips and my truck was

barely touching the ground in the front, it was so loaded

down. But I had like these piles of resource material

that-- Sometimes I would remember right away, "I've got

some things that would go perfect here, " and I could pull

them right out. And I had some stuff that if I just went

through the junk I'd find, "Ooh, this is nice." You know,

so.

MASON: So if you left it outside it must have gotten

rained on, as much as it rains in L.A.

RIDDLE: Yeah.

MASON: And probably the texture changed sometimes.

RIDDLE: Well, I used to--

MASON: Because I noticed these are all polished up.

RIDDLE: I used to try to shine the things up.

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: That was part of it, too. But I tried to get rid

of the rust. And then I would put polyurethane or

something on. Wirebrush the stuff. I even got to the

place where I found a guy who sandblasted, and I had him

sandblast some things.

65

MASON: So that was an important part of the whole aesthetic of the piece? The shine and the--? RIDDLE: Yeah. And the natural patina of the metal. So you've got a contrast between highly polished-- Because at the same time I was starting to see-- I saw David Smith, the minimalist sculptor. I didn't like his work, and then I saw a piece in front of a museum one night. It was in 1972, it was an art and technology show, and they had a David Smith out front. I was just going into the museum, and I saw the way he burnished those surfaces with his grinder. It was like it was five, six surfaces. And I'd always tried to get that effect of multi-levels of transparency as a painter, and here this guy was doing it on the surface of this metal. So I just freaked out. Then I started really looking at his stuff more closely. Then I started seeing the fact that one of the things about minimalism was that you could create the illusion of mass with his forms. They looked heavy and strong, but yet they were hollow. You had the illusion of mass without the weight of mass. So I started liking that kind of idea, too. He was a major influence on me. I mean, he's somebody I still like. But-- I don't know where I am anymore .

MASON: I guess the other guestion I had was, did they teach welded sculpture at school? Or was that something

66

that you had learned--?

RIDDLE: Not to me. No, because like, see, I went to

night school. They never had sculpture classes at night.

When I went back for my master's, I would have gotten a

degree in sculpture, except they didn't teach it except in

the daytime. So I've never had a class in sculpture.

MASON: It was just interesting. I was reading about--

When you read things about Mel[vin E.] Edwards and Ed

Love, you know, they always say that they were attracted

to welded sculpture. And I think Ed Love said something

about seeing a piece of P'lla Mills in the Golden State

[Mutual Life Insurance Company] collection.

RIDDLE: The same thing I saw.

MASON: Huh?

RIDDLE: Same one. You've got a picture here. I know

it's the same one. It's the same one as--

MASON: Oh, yeah. The Star of Bethlehem. This was a page

that talks about the--

RIDDLE: That was the P'lla Mills in the-- That was it,

boy!

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: We used to love that. That was when I started

liking sculpture, was in those days. This is the kind of

metal that I used to go get with [William E.] Pajaud.

MASON: This is Control Force.

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RIDDLE: I remember the day I found that. There was a

great big gear ring in the junkyard, and I was with Pajaud

that day. I used to like things like alarm bells and--

That was some kind of bird. I don't know what kind of

bird that was, but it definitely is a bird with wings.

And what is it called?

MASON: It's called Control Force. There's no date on

it.

RIDDLE: No, I would have never called it that. I don't

know where that came from.

MASON: Oh, okay. Well, this is from the International

Review fof African American Art] .

RIDDLE: People put titles on your stuff.

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: If I did that, it was probably "Bird of Prey" or

something, because I think that was an eagle, and it was

like a bird of prey. But he had some kind of owl kind of

bird, because they're birds of prey. But it was an

Oalarmist kind of thing. Yeah, like how they always catch

those-- Like they always have those birds of prey with

snakes and things and lizards that they've caught when

they fly back up on their perch. So I was probably

dealing with that, because I see on there the fact that I

used alarm bells.

I used to love to find electric boxes, you know, that

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had fuses and things that were-- So that you could see that it was some kind of an electronically related thing. Schematic designs and things like that, because they always reminded me of technology.

MASON: How was technology important? Because I noticed most of the-- When you're talking about a lot of the junk for-- You know, getting junk out of intersections, you talked a lot about finding car parts and things like that. You know, why were car parts more attractive--? Well, you talked about that whole Japan thing.

RIDDLE: Well, because they were really good suppliers. I mean, all the junk in the intersection is car related. Because the cars had wrecks, the car tires swept the junk into the middle. You know, that was just how it accumulated, by cars going this way and this way and this way and this way. [tape recorder off] MASON: I was just asking about your interest in car parts, your attraction to car parts and technology. RIDDLE: Yeah, I was just saying that in the intersections, they were like the producers of the debris. But my real interest was in junkyards and scrap piles, because I was interested in welding. Now, Noah, his real interest was in--just to use him as an example-- He did his gathering from secondhand stores. Now, he would go into a secondhand store--I used to go with him sometimes--

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he would go in there and he'd say, "How much for this pair of shoes?" And they'd say, "Those are two dollars, sir." And he'd say, "What if I buy all fifty pairs?" And she'd say, "I'll sell that to you for twenty-five dollars." He'd give her twenty- five dollars, pull out two big gunnysacks, throw all the shoes in the gunnysack, take them home and do a piece about shoes. He'd have all these shoes lined up, [and] that would be his piece of art. The same way that Wayne Thiebaud would paint slices of pie in the bakery shop showcase. So now that's where he got his, but I loved the metal yard.

I like the secondhand, like the flea market in Pasadena. You go out there, and these people are trying to sell memorabilia and things. But there's so much art stuff out there. If you go out there just thinking you're going to make some art, and you're not trying to get some collectibles, but something that strikes you-- And it's that same energy that ' s in the walking down the railroad tracks, playing "I'm only going to pick up that which catches my eye." And anything that doesn't really catch my eye, I'm not even going to give it a second thought. You get that same mentality, and you get accustomed. Because the human mind, once it adapts to a certain procedure, it can become-- The more it does it, the more sophisticated and the more it separates itself from other

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human beings who don't do that. And then they say, "Well, that's easy." It may be easy what they see, and it may be easy the way they see you do it. But they may not know that you put ten years of practice and development into cultivating the ability to do this thing. Which isn't speaking about me: that's about anything that you do repetitiously and long enough. You become proficient at it.

So like my favorite was to just do-- Like David Hammons and another friend of mine, we developed this theory that if you see something you want out by the curb for the trashman, if you stop and you get it, then it's yours. But if you drive off and you say, "Gosh, I should have gotten that. Dog, I should have gotten that!" and you go back, it's never there. It's never there. The only time it can still be there is if you get down to the corner and turn around and go right back. But if you go on about where you were going when you saw it and then come back later, forget it. I mean I've got a whole collection of mental imagery of things that I should have gotten that I didn't. Michael Jackson one time. A life- size Michael Jackson sticking out of somebody's trash with the glove and one of those Michael Jackson poses and his Geri-curled hair and all that. And I said, "Oh, man." I drove on down the street. And all the way driving down I

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said, "Dog, I could make a bad piece of art out of that.

I don't know what piece it is yet, but I know I could use

it." By the time I went back and got it, all that trash

was still there, but Michael Jackson was gone. Somebody

else said, "Ooh, Michael Jackson, " and put it in their

record room .

MASON: So when you see--?

RIDDLE: Anything that really catches your eye.

MASON: So you don't know what piece you're going to make.

Or is the piece suggested by the thing that you find? Or

how does that process work?

RIDDLE: Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of times it's like-- My

titles always precede my art. I always have a name of a

piece before the piece ever comes . I may change the name

of the piece after I get into it and make it a little more

explanatory, but I always have a--

I remember one time I found a box, and next to it there was an old wooden door that somebody put out. It said "employees only" on it. You know, they always have that. Somebody had stenciled it on there. And I saved that part that said "employees only." I had that thing in my basement here in this house for a long time. And then one day I was thinking about the United States and Central and Latin America and South America, too, because I thought about Salvador Allende and [Augusto] Pinochet in

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Chile and how [Henry] Kissinger, [Richard M. ] Nixon, etc., all got rid of Salvador Allende in '72 because Chile was the leading producer of copper. This was before fiber optics and the microchips were really booming and everything. They were still using copper wire. And AT&T [American Telephone and Telegraph Company] and ITT [International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation], if you think about them, they were all copper wire. I mean, that's what their foundation was, copper wire. They didn't want what they considered to be a Marxist--even though he was elected in a democratic election--to be in charge of copper any more than they wanted Saddam Hussein to be in charge of the oil. Even though the British partition-- Iraq had made Kuwait at the turn of the century so that they could steal that oil out of there which wasn't theirs in the first place. But it's always the same thing .

So they got rid of Allende. And then I started thinking about [how] they got rid of Omar Torrijos in Panama. [James E.] Carter had just gotten with Torrijos and made a contract to cede the Panama Canal back to the Panamanian people, and all these Reagan kind of people going out of their damn minds, and right after that, now, Torrijos was in a helicopter crash. All of a sudden, who took his place? Manuel Noriega, you know, who we loved

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right up until the time that we needed a scapegoat. So then we dumped him off because he wouldn't help us with the Contra training so that we could get rid of Daniel Ortega. So I saw all of this piece as evolving out of this "employees only." Who did they kill? They killed Maurice Bishop, they killed Torrijos, and they killed Allende, even though they had surrogates to do it. Still, they got rid of him. Then the only three that were still bothering them, really, that they didn't get to kill--although they intended to kill Noriega, it just happened that they didn't get him- -Noriega, [Fidel] Castro, and Ortega.

I loved to look through American Rifle Association and hunting magazines, because they always show "Get this bullet!" And they show these bullets that can kill with the greatest killing power that you can get on a rifle. They show these mushroom bullet heads that are all flattened out and say, "Compare this with this. This is what you want." I always cut those pictures out. And so I collaged bullets that are spent and used in these ads. And I put one next to Allende, Bishop, and Omar Torrijos. But, yet, I have nice clean unused bullets next to Noriega, Castro, and Ortega, because they haven't knocked them off yet. I like to make those kinds of plays on things.

But when I got that door that said "employees only, "

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I had no idea that the employees would be Pinochet-- I had this really nice picture of Pinochet and the generals all standing at attention. I collaged that in a very painterly way over the part of the door that says "employees only. " And then I show, on the outside edge, a separation of about six inches of the non-employees to be assassinated, because they don't fit in with what we want South America, Central America to be.

MASON: That's in the William Grant Still [Community Arts Cemter] show that's up now. RIDDLE: Yeah. That's--

MASON: What date was that? That was in '70 something. RIDDLE: My piece has evolved. I mean, I've been working on it ever since I thought of it. It probably took me about two years, but I didn't paint on it every day. I might see an article in the newspaper or something and say, "Ooh, this fits." And then I'd go back and work on it. But I like to let them evolve because-- I mean, the reason is I had no idea that that would become what it was.

MASON: Well, I was thinking that since you've done so many things, even though it's really artificial to divide everything up, maybe we could just talk about-- Since we're talking about sculpture, maybe we could just talk about sculpture and then assemblage and then ceramics and

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then painting, even though it's kind of all mixed up

together.

RIDDLE: Well, I don't mind. It would probably help you.

MASON: Yeah, it would help me. [laughter] That's what

I'm saying, it would actually help me.

RIDDLE: You set it up like you want it. I don't have any

problem with that.

MASON: Okay. Because otherwise I'll just forget or--

Because we were talking about assemblage. We haven't

talked about your Made in Mississippi series and how that

came about yet. I wanted to ask you--

RIDDLE: That was a funny thing.

MASON: What was one of the first pieces of assemblage

that you saw? Was it the Watts Towers? Or was it

another--? I guess I'm wondering what gave you the

impetus--

RIDDLE: I was still painting when I saw Watts Towers.

MASON: So I was just wondering, what was the impetus for

feeling that junk could be art?

RIDDLE: Well, back to-- Like I said, I saw how Noah did

it, and then I saw-- I was attracted to it because, again,

it came out of that prior ceramic experience of the

manipulation of real things rather than trying to draw the

real thing. Because I know in drawing, if it's not quite

right, you've got to erase it. But if it's not quite

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right in metal, say it's stiff metal, you can heat it and bend it until it's right. The Tightness of it comes from as you bend it; you see maybe it crosses over another form that's either in front of it or behind it. And all of a sudden you see a nice connection between the two. So that in the--we're talking about assemblage now--additive form of sculpture rather than the-- Well, it could be subtractive, too. But a good example was I did a piece of Malcolm X.

It was supposed to be a man who had been down. So I let myself lay on the floor and I studied the way that you would normally get up if you were flat on your back, but now you're coming up. You would have one elbow up, pushing yourself up; your legs would be a certain way. So once I got that, I made a wax model of Malcolm. I was almost through with it, and I went to the flea market. My son [Anthony Thomas Riddle] was going to look for comics and I was looking around. He was looking for comics; I'm looking for what I want to look for. And I saw a blowtorch, an old-fashioned painter's blowtorch that they used to use to heat up paint. That was before they had chemical paint remover. They would heat paint with this blowtorch, and then they would take a putty knife when the paint started blistering, but before it could catch on fire, and they would scrape it off. That was one of the

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ways-- They probably still do multilayer, but now they've got chemicals [where] it would come right off easier.

It's a piece of art itself, the blowtorch. But I noticed when I put it under Malcolm-- See, Malcolm's hand had been-- I didn't want to do a real hand with fingers. So, I mean, I made it like a hand-- I made this part of the hand, actually. I had Malcolm's hand coming up, and it was turned this way. And I noticed, one day, I had this blowtorch and I just stuck it up under there to say, "Suppose Malcolm was coming up off the ground with a blowtorch in his hand. That would make an extra serious piece. I mean, Malcolm's been down, but know he's coming up to put some heat." So I really liked that idea. But, now, the unexpected came when I got behind the hand and the knob on the blowtorch is like--it's got little notches in it all the way around so the guy could turn up the fuel and increase the flame. But it's just like in the Adinkra symbol book that shows a symbol that has eight notches in it, and it's the star which is the son of God. You know? So I saw that. But also, with his hand going like that, it's like the star and crescent. And all of a sudden, I saw all of these Muslim connotations just because, now, there's a blowtorch in Malcolm's hand, where that was never the intention when I made Malcolm's hand.

So I see a lot of times in the development of a

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piece, if you let the piece develop for a while, and then when you don't see [anything] [John] Coltrane like about it-- Or you don't see spontaneity, where you're contriving parts instead of the parts just spontaneously-- Like when Coltrane and them would be playing some jazz, you know. All of this skill is there, but the show, like an art show, is when they're playing extemporaneously, and an accumulation of all their skill, all their ideas, their playing right at the ultimate minute of how they're thinking-- If it wasn't for a recording, a lot of times they might not be able to replay that. They might be able to transcribe it and replay it here. But if they don't have that, the only evolution on the piece is coming out as they play the changes and the things that they achieve. They say, "Yeah, I've been trying to get to that."

The same thing happens in sculpture. I mean, it happens in painting, too. But that's why I liked-- In sculpture, you're dealing with real objects, and you have the ability, in this case, to mix recognizable, discarded junk with lines and images that you've created. So that pretty soon this three-dimensional collage of parts or assemblage becomes like [Louise] Nevelson's pieces: if you take it out of context, it's a whole bunch of banisters and wood turnings and different cut outs and things. But if you take it all and put it all in a form

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and paint it all one color, then it become one thing with a whole bunch of very interesting subparts contained within the boundary of this one thing. So I like sculpture from that standpoint. And I love things in the streets still that get run over and smashed, because they've acquired their shape as art parts accidentally. Nobody sat there with a hammer.

There was a piece in the Grant Still show that I still-- This is a still assemblage. I wanted to tear open some bags, because I found all of these wonderful bags with Statues of Liberty printed on them. I wanted to tear one open to show Nixon had been busted. But [when] I tried to tear a bag, I was caught up in this "How do you tear it?" because it's a conceived thing, the pressure. And I didn't want that. So one day I took it to work and I got a plastic bag, filled it up with water, put the plastic bag inside the paper bag, went up on the upper level above where we parked this morning, and threw it off the upper level. And it hit the ground. The bag tore and splattered in every which direction. And I ran downstairs, and it was the most amazing thing. The part of the bag that had the Statue of Liberty didn't get one tear on it. The rest of the bag just was torn to shreds. And I took it like I used to see my mother do with Ivory Snow. I used to have Ivory flakes or something you used

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to put on fine sweaters, like wool sweaters and stuff, because you had to wash them by hand. Then you would put newspaper out and you'd block the sweaters out. You laid them out so that they were just like they were. And then, that way, when they dry, they wouldn't be all distorted. MASON: Yeah, they would keep their shape. RIDDLE: Yeah. So I did that paper bag the same way. I ran home from work with the paper bag. It was still wet. I went down to the basement and laid it out, made sure it was just like it tore. And then I was able to create the piece Nixon: the 20th Anniversary, Busted. Because he got busted just like that paper bag, just like brothers get busted. But, I mean, it was like that accidental thing. I like that in sculpture.

The sculpture and assemblage parts that are in my head now, I would like to create certain parts out of wax and cast them. My plan is to cast them in my backyard, somewhere along the creek so that I have some nice setting, and I'll be out there. You know. But the idea of making parts or casting real things, which is easy to do in casting-- But being able to create the exact parts you want and mix them with things that you find and weld them together to create the object that you're trying to express yourself with-- See, I mean, to me, that's like the ultimate: to be able to deliberately create

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something, but combine it with something that you had no hand in developing its shape. You only have a hand in making it part of this other thing, to become a whole something .

That's why I like sculpture, though; it's because — The other thing I think about sculpture is that the first time that you make something that you can stand on, that you can actually make something and then stand on it, that's amazing, because it changes your whole view. Because if you're five feet tall, everything you see is basically from the five-foot level. But if you make something that makes you five foot seven, you actually have a different perspective on everything, because you're seeing it from a different viewpoint. I used to always think [about] that, plus something that could fall on you and break your arm or kill you- -that you made. MASON: Like the Richard Serra Tilted Arc kind of thing. RIDDLE: Yeah. Well, I mean, definitely if one of his pieces fell on you, you'd die. Or you'd be hurt when one of those big old poles flying over hit you. ^4AS0N: Why was that danger an important element in your work? Or potential for danger?

RIDDLE: Not so much that, but the fact that you made something that now you have to wear a hard hat to be around. I thought that was nice. I mean, just that idea

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that something that you made was big enough to kill you. You know, it's just like when Christo did those pieces, and the umbrella flew off. And I mean, it's sad the woman got killed, but--you know--it's the size of the umbrellas and the ability of those umbrellas to pick up currents of wind. Obviously, he probably didn't anticipate that one would ever kill anybody. But just that idea that the pieces assume a kind of life of their own physically, aside from what they look like. But that's what sculpture has that painting doesn't have, because painting is all-- Painting is more like an illusion. You can create depth, you can create photo- realism, you can create excitement with color, but it's much more of an abstract thing. And it's all what you can do through your hand, through this inanimate object, the brush, back to the bristles which you are actually putting paint on. Sculpture is just you get more dirty, it's more physical work, and that's nice to be--the physical thing. You're wrestling with things. You've got to see "Can I make something big enough to--? I've got to get a chain hoist in my studio so I can go-- Because it's too heavy to hold in place."

I remember one thing about sculpture, too, that-- this is in the era of table model sculpture, which could hardly fall on you or anything--you needed three hands.

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You needed a hand to hold the torch, a hand to hold the rod, and a hand to hold the object that was being welded. I hated clamp-on tools; they were like illegal. So I discovered balance for myself. I mean, I went through a year where I used to think, "If the piece I want to attach can stay right where I want it, because it's balanced--" A little part is over here, and a little more is over here. If it can stay-- Sometimes I'd spend a half hour, and just when I got ready to weld, a piece would fall off. If I could let it stay in place long enough for me to weld, then I felt like, physically, because of balance, that's where the piece went. So that became like a law for a long time, that I would practice that.

MASON: Well, in the earlier-- This one doesn't have a pedestal. Street Trial. But others do have a pedestal for some-- Was that a decision: pedestal or not pedestal? RIDDLE: Only in that it was easier to make things stand up.

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: Whereas, like, I could see now, where the three points on the plane would be-- [tape recorder off]

I'd like to get to the place where I did architectural sculpture. I gave up printmaking because it's not healthy. Because you use too much petroleum salts, so I didn't want to-- Now, that kind of way isn't

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dangerous as much as it could be foolhardy. If you know the chemicals are carcinogenic or that they can be liver damaging and different things, you know, nerve damaging- - I mean, it says that on all the warning labels. Why keep doing it? So I mean, if I die, I don't want to die because the chemicals killed me. If I had to go art-wise, I'd definitely want it to be an accident. "Yeah, he died while he was doing his art." You know, I'd rather have that than, "Yeah, he knew he was going to die, but he kept doing it anyway." That seems somewhat stupid. But anyway, I switched to painting. MASON: Well, I wanted to-- RIDDLE: I'm sorry.

MASON: Before we talk about that, I wanted to talk about how the Made in Mississippi came about. RIDDLE: Yeah. That's what I'm trying to get to now. MASON: Oh, okay.

RIDDLE: But that's cool. That was the reason I said I switched to painting. But, as I'm painting right now, I'm beginning to put physical forms in the painting. Like I'm actually beginning to attach things, because that's a prelude to sculpture, which those boxes were. I had said earlier I wanted to get a sculptural degree, but I couldn't get one. And so the man at Cal[ifornia] State [University, Los Angeles] said he gave me the option in graduate school

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to-- As a painter, I could do assemblage, and I couldn't actually do sculpture. So in my junking forays- -

I remember one day John Outterbridge and I were out junking around- -that ' s not the word we used to use either. But I was out there somewhere, and Bridge knew where this junkyard was. In fact, those pieces in that one, the Hoe, because it's a hoe and some stove legs-- I was at one of Bridge's junkyards when I found those parts. We were someplace looking for junk, and this guy had ammunition boxes. They used to hold mortar shells, circa the Korean War. The guy had a big stack of them, I said, "Hey, how much for one of them?" And he told me. I said, "How much for twelve of them?" And he gave a real --like two dollars a piece or something. So I bought twelve of them. And they sat around in my basement, in my backyard, in my studio for a long time.

One day I started thinking about them, because I had to do a master's thesis. And the guy said, "You could either do a written thesis, or you could do a visual presentation, " but you had to write a paper. So I wrote this paper called "Spirit vs. Technology," and my premise was that technology was a corpse unless it was imbued by spirit. I used the analogy further that you could take a car, which was a technical process, and you could let it sit in your driveway and nobody would drive it, nobody

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would touch it, and it would slowly deteriorate. If it sat there long enough, it would deteriorate, even if it had been brand-new, to the point where it was inoperable. It took the spirituality of a person getting in there, turning on the ignition, starting up the car, doing all the processes that are involved in driving. So technology without spirit couldn't function. And then also, from the other angle, that famous line in George Jackson's "Technology was a headless beast at the controls of a machine gone mad, " talking about American ideas and things. So to me, I was trying to show spirit and technology.

I think that first piece that I tried to use was Bird and Diz. It was right there. I was showing that Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie-- I had found some old horns and some pressure gauges and things. I remember going to a secondhand store and buying a beautiful piece of dark blue pinstripe suit and cutting that up in there and putting that as a liner in the bottom of the box and then showing that Dizzy Gillespie and Bird [Charlie Parker] were a good [example] of how the technical process, that created those instruments primarily for classical music, had no idea in the creator's mind that Bird was going to pick up the horn and play it like he did. Or that Dizzy Gillespie-- Or that Bird and Diz and

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Thelonius Monk and them would all come together and make be-bop. That's what spirit does to technology. Spirit can take technology on an evolution that the technology ' s creator never intended it to go. So then I took the-- I ' m sorry .

MASON: Did you work on the surface of the boxes at all? RIDDLE: Uh-huh. Like I said, I lined the inside of the musical side with a kind of suit material that the brothers used to wear on those sets back in the old be-bop era when the musicians were well-dressed and everything. Then I took the front surface of the door--

I had an artist friend named Danny [Daniel] LaRue Johnson. I remember when Danny and I were first starting to deal with art in L.A. I was over to Danny's house one time. I was sitting there talking, and he was rubbing on this box, on a piece of wood, a Joseph Cornell kind of assemblage. He used to do a lot of rat traps and paint American flags black and have black dolls caught in the rat traps. But he'd paint them all black, like Louise Nevelson, to combine all the different fragmented parts into the commonality of being one color. So that made them one, even though they were separate. I always liked how-- But he was rubbing on this box, and I said, "Man, why do you spend so much time rubbing and polishing?" He said, "Some people call it the finish fetish, " and he

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started laughing. He said, "But, you know, I do it because not only is it peaceful, it--as an artist--gives me time to think and relaxes me." He said, "But it's craftsmanship. " And he said, "No matter what a piece looks like or what it is, if it has craftsmanship as an integral part of it, it will always be presentable just on a craftsmanship level."

Now, once you draw people into the craftsmanship, then you rip them apart with the concept within the craftsmanship. You see, craftsmanship has the ability to draw people to itself, just because it's a thing of such quality that everybody recognizes it. Well, not everybody, but enough people. You know, they'll say, "Well, that's--" And they'll touch it, and then all of a sudden, they'll look around the edge of this smooth surface and here's something that's as sharp as a razor blade trying to cut their- -

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TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO SEPTEMBER 5, 1992

RIDDLE: That's the only piece in that whole series where the parts extended outside of the box, too. I mean, I did that on purpose, because I wanted to show that the brothers' technology was breaking out of the boxes.

Now, I used anununition boxes for two reasons, because-- They had those rope handles so they could hang. All I had to do was take a two-by-four and mount each one on a two-by-four and I could exhibit them like that with the doors closed so that the viewer had to unlatch it-- it ' s just a simple latch on the front--but they had to unlatch those two hinges and open up the art to see what was happening in there. So I kind of liked that, because it made people have to do a participatory thing.

So it was really my master's thesis, and that was nice. It was a self-contained kind of storage thing, too. You'd close the lid, put the little latches on, and stack them up, because they were meant to be stacked up on top of each other. Therefore, they wouldn't take up much space; the lids kept dust and dirt out of them. They sat over at Bridge's house from the time I left Atlanta to the time the California [African American] Museum bought them. So they probably sat in Bridge's house-- They bought them

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in '89, I left in '74, so they sat at Bridge's house for about fifteen years, you know.

MASON: Were they all meant to be seen together? RIDDLE: Uh-huh.

MASON: I remember I saw this show and I think there was one they put at the end that was closed and you couldn ' t open the door.

RIDDLE: I did that on purpose because I was tired of doing them boxes. I promised them I would have ten for the show, or nine for the show, and so I did one you couldn't open. There ain't nothing in that one. You know, like just humor. Humor and laziness. But I did that on purpose, because everybody said, "What's in that one?" I used to say, "You'll never know." [laughter] MASON: You are very mysterious.

RIDDLE: That's assemblage, too, that Charlie Parker. I like the bebop era. So this piece has all assembled parts on the bottom. I put little boxes on the bottom that showed African instruments to show that their heritage is basically African instruments. But the rest of it's two- dimensional . MASON: Okay.

RIDDLE: There might be some balsa wood thickness pieces in there like there's an African person over here somewhere that grew out of his bass fiddle. It's hard to

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see in that, but I always liked that. That's a real

picture that had Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and

John Coltrane when he was a real young musician. He was

in the background just asking could he sit in. And I

always liked that because it has historical significance.

MASON: And here's an Olmec. Maybe it's an Olmec head- I

don ' t know .

RIDDLE: Yeah, it's an Olmec. I like to try to show-- And

then, again, there was Liberty.

MASON: Yeah, the Statue of Liberty.

RIDDLE: I was using Liberty in that case to say that--

[tape recorder off] [Carmen Riddle joins interview]

MASON: We started off with Bill Pajaud. We wanted to get

some of the older people in the arts community. We talked

with Ruth Waddy, Betye Saar. And then we started to talk

to people who were younger, but who had had galleries,

like Alonzo Davis. And I just did Suzanne Jackson a

couple of weeks ago.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Where is Suzanne?

MASON: She's up in San Francisco. She just got her

degree from Yale. She just got an MFA [master of fine

arts], and she's working in costume design right now.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, that's what she's doing?

MASON: Yeah. I mean she's still painting, but she's

earning her living now as a costume designer in between.

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Well, she says she hasn't really wanted to show yet, but I

don ' t know .

CARMEN RIDDLE: She was doing those chickens when we saw

her last time.

MASON: She's just trying to make money to get supplies.

RIDDLE: You know, before when you were asking about the

different family stuff-- She has a whole family story that

fits in very well with me. That's why--

CARMEN RIDDLE: What's that?

RIDDLE: Well, I told her about how the first house I ever

lived in was your grandmother's, Alice Garrott's.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah. Well, our families knew each other

generations back.

RIDDLE: And her family was one of the first black

families in Glendale.

CARMEN RIDDLE: No, California.

RIDDLE: Yeah, but I mean when they lived out in Glendale.

MASON: When did they come to California?

CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, my grandfather was the first black

dentist. And they came to California before slavery was

over.

MASON: So he was before [John A.] Somerville then?

CARMEN RIDDLE: Somerville and my grandfather. Yeah, he

said that was wrong. [laughter] So it wasn't--

MASON: Yeah, it's always wrong.

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CARMEN RIDDLE: No, it was wrong. MASON: It's always wrong.

CARMEN RIDDLE: It is wrong, because Dr. Garrott-- That's just something that's happened in the last few years that they've said Somerville. But Dr. Garrott was the first one, and then Somerville.

MASON: Of course, he wrote his autobiography [Man of Color: An Autobiography of J. Alexander Somerville] , too. So he'd probably say, "Well, you know, I was the first." CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah, there's an argument there. But anyway, they were there in the 1800s and everything like that. But our families were connected the whole time. RIDDLE: We used to live close to each other. Her mother and father lived right almost next door to my mother [Helen Louise Wheeler] and father [John Thomas Riddle] 's two best friends. Ruby and Ollie Terry. And, yet, we didn't know each other.

CARMEN RIDDLE: And, you know, the thing that they had at the black museum-- You know, the California history thing? MASON: Yeah, yeah.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, our families are in there. Yeah, from that-- We went to that show the last time we were there. And so it was really interesting seeing that. RIDDLE: She had parts of her family in it and parts of my family. And yet, we didn't know each other.

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CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, we did, but we didn't pay any

attention to each other. They used to have the

pharmaceutical doctors and lawyers breakfast in Griffith

Park every summer. They had a breakfast, and we always

went. We saw a picture after we got married where he was

at one end and I was at the other, and we didn't even know

that we were both there.

MASON: Yeah, that's pretty funny.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He didn't start art until after we were

married.

RIDDLE: See, she's telling it. She knows it. See, she

actually saved me.

CARMEN RIDDLE: We won't go into all that. [laughter]

But he didn't do any art until we were married. And then

he did the same picture over and over again, on one piece

of canvas .

RIDDLE: I just kept painting it over.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Because he was in the air force- -

RIDDLE: And I threw it away.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He did the same piece over and over again,

but it was something that he seemed to like and be

interested in. So when he got out of the service, he went

to art school at Cal[ifornia] State [University, Los

Angeles] . But what I was going to ask is, now, who else

did you see? Because, see, there was a time when all of

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them-- It was so much fun in California, because they had

this group of artists and families that we all did

everything together .

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: Yeah.

CARMEN RIDDLE: With Dan Concholar and Alonzo Davis.

MASON: Yeah, we interviewed Alonzo.

RIDDLE: And Bridge.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Dale [Davis] and Bridge and--

RIDDLE: And Yvonne Cole Meo.

CARMEN RIDDLE: And Betye Saar. And, of course, Ruth

Waddy was always in on every-- She helped get the people

together, too, along with Alonzo.

MASON: Yeah. At the same time, there was this other

group of artists.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Who was that?

MASON: You mentioned Daniel LaRue Johnson and people

like--

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, Danny Johnson was along that time, but

Danny was a very individual-type person. He wasn't a

joiner. He was a very good artist, but he was not very

sociable and he didn't want to be around other people. He

took his family and went to New York.

RIDDLE: He preceded Mel[vin] [Edwards] and them to New

York,

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CARMEN RIDDLE: Mel was a friend of Danny's. Now, I guess,

that was about his best friend. So they both went to New

York.

RIDDLE: That was in '58.

MASON: And then he went to study in Paris.

RIDDLE: That was in '58, because he came by and said,

"Man, we ought to go to New York." And I thought about it,

but I was afraid.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, he--

MASON: But I-- Oh, I'm sorry.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Go ahead. Go ahead.

MASON: No, I was just going to talk about some of the

other artists who were in the black shows, like [Los

Angeles 1972: A] Panorama [of Black Artists] and then they

kind of went off on their own.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Who was that?

MASON: Like Fred [Frederick J.] Eversley and, let's see,

Marvin-- Marvin Harden wasn't in the--

RIDDLE: Fred was real white. Because he went out to the

white artists, because they were doing resin casts. He did

those beautiful resin-casted pieces. But he was hanging

out with the--

MASON: Plus he-- He really —

RIDDLE: He became an artist though. I mean, Fred became--

I'm not saying we weren't artists. But he became an

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accepted artist in corporate America, because he had,

like —

CARMEN RIDDLE: Commercially.

RIDDLE: Pieces in plazas and, I mean, before anybody was

doing that.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah. He was more into crafts, and he was

very commercial. He could make money off of-- Around

whites a lot, you know.

MASON: Do you want me to turn the tape off? Or--?

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh.

RIDDLE: No. Is it off or on?

MASON: It's on.

RIDDLE: Yeah. I tell you, you could edit this out. She

knows a lot of stuff.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh. Well, I don't know. I didn't know you

had the tape on.

RIDDLE: See, now she's going to clam up. She's not going

to tell you about what her mother is like.

CARMEN RIDDLE: She doesn't care about that!

RIDDLE: Yeah, well, she asked about all the parents and

stuff.

MASON: Yeah, well —

RIDDLE: Like, her mother is, right now, she's ninety-six.

CARMEN RIDDLE: She's probably ninety-eight, but she puts

her age back.

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RIDDLE: And she's blind, completely blind. And she lives by herself, and she do what she did. CARMEN RIDDLE: She knew everybody in California. RIDDLE: She's got like--because probably her blindness, too, but even before that-- She's the keeper of the history. She can tell you about every family back in certain eras and things and all the relationships between this person and what happened to that kid, this kid. It's amazing. I mean, she's like out of the tradition of the old African tradition where the Creoles and the people kept the oral history to pass it on. She has, outside of her blindness — and now she says she's tired of living so long-- nothing wrong with her. I mean, she can bend down and get things out of the lowest shelf on the cupboard and not have to pull herself up on the countertop or anything. I mean, she fell and broke a rib when we were out there last Thanksgiving. She was healed in two weeks. MASON : Wow .

RIDDLE: I mean, she's an amazing person. Her mother and father's side is a whole history. But without that part a lot of me is missing, because we've been together, like I said, about forty years, that I've known her. CARMEN RIDDLE: We met the first day at City College, LACC [Los Angeles City College], and we've been together ever since.

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MASON: Yeah. Well, that's amazing, because it's like most

of the artists I talk to, and even non-artists-- You know,

Cecil Fergerson talks about being married three and four

times and stuff. I don't know how many times he's been

married, but, you know it seems to just--

CARMEN RIDDLE: I know, everybody.

MASON: It seems to just really destroy- -

CARMEN RIDDLE: They just didn't make it. You don't have

Dan Concholar on there?

MASON: We have kind of a--

CARMEN RIDDLE: He doesn't do art now, but he was a great

artist in his own way. But when his wife [Olivia

Concholar] left him, he was just so crushed--

RIDDLE: Never done art since.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He went to New York and hasn't done art

since.

MASON: Suzanne Jackson ran into him in New York.

CARMEN RIDDLE: New York, yeah.

MASON: But I can't remember what she said.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He's in--

MASON: He has some administrative kind of job.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah, that's what he's doing.

RIDDLE: He promotes other artists.

MASON: Yeah, right.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah. But he was great. And he lived like

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an artist. I mean, he and his wife just lived like

artists.

RIDDLE: They lived on Budlong [Avenue]. They used to

always live on Budlong.

CARMEN RIDDLE: They lived on Budlong, this old house, but

they were both from Arizona. She was Hispanic. But their

lives were so interesting. And then, David Hammons. I

don't know if you know David Hammons?

MASON: Yeah. We were going to interview him, but he's

living in Italy now.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah. David had a family in Los Angeles.

Now, he gave up his family. He had the nicest wife and two

little kids. They're grown now, but--

RIDDLE: Carmen, David, and Becky. Becky was his wife.

CARMEN RIDDLE: But he left his family in order to pursue

his art career. So I felt bad about that, because I just

don't think anything is worth that. But he has since gone

on to bigger and better things in the world of art. But,

you know, his kids kind of resent it.

RIDDLE: But now, one thing about-- Now David, he was a--

The thing good about David was he had a super sense of

humor .

MASON: Did you say sense of humor?

RIDDLE: Uh-huh. I mean, really, a great sense of humor,

to me. It was the same kind of sense of humor that I had

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one similar to. So we always saw the humorous side of all the things related to art, which gives you a whole other perspective.

MASON: Yeah. If you look at some of his pieces now-- I remember seeing a piece of fried chicken.

CARMEN RIDDLE: And the funniest thing is he's-- I call him a con artist, because at the museum he had a show here a year or two ago and he had ribs hanging up there. And the white people would come up, everybody had their champagne and [were] dressed up and everything, and they would say, "And, uh, how do you explain this?" He had been talking to us, laughing at how much money he had made, and he doesn't have to put out any money on these things because he just picks up stuff. He never pays for his material. When he did things with hair, he just went to the barbershops. And when he did [inaudible] art when he was here, you know, anything free. Then all his money just comes to him when he gets paid for it.

So he said, "Oh, yeah. These people, you just tell them anything." So the lady said, "Now, how did you happen to think of this rib. Is this a rib? A barbecue rib?" And what did he say? He said, "Well, yes. The way I feel about this--" And he went into some long dissertation, and she just thought it was great and brought her friends over. And that's why I call him the con artist. Because he does

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stuff like bottle caps and then makes it into something.

MASON: Yeah. There's one in here that's like a

basketball .

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah. Yeah.

RIDDLE: He has ingenious ways of doing--

CARMEN RIDDLE: He never spends a cent. And I do admire

him for his money-making ways, because he makes plenty of

money .

RIDDLE: He's got one in that book where he's just got

Skillets.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He just gathers up whatever he can free.

RIDDLE: Skillets in the Closet.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He never pays for a thing.

MASON: Yeah, there are the bottle caps.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah.

MASON: The basketball.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Uh-huh. And they didn't like it when he

did a piece of art-- What was it?

RIDDLE: The one that he did on Jesse [L,] Jackson.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Jesse Jackson.

MASON: Yeah. How Ya Like Me Now.

RIDDLE: They painted him white.

MASON: Yeah.

CARMEN RIDDLE: But he didn't mean that.

RIDDLE: They smashed him up with some sledgehammers.

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CARMEN RIDDLE: And that must have really made him feel

bad—

RIDDLE: He felt bad at the time.

CARMEN RIDDLE: --because he likes to feel like he ' s a

black artist, and for blacks not to relate to it made him

feel really bad.

RIDDLE: But see, he was too abstract in that-- I mean,

for black people. Because one thing about black people,

we're not abstract. We would like everything, like, what

it is. We want it more simplified. I saw that in the

movies .

CARMEN RIDDLE: I want to see people and color and stuff.

MASON: Yeah, but when you say abstract, I mean, you know,

African art is really abstract. So--

CARMEN RIDDLE: I don't think so.

MASON: You don't think so?

CARMEN RIDDLE: No.

RIDDLE: No, I don't either. I think the African artists

now who do art, it's somewhat abstract. But I think when

it was in its original form--

CARMEN RIDDLE: Utilitarian.

RIDDLE: --when it was artifact-- Yeah, utilitarian.

Because it wasn't really viewed in the sense-- I mean, be

adding something that's not there-- It wasn't really

viewed for its aesthetic. I think if the aesthetic was

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there, it was there because of the pride and the tradition of carving, because they weren't looking at avant-garde things, they were looking at keeping a tradition through repetition. And the more you could keep the tradition, the better you were. Whereas in the Western art, which isn't artifact, it's like "Come up with this new thing and get it patented." And everybody says, "Well, Alexander Calder does kinetic art mobiles. Therefore, nobody else can do mobiles." That's why you don't see the advancement on his principle of balance and kineticism through mobiles, because if you do, then everybody would say, "Man, you're just copying Calder." So then what you might really feel would contribute doesn't get a chance to perpetuate what Calder did, and that's a sad thing, but that's the way the West looks at it. It's got to be something new and different. It's like new for new's sake.

Now, David's piece you just showed me with the bottle caps and the basketball, if you look at that from a distance, that has qualities of African art about it, just in the shape of the design. MASON: The pattern.

RIDDLE: The patterns. I remember when David first — We used to argue about that in the days Carmen speaks of. Was there black art in the days of the penitentiary and

105

all of that? Was there black art at the riots? You know,

that was the big question. Is there black art or is it

just black people doing art? Or is there such a thing as

black art? And those arguments used to rage. And David

used to be in the position that there was no such thing as

black art. We used to get into almost cussing at each

other about those. It was all in Alonzo ' s Brockman

Gallery on Saturdays. The artists would meet. But it was

healthy, because you had to come back the next time they

met with visual proof of your position. You couldn't just

verbalize. And they could come back and show me some

black art. So we would get into that. The Wilbur Haynie.

Now, he was a great artist. I don't know what happened to

him.

MASON: Yeah, I think he went--

RIDDLE: Wilbur was bad, boy.

MASON: Yeah, he did these hard-edged kinds of things.

RIDDLE: Yeah, maybe just a blue field with a red line

coming through, but a beautiful red. It wasn't just an

old jive red.

MASON: Was he part of Brockman Gallery or was he off on

his own?

RIDDLE: Uh, he was a little bit more off, but he came

through there. And Ernest--what was Ernest's name? — he

died. Ernest who did the dissertation on BAAism. It was

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a classic one night. MASON: On what?

RIDDLE: BAAism. He got up one night and he talked about BAAism which was-- See everywhere at that time in the mid- sixties, black groups like AFRI-COBRA and all these people were jumping out. But there was always the Black Artists of Baltimore, the Black Artists Association of New Orleans, the Black Artists Association of L.A. So that was BAA. It was always BAA, the Black Artists Association. So Ernest did this thing, a dissertation on BAAism, and he was putting down all the black artists associations. Because this was this: "Was there black art or was there just black artists?" I wish somebody had taped it, because that was the funniest thing. CARMEN RIDDLE: Who was that?

RIDDLE: This guy, I can't think of his name. Ernest Herbert. He died. But he was a really good artist, an abstract artist. And so he was against black art. He just thought they were black artists and some of them did black art and he taught the whole concept of these--all over the country- -black groups and he called it BAAism. He would start baying like a sheep at the end of each kind of discourse, and he would go "BAAAAism." Well, we would just-- That was a hilarious thing, boy. I still remember. I don't even remember what he said now, but it was

107

hilarious at the time.

CARMEN RIDDLE: What's Alonzo doing?

MASON: He works at the San Antonio Art Institute.

RIDDLE: He's in San Antonio?

MASON: Yeah, he's on the faculty. He's like dean or

something of the college of fine arts.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Really?

MASON: Yeah. Or chairman, or something like that.

RIDDLE: That's where Claude Booker came from, San

Antonio.

CARMEN RIDDLE: There's a lot of Mexicans there.

MASON: Urn, yeah. I went around to the school. The

student body seemed kind of mixed. He had one student who

was Native American, another student who was Mexican, but

she was, like, you know, white Mexican. And some blacks.

It was really mixed.

CARMEN RIDDLE: It's an art school?

MASON: Yeah. Yeah, a fine arts school.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He always did find those administrative

things.

RIDDLE: Mm-hmm. I met Alonzo the first time I ever

taught ceramics. I didn't know how to fire the kiln at

L.A. High [School], and they said, "Well, there's a guy

over there at Manual Arts [High School] who knows how."

So I went over there, and that's when I met Alonzo, He

108

was in there cussing his students out. When I walked in

the door he was calling them all kinds of names. And I

thought, "God, what kind of school is this?"

CARMEN RIDDLE: Those were great days, though. His

gallery had great turnouts, Brockman Gallery. Everybody

came to those shows.

RIDDLE: Mm-hmm. That was the place to be.

CARMEN RIDDLE: To either see the art or to be seen.

Because they had great outfits and they had-- He had

music, and it was really a lot of fun. A lot of fun.

MASON: Somebody said the difference between Suzanne

Jackson's Gallery 32 and the Brockman Gallery was that the

Brockman Gallery showed all the artists with MFA's, and

Suzanne Jackson's gallery showed everybody else. Because

she had like Emory Douglas. She showed-- Or is his name

Douglas Emory? I always get that mixed up. But the

Panther.

RIDDLE: Well, she was more like-- Because she had poetry

reading and stuff, too.

CARMEN RIDDLE: She was more like an artist herself, too.

I mean, she wasn't--

RIDDLE: Well-- Yeah, I understand.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Alonzo was more administrative. Alonzo

did know art. He's an artist but, for the most part, he

did know good art. And Suzanne was a piece of art. She

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had a marriage where they drove off on a motorcycle. They

had their marriage- -

RIDDLE: In that same place at--

CARMEN RIDDLE: Up there in Griffith Park.

RIDDLE: Up there where all the little ferns were--

CARMEN RIDDLE: And everybody came--

RIDDLE: Had a breakfast--

CARMEN RIDDLE: And they drove off on a--

RIDDLE: And they drove off on the back of Pete's

motorcycle .

CARMEN RIDDLE: A motorcycle.

RIDDLE: She was in a bridal gown and the whole thing.

CARMEN RIDDLE: I didn't know he was married at the time.

RIDDLE: And he drove off, and her gown and her thing was

just flowing in the back.

CARMEN RIDDLE: She was really a character. Plus, she

went with Bernie [Bernard T.]--

RIDDLE: Casey.

CARMEN RIDDLE: --Casey for a long time. And she was just

really far out.

MASON: She actually had grown up in Alaska and San

Francisco.

CARMEN RIDDLE: She was, I guess, the ultimate of

hippiedom.

RIDDLE: And then she had, like, poetry readings and other

110

kinds of, like you say. Panther kinds of things. She had

more--

CARMEN RIDDLE: Happenings there.

RIDDLE: You know, social, avant-garde things that mixed

with art.

CARMEN RIDDLE: But see, Alonzo had a lot of the society

and art and bodies.

RIDDLE: He was right over there by where all the black

people live.

CARMEN RIDDLE: That's where Sidney Poitier came and

bought some of his art there. He had a lot of stars that

came to his.

RIDDLE: And other galleries were raiding Alonzo ' s

artists, like Ben[jamin] Horowitz and Ankrum Gallery and

those people wanted-- They would come to Alonzo ' s and try

to pick some of his artists off.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Black artists.

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: But Alonzo and them, they did a lot.

CARMEN RIDDLE: It was great because they brought the

black artists together.

RIDDLE: And then David Hammons, he said one of the

funniest things. It's so true. But one night, like

Carmen said, everybody went, I mean, to be seen at

Brockman Gallery.

Ill

CARMEN RIDDLE: And then you'd have outfits, special outfits just for Brockman Gallery.

RIDDLE: And I remember one time David said-- He wasn't there. And everybody said, "Where's David? Where's David? Where's David?" And everybody was in a panic because they thought he had died or something, because nobody missed an opening at Brockman' s. So I rushed home and said,

"David! David, are you all right?"

He said, "Yeah. "

I said, "Man, how come you didn't come to the art show?"

He said, "John," he said, "I knew--" He always talked funny. He said, "John, I knew that I was the only black artist in Los Angeles doing art because all the other artists were at Brockman. And it felt so good to be the only black artist in Los Angeles doing art." Because he knew that at that exact hour, none of the other black artists were doing art because they were all at Brockman' s. So he stayed home and did art.

MASON: Well, I have a thing from you. You did your first one-man show at Brockman Gallery, right? In '68? CARMEN RIDDLE: That was the beginning of Brockman Gallery.

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[This portion of the text has been sealed.]

113

CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, I still think that was the beginning of the black artist group that they were in. RIDDLE: It was.

CARMEN RIDDLE: And that's the one that's the most well- known on the whole coast, you know. MASON: What about Art-West [Associated], though? RIDDLE: Well, that was Fred Eversley.

CARMEN RIDDLE: That was just something that came out of that.

RIDDLE: Now, Fred Eversley was--

CARMEN RIDDLE: They wanted to have something else. RIDDLE: You know who his brother is, is Ron Karenga. MASON: Fred Eversley 's brother is Ron Karenga? RIDDLE: Not Fred Eversley. What's his name? Fred-- What was Ron Karenga ' s other name? CARMEN RIDDLE: I don't know.

RIDDLE: See, Ruth Waddy started Art-West with this guy. The guy who was in it, he was a gay. But this was like when gay was--

114

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, you mean that real tall gay one?

RIDDLE: When gay wasn't like gay is now. And he wore--

MASON: Was it William Smith?

CARMEN RIDDLE: He was effeminate.

RIDDLE: Wesley Gale. And he would come with horsetail

fly swishers. I mean, he was like--

CARMEN RIDDLE: He was really outlandish.

RIDDLE: "I'm Wesley Gale." I mean, he was outlandish.

But now, Ruth's group, Ron-- What was Ron [now Maulana]

Karenga ' s name before he was Ron Karenga? Because he used

to always be at Halver Milley's, at those parties arguing.

But he was a social worker. And his brother was an

artist, because he was in Art-West. And I remember

afterwards when I found out-- Because his brother was

real, kind of like-- There was a lot of feminine men

artists in Art-West, and his brother was one of them. And

I remember later when Ron Karenga became Ron Karenga, I

used to tease him about his brother, because Ron was out

there being all militant and everything.

MASON: He's very, very macho.

RIDDLE: But he went too far, because he was torturing

women .

MASON: Yeah, I heard he's been arrested.

RIDDLE: We used to go to some of his things and the

people were saying, "Ron Karenga I Ron Karenga!" It was

115

like idolizing Ron Karenga rather than-- I mean, it

actually culminated in the war with the Panthers.

MASON: Yeah, "Bunchy" Carter- -

RIDDLE: In fact, two guys at UCLA, Bunchy Carter and

[John] Huggins, got killed out there on campus.

^4AS0N: Why was that? I mean, because--

RIDDLE: Because the FBI and them had infiltrated the--or

whatever part of the American government- -organizations.

And you know, it's like, "Man, they talking about your

momma over there," with us. And then they would tell the

Black Panthers, "Man, they say your momma was a dog."

"Man, what ' d you say about my momma?" And then all of

that black hostility spilled over in those killings, but--

MASON: Do you think their ideology was that different or

not?

RIDDLE: Well, it's kind of like DuBois and Booker T.

[Washington], you know. Malcolm [X] and Martin [Luther

King, Jr.]. We need it all. There's no one black

philosophy that's going to cover all the black diversity

and bring everybody together. Again, like art in the

Watts riots. My first real art stuff came when I met Noah

[Purifoy] and them after the riots, because we put

together the first Watts [Summer] Festival [of Art] .

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: The very first one.

116

MASON: Were you part of the 66 Signs of Neon, too?

RIDDLE: Uh-huh. That's in that show with Noah when he

has Sir Watts. See, that's when I met Noah. He was

making that thing out of those safety pins, because he had

gotten all that out of a cleaners that had burned up. But

Signs of Neon was like, to me, when I first met real black

artists and they were doing stuff. And we had those art

festivals out there in Watts. But Alonzo had like the

first black gallery.

MASON: Yeah.

CARMEN RIDDLE: And gathering.

RIDDLE: Those were the greatest Saturday meetings when

you had to bring a piece to critique. And it couldn't be

no old piece; it had to be something you just worked on.

You had to stick it up there in front of everybody, and

everybody sat on the other wall at Brockman on the floor.

And there was a couple of jugs of paisano wine, and

everybody sat back and--

CARMEN RIDDLE: They drank and partied.

RIDDLE: You know, and you had to prove your point through

your art .

CARMEN RIDDLE: That's right. And they were all such

great artists, just great.

RIDDLE: And I got to really be friends with these people

I had never met, like Bridge and David and John.

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CARMEN RIDDLE: Did you do Outterbridge?

MASON: Yeah, Richard [Candida] Smith--I guess you talked

to him on the phone--did John Outterbridge. It was a long

one.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, really?

MASON: He had a lot to talk about.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, yeah. He can talk a lot about

everything .

MASON: What about all those organizations that sprang up

after the Watts uprising, like the Mafundi Institute and

the Watts Writers Workshop?

RIDDLE: They were good. [Budd] Schulberg did the Watts

Writers Workshop. And it gave people who were in the

same organized anger an outlet, who were writers- And

what's the old guy? They still show him. He started

founding and developing black entrepreneurship. A real

old guy.

MASON: Jim Woods?

RIDDLE: It's a real old guy. He was young then, but he's

real old. I see him on TV still, and he had a

manufacturing-- Like the first black baseball bats that

were ever made for the major league, they had a bat

factory out there.

MASON: Okay. I know who you're talking about, but I

can't remember what his name is.

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RIDDLE: I mean, it folded. I used to go to those meetings and that's when I first heard the concept "art pimps." I mean, "poverty pimps." These guys would be in these meetings and they had like $200 alligator shoes and fine clothes, and they would be talking about administering this federal money for the masses, and I could tell by looking at them where the money was going. They would put that money in their pockets, you know. But that's when black folks was really-- Poverty pimps, that's what they were. We used to call them the poverty pimps, and they'd get mad.

But a lot of things [were] good and a lot of things bad. Bridge went out there, for instance, to build this tribute to the Watts riots. MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: They burnt that sucker up. It was supposed to be like a drum kind of tower thing that-- CARMEN RIDDLE: He worked in the Watts Towers. MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: But those people burned it up.

MASON: Actually, Richard wanted me to ask you about that, because- -

RIDDLE: It's a vague memory, now. I just remember they built it and it burned up. MASON: Well, who would have burned it up? Because I know

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there was kind of a--

RIDDLE: People out there who didn't like it, you know.

Because they felt like--

MASON: People who didn't like the art or something?

RIDDLE: They felt like it was in a vacant lot where some

stuff had burned down, as I recall. And it was like, "We

need jobs and we need these things, and you're going to

put this old piece of crap out here? We don't care

nothing about this!"

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah, you know, a lot of people think

artists are elitists. They feel that art isn't-- "How's

the art going to help me eat?" and all that.

RIDDLE: So I mean--

CARMEN RIDDLE: There's always been kind of a gap between

art and the lower classes, because art is primarily for--

Even though the artists may be for the lower classes, or

from the lower classes, the people who buy art and get to

enjoy art are usually the elite, and the people who are

knowledgeable about it.

RIDDLE: And people who have expendable cash to buy things

that are-- Again, it goes into the abstract.

CARMEN RIDDLE: It's like most people-- Say, before we got

here-- It's a black city now. But before we got here,

most of the people who were his patrons were white. Even

though he was doing black art, the people who bought his

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art were white. So it's kind of a conflict.

MASON: Well, you have some celebrities here.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Hmm?

MASON: Black celebrities, though. You had like Sidney

Poitier?

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, yeah. Well, he tries to think of the

blacks living--

RIDDLE: Well, he bought in L.A.

CARMEN RIDDLE: There were more whites that supported him

than blacks. His idea in doing art, though, was to have

blacks buy his art and to have it in their homes and to

have it affordable.

RIDDLE: Yeah, that was my motto.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Because most of the people who could

afford it, like doctors and so forth, were not buying art.

MASON: Like Leon [0.] Banks?

RIDDLE: It was like quality art at affordable prices.

CARMEN RIDDLE: That's right.

RIDDLE: That was my motto. That's when I went into

printmaking, because you could do multiple images and you

could afford to sell a piece for $200, because you had one

hundred of them.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah, and most people could afford it.

And here, I mean--

RIDDLE: Whereas now you get an original, you want $2,000,

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and you can't find nobody.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He's in everybody's home here. I mean, he

is just--

RIDDLE: That's why I need to get out of here. I've

saturated the market. [laughter]

CARMEN RIDDLE: And plus, like Andy [Andrew J.] Young

[Jr.] and them, they all have-- Andy must have about ten

pieces of his in his own home. He's really just sold to

everybody; [everybody] has some of his art here.

RIDDLE: And he's given me commissions, too. In fact, he

gave me an Olympic [Games] commission to do a poster for

the Olympics. And they were mad at first and said, "Well,

you can't just do this without competition, Andy." And

Shirley Franklin said, "Well, if Andy says he's going to

do it, I guess it will happen that way." In fact, I was

supposed to call him; I didn't call him yet.

MASON: Yeah. That brings me to a question that I wanted

to ask you about, this idea of trying to communicate with

the black community. Because the interview I just did, we

were talking about the Studio Museum and how the director

feels that the Studio Museum should be responsible to the

community in which it resides and it shouldn't talk down

to people and that sort of thing. But I just wonder, how

do you find out where people are and what they want and

what they're thinking about? I was also talking to an

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independent black filmmaker who said that his films, although they deal with black life realistically-- I mean, just take, like. To Sleep with Anger, Charles Burnett. It didn't do as well as Superf ly , and yet it was a film that, it seems, a lot of black people could identify with and, you know, is exquisitely done. And so, as a black artist you're trying to sort of negotiate these things. How do you--?

CARMEN RIDDLE: I don't think he does. MASON: Oh.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Just being black and living as a black man, he just puts down what he knows.

RIDDLE: Yeah, there's always resource material that comes to you. That's what goes all the way back to the earlier comment on Bobby Seale and "Art ain't shit." I had just gone through nine years of night school, and I just never stopped. And here I was getting ready to be an artist, and here's a black person who I respected saying that what I did wasn't worth anything. And then the only way I could rationalize it was somewhere else. In the next couple of paragraphs in his book, he spoke to the issue. Unless it advances social consciousness and promotes black development and all that- -then it has value. So then once I saw that rationalization, I said, "Okay, now I'm justified." But I know in another sense it's locked me

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into a process I've never gotten out of, and that's the

social consciousness of black people through art, where a

lot of times I'd like just to give that up. But like

Carmen said, there's always, every day, some resource. It

could be Rodney King; it can be Somalia versus whatever

that place is.

MASON: Bosnia-Herzegovina.

RIDDLE: Bosnia-Herzegovina.

CARMEN RIDDLE: That's pretty good.

RIDDLE: And, you know, it's just like it can be even more

like--

CARMEN RIDDLE: The Haitians.

RIDDLE: Yeah, the Haitians versus they let all the

Hispanics come because they work for nothing: you don't

have to pay any benefits, you don't pay Uncle Sam taxes,

because this is people that don't really exist except they

come to work every day.

MASON: I think they do pay taxes, though.

RIDDLE: Not on all of them. I mean, there's a lot of

that Hispanic labor that doesn't exist on paper, but it

exists in production. And that's profit. Every nickle

they can save off a worker from salary right on through

the whole wage, cost of workers, I mean-- But that's why

they let them come in by the millions.

MASON: Let me turn this tape over.

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RIDDLE: It's SO the Hispanics can come in by the

thousands.

MASON: Well, that's okay--

RIDDLE: But, I mean, that's the same way we were talking

about yesterday. They shot down that plane over there in

Yugoslavia with the Italian United Nations worker. Now,

if Saddam Hussein had shot down or even shot at some of

those inspectors, [George H.W.] Bush would be blowing

Saddam Hussein up right today. But it just depends.

They're not going to go over there and jump on other white

people. That's why George Carlin does that whole comic

routine: we only blow up black, brown, and yellow people.

In my lifetime, since the Second World War, there haven't

been any wars with white people. It's always been some

white people giving some weapons to some brown-skinned

people to kill each other. The white people are trying to

do it themselves, because they started the whole problem

in Somalia anyway when it was a struggle between the

United States and Russia over who would control the horn

of Africa.

MASON: Yeah. And then they make it seem like, "Oh, these

poor Africans are too stupid to know how to take care of

themselves." Even though they were the first people on

earth.

CARMEN RIDDLE: I know.

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MASON: You know, it's pretty ridiculous. CARMEN RIDDLE: I know. Well, at least they're finally having to help. I guess, because they sent help to Bosnia and all that, they have to give some help to Somalia. RIDDLE: They don't realize--and I think this is the role of the social artist whether he's black or white--that there's just enough resources on the planet to take care of the problems of the planet. Because there's very little difference between bragging about Saddam Hussein didn't have electricity, the kids didn't have milk, the people didn't have shelter, they didn't have water, they didn't have this-- There's no difference between that and Hurricane Andrew going through south Florida. It's the same fact. When Bush started [Operation] Desert Storm and they said they killed x number of Iraqis, at the same time there was a monsoon that went through some place over there in India and killed the exact same amount of people. One was man-made, one was natural. And there's just enough resources to take care of what ' s here without the need for implements of war and all this waste and all that.

I always tell Carmen, "Art is the prison." The criminal justice system in America is the last vestige of slavery in the black community, and how much money does the total criminal justice system make in America? I

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mean, from the judges, lawyers, all legitimate people-- nothing wrong with them--the police, planners, architects, builders of the penitentiaries, the people who supply the stuff. Now, we need places to keep these prisoners, because we raise some bad-thinking people. But if there was peace tomorrow, we'd have troubled times, like we're having right now, because there's less need for war. But if there was the cessation of crime tomorrow, the insurance companies who get to sell two cars or two TVs, the brokers who get their commissions-- You think about every legitimate, honest, upstanding citizen who makes money off the fact that people do crime, if they all lost their jobs. See, we need crime. That's why crack can come in .

I saw Bush say he's going to rebuild Homestead. But when they caught [Eugene] Hasenfus in that drug arms plane, when they shot it down in Nicaragua and they let him out, and he said, "Yeah, we take arms to Nicaragua for the Contras, but we don't believe in coming back with empty planes, so we bring cocaine back from Hall's Ranch in Costa Rica." And I saw one night on TV infrared cameras showed the plane land at Homestead Air Force Base, go through a remote part of the runway. They offloaded it into some trucks that said "Ramiro's Seafood Wholesalers" or something, and the truck drove right off the base. I

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mean, the American government is involved in drug smuggling. It's big business. It helps suppress black anger about what ' s going on in the community and in the country by turning black on black. Put all these vicious fools out there killing each other and stealing your goods and making you ashamed of black people, making you hate black people, making you not come together as a community. It's all planned. They couldn't just say, "Oh, this is just some coincidence." That's just a diabolical plan where crackers make money and we eliminate ourselves and they know it. And we're stupid enough to be involved in it. But if somebody's not doing something against it to pull people's coats, maybe art isn't strong enough.

You said Super fly. I mean, the most black folk got out of Superf ly that I noticed was they were wearing cocaine spoons on chains and guys were buying those hats with hair hanging down in the back so they could look like Ron O. Neal . Now, to me, it's one of my favorite movies because it's full of symbolism from start to finish. MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: But black people that I talk to, a lot of them didn't see that symbolism. Maybe because I deal in symbology as an artist, from the beginning to the end, I

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saw nothing but symbols. But a lot of people misinterpreted. A lot of people saw that as a sign to escalate the cocaine business on every level. To be hip, to have chains with coke spoons around your necks, and to go off and say, "What's happenin?" and be cool. I mean, they got all the wrong-- All the front people saw it as a way to have a new front game, the cocaine trade. MASON: Yeah. Was the drug culture part of the black artists--?

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TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE SEPTEMBER 5, 1992

MASON: Okay. I guess, we were talking about the drug

culture. And you were saying- -

RIDDLE: Like I said, amongst the artists that Carmen and

I have been speaking of, none of them were-- I can't say

that either. As the movement of black artists grew, there

were a couple of guys that I can't-- One of the guys'

names almost came to my head, but--

MASON: You don't have to name any names.

RIDDLE: No, but I'm just saying, there were a couple of

people who--

CARMEN RIDDLE: But I remember going to that party. You

know, the Bohanon party?

RIDDLE: Mm-hmm.

MASON: Oh, Gloria Bohanon?

CARMEN RIDDLE: Uh-huh.

RIDDLE: And George.

CARMEN RIDDLE: And her husband was a musician. He had a

lot of musicians there. And I remember some of them were

taking drugs, and the artists said, "Uh-oh, we'd better

get out of here."

RIDDLE: Yeah, I remember one time I was looking for all

of my friends and they had disappeared. That always was a

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sign that you were missing something if you went to a party and all your friends disappeared. I mean, that went back to teenage times. So I went looking for them, and they were all out in the front on Gloria's wall in front of her house. There was about ten people there. And I saw Dan [Concholar] , so I went and sat next to Dan. The funniest thing-- The people who were out there, they weren' t--like Carmen said--artists, but they were at the party.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Musicians and Hollywood types. RIDDLE: Yeah, and they were snorting cocaine. What they had was a dollar bill, or some kind of bill, with cocaine on it and they had another dollar bill rolled up. They were passing it down this row of people and it got to Dan. And there was a guy sitting next to me too. And it got to Dan, and I heard him say, "Here, man. " And Dan said--he would always talk so cool-- "No thanks, man. That's too heavy for me." And I thought that I would fall out laughing, boy. But that was basically how the artists were .

CARMEN RIDDLE: They would take a bottle of wine around. RIDDLE: Kept some paisano's cheap wine. A half gallon. CARMEN RIDDLE: Paisano. Just drink wine and talk. And they really didn't need drugs. RIDDLE: They might smoke some pot, but they didn't do

131

heavy drugs.

Now, there was a couple of artists later that were really good artists, but they drifted in and out because they were using heroin. I just remember that we had a show at UCLA one time, and two of the guys in that show were really good artists. One of them was a pure heroin junkie. I mean, he was one of those nodding-out junkies. He was one of the people who said one time at one of the things at Brockman [Gallery] that the-- How do you phrase it? It was about the loss of human potential. The wasted human potential. It was the first time I heard it said that poetically, about how all these black people never got a chance to be what they could have been, or should have been, were just cast off as wasted potential because their skin color was wrong. I mean, those are the basic tenets of racism that you just disregard people because of what they look like.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, I thought you meant because they were taking drugs.

RIDDLE: No. But I mean, that's a phase of the waste that takes place when people don't get a chance to explore what they should really be about.

MASON: You think of people like Charlie Parker maybe who were not necessarily interested in drugs as, like, consciousness expanding. It was more of an escape, I

132

guess.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Plus the life they led. They had to go

from town to town. In those days, those musicians were

like that. They had to see different people every night.

It was just a hard life.

RIDDLE: It was an acceptable part of the behavior of

musicians of that era, because most of them were junkies.

I mean, if you look at Miles Davis's autobiography and he

talks about different bands he had with Sonny Rollins and

one of the Heath brothers, all of them were junkies.

CARMEN RIDDLE: All of them were junkies.

RIDDLE: And when they took their break, that's what they

did--go out and shoot up. You know, there was a lot of

pressure to be a drug addict if you were playing every

night live jazz in the bebop era. That was just part of

it.

CARMEN RIDDLE: I think of all of the artistic things,

that visual artists have this less. He's probably less of

a drug addict than a writer. They say most writers have a

tendency to be alcoholics because it's a very lonely

thing. But for some reason, the visual artists, the ones

that I've met, were not into drugs.

RIDDLE: I've known very few that were into cocaine. Not

an exception was [Herman] "Kofi" Bailey, because he was a

death-wish artist.

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CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, he was an alcoholic for the most part.

RIDDLE: Pills and alcohol. I mean, he'd drop pills and

then he'd drink.

CARMEN RIDDLE: But a genius, a pure genius at his art.

RIDDLE: When he had money, he always had a full pint of

scotch and one that was almost empty, or it might have

been vodka he drank.

CARMEN RIDDLE: But I think he would have been anyway. He

had so many problems at Spelman [College] .

MASON: I understand, though, that he taught Emory

Douglas?

RIDDLE: He was at Spelman for a while.

MASON: Oh, okay.

CARMEN RIDDLE: They put him off the campus in his later

days because he was harassing--

RIDDLE: Everybody.

CARMEN RIDDLE: --the girls at the place. They had to

tell him not to come back to the campus, and then when he

died, they gave him a eulogy.

RIDDLE: He used to come over here and drink and sit out.

But at the end, he was incoherent. And when I first met

him, he was incoherent. He was in Claude Booker's car

that night.

CARMEN RIDDLE: But he could really-- Boy, he was a great

artist.

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RIDDLE: Dropped pills at ten in the morning and was

drinking by ten thirty.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Great artist.

RIDDLE: I could tell he was the kind of person who was

trying to kill himself for whatever reason.

CARMEN RIDDLE: But all the others — Jacob Lawrence, Charles

[E.] White, Romare Bearden--I don't think of them as being

abusers of any kind of intoxicants, really. Do you?

RIDDLE: A good example is Bill.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Bill?

RIDDLE: I mean. Bill Pajaud. He told me as recently as

yesterday-- We were talking about those Saturday

excursions we used to go on. He said, "John, if it hadn't

been for those, I'd probably just be an old drunk now,

because all I did was drink." And when he started doing

art, he put his bottle aside and started--

CARMEN RIDDLE: It's therapy.

RIDDLE: He'd take up that therapy instead of the negative

escapism. See, they've both got escapism, but one's

positive.

CARMEN RIDDLE: I don't know if you've heard of Benny

Andrews?

MASON: Yeah, he ' s a New York artist.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, no. He ' s a Georgia artist, but he

lives in New York. They're so proud of him here because

135

he came from south Georgia.

RIDDLE: They had an article in the paper about him the

other day.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He was a-- What do you call [a person]

that works in the field?

RIDDLE: A sharecropper.

CARMEN RIDDLE: A sharecropper, yeah.

RIDDLE: He and his brother are artists.

CARMEN RIDDLE: His brother just died.

RIDDLE: His brother just died.

CARMEN RIDDLE: His brother's a writer.

RIDDLE: But I'll tell you the difference between artists

here when I first moved here. These artists were so

selfish, for the most part, so into themselves, that they

could never form an arts association. They tried. It was

the Black Artists of Atlanta, another BAAism. They tried,

but it was never like with Alonzo and them. It was like

other things .

MASON: What were they competing for?

RIDDLE: On the social level more than as artists.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah, because, you see, it's the South.

RIDDLE: Don't share your knowledge with other artists,

because they might be able to do as well as you in your

field. I mean, all that. Shoot, Lev Mills was the

classic. I asked him to show me how to silk-screen, and

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he said, "I don't have time to show you how to silk- screen." So I went and learned it somewhere else. But if somebody had asked me and I had the knowledge, I would have said, "Yeah, come on by and the next time I screen, I'll let you sit in and you can check it out." But it wasn't that, and it wasn't like-- They lived better. They had nicer houses here and they had wall-to-wall carpet. CARMEN RIDDLE: They didn't believe in the artistic life. RIDDLE: They didn't drink wine and sit on the floor. CARMEN RIDDLE: No.

RIDDLE: And they didn't talk about anything, and it was boring.

MASON: Did they have full-time jobs and then paint? Is that--?

CARMEN RIDDLE: Yeah. RIDDLE: Yeah.

MASON: I see. Were they getting exposure in galleries or anything? Or crafts? Or anything?

RIDDLE: Yeah, to an extent. I mean, they were doing as well as any--

CARMEN RIDDLE: It's just their lifestyle's completely different from the artists on the West Coast. RIDDLE: It was more cliquish.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Because on the West Coast, you're admired for being different and being an artist. Coming so close

137

to Hollywood, I think, too, that has a lot to do with it. You're given respect for art. Whereas back here, they're closer to slavery, and the main thing is to get away from anything that isn't academic. I mean, what they consider academic-- Like we are here with all the black colleges, and so they want to-- The social academic life is more-- RIDDLE: They would spend $3,000 on some outfits for an art soiree and then get to the soiree and see $500 on the art and say, "Oh, I can't pay that much for that." But they would pay $500 for a dress or a suit to go to the thing.

CARMEN RIDDLE: It's just a different way of thinking. RIDDLE: And plus Los Angeles is a pace-setting place. California. California sets trends. I heard somebody the other day say-- They were talking about Proposition 13 and how it's devastated California's tax base. "They need to help parts of the problem they got right now." And the guy said, "But you'd better watch out, because it started in California. And things like that, that start in California, have a tendency to cross the United States."

So I think we were beneficiaries of a much higher energy place than this. Because I came here and I had so much energy, and then we used to talk about our batteries would start running down. And you really need to go somewhere else to recharge.

138

CARMEN RIDDLE: And our kids, coming from California, it was good for them, because they picked up the academic part here. And I think you can always go back to California and have fun. MASON: The lifestyle.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Have fun. But they picked up-- Like they all got scholarships and became different things, a lawyer and all that kind of stuff. So they got that part from here, and they could always return to California, although they haven't. But the California lifestyle is so laid- back. And our oldest child was a beachcomber, Tony [Anthony Thomas Riddle] . RIDDLE: With dreds.

CARMEN RIDDLE: With dredlocks. And then when he got here, he changed and became a more responsible person. And now he runs a cable station in Minneapolis, which is-- I mean, you know, it didn't take away from his artistic part; it's just that he can make money now. MASON: He was doing assemblages? RIDDLE: Jewelry. MASON: Jewelry.

RIDDLE: He's always been like-- He used to be a street merchant. He'd make jewelry and sell it. But now-- CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, that was in California. RIDDLE: Now he says that that was the hardest time in his

139

life.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He hated it. He said, "I hated it."

RIDDLE: He said he may never make jewelry again.

CARMEN RIDDLE: He used to make us think that was what he

wanted to do. But that was the California part of him,

and now he's a very responsible person. He's still

artistic, but he's doing something else. You know, he's a

computer type of person and he's making money with it.

MASON: We were talking about being afraid of New York

earlier. What did you mean by that?

CARMEN RIDDLE: We have a daughter in New York.

RIDDLE: Well, only that-- I mean, at the time it was '58,

'59.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, you mean for art?

MASON: Yeah.

RIDDLE: I had been out of the service two years, had at

least two kids [Anthony Thomas Riddle and Deborah Lynn

Riddle] . And New York was like a big unknown. I had

never been out of California east, not really. And all of

a sudden to pack up your whole family and just head for

the great unknown that was New York just seemed a somewhat

scary proposition. Whereas, it turned out that by '73, we

did exactly that. We sold everything that we had — house,

cars- -gave away what we couldn't sell, packed up four

daughters [Deborah Lynn, Shawn Denise, Pamela Ann, and

140

Spring Robin Riddle], and headed for Trinidad. The

weirdest thing of all, after making that long flight down

there-- We got to the airport and the airport was like a

bustling airport, exciting. A half hour later we're the

only people in the airport, sitting on our luggage. The

place was a ghost town. It's eleven thirty at night. We

didn't know that those airports are only hustle-bustle

when the plane of the day comes in.

MASON : Yeah .

RIDDLE: And then people came up and said in this funny

kind of language we had never heard at all--English was

almost a foreign language-- "Can we help you?"

CARMEN RIDDLE: They were checking us out, because they

couldn't understand why we were there.

RIDDLE: [imitates an unintelligible language] And we

were like, "Jesus Christ, what's happening?" Here we are

these six strangers stranded in the middle of nowhere, six

thousand miles, twice as far as New York from home, don't

know a soul, can't understand what these people were

saying.

MASON : Yeah .

RIDDLE: So we ended up doing the same. Maybe we would

have been better off to go to New York with Danny [Daniel

LaRue Johnson] .

CARMEN RIDDLE: We stayed there a while, and then we came

141

here.

MASON: What did you do in Trinidad?

RIDDLE: Nothing.

CARMEN RIDDLE: We lived in this beautiful house on a

hill.

RIDDLE: Overlooking--

CARMEN RIDDLE: We went to the carnival. It was in

February.

RIDDLE: Right next door to the Mighty Sparrow, the

favorite musician of carnival, selected each February. We

always liked that.

CARMEN RIDDLE: We had a good time, and the people were

real friendly, real friendly.

RIDDLE: Now, if we had been con people, we could have

been rich today. Because everybody saw this family of

four daughters, and we had no visible means of support, so

they figured we had great wealth. We always had people

inviting us to these nice cocktail parties in backyards

with wealthy people and bankers. "These are the Riddles.

They just got here from California." And everybody's all

jumping all over you and wanting us to invest money, open

accounts in banks, and we ain't got quarters. But, I

mean, if we had been slick con people with a plan, we

might have been able to pull something off.

MASON: Did you make any art out of that experience or

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during that time?

RIDDLE: No, I just read. It turned out to be like a long

vacation. I read books, and we sat on our porch all day.

CARMEN RIDDLE: We went to the carnival at night.

RIDDLE: Went to carnival at night.

CARMEN RIDDLE: It was amazing because those people danced

through the streets, and you'd hear the music in all the

taxis, everywhere.

RIDDLE: Uh-huh, it was great.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Everybody just dancing through. Did you

ever see Black Orpheus?

MASON: No.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Oh, gosh. You should look at that. It's

a great movie. It's about the carnival in Rio.

MASON: I see.

CARMEN RIDDLE: The same thing.

RIDDLE: It was carnival and you went to "jump-ups" every

night. And one night--

MASON: What is that?

RIDDLE: That's like what they call a party.

MASON: Oh.

RIDDLE: And you go and you jump up and down. And we let

our kids go to the beach. We always laugh now when

someone says, "Where are your daughters?" She'd say, "Oh,

they went to the beach." "They went to the beach?

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Alone?" Like nobody ever went to the beach alone. CARMEN RIDDLE: Then we started getting scared. We said, "Oh, my god!"

RIDDLE: "Our kids are gone forever I" But it was an interesting experience.

And then we came back to Miami . And those Cubans that left Castro's Cuba, they want to act more white than white people. So they were worse racists than white people.

MASON: Yeah, they were real conservative Republicans. RIDDLE: So we stayed there about a week and we cut out. We came here because we heard this was "little New York." CARMEN RIDDLE: Because there was a black mayor [Maynard Jackson] .

RIDDLE: It wasn't little New York. CARMEN RIDDLE: Uh-uh.

MASON: Yeah. You get the impression that Atlanta is a black city, but then you wonder how much black people really control in terms of the economics. RIDDLE: Yeah, that's where the breakdowns come. CARMEN RIDDLE: And what kind of black people? RIDDLE: Political power--they control it. But in terms of economics, it's no contest. That's why at the beginning when we were talking about Billy Paine and Maynard and them-- I mean, those people just took the

144

Olympic's money and the Olympic's operation and said, "No.

You got us the city. Now get out of the way. We're gonna

run it. "

CARMEN RIDDLE: They Still don't got the [inaudible].

RIDDLE: They said that in the papers, too.

CARMEN RIDDLE: They did? Today?

RIDDLE: Not about the [inaudible]. But that they told

the commissioner, Michael Lomax, who's an exponent of

cultural arts and things here-- In fact, he's the

spearhead behind the National Black Arts Festival. And

they told him--

MASON: He isn't related to the Los Angeles Lomax?

RIDDLE: Same people.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Uh-huh.

RIDDLE: They used to live right there on Cimarron

[Street] and Adams [Boulevard] when I was growing up.

Melanie [Lomax] , and Wilhemina [Lomax] , the woman who sued

the [Los Angeles] Times for the job, because she was a

reporter-- They had that newspaper-- What's that paper?

The Sentinel?

CARMEN RIDDLE: No.

RIDDLE: The Atlanta-- The L.A. what? Wasn't that the

Sentinel?

CARMEN RIDDLE: The Sentinel or the [California] Eagle.

But that wasn't what they were--

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RIDDLE: But she had a black newspaper.

CARMEN RIDDLE: They refused to hire her at the Times.

RIDDLE: As a reporter.

CARMEN RIDDLE: I wonder if Melanie ever became a lawyer.

RIDDLE: She got eleven years' back pay.

MASON : Wow !

RIDDLE: Plus the job.

MASON : Wow !

RIDDLE: So, yeah. Michael's one of them. There's about

five kids.

MASON: I'm still not sure who controls the Olympics now.

Is it a big corporation or--?

RIDDLE: White people.

MASON: Or is it a corporate interest?

RIDDLE: Well, it's called the Atlantic Committee for the

Olympic Games, ACOG. It's under the control of white

people. There's some black token people, but the white

people make all the decisions. You know, anytime it's--

Like my father said, "Whenever there's a pile of money,

Johnny, there's always gonna be some criminals around."

And you're looking at the kind of money L.A. Olympics was

supposed to have generated, in the billions and billions.

You probably have people who just follow Olympics all

around the world, and every four years they get a cut of

the pie. It wouldn't be unreasonable, because there's a

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lot of expertise in Atlanta now--with the Olympic Games in Los Angeles that came here directly from Barcelona. So you've got that group of people. Then you've got people who right now, like we're doing this interview, they're sitting up talking, cutting deals on their share of the pie and their middleman fee and their commission for hooking up deals and all that. So by the time the people find out two weeks before the Olympics, they'll be going around, "Where's my part?" And there ain't nothing. You can't even get a ticket then.

MASON: Yeah. And so there's no organization that will make black people more aware of what ' s happening? , CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, that's what the mayor is trying to do and everything. You know, they're trying. RIDDLE: That's why he don't have no power. They left him outside. They told him they couldn't do nothing. They told Michael--

CARMEN RIDDLE: The city council tries. They're all in there trying. But the thing is-- What they do is, like with the city council trying, they hire the city council president's sister and wife and all that so that they're-- They say, "Okay." You know, they can be bought, too. So it's all kind of crafty. Not that bad, though. We make it sound so horrible. RIDDLE: Well, actually, it makes me mad, because I can

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see that if you're not like an aggressive hustler--

CARMEN RIDDLE: It's probably like that in any city.

RIDDLE: Like right on. You quit your other job and your

full-time job is to be in these Olympics making some

dough. If you don't take it as that kind of an approach,

there ' s not anything for you . And the other people feel

like, "Well, I'll just sit back here and benefit."

Suppose I was an artist who wanted to do some Olympic T-

shirts or posters or-- Because it's all for this giant

influx of people. Well, they're going to arrest you.

They're going to run you off the streets. They're going

to tell you you can't do this because you're not

authorized to make money off of the Olympics. Only the

"in" people can make money off the Olympics. You know,

this is supposed to be the land of free entrepreneurship.

You know, creating business.

CARMEN RIDDLE: Well, you're getting to do something in

it!

RIDDLE: Yeah, but I mean that's only because I knew

somebody.

CARMEN RIDDLE: I know. [laughter]

RIDDLE: What about the guy who's a better artist than me

and would be much more enthusiastic than I've been to this

point--

CARMEN RIDDLE: Thank goodness you knew somebody.

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RIDDLE: --who don't know nobody. He don't have a chance.

CAP?MEN RIDDLE: It's always the way.

RIDDLE: That's not-- It doesn't make it right.

MASON: What kind of