If you've ever hunted treasure, you know what it is like to rush toward a sparkling object only to be enticed to a shinier one just beyond or around the bend. This is the hunt in a crowded junk or antique venue, and the same if you are searching around low brush and in the next dry ravine for stone tools. Even a wild mushroom hunt is an adventure where progress can peter out at one locale while something else calls loudly from the next thicket. A treasure like an unbroken Clovis point or enough black morel for dinner yields months of satisfaction.
I was researching a 1900 Tennessee newspaper for one thing and was so entranced by another that I set aside my project to investigate a new one. The article entitled Negro Student was published in The Daily Leader (Lexington, KY), 29 April 1900. I was not taken by the fact that a college would dismiss the student because she was not a white woman. Expected in 1900. However, the story left out something remarkably important, the woman's name. As far as the newspaper editor was concerned, "she was a Negress", "was quiet in her demeanor", "would pass in any circle for a white woman", and "the wife of..." was description enough. The young woman was not entitled to a name. Her color defined her.
She was born Susie H Williams and married a prominent Black businessman named John Beale Bosley on 30 Nov 1898 when about twenty years old. They lived in Nashville, Tennessee. Although I could find a great deal in ancestry and newspaper research about John B Bosley, as is often the case with men, I found only enough about her to both admire her accomplishments and empathize with her losses. Here is what I know.
Susie was so light-skinned that she could pass in that society as a white woman. She enrolled in Peabody Normal College to study art, knowing that as a black woman she would be rejected at the school in Nashville. She willingly went through the humiliation of a public dismissal, perhaps believing that she could continue to learn about art until she was found out. But several years later in The Nashville Globe, Susie H Bosley shares that she spent three years studying art at the prestigious Eden Art Academy in Cincinnati. That must have happened between the years 1895 and 1909; Susie was born about 1877. Ohio colleges were some of the first in the nation to enroll black men and women. Although her qualifications look great in the advertisement, how well did the community respond to the art studio and Susie's aspirations?
Did Susie have several students? Was she able to support herself on this income? Was her art received with distinction? I've also researched the two names by which Susie might have signed her work. A quick search and I have not found anything. As of today, I do not know whether Susie used oil or pastels or worked instead in wood or pottery. Her name does not appear among notable Tennessee or Appalachian artists of that time period; however, I could delve further by asking the right people.
Susie died in November 1912, within two years of her husband's death. Whether she married again, was welcome in the Brooklyn, New York home of her husband's family, or had a child, I have not been able to ascertain. The only mention of her death, no obituary comes up as did the obituary of her husband, is the creditor notice in the newspaper. I easily located obituaries belonging to her husband's family in New York: Minta Bosley Allen Trotman and Catharine Allen Latimer. However, the last word on Susie's whereabouts is the 1909 newspaper advertisement about her Nashville art studio. I hope that she died with family near her.
Before I conclude my thoughts, I want to explain a couple reasons that Susie's life and work are important to me this week. (I've stewed over this for that long.) First, my grandmother, Hilda Martha Mueller Slayden, died in 1929, within an hour of the surgery that delivered my mother and her twin to the world. She was the same age as Susie when she died. I have found a great deal of information about Hilda, by internet research and in personal objects we own, such as the scrapbook she kept of her college years in St. Louis, Missouri. She was also an artist. We own pieces that she painted and made by hand. I can look at the painting of an infant signed by Hilda Mueller and know that she lives on.
But, Susie seems as forgotten as are many black men and women for whom we marched in the summer of 2020. Say her name! Brionna Taylor! Say his name! George Floyd! Police in the U.S. killed 164 Black people in the first 8 months of 2020. These are their names. (Part I: January-April)
Although we marched against police who continue since days of slavery to exact cruelty, injustice, and hatred on black men and women, we were also acknowledging that every human being has the right to peace and the pursuit of happiness. Every human being deserves recognition, not merely of his or her existence but also of his or her participation in the community and contributions to it.
I am remembering Susie H Williams Bosley right here today. Say her name! Susie H Williams Bosley!
I sincerely hope that someone, living in Nashville perhaps, has a work signed by Susie. May she be resting in eternal peace.