A BITTERSWEET HOMECOMING
Queen Esther Marrow performs tonight at CNU, on land taken from her community decades ago by eminent domain
In 1959, Queen Esther Marrow was 19 and yearning to escape Newport News and the daily reminders that her hometown was in the Jim Crow South.
She moved to New York City. She was discovered by Duke Ellington. She trained her voice to soar on grand stages, becoming an international jazz singer.
While she was delighting in those adventures up North, the grandmother who’d raised her, and her neighbors in the Shoe Lane community of Newport News, were being uprooted by the city’s racist use of eminent domain. Christopher Newport University was being built on the land of a thriving Black community.
Tonight, Marrow, now 82, returns.
For the first time in 63 years, she will perform in the area where she first learned to sing: in a church,
inside what is now the Ferguson Center for the Arts at CNU.
“I want to be as proud and dignified as I possibly can on that stage for my grandma, for all those people who had to move who were underpaid for their property,” she said.
Marrow grew up in a brick,
ranch-style house off Route 60. Her grandmother, Roxanna Marrow Johnson, had all nine of her children in that house, and the property included a cornfield next to a stand of pine trees. The family had a few horses, raised chickens and hogs. There was a small smokehouse, too. She liked singing in the choir at the United House of Prayer for All People but had no ambition of becoming a professional singer.
When she wanted to leave, she received help from an uncle living in New York City.
“I wanted to get away from here. I wanted to get away and to be free,” she said, about living in a city where schools, businesses and opportunities were segregated. “I didn’t feel free here.”
She got a job at a dress house that made high-end clothing for stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and she hummed and sang while she worked. One day, one of the designers suggested she sing “Happy Birthday” to the firm’s manager.
She did. When she finished, the manager said he wanted her to meet a woman he knew who lived on Central Park West and had connections to the music industry. When the woman heard Marrow
sing, she fell in love with her voice.
“And she had a friend that knew Duke Ellington,” Marrow recalled with a wry smile. Ellington listened to Marrow sing “How Great Thou Art” and invited her to join him on stage at a San Francisco concert. She started touring the globe with “The Duke” and, after several years, met actor and activist Harry Belafonte, who introduced her to Martin Luther King Jr. Marrow then worked with King, singing at civil rights rallies with Aretha Franklin.
She shared stages with Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Mahalia Jackson. She met a pope and three U.S. presidents. In 2015, Newport News presented her with a “Resolution of Recognition”
that noted her contribution to the civil rights movement.
Marrow’s grandmother had moved to a house on Roanoke Avenue in Newport News, where Marrow now lives. She
feels a sense of loss whenever she passes through or visits what used to be the Shoe Lane community and finds the sights, smells, people of her childhood are gone; she gets angry when
recalling that the residents were underpaid for their properties.
“It wasn’t right, and to know I’ll be standing on a stage and in a building that was on our land, I feel good in one sense,” Marrow said. “And I feel bad in another.”
She will use her show to do what she has made her mission: to uplift and bring people together through her music. Her songs will be about the African American experience.
“And I’m happy that I’m thinking Grandma will be looking down and smiling.”
Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia. com
IF YOU GO
When: 8 tonight
Where: Ferguson Center for the Arts, 1 Avenue of the Arts, Newport News
Tickets: Start at $15
Details: fergusoncenter.org