A Black Portrait, in 20,000 Pieces

Know the right people, ask the right questions and Mayme A. Clayton will gladly invite you in to wander through her semi-secret treasure trove.

If you do, she’ll first wind you through the curio-packed rooms of her modest home on the fringes of West Adams. Shelves buckling with books and videos, walls and side tables cluttered with recent snapshots and hand-tinted portraits of another era are merely teasers.

Out back, up five crumbling cement steps, past shaggy trees, a rusting bicycle and a wild tangle of desert succulents, Clayton nimbly negotiates the path in purple suede hiking boots. She slips a key into the lock of her garage side door, which opens onto a startling sight: Harsh fluorescent tubes beam down on towers of books, rising floor to ceiling. They snake, stairstep style, along the wall. They geyser up at the center of the room. They are piled precariously on tables. Amid them are stacks of musty papers--sheet music, old letters, stray photographs, lobby cards. Videos tower like pillars. Photo albums crowd on a makeshift shelf. Bankers’ boxes sub as filing cabinets.

On this humid afternoon, Clayton engages in a playful game of show-and-tell, pausing over some highlights. No need for decimal systems, memory serves. She sinks her hand between two particularly prodigious piles, fishing out a slim, signed 1773 edition of “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” by poet and ex-slave Phillis Wheatley stowed in a box secured with a gold Christmas cord. It is the first published book by an African American.

Signed first editions of Zora Neale Hurston’s fiction and folklore share shelf space with aging, exquisite editions of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry, the essays of W.E.B. DuBois and the fiction of Richard Wright. In a gust of dust and mildew, Clayton, riffling through the card catalog in her head, puts her hands on letters, some sheathed in plastic, others open to the elements: a note typed by Josephine Baker; handwritten correspondence--yellowed and fading--from George Washington Carver on letterhead from Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. And with a conspiratorial wink, she passes under the light a fragile text, the memoir, nearly a century and a half old, of ex-slave and abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

The Western States Black Research and Educational Center, as Clayton has named this expansive, idiosyncratic collection, is her close-to-the-heart endeavor to preserve African American memorabilia. In what is arguably the largest such collection on the West Coast, Clayton figures she has amassed upward of 20,000 pieces--more than 500 films, 300 videos and thousands of books and magazines, along with sheet music, tracts and pamphlets. There are framed advertisements for hair care products and breakfast cereal, old movie and jazz stills.

But there are no sprinklers or fire extinguishers. No climate control. Insurance? “We need to have more,” she says. Security? “My dog,” she declares, placing her folded fists on her hips. “I don’t need anything more than that. Some guy jumped over the fence, and I came out and Tootie had him pinned against the wall!”

Today is a particularly busy day in a particularly busy season for Clayton. Sporting in a bright orange sweatshirt and kente-patterned beads, she threads herself through the narrow curves of crawl space, with an urgent sense of duty. Normally, around this time of year, she is getting ready for the annual Reel Black Cowboy Film Festival at the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, assembling films and other related period ephemera. But lately, Clayton has begun the serious first steps of planning for a permanent home for her hard-won collection, assisted by her oldest son, Avery.

A retired librarian, Clayton, 78, has been building this collection since the early 1970s. It’s a vast and eclectic library that attracts collectors, writers, actors and scholars from across the country. Actor-director Ivan Dixon (“Hogan’s Heroes”) has spread the word in his circle about Clayton’s holdings. Film and TV historian Donald Bogle considers Clayton’s collection “unmatchable and invaluable.” And Alex Haley, who knew a little something about the importance of a connect-the-dots legacy, visited, then inscribed a note inside the center’s copy of “Roots”: “For my brothers and sisters, I deeply share your sentiments that our history should be preserved.”

Over the years, Clayton has been wooed and courted. She’s entertained offers that sounded too good to be true from universities and from various social organizations institutions, public and private, all earnest efforts to help get these fragile books, records and priceless papers safely stored. But Clayton hasn’t always been so happy with the follow-through. She’s been even less enthusiastic about her would-be helpers’ plans. “So many have wanted to pitch in. But,” she says wagging a finger, “you have to be careful about phonies.”

Over the last few months, though, the wariness has dissipated bit by bit as she and Avery, an artist, have begun more actively to explore what it might take to construct, from the ground up, her own facility--a community center with her research collection as its heart.

Starting in May, strategy meetings with community activists, filmmakers and librarians began in earnest: “We had been thinking about a way to try to connect with a university. We’ve talked with USC and UCLA. I like the prestige that would come with the university or an institution like the Getty,” says Clayton, the unspoken “but” as heavy as the humidity in the air. “You just don’t know what is deep in their brain, what they really mean. They just talk about ‘having it.’ ”

The object, though, says Clayton, has always been to share it.

The art of collecting these stories, images and songs involves more than merely amassing stacks of books and paper. “Collectors are important,” says Bogle, “because their great enthusiasm and great passion usually puts them way ahead of the curve in the culture in general.” In other words, they find import in castoffs that others don’t value--or even notice. For Clayton, collecting is a way of retelling a story, passing down a people’s history that in her time had either been skewed or ignored.

“I’d worked at UCLA for 15 years in the law library and was put on loan to Afro-American studies when they were building that department in the late ‘60s,” Clayton recalls, carefully balancing herself on a tall stool behind her book and paper stacks. With a master’s in library science from Vermont’s Goddard College and a doctorate in humanities from now-closed Sierra University in Santa Monica, Clayton was selected to help. “The advisory committee didn’t think that black students needed retrospective books, history.... “ she says. “They wanted contemporary authors. They only wanted to deal with the present.”

Clayton paid them no mind. She began paging through catalogs, contacting bookstores that dealt in rare and used books. She began building a collection that reflected the nuances of the black experience in America. Those efforts put her in contact with a wide world of collectors and antiquity experts and inspired her side hobby.

After resigning from UCLA in the ‘70s, Clayton took a job at Universal Books in Hollywood. “They had a huge black book collection,” gushes Clayton like a schoolgirl with a crush. She expanded the store’s holdings and eventually became partner. When the store hit hard times, the partners divided its inventory, and Clayton left with “every black book in the store.”

Those 4,000 books went into the garage, “and it just kept snowballing.” The Western States Black Research and Educational Center was born. Clayton got the word out, talking to schools and civic organizations. She bought film libraries and inherited old photographs and stows of books or records that people had crammed into attics or basements. “A grandfather might die and the grandkids don’t know what to do with the stuff. I’d tell ‘em, ‘I’m happy to take them.’ ” Too often, she says, when people die in this community--entertainers, teachers, athletes, lawyers--their collections just disappear. Gone. “That story’s gone forever.”

Victoria Steele, head of the department of special collections in the Young Research Center at UCLA, knows all about the nature of ephemera, how easy it is for eras to slip through one’s hands. For some time, she’s known of Mayme Clayton and her remarkable collection and has recently been advising the Claytons. “She’s had a very clear vision for years, and those are the best kind of collectors,” says Steele, but fine collections fueled by such passion and direction are always difficult to let go of. “It’s wrenching to part with something so personal or that is such a signifier ... but something has to be done. That smell when you walk into the room, the mildew, that is not a good sign.”

Clayton doesn’t have to be reminded. She knows it’s time. She’s surrounded by evidence of evolution--the cycle of a neighborhood, a yellowed book, her body. But in thinking about the future, “I just have to make sure we wouldn’t be giving up anything,” she explains, busy over her bankers’ box files, searching for the awe-inspiring curio, another missing link.

What has been remarkable to many is the manner in which Clayton has more than made do. “Sometimes we get caught up in ‘if I don’t get that grant ... I can’t do it,’ ” says Johnie Scott, associate professor of Pan African studies at Cal State Northridge, who’s known Clayton since his days with the Watts Writers Workshop. “She’s a griot. Literally as well as figuratively. She holds our stories.”

“It was like the ancestors were talking to you,” says actress and singer Jenifer Lewis, recalling a recent visit to the collection. “Even the smell was delicious!” There is energy you get from touching things that are old. Things that changed humanity. I ain’t gonna lie to you. I couldn’t even put a face on slavery, but you come out so moved. My cells were dancing.”

Avery Clayton, 55, knows the effect. He and his younger brothers, Renai and Lloyd, grew up watching their mother sail in with new acquisitions and, remarkably, fit them into her ever-burgeoning stacks. “She’d get a little money and buy a book here and there,” bits and pieces toward a grander vision. “Our parents instilled a sense of social purpose,” he says. “We would show up at marches with picket signs, talk about events of the day. In that atmosphere, we knew about the history.”

Perhaps that’s why the notion of keeping the artifacts close by--accessible as, say, a closet or basement--is so important to the Claytons. They envision a full-service neighborhood center, rather than shelves in a library or museum collection. Building such a center, would almost be like having her collection at home. “But,” says Avery, “you’re not ready until you’re ready.” Avery’s presence, say those close to Clayton, has helped her warm to the notion of exploring possibilities. “Avery is a trusted and loyal son,” says UCLA’s Steele, “whose interest is in line with her own.”

And Avery knows what’s ahead. First, a feasibility study that could cost as much as $70,000, he says. They’ll need an inventory and an appraisal. They’ll have to move the collection to an interim facility. And that’s just for starters. “Then we can begin looking for funding.”

But the dreaming has already begun. Avery unrolls a drawing of a building. He smooths it out amid tubes of acrylics and pots of turpentine on his studio worktable in Altadena. With the eraser tip of a pencil, he points out the amenities: exhibition rooms, studio space, a cafe. An engraved marker out front facing Crenshaw Boulevard, their preferred site, would announce: “The Mayme A. Clayton Library and Cultural Center.”

Avery has his moments of uncertainty. “There are times I think, who are you to think you can do this?’ It’s so big. But I remind myself, she deserves to see this building in her lifetime.”

He leans closer to the pencil sketch. The building would be a cylinder of stucco trimmed in copper. Three stories. “There’s the gift shop, classrooms, a print shop. And of course, the book and memorabilia collection.” Adjacent to it all, there’s a garden, full of shaggy trees and wild with desert succulents. It’s right beside the place, where, just like always, “They can come in and read,” says Clayton, “as much as they want to.”