An Angel in Ascension

Artist and poet Malaika Favorite has returned to her roots in Louisiana

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Malaika Favorite discovered art when she attended first through third grades at the all-black Dutchtown Elementary. The school fostered her talent. “The teachers didn’t have any money for decorating the classrooms, so they hired me and my sister,” she said during a recent visit in her studio. “They’d give us three dollars to make a poster. We were in the second or third grade, but we could draw. That was my first job. We’d be up all night drawing that stuff. We wanted it to be perfect.”

Growing up in Geismar in Ascension Parish, the second of nine children, Favorite—christened Barbara—experienced rural life in the shadow of the petrochemical plants that lined the River Road. Her father Amos, who worked at the Ormet chemical plant, raised hogs in their backyard, both to eat and to sell. Her mother Rosemary used washboards to launder clothes. Hogs are a frequent motif in her work, and she’s done several series painted on wood-and-tin boards. “A washboard has a historic feeling, but it also means labor. It already tells a story.”

Favorite is both a poet and a visual artist whose work can be found in major collections in the U.S., including the Absolut Vodka collection; the Coca-Cola Company in Atlanta; and the Hartsfield-Jackson airport in Atlanta.

An artist member of the Baton Rouge Gallery, she recently had one-woman exhibits at the West Baton Rouge Museum in Port Allen and Southern University’s Hayden Hall gallery in Scotlandville.

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When she was a teenager, her father paid for a correspondence course in art, with monthly lessons sent to her through the mail. She recalled a day at Prairieville High School, which was segregated, when “a man came to the school and told us about the Freedom of Choice act,” which gave individual black students the choice to attend white schools. “Instead of integrating, they came to the black school and said, ‘Who wants to go to the white school?’” she said. 

“I was bored at the black school. All my friends had boyfriends, but I was a late bloomer. I wasn’t into sports. I was bored to death. 

“Several students wanted to go, but mine were the only parents who said yes. In eleventh grade, I started at Dutchtown High School. While I was there, they built East Ascension High, so I went there in my senior year.” 

“It was a scary thing, but I wasn’t gonna leave the school. I wasn’t the smartest student, but I thought I had as much right to go there as anybody else.”

Favorite describes herself as almost pathologically shy then, but she displayed an intrepid spirit. “Nothing about the experience was easy,” she said. The school-bus system wasn’t integrated, so she was picked up by “the black bus,” which dropped her off at the white school in the morning and picked her up in the afternoon.

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With some exceptions, she was treated harshly by her schoolmates. “There was constant harassment. A few girls treated me decent.” Once a dead bird was tossed at her. Another time, standing at her locker, she was pelted by eggs. “I’d sit down at a table in the cafeteria and everybody would get up and leave.”

The wider community didn’t like her changing schools either. “My brother was beat up,” she said. “At night, my father and brother would take turns sitting up with a shotgun. One night my brother yelled and we all woke up and ran to the living room. There was some commotion in the front. My father fired buckshot into the dark. The next morning we found a cross had been burned in the yard. 

“It was a scary thing, but I wasn’t gonna leave the school. I wasn’t the smartest student, but I thought I had as much right to go there as anybody else.”

She weathered the storms by sitting on a bench at recess, drawing pictures, which attracted the attention of younger students. “The little kids, first graders, weren’t prejudiced. They had no concept of racism. They’d say, ‘Draw me a horse!’  Other times, I’d sit in the library and read my Bible and try not to get upset.” 

In the library, she discovered H. W. Janson’s History of Art, a thick tome first published in 1962 that became a widely used college textbook. “At the black school we only had about three skinny little art books,” she said. “We got the white school’s hand-me-down textbooks.” 

She graduated from East Ascension High School in 1967 and enrolled at LSU with the help of small scholarships and student loans. “The black students were put in the basement in [women’s dorm] Evangeline Hall,” she said. “There were eight of us in a room with bunk beds. It was horrible.”

She struggled with her courses, but in art classes she found her niche. “I always took art, and it was so much fun. But we were taught that all you could do with a degree in art was teach, so I stayed and got my master’s.”  

Favorite’s interest in politics was awakened at LSU. Her plant-worker father “was an environmental activist,” she said. In 1991, People magazine published an article about Amos Favorite’s efforts to combat the toxic chemicals that poisoned the air in the area known as Cancer Alley. 

Following her father’s example, Favorite soon found her voice, protesting the Vietnam War and speaking at Free Speech Alley in front of the Student Union. “David Duke used to make speeches there, and I’d make speeches against his speeches.”

“A guy I was dating told me he thought that was a good name for me,” she said. “It means angel in Swahili.”

She joined the Baptist Student Union, which sent her to Salt Lake City and Hawaii on missions. Back home, she realized that white Baptist churches didn’t want her as a member. “One time I went to Istrouma Baptist with a white couple. An usher came up and told us, ‘You can’t come in here; kindly leave.’

“That stayed with me,” she said. “It was like a contradiction. I couldn’t believe Christians would behave like that. I stopped going to the Baptist Student Union and became militant. 

“During my militant era, I was so into the cause and the people. I decided we should have a Black Panther party in Baton Rouge. I wrote a letter to the New York chapter. I even went to New York and tried to meet with the Panthers. When I got home, there was a black car parked in front of my house. Two men in black suits and shades came up behind me. One of them pulled out a badge and said, ‘FBI.’ 

“They came into the house and said, ‘Are you Bobbie Malaika?’ They pulled out the letter I wrote to the Panthers and said, ‘We’re aware of your affiliation with the Black Panther Party.’ They had me on a list. They said, ‘We will be watching you.’ 

“I wrote a lot of real militant poetry with a lot of cursing. They pulled it out and said, ‘You wrote this stuff.’”

Nothing further came of that visit, and later she wrote an essay about the experience. “I’ve thought about trying to get a copy of my file [through the Freedom of Information Act],” she said.

She adopted the name Malaika, which had been popularized in a 1965 song by South African singer Miriam Makeba. “A guy I was dating told me he thought that was a good name for me,” she said. “It means angel in Swahili.”

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She completed her MFA in 1973 and was hired by Grambling State University in the northern part of the state, remaining for three years. While there, she traveled to Africa and India on Educators to Africa trips. “We attended lectures about the culture and art, visited museums,” said Favorite, who uses kente cloth and other African fabrics in her work. “We spent six weeks in Ghana and Togo. The whole time I was there I felt like I was high, like I was floating.” 

Returning to South Louisiana in 1977, she worked as an artist in schools in Napoleonville and Baton Rouge.” I taught part-time classes at LSU, but I could never get hired full time,” she said. At LSU, she met Anthony Kellman, who was studying for an MFA in creative writing. A native of Barbados, he has published novels and books of poetry. He and Favorite married, in 1988, and moved to Augusta, Georgia, in 1989, then Atlanta, in 1995, where they would live for the next eleven years. “Atlanta was the best thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “It was a breakthrough for my art, one place where I felt like my art was taken seriously.

“I had never thought about public art until then. I applied for commissions. I did twenty-eight paintings for a senior-citizens center. I did murals on Auburn Avenue, in the historical black district. I created twenty paintings on washboards for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.” 

“I’ve always felt it was important to have a place to create.”

In 2006, she moved back to Augusta, where she continued to work on both painting and poetry. “Augusta was good for my writing,” said Favorite, who has published three books of poems including Ascension (2016).

In 2016, Favorite returned to Geismar to relocate her art business at home and to help care for her mother, who is now 89. Her husband had retired the year before and returned to Barbados. “I go back and forth between here and Barbados,” she said. 

In Geismar, she works in a metal  studio she built on her family’s property. “I’ve always felt it was important to have a place to create,” she said. “That’s why I insisted on having this studio.”

She plans on having new work for her Baton Rouge Gallery show in December. “I’m considering a series of portraits called ‘Searching for the Ancestors,’” she said. “I will use images of living people juxtaposed with their known and imagined ancestors.

“We talk about and paint our black and African ancestors, but we pretend the white side does not exist. This will be a series of  paintings that reflect both sides of the African-American legacy—portraits of our ‘other’ ancestors, who were white.”  

malaikafavorite.artspan.com

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.