The beloved novel Porgy quietly turned 100 years old this year, nearly unnoticed by the literati. It’s a Charleston story of sex, drugs and violence in a fictional Gullah tenement that inspired global adaptations for theaters, opera houses and the silver screen.
Now, Charleston’s all-knowing historian Harlan Greene has uncovered key new clues that helped to spawn the classic in his new book, Porgy’s Ghost: The life and words of Dorothy Heyward and her contributions to an American classic.
It’s fairly well-known that Charleston-born writer DuBose Heyward drew the inspiration for his 196-page novel from the real-life James Island native Samuel Smalls. He served as the archetype for a disabled beggar, Porgy, who navigated Charleston in a goat-drawn cart.
Set in the make-believe Catfish Row, Porgy struggles to separate Bess from the hulking dockworker Crown, her violent and overbearing lover, and a fast-taking drug dealer, Sportin’ Life.
Heyward’s 1925 novel became a bestseller, but the 1935 three-act opera, Porgy and Bess, outshined, Porgy, the 1927 play, and the 1959 movie, Porgy and Bess.
The internationally acclaimed folk opera, Porgy and Bess, with music by George Gershwin and celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, produced memorable tunes like “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and “Summertime.”
None of the productions that followed Heyward’s novel, however, might have existed if it had not been for Heyward’s wife, Dorothy Kuhns Heyward, an Ohioan, who met her future husband in 1922 at a New Hampshire writers’ retreat.
That is the conclusion Greene, a meticulous archivist, reached in his new book.
A supportive wife
Researchers overlooked significant clues in Dorothy Heyward’s papers in the South Carolina Historical Society archives that showed she played a much larger role in writing the play and subsequent works than previously known, Greene said.
Being a perfect “Charleston gentleman,” Greene said, Heyward was committed to his job as an insurance salesman so he could support Dorothy, who he married in 1923, as well as his mother and his sister.
Dorothy Heyward, an already accomplished writer who had penned a Broadway play, however, insisted that her husband abandon his job, use his talent and commit to writing fulltime, Greene said.
After Heyward completed the novel and it was published, Dorothy recognized it as the foundation for “a great play,” Greene said. She secretly dramatized it, changing its tone to give a defeated Porgy the agency to pursue Bess after she leaves Charleston for New York City with the character Sportin’ Life.
In the novel, Heyward “peeked” across the color-wall into a Gullah neighborhood where Porgy had a summer of love and loss, Greene said.
“But Dorothy gives (the play) that great quixotic end that yes (a Black man) can go try to follow his dream against impossible odds. He is never going to find Bess, but he is going to die trying. For me, that really flips the entire story.”
Not much fanfare
So far this year, it appears none of the city’s major museums and book festivals or colleges remembered that Porgy, the novel, is in its centennial year. The only apparent recognition came recently when the Charleston Library Society invited Greene in for a sold-out book talk.
Nevertheless, Charlestonians will likely never stop talking about “Goat Sammy” Smalls and Maggie Barnes, who was Heyward’s inspiration for Bess. A crime story in The News and Courier reported that “Goat Cart Sam” fired a gun during a shooting that involved Barnes. The story caught Heyward’s attention, but Sammy’s failed attempt to elude police on his goat cart intrigued Heyward even more.
Keeping the discussion going
Charleston filmmaker Lauren Waring Douglas wants to continue the Porgy and Bess conversation.
“I have something forthcoming very soon,” she said. Her coming documentary, When Porgy Came Home, spans the time from Smalls’ life to 1970 when the opera, Porgy and Bess, was first staged in Charleston before an integrated audience.
“There is a lot more to (Smalls’s) story that deserves to be told,” Douglas said. “He was a complicated disabled Black man, but he was so much more than his disability.”
Charleston native Kendra Hamilton, an associate professor of English at Presbyterian College, is the author of Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess. In the final chapter of her 2024 book, Hamilton shares the Samuel Smalls’ stories she heard from her grandmother, Anna Hall Hamilton.
Her grandmother lived in the Silver Hill community and Smalls lived nearby. Smalls was best known as the singing panhandler in the goat cart with the angelic voice, she said. But at the end of the day, he’d leave downtown and return to the Charleston Neck area where he gambled and beat women with his goat whip.
“We don’t know if that is true,” Hamilton said. “But these are the stories that were told about him. He was more like a cross between Crown and Sportin’ Life than … the saintly Porgy.”
Hamilton bristled when she reflected on the money made on the Samuel Smalls story. The creators of the Porgy and Bess novel, play, opera and movie, she said, “made millions, but his mother died in poverty.”
Smalls died in 1924. He is buried at Folly Road Presbyterian Church on James Island where his mother Elvira Gibbs is also interred in the racially segregated cemetery.
Charleston tour guide Alphonso Brown rejected early 20th century criticism that the Porgy and Bess story projected negative stereotypes of Gullah people and was a cultural misappropriation of Black life in the city.
After seeing the 1970 opera in Charleston, Brown said, “I could never enjoy it (in any) other place ever since. Because it was here in Charleston, it was so real. We were those people who actually lived that life.”
Greene agreed with Hamilton and Brown, adding that “Dorothy Heyward insisted the play was not “a piece of propaganda for either racists or liberals to use. It was a piece of art that should stand on its own.”
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