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The Other Family. On South Fifth Avenue, when Leontyne was growing up, few children owned two pairs of shoes, and some did not even have one pair. At a sacrifice, James and Kate Price always saw that Leontyne had a pair for school as well as "patent leathers for Sunday." Says Leontyne: "Mamma never wanted us to go barefoot like the other kids; she wanted us to amount to something." Leontyne's first memory of music is hearing her mother sing in "a lovely lyric soprano voice" as she hung out the clothes in the long, level Price backyard. Leon tyne had a doll piano when she was three, and. recalls Kate. "That child run me crazy giving me concerts." At 3½ Leon tyne took her first lessons from Mrs. Hattie Mclnnis. the town's Negro music teacher, and if Kate Price could not raise the fee of $2 a lesson, she would do Miss Hattie's washing and ironing.
When Leontyne was five, Kate traded in the family Victrola as down payment for a piano. "When she came home from school." says Kate, "that child had one-half of a fit." On the other side of town, on North Fifth Avenue, lived the Alexander Chisholms. Elizabeth Wisner Chisholm was the daughter of a lumber baron, and Alexander Chisholm a Vermonter who met his wife while she was a music major at Smith.
He returned to Laurel with her, is now chairman of the board of the First National Bank. After school Leontyne would sometimes wander over to the large green house to visit "Big Auntie" Everlina Greet, the Chisholms' maid (before that, she had been the Wisners', served the two families for 45 years before she retired four years ago). Leontyne would play with Jean and Peggy, the two older of the three Chisholm daughters. They were, she recalls, her "other family," and she was their "chocolate sister."
Where She Came From. "Miss Elizabeth" Chisholm remembers Leontyne in those days as the girl with the "high-glee eyes" who was forever singing. She took to accompanying Leontyne at the piano, and later she occasionally had her perform at informal musicales. Between Leontyne and the Chisholms-who eventually helped send her to the Juilliard
School of Music in Manhattan-grew an attachment that both sometimes feel has been misunderstood. Says Leontyne: "Everyone finds it so amazing that two families should love each other in the middle of Mississippi which is, let's face it, a red-hot state where my ancestors were not so high on the social scale. Well, that hasn't got a cotton-pickin' thing to do with it. There wasn't anything in the world Mrs. Chisholm wouldn't have done for me. But she was my friend first and my benefactress second-whatever I turned out to be, and even if I didn't turn out to be much of anything." Says Mrs. Chisholm of Leontyne: "Don't call me her patron. I don't think I have ever 'patronized' Leontyne. I have only loved her. I'm just where she came from."
But where she came from remained in many respects a divided world. Leontyne entered the Chisholm mansion by the back door, as she does to this day. She is free to use the front door, Mrs. Chisholm explains, but it would make the help uncomfortable.