Geographic magazines by volume, date, and subject matter on index cards. She lacked goals and adventure for the first time in her life. “My work is all over,” she wrote, “and I am lost.”82
Katherine Jackson French, 1930. Courtesy of Centenary College of Louisiana Archives and Special Collections.
Katherine Jackson French, 1934. Courtesy of Centenary College of Louisiana Archives and Special Collections.
Katherine Jackson French, 1948. Courtesy of Kay Tolbert Buckland.
On Christmas Eve, 1955, a fine winter night, twelve-year-old Kay Tolbert went to bed looking forward to Christmas festivities the next morning. Instead, she was wakened by a neighbor and told that her grandfather Frank was dead. His passing was a shock; he had been in seemingly fine health the day before, helping the family with holiday preparations. The body was returned to London and laid out in Annie Pollard’s home. The funeral service was held there two days later. The family attended, as did sixteen honorary bearers. French kept the ceremony book, making detailed notes of the hymns sung, scripture read, who the pallbearers were, who called (over 140 people), and what family and friends attended. She noted that “Crossing the Bar” was read at the grave and also took notes on the sermon, writing “Integrity, honor, justice, mercy, love for God and Man, happiness and usefulness to end” under the heading “Lessons from a good life.”83
By the time Frank died, French’s son-in-law, Carl Tolbert, had already changed occupations and begun working for an insurance company, deciding that it would pay the bills better than teaching music and playing the clarinet and better enable him to provide for his family. In 1954, he accepted a job as an assistant manager for the firm and moved his family to Atlanta. French, her husband gone and her career over, went with them. Prior to her departure, the Woman’s Department Club of Shreveport awarded her a life membership: “No one in Shreveport has contributed so generously of both time and talent as have you, and now that you will be away from us part of the year we feel that we cannot pass up this opportunity to say a hearty ‘thank you’ from us all.”84
After a short time in Atlanta, Carl accepted a promotion to the position of manager and moved the family to Columbia, South Carolina, during the summer of 1957. Columbia was a good-sized city by then, and Kay Tolbert Buckland remembers the family living across the street from a lake in a neighborhood with many pine trees. The house had a large porch, and neighborhood children would sleep out on it on cots during the summer while the adults played cards.85
“The Rose Still Grows beyond the Wall”
By this time, however, French had started to ail. Past useful work, separated from her sister Annie, who was “so alone and not well,” and away from the two cities she loved (Shreveport and London), she began to succumb to the heart ailment that had plagued her for decades. She was bedridden almost from the day she moved with Carl and Katherine to Columbia. Her daughter tried to care for her, and a Dr. Miller made house calls, but she worsened. She was able to come downstairs for Christmas dinner, which Jackson’s niece Eloise Jackson Pennington says “made [them] all feel better.” But French was not to heal.86
French’s daughter, Katherine, called R.Z., the African American woman who had worked as a servant for French during her many years in Shreveport. R.Z. came to Columbia, staying between six and nine months and tending French. The time came when even R.Z.’s ministrations were not enough, and French was placed in a nursing home in Columbia. According to Kay Toland Buckland, Carl and Katherine had “a huge battle”: “My father insisted…. And I remember how upset my mother was because she did not want to put Grandmother in the nursing home…. It was a very difficult time for her.”87
French suffered several heart attacks during her stay at the rest home. Her daughter visited her there “all the time,” Kay Buckland remembered. “I went some with her…. She [French] was just laying there, almost not even aware.”88
On Monday, November 10, 1958, Katherine Jackson French passed from this world. And thus the family gathered one last time in French’s beloved London.
“Grandmother wouldn’t have wanted us to cry and be sad,” said Kay Buckland. “She would have wanted us to sing and be happy.” And sing they did: “There was some member of the family, and I couldn’t tell you who it was, probably someone Mother’s age or maybe one of their children, could play the piano and could play by ear. And so we sang all night long…. I don’t remember the songs. Everybody sang…. I don’t remember whose house we went back to, but it was after the ceremony and all. I just remember for several hours we all sang … all songs that everybody knew but I couldn’t tell you what they were.”89
Services were conducted on Thursday, November 13. Over seventy friends signed the “Those Who Called” book. There were forty-seven floral tributes. As at Frank’s funeral, Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” appears in the program:
But such a tide as moving seems asleep
Too full for tide and foam
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.90
Katherine Jackson French was laid to rest next to her husband, Frank, in the Jackson family founders’ plot in the Russell Dyche Cemetery in London. Her grave lies less than a mile from where she grew up.
Tributes poured in from Shreveport. Books were placed in libraries in French’s honor, charities given money in her name. Several boxes of letters in regard to her death still exist. “You’d think everybody in Shreveport knew my grandmother,” said Kay Buckland.91 One letter reads: “Think of all the people whose lives were enriched because she passed their way.” Another notes: “She was such a wonderful woman that it is difficult to put into writing what we, her friends, feel. Erudite, stimulating, yet down to earth and interested in the minutest bit that affected people and particularly her friends, which are legion. Public spirited, gregarious, deeply spiritual, and a great inspiration to so many both in the cultural and religious life of our community, her name will ever be enchrined [sic] in the hearts of her friends, the church, the organizations to which she belonged.”92
Cecelia Ellerbe, her fellow cofounder of the Shreveport Woman’s Department Club, had the last word on Katherine Jackson French. At the club’s tribute to French the following January, she read a poem she had written in honor of her friend:
Let this be said, for honor is her due,
She was a teacher, one who loved this art
That was the highest privilege she knew
By right of knowledge, that she could impart
The meaning of a life is in its thought
And in the measure of the mind its test
The good she knew, the wisdom that she sought
These were the substance of her last bequest
To keep when strength had failed and breath was spent
To be her final wish and testament.
The
