Tiffany Jackson Raises The Church Roof

Dr. Tiffany Jackson began with her parents. Her mother was born in Alabama to sharecroppers who had ​“a lot of kids,” Jackson said, and raised them in a shotgun shack. Jackson recalled asking her mother why it was called that.

“If you stood in front, and you aimed a shotgun,” her mother told her, ​“it would go clear through the back door.”

A healthy audience gathered Sunday night at the majestic St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church Sunday night on Olive Street to hear Jackson and the St. Paul and St. James Band — Will Cleary on saxophone, Drew Fermo on piano, David Chevan on bass, and Tido Holtkamp on drums — perform ​“From the Hood to the Ivy League,” Jackson’s one-woman show. It took those lucky enough to hear it on a journey from Alabama and Florida up to New Haven, and through a life filled with grit, humor, hope — and song.

“Jim Crow wasn’t so kind to my family,” Jackson said. Her mother and her siblings lived on a plantation and couldn’t attend school until after harvesting the cotton crop. Her mother ​“had one dress that she would wash every night and wear the next day.”

When her mother was a young mother she got a job as a housekeeper for a nearby white family. One day, the head of the household propositioned her. She managed to decline him. She left the job. The wife of the head of the household came by Jackson’s mother’s house asking her mother to return to work. Jackson’s mother politely refused, worried about what the head of the household might do. ​“She knew if he raped her, no one would believe her,” Jackson said.

Her father, meanwhile, was ​“tall, dark, lanky, and handsome — so he thought,” Jackson said. He grew up on the Florida Panhandle. ​“Someone should have told him he wasn’t in New Orleans,” she said. He was ​“educated, smart, and slick.”

He ​“fell madly in love with my mother, deeply in love,” Jackson said. Her mother was more grounded. ​“He all right,” she said about him.

They went out, and in a circumstance Jackson described as ​“date rape,” her mother got pregnant with Jackson’s brother.

“I’m not raising this baby by myself,” her mother said. The two got married and moved north.

Her father joined the Army, but when the Vietnam War started, he went AWOL, then went to jail. When he got out, he ​“wasn’t the same man,” Jackson said, treading lightly. A visit he made to the White House prompted a visit by the Secret Service to the Jackson house; it turned out he had tried to go to the President directly for help.

Jackson’s mother understood that her father was not going to be able to care for his family. So she took her two children and moved to New Haven, where she had family, including an aunt who chewed tobacco and could hit a spittoon from across the room.

Her mother got a job. ​“Welfare was not for her.” The family moved into Church Street South. And they joined a church, the Burning Bush Temple of Fire.

“It was in the black church experience that I learned to sing,” Jackson said. It was where she found her gift.

The band had been accompanying her through the entirety of the story. Now, as Jackson slipped into ​“Oh, Mary Don’t You Weep,” she unfurled her voice, and the church clapped along on the backbeat.

In The Neighborhood

People asked Jackson as a young woman if she’d ever heard of Neighborhood Music School. ​“I said, ​‘I don’t got no music school in my neighborhood,’” she related.

But Church Street South was ​“a beautiful place to live in 1977,” she said. It had a fountain and tennis courts and a field for baseball. Schools were close by. ​“There were Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans, white people and black people, and we loved on each other.” Reggae and merengue mixed in the air as she and her friends played double dutch. Hip hop arrived. ​“We knew when there was going to be a block party because the speakers would shake the bricks.”

As time went on, she saw Church Street South go ​“from a neighborhood that was vibrant and alive — to crack cocaine, drugs, and AIDS, and the war against drugs, or people.” Her first serious boyfriend was drawn into it; they had real passion for each other, and then he grew distant. She lost touch with him and thought he might be strung out. Then he was shot and killed.

“Why him?” her brother asked

“He was nice,” Jackson recalled. ​“I said, ​‘I know.’” Her brother missed their father a lot; he ​“had memories of him,” Jackson said.

She began going to Neighborhood Music School for voice lessons and learned to sing opera. She went to Co-op High, to Educational Center for the Arts. Her household got a little tired of her vocal exercises. ​“Yo, Tiff — shut up!” she would hear.

“It’s tough being an opera singer living in the hood. But I kept hollering,” she said.

In Jackson’s junior year she was on a trip with Co-op High students. She and her friends were in a hotel room, ​“being girls,” she said, when she suddenly got a feeling. There was a tap on the door, and it wouldn’t go away. She went into the bathroom and prayed. When she got home, her mother told her that her brother had been ​“shot up a little bit” but was expected to recover. It turned out that he had been shot when Jackson heard the tap on the door. He had been shot with a sawed-off shotgun; the damage could have been much worse, but instead, he lived and healed.

“That was the moment I realized that going to church was not just a ritual,” Jackson said. As the gospel number she sang said, ​“Jesus is real to me.”

“The Necessary Diva”

Jackson got her bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Michigan and a masters in music from Yale. She moved to New York City but returned home after Sept. 11, 2001. ​“My mother had to hear me hollering” again, she said.

“Somehow I stumbled upon an agent and started singing around the world,” Jackson said. She sang in Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and in festivals and with orchestras across the United States. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2005. She began teaching at private schools in the area as well. But she realized she needed another kind of challenge as well. She took up bodybuilding and won the second competition she entered. One of her friends called her The Necessary Damn Diva. Jackson dropped the ​“damn.”

“I became the Necessary Diva, the opera-singing bodybuilder,” she said.

Exercise led to soul-searching. ​“Why did I feel a need to get fit?” Jackson asked. Part of the answer lay in her own personal history; she was ​“violated by a trusted family member” as a girl, she said. When she told her mother about it, her mother made sure she never saw the man again. ​“He did not break me,” Jackson said.

It also tied into black history. She thought of Sarah Bartmann, a South African Khoikhoi woman who, in the 19th century, became a freak show attraction because her physique was so different from that of the Europeans who ogled her. ​“They would hoist her up on a block. She would stand there half-naked and people would poke and prod her,” Jackson said. She thought, too, of all the black men lynched for crimes they didn’t commit. The transition into ​“Strange Fruit,” in all its rawness and pain, was more than natural.

Armed with ​“my muscles and my music,” Jackson said, she moved to Manhattan and studied at the Manhattan School of Music. In Harlem she was called a Nubian queen, an African princess. ​“I could be all of that,” she said. She started studying Duke Ellington and his songwriting partner Billy Strayhorn. It got her thinking much more about jazz, about how she could ​“bend the genre to tell my story.” In returning from opera to her roots in gospel, she could ​“bend the genre and find my heaven.”

Dr. Jackson

Jackson got a scholarship to study for her doctorate in music at University of Connecticut. She found herself the only African-American student in the program.

“I don’t have time for activism,” she thought. ​“I have to get this coursework done.”

She did study — and bring to her professsors’ attention — the work of African-American composer Harry T. Burleigh, African-American concert singer Elizabeth Greenfield, and others. She taught a course in popular American music to undergraduates in which she told the more diverse (and accurate) version of the story. Her mother accompanied her to her dissertation defense. After Jackson did her presentation, one of the people on the board said, ​“you and your friends need to step out now.”

“What is this, some kind of secret society?” Jackson recalled her mother saying. But she was awarded her doctorate, in 2018.

While working on her dissertation late one night, she was struck by a voice in her head. ​“He’s going. He’s gone. He’s leaving. Stay calm. In control,” the voice said. She thought of her father. She had prayed for him often: ​“Dear God, please protect my dad. Make sure he’s not a John Doe somewhere.”

Her mother called the next day to say that her father had died in a fire, his body all but consumed by the flames. They drove down to Greenville, Florida. ​“I stood in the space where my father was found,” she said. ​“I picked up a brick, and I put it in my truck.”

“This is the only thing my father owned,” she said to herself. ​“I’m going to take it and I’m going to build on it.”

Her father was given a military service. A soldier played ​“Taps.” ​“My father died a hero,” Jackson said. ​“He was on drugs all his life, and he had mental illness all his life. But I saw beyond his faults. I saw the human being.”

Her biggest lesson, however, came from her mother. She recalled a moment in the car with her when she said, ​“you know, Mom, I love you so much. You protected me and surrounded me with love…. Without you here, I wouldn’t want to be here,” because her mother had shown her such unconditional love.

Her mother’s response startled her. ​“That ain’t love. You’re crazy,” her mother told her. ​“You aren’t supposed to love anyone more than the Creator. I won’t be here forever, so you got to get it together.”

She thought of a quote from Muhammad Ali: ​“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room on this earth.”

“Singing is my gift,” she said, ​“and it has made room for me. It has paved a way for me. It is my gift that has led me to my purpose.”

She has begun working with students at Hillhouse High School. And she has started a nonprofit, the Gift Passion Purpose Project, to raise money to get lessons and training in the arts for students who can’t otherwise afford them. ​“No kid should be left behind because of circumstances,” she said. ​“That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“I believe that when people know who you are and your story, they’ll be more apt to support your cause,” she continued. ​“It takes a community.”

The show ended with a performance from the Elm City Vocal Ensemble — Erik Brown, Dana Fripp, Harriet Alfred, and Jackson as singers, accompanied by Jonathan Berryman on piano. Their voices raised the roof. Everyone clapped along.

Visit Jackson’s website here to learn more about her nonprofit and further performances of her one-woman show.