Hampton, Arkansas, was my birthplace. Ever since I was a little child [I was] drawing at the church—that’s really where I used to hang out—and that’s one education, and the other one is when I first recognized that there was such a thing as “art” that I had been doing. The problem wasn’t the term…there weren’t any artists in the little town, so I didn’t have any art teachers. Secondary education was a correspondence course: Art Instruction Incorporated. I took part of it. I was I guess about 15, 16, about that age. I’m not quite sure. Drawing got my attention and everybody said, “Willie can do that. He can draw good just like it is.” At first they would not accept me. I was a little young. Eventually the salesperson came from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Art Instruction Incorporated and he got to talking with my dad. Before I knew it, I was signed up for Art Instruction Incorporated, which I enjoyed, and began to recognize this field of art from the samples that they showed me. One thing in particular was the artists which they showed me on the covers of Look, Time, Life, or I think it was Saturday Evening Post. I would be allowed to take time out in the school day to go and practice my art. That was one good thing. My instructor was open-minded to see that this was the gift I should develop.

When I came to Houston I lacked one year in high school, and I didn’t go immediately to high school because I wanted to make a little change; have some jingle in my pocket. Matter of fact, when I came here I left my cotton sack hanging on the fence from the cotton patch I had been working in. Houston was a hayfield. All out by the Astrodome, they had cattle out in there and I was by chance off for the summer. I met a man who loaded hay on his truck and I started talking with him and he offered me a job. I had been around hay—but I had never pitched hay. I kind of enjoyed it because it was like taking me back to my raising or rearing. I did the farm chores that most boys do, baling hay, picking cotton, plowing—the whole works. Then came the night life. The Eldorado Ballroom. I was crazy about the music. I used to think I was going to be a guitarist with my own band. I never did—but I did make acquaintance with some of the musicians who made it. When James Brown was a singer he used to come to the Eldorado Ballroom, and this group called the Midnighters. James Brown and the big-time singers we all had records of, they’d come into town and they’d stop at the Eldorado before they’d go to the Coliseum. This was a time when it was highly segregated as far as public places; when they came to town they went to the black places.

I went to Jack Yates High School for that one semester that I lacked. Before graduation day we had different people come, you know, out of a profession, and John Biggers came to be a speaker for the artists and art-intended students. My instructor, who had known John Biggers for a while, spoke to him particularly about what I was producing in her class. And John was marvelous at it, you know. He says, “Now, I’ll tell you what—as soon as you get out of here you come and see me at TSU, and I think something can work for you.”

I got a scholarship. I received the Jesse H. Jones scholarship that got me through TSU. I had one teacher, Dr. Mary Jordan Atkinson—she was a history teacher and philanthropist—who helped me financially. Dr. Atkinson was the person who pushed me to submit some of my [written] work to the program that was at TSU so far as art, and I ended up—never having competed before—with two pieces of my work accepted as second place. And I had one professor, Dr. Smith, who recognized my poetic potentials enough to [let me] write my oral exam as a poem.

I’m an artist first. And them I’m a writer, and I guess I’m a poet—I can consolidate writer with poet. No one wanted to recognize me as a poet because I was so good as an artist. At that time they could put a label on you, and unless you were strong enough you would submit to that. It ended up that a lot of my time at TSU was what should have been: just treading the water, you know, seeing what all was out there. And thanks to John Biggers, he did not push me to be like John Biggers with his crosshatch. I was in my freshman drawing class and he took me out of my freshman drawing class and put me on a mural—and I thank him for doing that. I didn’t have to do that freshman drawing class because, he said, “You’re already doing the things that I’m teaching in that class. So you get a ladder and get up there.” And he was showing me how artists through the ages have remained artists and still spoke their piece and influenced a whole bunch of people. He was teaching me the philosophy of art. I didn’t know it, but he was teaching me that, rather than simply drawing pictures. He let me have that kind of freedom to express myself and he wanted me to see what it’s like to be up on that ladder, which is an expression, you know.

I can say what my thoughts are about the future…and I think that sticking to my guns between the writing and the art [is a part of it] and mostly painting and drawing would be the graphic part of it. I feel like I’m going to be successful at [a] late age because I have done something about it with the help of someone who saw some of my work in a book that was done back in the 50s. I’m thinking that I will be successful…I’ll become known, and am becoming known. Then I won’t be surprised if it does happen. I’ll have this experience that got me ready for now—really got me chock-full of things that I want to draw and paint.