Samuel Smalls: The Origin of Porgy

   by Damon Fordham, Adjunct Professor of African-American Studies

On March 25, 1924, the Charleston News and Courier featured a story entitled "Cripple Accused of Firing at Woman." It told of Samuel Smalls, a handicapped African-American beggar who was "commonly seen on King Street with his goat and wagon." He was charged with "firing several shot[s] at Maggie Barnes, at 4 Romney Street." But it was not until June of the same year, that a true bill against him was returned."1

This apparently minor crime report would have been forgotten had it not been for Charleston writer DuBose Heyward. Heyward would later admit that reading this newspaper story inspired him to write a book entitled Porgy, about a crippled black beggar and his love for a woman named Bess.2 The book, with the assistance of Heyward's wife Dorothy, eventually became a Broadway play, and that play became the basis of the libretto of the opera Porgy and Bess, with music by George Gershwin. Porgy and Bess would not only become the best-known American opera, it would also bring worldwide attention to the conditions in and inhabitants of the lower-income areas of Charleston's black community

The full story of Samuel Smalls remains unclear. Several interviews with Smalls' relatives which appeared in the News and Courier in the 1950s were both condescending and contradictory, as the family was portrayed as stereotypically speaking in an exaggerated "Negro dialect."3 Much was made in these articles of the poverty and illiteracy of Smalls' mother, Mrs. Elvira Gibbs. The varying sources that appear in these articles seem to agree on some information about Smalls. He was born on James Island, SC, the son of Mrs. Gibbs and Samuel Smalls, Sr.; he was unable to walk from an early age, and died in poverty and obscurity in the mid-1920s when he was in his mid-thirties. He is buried near a church on James Island.

After Mrs. Gibbs' death in 1961, her daughters voiced objections to the portrayal of their family in the local press and in Porgy and Bess. One daughter, Mary Martin, noted, "Mamma wasn't educated, but she wasn't ignorant. She had common sense." Another daughter, Lizzie Deleston, concluded, "Mr. Heyward just wrote stories about the slum mamma lived in, but he didn't help."4

But in a way, the story of Sammy Smalls did help. For the local chapter of the NAACP tried to use a staging of the play Porgy as a test case for integrated seating; although it failed, it worked elsewhere—staging of the opera in other cities all over the world opened up audiences to integration. This certainly held true when the opera opened for the first time in its native city in 1970 during the state's Tricentennial Celebration. Blacks and whites came together (there were mostly local actors on the stage) to stage the tale while a national audience watched (it was broadcast on the CBS television show Sixty Minutes).

1. "Cripple Accused of Firing at Woman." Charleston News and Courier, March 25, 1924. See also "Sessions Court Gets Under Way." News and Courier, June 3, 1924.

2. Robert Rosen, A Short History of Charleston (San Francisco: Lexicos Press, 1982), 135.

3. See "Porgy's Mother Still Lives in Charleston." News and Courier, March 11, 1951, and "Porgy's Mother Still Alive—Unaware of Fame Which Gave World 'Goat Sammy.'" News and Courier, June 23, 1959.

4. "Little Fame, Much Pain—Mother of 'Porgy,' Elvira Gibbs Dies." News and Courier, November 3, 1961.