Melvin Edwards by Michael Brenson
November 24, 2014 Melvin Edwards by Michael Brenson BOMB’s Oral History Project documents the life stories of New York City’s African American artists. [ Download as a PDF, EPUB, or MOBI file ] Portraits of the sculptor, Melvin Edwards, October 1965. Photo © Museum Associates/LACMA Michael Brenson Your life has been an epic one, so I don’t know how we’re going to tell the story. But we have to start somewhere, so let’s go back to the beginning. You were born in the Fifth Ward, in Houston, in 1937. It was a very particular place, at a very particular time. What was it like, growing up there? Melvin Edwards Well, I’m the oldest child, and the house we lived in was my grandmother Coco’s house. She was my father’s mother; her name was Cora Ann Nickerson. She and my grandfather [James Benjamin Edwards] divorced in 1920, maybe earlier. She came to Houston, and he went to Kansas City. He would come occasionally and visit Texas, but I didn’t get to know him very well. Now, my mother’s father [James Frank Felton] lived just outside of Houston, in McNair. It was a village, part of the larger area called Goose Creek; so we saw him maybe once a month. In my teens, he came to church on Sundays in Houston and sometimes visited with us or other family members. I should explain, my father’s family’s primarily from the woods in East Texas, a place called Dotson, which is a part of a larger village called Long Branch, which is in the triangle of Nacogdoches, Henderson, and Carthage in Texas.
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