April 3, 2003...
Third Ward native blends art, history
by BETTY L. MARTIN
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle
Her gifts of song, storytelling, poetry and drama are evident
even before she takes the stage as America's griot, pronounced
gree'-oh -- the keeper and teller of tales, folklore and history
in African villages long before pen and ink.
She travels the world, combining talents with seven costume
changes, props, slides and audience participation to tell the
history of her -- and everyone's -- African-American ancestors
through various characters and musical numbers, including a South
African "click" song to Billie Holiday.
"We are all one people -- just with many paint jobs,"
said Wiseman, 52, daughter of Houston retired teacher Mary Helen
Wiseman for whom Houston's Wiseman Library is named and who also
is a descendant of Sam Houston, and El' Ray Wiseman, a gospel
quartet singer.
In her one-woman show, Wiseman incorporates what she's learned
in the classroom, both as a master's-degreed student of education
and as a teacher, and from six years in West Africa as a Peace
Corps volunteer and television talk show host. She also uses
influences from her home neighborhood, Houston's Third Ward,
where she grew up.
She vividly remembers her first-grade teacher at Kashmere
Elementary School, Ada Reynolds, who encouraged her inquisitive
mind and her dramatic flair, and with whom Wiseman still stays
in touch.
A graduate of an early drama program for children at the Alley
Theatre and, later, a graduate of Kashmere High School's Class
of 1968, she took first place in University Interscholastic League
tests in dramatic interpretation and speech, learning Russian
and Latin along the way.
"When I won a second place, I cried," Wiseman said.
"My mother said `I'm glad you didn't win first. You need
to learn defeat and how to take it gracefully.' "
Confusion about her part-Jewish surname helped her get through
doors that would otherwise have been closed to her. In 1969,
she became one of Rice University's first African-American students
in its accelerated program for gifted and talented students.
"I remember my name being called -- `Wiseman? Wiseman?'
I said, `I'm Wiseman.' And I remember how surprised they were.
But I loved Rice."
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, an Afro-sporting Wiseman
joined Sudan Arts Southwest, Houston's guerilla theater, with
other African-American actors and street poets who used their
words and songs to promote social change and to protest what
they saw as the unfair treatment of black men.
"I wasn't angry," she said, adding that other members
have since become a city photographer and a romance writer. "It
was a lot of fun."
She also won a state conference while touring with a Fort
Bend County theater company, Jack and Jill, which traveled throughout
the southwest region of Texas, Louisiana and Arkansas.
Liberia was an excellent choice, she said, and she knew she
would live there a long time, longer than her two-year assignment
in 1973 with the Peace Corps.
"I've been very careful to sculpture my life," she
said. "I decided several things early on ... that I would
be a virgin until I married, that I was never going to be an
unwed mother, that I wouldn't be kissed until I was 16. I kept
all of them but the last one. And that proves that you don't
tell people your dreams."
She learned to speak Kpgelle, the Liberian language of about
300 words, and taught English in one of the school's five classrooms
filled with students of all ages, infants to aged senior citizens,
then successfully petitioned for transfer to the National Liberian
Culture Center.
She hosted a TV show there, Under the Palm Tree, while living
in a house built inside a hill.
"Think Hobbit," she said, referring to one of the
village settings for author J.R. Tolkien's action-fantasy books.
A friend of the Liberian president, Wiseman was put off by
the president's son and refused to dance with him despite a $300
bet he had waged.
"I told him, `I'm from Texas,' and he retreated right
away," she said.
She developed a cultural troupe of actors, dancers and musicians,
but during a command performance at the home of a Liberian billionaire,
a revolution began.
"I was thanking the distinguished guests when a guard
took my microphone away and handed me down, off the stage. The
president's son saw me and said, `You like her? You got to tame
her -- she's from Texas,' " Wiseman said. "Then he
kidnapped me, but I refused any food or water or Fanta -- a favorite
drink there -- and they let me go."
While the war was going on, she continued her TV show from
6 to 10 each evening, and it became the second-place show in
popularity, right behind the news. But then, the government forced
her to host a special guest on her show, the now-deposed dictator
Idi Amin of Libya, to whom Wiseman was to ask pre-submitted questions
such as "Tell us your great vision."
"But I couldn't help myself. When he told me I looked
like one of his wives. I said, `Which ones? The ones who are
dead or the ones who have fled?,' " she said.
Somehow, she made it through the interview without getting
arrested or murdered, "mostly because he was a guest in
Liberia. It wasn't his country, so it would have been rude to
his hosts to kill me."
While in West Africa, she recorded vocals with singer Mariam
Makeba and Hugh Masekela. Wiseman returned to the United States
in 1979, retaining much of the African style she had picked up
there. After a five-month vacation in New York and California,
meeting Sarah Vaughn, the Temptations and Nina Simone, she started
developing her one-woman show, singing periodically with the
Houston Symphony Orchestra and creating many other shows she
has recorded on CDs and tours in the United States, Europe and
Africa, previewed on her Web site www.kijana.com/kijana.html.
In 1997, she won first place in the city of Houston Talent
Competition and five of her one-act plays have won seven first-place
awards in the past six years. In 2001 and 2002, The Griot was
honored by The Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities,
which named it the best college diversity program of the year.
The same association also named Wiseman the 2002 Performing Artist
of the Year.
On May 12, 2001, she got involved in another production, her
wedding to Internal Revenue Service auditor Aundre Fusilier,
"my good friend and partner," for whom she sang a song
she wrote while meeting him at the alter.
As many of the leaders of Houston's African-American community
watched, the couple recited vows they had jointly scripted and
that included the phrase: "Together, we will embark on the
greatest adventure two people can share. And it will be good."
Wiseman said that between her home life and her life on the
road, her carefully planned life is turning out even better than
the happily-ever-after fairytale she once dreamed of.
"If you breathe, you have talent," she said. "It's
up to you to find the beauty inside yourself."
