Henry Speller

American, 1900 - 1997

BiographyWilliam Arnett of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation accounts for Henry Speller’s biography as follows in his essay entitled “Handy Man”:

“Henry Speller grew up on a plantation in a tiny Mississippi Delta community….Speller was born to Rosie Edwards and Robert Speller, a man he saw only once. He was raised by his maternal grandmother Zannie, whom he called Mama, and her husband, Ike Simpson. Like almost everyone else there, the Simpsons were sharecroppers. The impulse to make things came early: “When I was a boy I thought about trains, and I’d take some bed rails and call it a track. Get me some wheels and put them on there, call it a section car. Put me some cross ties. I’d ride all around the house, make me some little buildings, call them the stations. Never could get them trains out of my head.”

“Henry Speller gives a reason for making drawings: “They just consolate me when I’m back here by myself.” Speller draws sexual fantasies, of long-haired, big-breasted women. Such fantasies kept him sane and functioning when he stood in the Mississippi: and drawing them helped to “just consolate” him in the presence of the monotony and internal anger he had to deal with each day.”

“Speller finally tired of subsistence farming, left the Delta and settled in Memphis in 1939. ‘I didn’t have no job at first,’ he says, ‘started as a junk man. Had a push wagon, go along the tracks, pick up coal that fall off the train, sell it for twenty cents a bucket. Wife Mary take in washing and ironing. I do the washing, she do the ironing.’ Later he worked as a landscaper and a garbage collector for the city, and as a janitor for a trucking company. Speller lived just a few minutes from Beale Street, where a statue of W.C. Handy looks down from a pedestal in the park. ‘Music always been in my head. I heard it, played it, sung it. Memphis got music. It regulates the way people do things.’”

“Speller regulated his own life with music and art. He often sat on his porch, slowly moving back and forth on a metal glider and playing his harmonica and his guitar, strumming, humming, and talking the blues. And drawing. His music and his drawings convey the same persistent, driving blues rhythm of a paddlewheel striking the water of the river, or a locomotive bumping along the straight long miles of crossties.”

“Speller knows the life. He knows the leaving, the rambling, the search for something different, the desire for change, the frustration when it does not come. He feels, but never shows, the anger of separation and alienation. Standing in the water by the levee or cleaning up the city’s office buildings, Speller’s world was not his to enjoy, only to serve: ‘White people would always try me out when I was cleaning up their place. They leave money under the desk, and I’d give it to them and say, ‘Here’s that money you left’ and they’d say, ‘Why’d you give me that? Where you found it?’ And I’d say, ‘Where you left it!’ I never wanted nothing that wasn’t mine.’”

“Henry Speller and Georgia Verges [Virgil] met in the early sixties, married in 1979, and had a marriage that both described as ‘just about perfect.’ She died in 1988. She had learned to draw as a child but became actively involved in her art only after being encouraged by her husband. It was an important element of their life together. Often, they engaged in playful yet serious competition, drawing the same subjects and comparing results. ‘I ain’t near as good as Henry,’ was her assessment. ‘She done come to be a whole lot better than me,’ was his.”

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