Episode 1 - Perdita Duncan

Image credit: Butte-Silver Bow Archives

Welcome to Mining City Reflections where we illuminate the history of Butte, Montana through the stories and observations of 20th century women who lived there. I’m your host, Marian Jensen.

An oral history collection in the Butte Archives has preserved the personal reminiscences of such women. They bring to life the challenges and achievements of the boom to bust town in vivid detail. During the first half of the last century, more than twenty ethnic groups arrived in Butte. The city’s history truly mirrors the meIting pot image of America. But that reflection is not without tarnish.

In this segment we explore the experience of African Americans through an oral history, recorded in 1980 by Montana historian, Professor Mary Murphy. She interviewed Perdita Duncan, an articulate and self-assured voice for those who endured discrimination --- not for their ethnicity or national origin but for the color of their skin.

“Life was passing me by and I always felt that I know who I am. I know what I am. I know what I can make out of myself.”

Perdita was born in Butte in 1927, the second of four children in the Duncan family. They were among the Mining City’s small black population that hovered around two thousand, a scant two per cent of the total. While Jim Crow laws did not exist in Montana, African-Americans were not fully accepted in Butte. Though employment was available, for women this meant work as domestics or waitresses and cooks. The jobs for men usually existed in the service sector as well, like railroad porters and valets, while the better paying jobs in the mines were off limits.

In contrast, Perdita’s father, John had studied podiatry, and her mother, Armeta, had trained as an elementary school teacher. They proved inspirational role models, instilling a strong sense of achievement and identity in their children, all of whom went to college. Despite her training, Perdita’s mother had to take work as a domestic, but her refinement must have been noticed because she was held in high esteem by her employer, Cornelius Kelly, the Anaconda Mining Company’s longest serving president, and one of the most powerful men in the state.

“There was a club up in the mountains somewhere where all the wealthy people, or up and coming wealthy, used to spend their time up there. She was waiting on tables then, and still not married. And the word came that Cornelius Kelly had been called to return to Butte. He subsequently became the president of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and went on to New York. So it was mom’s -she said good luck- to be the one to call him to come back from fishing, and when she called to him, he just dropped his fishing pole because he had an idea what the message was. She helped him get ready to come back to Butte and he was appointed the president of the Company. He felt that incident was so important that he never forgot mom. Every time he came back to Butte he always sent little gifts to her.”

Perdita’s father possessed a cosmopolitan perspective, having been born in India and then educated in America. She still could recall his concerns for the state of the world while watching the Armistice Day celebration in Butte in 1917.

“I was quite young, but what my father was trying to impress upon us was that this was a bloody war that had been fought to save democracy, the democratic way. And he wanted us to remember it because the mine whistles blew; the boys were hawking extra newspapers, and that really made quite an impression on me.”

Though the Duncan household provided stability and a loving environment, life outside the home presented challenges. Perdita recalls her school days in Butte where discrimination was more subtle than other parts of the country, but nonetheless present.

“Well at that time we had quite a colored population here. So we had two churches: the Methodists and the Baptists. We went to both. We were neither Methodists nor Baptists; my mother was born in a Presbyterian family and brought up in a Presbyterian family, but when she came here she couldn’t belong to the Presbyterian church.”

While the black churches served as a center for social as well as religious life, they no doubt inspired Perdita’s love of music. She demonstrated talent at the piano at an early age, and her parents found Butte offered rigorous music training in the classics including opera.

“The musical appreciation courses given in high school were of the classics only. The operas, the major singers of the time. Caruso was the most famous singer then. They played the arias that he recorded. You’d have to know which aria he was singing and which opera it was from. This was all taught to us in high school! And my music teacher had a toy symphony orchestra. And all her students played some instrument. We learned the symphony and became familiar with that music. Being taught the classics when you study music, they didn’t teach anything else. You learn most of the piano literature there. And [my teacher] had been taught by Orlashatitsky, who had been taught by Franz Liszt.”

Once Perdita entered high school her social life suffered, but her music sustained her along with a kind-hearted principal who encouraged her. Her strength of character emerged.

“In grade school there was no difference made, but when you went to high school, that’s where the type of socializing of the dancing things became important to teenagers. And that was where I was cut off. There were some with whom I’d been very close growing up, and at that point they no longer had anything to do with me. I didn’t understand it until my father used to tell me I had to learn how to live alone for the rest of my life. Because there are always time where you’re going to have to be alone, you have to adjust.”

Even with these difficulties, Perdita pursued her lifelong passion for music and dancing at every turn. Imagine her amazement when a dance marathon showed up at the Knights of Columbus in Butte.

“Because they had a dance marathon down there. I was still in high school. And the dance marathons were being held during the Depression years. Well these young people danced themselves practically to death in order to earn money.”

Despite the isolation and discrimination, Perdita embraced the opportunities before her. She considered her Butte High School education superior and felt ready to face the world after graduating.

“I grew up here in the State of Montana and the City of Butte when the State of Montana ranked number one as having the best educational system of any state in the union, and that went on for a good ten to fifteen years. When I went to school, I got a very good education. By the time I was out of high school, I was prepared for anything and everything. The rest was - I called it refinement. I had been taught how to study, how to think for myself, where to go to find what I needed. If I had a lesson that I needed to find some more information immediately, I went to the encyclopedia for an expansion on that subject. We were taught how to write and how to spell by the time we got out of grade school. They taught you geography; you know where all the countries in the world were. They’ve subsequently changed the names and they don’t teach that anymore.”

Eventually Perdita traveled to Ohio to attend Oberlin, the first white college to admit African-American women. But there was little opportunity to pursue a vocation in concert music.

“A black person is not going to be able to make it in the concert world, especially a woman. If you majored in piano, you had to settle on being an accompanist. At that time, most of the accompanists were men, and well women are discriminated against even today. There are not that many women pianists of note, of all races. So I mean, you didn’t go there with the purpose of majoring in music.”

Unsure what profession to pursue, Duncan majored in sociology and English, and moved to New York City after graduation. Eventually she began a career in social work that would last 37 years. Encouraged to enroll in law courses at St. John’s University, she held a position in the legal division of New York City’s Department of Social Services. But she did not abandon her love of music. Instead Perdita developed a second career as a classical music critic.

“When this opening came in the newspaper to write the music column, that was not supposed to have been permanent. Their regular music critic retired and the editor was a friend of mine. He said ‘just do me a favor. These tickets keep coming in and we have no one to cover the concert. You cover them for me until we get someone.’ I was happy to do it because it was a struggle to get the money to go to these concerts. But I got there, and sat in Carnegie Hall with the two bit seats. You were way up at the top of the room. The Metropolitan Opera House was one down. You were so far away from the stage you had to take the big racing binoculars to see what was going on.”

She spent her nights at Carnegie Hall and The Metropolitan Opera, eventually reviewing performances in a column for the New York Amsterdam News, one of the largest black newspapers in the country. Her reviews even appeared in the New York Times.

Once retired, she returned to Butte to care for her aging mother, continuing to write music reviews into her 70’s, this time for the Montana Standard. About growing up in Butte, Perdita said, “I learned very early that I was a colored girl growing up in a white community and that my name was Perdita Duncan. After that, nobody could crush me.” Perdita died at home in Butte in 1985 at the age of 76.

Mining City Reflections is a production of KBMF-LP and has been funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Permission for these recordings has been granted by the Butte Silver Bow Archives, the Montana Historical Society and the University of Montana.

Learn more at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives: https://buttearchives.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/perdita-duncan/