RAY FUNK
Connie Williams was a key figure in TT culture in the US in the 20th century, yet little remembered today.
She was known for running the Calypso Restaurant in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, and later Connie’s Restaurant in San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s.
She is perhaps best known for hiring a teenage James Baldwin for her New York restaurant and inspiring him and others.
Throughout her career, she was a strong supporter of the arts in general and TT culture in particular: she backed calypso, pan and mas through innumerable concerts and dances on both coasts, and was perhaps the first chef to popularise TT cuisine.
Little is known about Williams’s early life except for what is preserved in a 1939 declaration of intent to be a permanent US resident. Williams was born in Port of Spain in 1905 and migrated to the US in 1924. She lived in Harlem, and initially worked as a nurse or domestic servant.
She opened her calypso restaurant in 1942 in the basement of 51 McDougal Street, just a few blocks from Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.
Almost from the beginning, it became a popular spot. A recent New York Times article noted: “In 1943, (painter Beauford) Delaney introduced a 19-year-old James Baldwin to Connie Williams, a Trinidadian restaurateur who had just opened Calypso Restaurant – whose patrons would include Tennessee Williams and entertainers such as Eartha Kitt and Paul Robeson – in a basement space on McDougal Street.
“Hired as a waiter at Calypso, which had live music and dancing, Baldwin mixed with the bohemian clientele. Among the habitues who befriended the erudite young server was the writer Henry Miller. But the occasional customer with whom he may have developed the most enduring friendship was Marlon Brando.”
A Wikipedia piece on her points to a wide range of supporters: “Other artists, performers, and intellectuals who frequented the Calypso included Henry Miller, CLR James, Tennessee Williams, Eartha Kitt, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright (author), Grace Lee Boggs, and Paul Robeson.”
[caption id="attachment_976803" align="alignnone" width="800"] As a teenager James Baldwin worked as waiter at Calypso Restaurant run by Connie Williams in New York. -[/caption]
Lee Boggs, social activist and author, noted in her autobiography that Richard Wright also frequented the restaurant. Boggs herself went to stay with Williams in San Francisco. Baldwin’s friend Stan Weir wrote recently: “The Calypso was catching on fast in a unique segment of the public, especially among radical intellectuals. CLR James, for example, sometimes brought Pan Africanists; Buford Delaney attracted the Henry Miller crowd; and then there were the dancers, musicians, actors and singers from the equivalent of what are now the off off-Broadway shows – many were West Indians carrying developed political attitudes.”
Baldwin himself wrote about Williams, “Because of (Beauford Delaney and) Connie Williams, a beautiful
