Thought for Food

Some Memphis residents were offended by the visage of a black woman with a gold tooth taking shape on a new mural near a minor-league baseball stadium (NYT).

“We’re telling our young people to take the gold teeth out of your mouth and pull your pants up and be a responsible citizen, and then you paint one on the wall,” Mr. Grant said. “I immediately responded in a very violent, negative-type way.”

He began hearing from others with similar concerns, and got in touch with officials from Rhodes College, where a group of students was overseeing the mural, which portrays a diverse group of the city’s residents, arguing that they might as well have painted a black child eating a watermelon. That is when he learned from Elizabeth Daggett, the coordinator of the college’s arts outreach program, that Ms. Simmons was a real, longtime Memphian.

“As soon as Liz said, ‘We meant no disrespect to Miss Savannah,’ he stopped cold and said, ‘Who is Miss Savannah?’ ” recalled Daney D. Kepple, the director of communications for Rhodes.

Mr. Grant said, “I thought it was an artist’s rendition of what he thought an African-American in Memphis should look like.” Instead, he said, “This is a real live beautiful African-American woman.”

Miss Savannah Simmons is an 80-year-old former factory worker and a Head Start volunteer. For four decades, she worked as a nanny and housekeeper to the owner of the building where the mural is painted.

When she got dentures, she asked her dentist to add a gold tooth in memory of her father, who had one in the same location.

“It didn’t bother me” that people took offense to it, Ms. Simmons explained. “They just didn’t know who I was.”