From that version of Davis, Talley learned who he could – and would — become: an editor and creative director at Vogue, a friend to and collaborator with some of the most acclaimed designers in the industry and a larger-than-life fashion influencer before his death in 2022.
Each weekend, Davis, who worked at Duke for five decades until retiring at 65 in 1963, according to Talley’s 2003 memoir, “A.L.T.,” transformed into a style icon. His grandmother was the inspiration for Talley’s career and the greatest influence on his life.
“Bennie Frances Davis may have looked like a typical African American domestic worker to many who saw her on an ordinary day. But I, who could see her soul, could also see her secret: that even while she wore a hair net and work clothes to scrub toilets and floors, she wore an invisible diadem,” Talley wrote in “A.L.T.” “Though her life often may have been hard, my grandmother radiated kindness and love. The sparkle from her invisible diamonds could light up the darkest corners of your soul.”
It meant something to be employed by Duke
Bennie Frances Roberson Davis was born on April 9, 1898, outside Durham in Orange County, the eldest of eight children who grew up in a small home that Talley said had no electricity and required her to “walk to school for miles.” Though she didn’t finish high school, she could read and write – but reserved her reading almost exclusively for the Bible.
Church was the centerpiece of life for Davis from an early age and would remain so throughout her life. From her faith, she learned the value of hard work. And to help her family, she began working as a housekeeper at Duke at age 15, according to Talley.
Tamika Nunley, the William & Sue Gross Professor of History at Duke whose research focuses in part on African American women’s and gender history, said that because domestic employment involved demanding labor, exploitation, and physical vulnerability, Davis might have found a housekeeping position with predictable hours and more visibility at Duke more appealing than working in the home of a private Southern family in the early 20th century.
“North Carolina was still the Jim Crow South, a place shaped by slavery, the American Civil War and segregation,” Nunley said. “So, in that sense, I imagine that working in housekeeping with students socialized to see themselves as better than Black Southerners presented several challenges – but also tempered with the fact that it did mean something to be employed by Duke University. But we cannot know how Davis felt without her own reflections on her experience here.”
Davis’ life was not easy, Talley often said, as she lost two infant children, and then her husband, father and most beloved daughter in quick succession in her late 40s and early 50s.
Soon after Talley’s birth in 1948 to Davis’ daughter Alma and Wiliam Talley, he went to live with Davis and became the brightest light in her life.
“When I came along she had something to devote her love to,” Talley said in a 2022 episode of PBS’s “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” “She turned her attention all to me.”
‘On the weekends she rose’
Davis raised Talley in a house at 1007 Cornell St., the rooms full of “odds and ends, leftover furniture from dorm rooms” that Duke students had bequeathed to Davis.
Her standards for cleanliness also transferred from work to the home life of the woman he called “Mama.”
“She worked hard at her job and kept a clean, welcoming home, so that those in her care (her own mother and I) could be well provided for, and so that we could all serve God,” Talley wrote in “A.L.T.” “What this meant at a practical level was that every surface in our home glowed – not only through the application of soap, paste wax, or ammonia, but also through the underlying working of love.”
No act of labor was off-limits for Davis, who washed clothes in a kettle of boiling water in the front yard, cooked scrumptious meals each morning and evening and chopped wood for the stove in the mornings before departing for work at 7 a.m. Once Talley was old enough to help with household chores, his grandmother “taught me not only to clean things, but to make them shine,” he wrote in “A.L.T.”
That same care manifest in her impeccable Sunday-best style each weekend when she dressed for church.
“On the weekends she rose,” Talley said on “Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” “She rose to her regality – her regalness when she put on that hat and put that handkerchief in the handbag and those gloves matching her handbag and the handbag matching the shoes and that little black suit or that little navy-blue coat and we marched off into church and I discovered fashion.
“The color, fashion, attitude. Everyone in the church was a queen; every sister, every niece, every woman, every man.”
Church was where Talley first began to revel in fashion, an obsession that blossomed further when he discovered Vogue magazine at the Durham Public Library at age 9 or 10.
“For him in some ways, church on Sundays was his first experience of a fashion runway,” said Kate Novack, the director of the 2017 documentary about Talley’s life, “The Gospel According to André.” “It sounds like it’s sort of disparate experiences, but it was very connected. There was the ceremony and the ritual of the really impeccable clothes and hats that I think for him were no different than a Marc Jacobs runway.”
Said Nunley: “And so much of his style was inspired by all of those working Black people in Durham going to church on Sunday, many of whom really carried the brunt of the labor at places like Duke.”
Missing her almost every day
Talley carried his passion for couture to North Carolina Central University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in French literature, and on to Brown University where he earned a master’s in the same subject. Connections he made in graduate school led to an apprenticeship with fashion journalist Diana Vreeland at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1974, and his relationship with Vreeland became the second most-important in his life as she catapulted his career.
Talley worked with artist Andy Warhol at Vreeland’s recommendation and became immersed in the world of high fashion where he befriended designers such as Karl Lagerfeld. Later, he would become the creative director at Vogue from 1988 to 1995 and the magazine’s editor-at-large from 1998 to 2013. He styled everyone from former first lady Michelle Obama for her first Vogue cover shoot to Melania Trump for her wedding to Donald Trump, and became known, himself, for wearing flamboyant capes and robes on his substantial figure.
But he always returned home to Durham, and he always spoke reverently of the grandmother who raised him. He kept the southwest Durham home he bought for Davis shortly before she died in 1989 from leukemia until his own death in 2022 from heart disease.
“I miss her almost every day,” he said in the 2017 documentary, 29 years after her death.
For the documentary, filmmaker Novack captured a scene of Talley attending a church service at Duke University Chapel, listening to a sermon delivered by Yale Divinity School Theology Professor Eboni Marshall Turman. Afterward, Talley admitted to Turman that he couldn’t help but think of his grandmother who once worked not far from that Chapel tower.
For Nunley, the Duke history professor, that moment in the film stood out.
“He is not hesitant to discuss where his grandmother came from, and also the ways in which she worked for this institution,” Nunley said. “He thinks about how far Black women have come from the time of his grandmother’s generation to now, seeing Black women professors and people who are leaders in their own right, taking up space at Duke.”
Talley, though, never forgot where his grandmother came from, and never stopped honoring the hard-working matriarch who raised him. After she died, he designed a marker to stand at her grave in the family cemetery outside Durham. Made of dark, Georgia granite, the 6-foot-6 obelisk was carved to mimic Talley’s precise height.
“So that it could always be as if my figure were watching over her final resting place,” he wrote in “A.L.T.”
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