Cecilia Nadal
Photography by Wesley Law
Cecilia Nadal is looking for a gypsy.
She knew Jasmin Cecic well, for a time; he even went with her to Chicago to introduce her to the Roma community there, when she was planning The St. Louis Gypsy (Roma) Music Festival in 2006. Now she’s thinking of doing another festival, but Cecic’s cellphone number is no longer working.
She drives to Gravois Avenue and starts walking. I traipse along. She checks the Hollywood Restaurant, but it’s shuttered. She stops at the office of the Bosnian newspaper SabaH and asks its publisher, Sukrija Dzidzovic, if some of the Roma are moving to South County.
“I don’t think there is any major movement,” he says. “They don’t care much about previous contacts to call them back. It’s not part of their lifestyle. Some of them are in truck industry. Some collect recycling. You find them at the Milan café.”
I hear a hint of disapproval, but Nadal ignores it. “Jasmin has a trucking company,” she says. “He brought 23 relatives here with the profits.” She stays to chat with Dzidzovic, who says he’s opened a travel business “to fill up the hole so the newspaper will continue to run.” He’s frank about his money struggles, his hunt for another job: “Full-time whatever. I would be satisfied with anything. Cleaning.”
Nadal used to run a job-training company, so she brainstorms with him, beginning softly—“This is not my business; I’m coming from a place of ignorance”—and moving toward firm, practical strategies. He argues a bit, then grins. “Maybe I am the person who is praying for a job and begging to God not to have it.”
Outside, she smiles and says only, “I love how introspective the Bosnians are.” She’s not convinced he’s right about the Roma, though. “He’s Bosnian,” she says, her shrug as philosophical as his.
We head down the sidewalk, bent against an icy February wind, and pass a jumble of pink and orange plastic flowers and painted watering cans arranged around a sapling. A sign reads “Faith Hope Love.” A store display, maybe?
“Let’s find out,” she suggests. She asks the next passerby. “That is Maria,” he says, and knocks on a storefront. Maria comes to the door in her pajamas. She lives here; there’s no store. Somebody just decorated a tree. In a rush of Spanish, Nadal finds out all about Maria’s home, her kids, her life.
At Cafe Milano, about 40 young, dark-haired men stare as Nadal tells the bartender, who’s the only other woman in the place, “I’m looking for my friend Jasmin Cecic.” The young woman nods and keeps pouring. As she slides the next drink across the bar, she promises to pass on a phone number.
“I’m kind of a gypsy myself,” Nadal tells me later. “I’ve been studying their culture since high school.”
She says this often, that she’s a gypsy at heart; I’ve read it quoted in earlier profiles. But I’m not quite buying it. She’s too comfortable wielding power, managing money, finessing technical details. In just the past month, she won an Adelante Award from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Gitana Productions, the global arts-education nonprofit she founded, received a proclamation from the city.
I glance at her coat: a burnt-orange batik jacket that’s quietly ethnic, interesting without demanding to be. Nadal might be bohemian and free-spirited, but she rooted herself in St. Louis four decades ago, and she’s just as good with CEOs and janitors and juvenile delinquents as she is with temperamental artists.
She lives to foil the stereotypes.
Jose Nadal was a black Puerto Rican with strong, even features and gentle eyes. Before he could even speak English, he fell in love with Althea Robinette, a St. Louisan who carried African, Cherokee, French, and Irish blood. Althea’s mother had looked like a gypsy, her eyes dark and wild. “She picked up a revolver in a fight with my grandfather, and he grabbed it from her, and as they fought, she was shot,” Nadal says. “So my mother was without a mother, and you could tell. She always remained a young girl.”
Playful, Althea never met a stranger. She was “shiny,” her daughter says, and wore dangly, sparkly earrings and sequined hats. She loved her children with the fierce devotion she’d yearned for. She’d put on an André Previn classical LP and urge them to shut their eyes and pretend they were going someplace very far away. (At age 72, she went with Cecilia to a 12-hour Roma wedding and danced almost without pause, eyes half closed, transported.)
The Nadals lived on military bases—by the time Cecilia finished high school, she’d lived in 12 states and three countries. In Panama, they lived in base housing next to a jungle. As bubbly and outgoing as her mother, Cecilia got to know every member of every family on base. The housing jumbled all races together, and she never saw color as anything more than a detail, like a bumpy nose or a soft voice.
Then she moved alone to St. Louis at age 18.
She walked through the streets, incredulous. It felt like some bureaucrat had come through, tagged everybody by skin color, and assigned them neighborhoods. Slowly, it dawned on her that the darker or more different you were, the less likely you’d ever move from that place.
She majored in sociology at Saint Louis University. She learned to call what she’d seen “an entrenched, racially segregated underclass.” She practiced ways to find common ground with anyone.
St. Louis was a bitter awakening, but it also marked Nadal’s first, sweet freedom. In her father’s Latino culture, a young woman graduated from high school, married, and had lots of babies. When his firstborn graduated from Rome Free Academy in upstate New York and announced that she was going to college, his eyebrows shot up. It seemed, to him, a strange decision, coldly frivolous. But he bit his tongue and gave his blessing.
At SLU, she started the Black Renaissance Players. Exhausted and giddy after one of their shows, she went to a Laclede Town pub with the cast. A tall African-American man in a cape—a friend of her cousin’s—walked into the pub.
“He looked at my cousin, who looks like a black Sophia Loren,” she recalls. “Then he turned and looked at me and said, ‘Who is this woman?’” The sureness in his voice caught and held her. Alonzo Chappelle had grown up on the North Side but made it to Webster University. A trained actor, he became a communications consultant and eventually the city marshal.
They married and made an extraordinary child: Maria Chappelle-Nadal, now a Missouri state senator. They separated the same year. Cecilia earned her master’s degree in urban sociology at Webster. For years, she gave up on romance and made work count for everything. At 63, she’s softening again: “That person may still be out there,” she says, “and when that happens, I will know.”
Nadal looks a little like a black Sophia Loren herself—without the hauteur, and cushioned by middle age. Her smile is the sort people call “generous”: wide and open, nothing needy about it. She’s not trying to please; she’s trying to connect.
At 21, she directed a halfway house. She learned to listen, to understand why prostitutes, addicts, and thieves had let their lives unravel. Next she ran an alternative school, then her own nonprofit for 23 years. Productive Futures provided job training for immigrants and long-unemployed St. Louisans—and it trained businesses that would hire them.
In 1996, Nadal founded Gitana Productions to promote “global healing through the arts.” She’s tackled everything from the conspiracy of silence in Darfur to the struggle of Afghan women, and she’s also staged some of St. Louis’ most joyful cross-cultural performances. In 2000, Nadal decided to bring the China National Orchestra to St. Louis. She strode into a bank president’s office and explained her plan. “He turned four shades of red and did his best,” she says. “‘Tell me, how…did you get interested in this?’ he said. I was a fat black woman asking about the China National Orchestra.” She laughs, shaking her head. “That’s the new level of racism,” she says. “It’s OK for someone to talk to you, but you are not supposed to be in the global arena.”
Over the years, she’s learned to deflect people’s suspicions of an African-American Latina who might be smarter than they are.
But she does get tired of having to work at it.
Nadal steps into the tiny Central West End satellite office and introduces herself to Officer Patrick Clancy of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. When she inquires, he says he’s been working here since March.
“Oh, so you took over for Suarez?”
His eyelids lift a few degrees. “Yeah. And we switched; we’re in the 5th District now.”
“Right, because of that consolidation,” she says. “Is that going to work for you?” She tells Clancy she uses the arts to draw communities together, and her Global Education through the Arts classes in the Amherst Park neighborhood introduce African-American kids and immigrant kids from Iraq, Egypt, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Mexico, Tanzania… She’s hoping he’ll come to a community meeting and allay people’s suspicions of the police.
“I’m trying to think, along that stretch, what our problems are,” he says, braking her rush of information to his methodical pace. “You have your isolated incidences with robbery, your shootings, they are kind of out there looking for one specific person. But the biggest problem is larcenies. That’s what’s affecting the common person.”
She nods. “So let me ask you some basic questions. If we had a Somali family call 911 and they say, ‘Police, police,’ but they can’t speak English, what happens?”
“We will send at least a two-man car.”
“And when they get there and someone can’t speak the language?”
“We have interpreters you can call.”
Nadal suggests a booklet the International Institute of St. Louis puts out and promises to help him get a copy. “Now, the kids, the first thing they said to me was, ‘Can we go in the police car?’ You should have seen their eyes,” she tells him. “On one hand, fearful, but on the other hand, excited.”
He smiles broadly. “We also have coloring books,” he volunteers.
“Now I want to talk about something that has nothing to do with this,” she says. “Your last name is Irish. Is your family originally from St. Louis?”
“I’m thinking it’s four or five generations back,” he says, bemused.
“Because you know this is part of what was called Kerry Patch, and a lot of Irish people still come to St. Augustine’s.”
“Well, my dad grew up in Pine Lawn.”
“Many people have no idea there are many white officers whose families grew up in north St. Louis,” she says. She tells him she has Irish blood; many African-Americans do. “Muhammad Ali was also Irish. His great-great-grandfather was from Ennis.” She thanks Clancy warmly for his help and rises to leave. But now he doesn’t want her to go.
“My mom’s side is German,” he confides. “They settled in Ste. Genevieve. My mom’s uncle is 101, and he still lives on the farm…”
In any given week, Nadal crosses a few hundred lines of race and class and bends a dozen competing agendas into collaboration. In the three days before meeting with Clancy, she met about a program mentoring juvenile delinquents; found a name for her next event (Karamu, Swahili for party); and went slightly crazy trying to get visas for Japanese and Argentinian musicians living in Europe. (“I called a friend in Homeland Security and said, ‘Do we have a beggarman’s chance of doing this?’”). She also helped a brilliant Roosevelt High School grad from Somalia write her résumé. (“She had Roosevelt at the very end because she’s been made to feel bad about going there. I said, ‘Hell no, put that right at the top, and under it put ‘Valedictorian.’”)
Nadal drives a Toyota Avalon with the license plate FUTURES. She’s had it since her days running Productive Futures.
But it means more now.
People called Nadal’s great-grandmother Mama House. A proud blend of Cherokee, African-American, and French blood, she traveled all over the country at the invitation of wealthy families who’d heard she was a healer. People sat, still and eager, while she went into deep prayer for 30, 40 minutes. Then she’d lay her hands on someone and pray, clearing a path to what was whole and holy.
Nadal’s only memories of her are of a whupping—Mama House didn’t tolerate nonsense—and of watching those strong arms boil greens, bread pork chops, stir cornbread batter. But later, she heard the stories: “How people would jump when she touched them, because she had some kind of magnetism we don’t understand yet. How she helped people who were partially blind or paralyzed.” She smiles. “My father said I was like her. After she died, I kept dreaming about her—just seeing her face, or seeing her sitting with her iron skillet in her lap, clipping the ends of green beans.”
Nadal is also like her daughter, a sweet-faced, scrappy legislator who’s more warrior than healer. “She’s tougher than me,” Nadal says, laughing. “I could not be with those folks in Jeff City at all. I would get out of their company quickly. And my daughter will parley with them and at the same time say no and fight for what she believes.”
Nadal’s way of fighting—and healing—is to engage, openhearted, with one person at a time. “When I sit and talk to an Afghan woman and I say, ‘What are the things that you need? What is hard for you? How can I help you?’ I am going to hear something a lot more substantial than ‘Oh, these people need…’”
She hates the word “diversity” because it asks too little; it’s static. “Those of us who bought ‘diversity’ were a little naive,” she says. “We were not asking for very much to ask for diversity. What we should be asking for is equity and growth, because that requires people to engage with each other. Don’t do these group things where one person’s ‘pink’ and one’s ‘purple.’ These damn focus groups, that’s the worst thing you can do. Get people meeting at cafés, in boardrooms, in the community where they live.”
Years ago, when she worked to get more rural African-Americans and Mexican-Americans into Dallas’ community-college system, she’d go into strangers’ houses. “They would just share with me—stories, food, hospitality—sitting down and just talking, not having to know before I meet you what your dossier is, being very free with discovery of another human being. I decided we need to fight for that.”
Meet me at the gas station at Delmar and Skinker,” says Nadal, not one to overdirect. She pulls up, nods toward my Mini Cooper, and pulls out again, leading the way through a maze of side streets. She’s visiting a young couple from Mexico, ostensibly to tell them about an upcoming festival. But she has another agenda.
The wife, call her Rosita, is a former student. When she was 15, she and her sister went through hell to reach this country. She arrived shy, near wordless. Nadal described her classes, and Rosita said no but couldn’t forget the idea of dancing. When she saw Nadal on Delmar Boulevard a few weeks later, she came up shyly and said yes, she would like to come.
Now she has a husband who watches her, his eyes soft with unspoken adoration, as she talks. Nadal tickles their baby boy’s toes. “I know about babies,” she informs him, “because I was the oldest of 11!”
She turns back to Rosita to tell her about June 14. “We are bringing the best Latino musicians together with the best African-Americans. Bokulaka is older, and he does original music from the Congo.”
Nadal’s just finished three back-to-back meetings, and she’s scheduled for exploratory surgery in a few days. But she reaches deep, drawing an energy that fills and warms the room. She talks with animation about the festival, coos over the baby, teases the husband’s quiet brother, saying at first she thought he wasn’t quite right, because he kept chirping, and then she realized it was the game on his phone…
“So anyway,” she says, turning to Rosita, “are you still thinking about school?”
“I wish I could go,” Rosita says. “Later on, maybe. I could do medicine.”
“Or be a nurse?” Nadal inserts, always practical. “You are so smart. But you are also a mommy now. Wife first,” she smiles at the husband, “mommy second. But you could do this for the family, because when you grow, your family grows, too.”
The husband interrupts in Spanish, telling Nadal that school will be something for Rosita; that she needs this for herself, not just for the family. Nadal’s face clears. She turns back to Rosita with fresh determination. “You can get a scholarship anywhere, because of your grades. I love you dearly, and I am still here even though you are not involved in the program anymore. All you have got to do is say when, and we’ll make it happen. I haven’t lost my friendship with you.”
She backs off, segues lightly into a discussion of food. She tells them about pasteles, her favorite Puerto Rican dish: plantains wrapped in leaves and boiled. But when Rosita says she wants to bring her baby to see the kids in the program, Nadal says, “Remember Sunita? She now wants to go to school to be a clinical psychologist. Her science teacher is going to help. So it’s connections…”
She’s delivered her message, pulled the threads together, brought closure. She says warm goodbyes, ready to go home and rest. Then the brother asks a question in Spanish.
Nadal takes a breath, then gives a long, careful answer. He listens, his eyes serious above high cheekbones, a clean jawline, sensitive lips. They go back and forth, and I hear words I recognize—“Espíritu Santo,” “profundo,” “tres,” “electricity.”
“Cecilia, are you talking about the Trinity?” I whisper.
She nods and keeps going. He’s said he isn’t sure he believes in the doctrine. She tells him, translating this bit for me, that he must “find the place that touches your head, your heart, and makes you walk in the right direction.
“You have choices,” she says. “You can’t just sit and ask the questions; you have to seek the answers.”
When we finally leave, she says, “I was supposed to meet him today.”
Sometimes there’s an agenda hidden even deeper than her own.
"Rise and shine!” Jose Nadal called to his kids at 6 every morning, so they could clean the house for their mother before school. Military discipline had saved Jose from hunger and torn clothing on the island, and he used that discipline daily, reaching for it like a chef grabbing his favorite knife. Trilingual, he became a communications specialist in the U.S. Air Force, and at night he washed dishes at the Officers’ Club. In middle age, he earned two master’s degrees and became a college counselor. For a disciplinarian, he was soft-spoken, and all his kids adored him. But Cecilia, the firstborn, shared his mind. “They’d sit on the porch steps together,” her sister Anita remembers, “and talk about ideas for hours.”
Now, Nadal has to fight for the solitude to think. She took an afternoon for herself a few months ago and went down to the Old Courthouse to learn more about Dred Scott. “He was tried twice here, and they never did give him freedom,” she says. “He was turned over to the Blows, so they were able to free him legally—but it was never resolved in that courthouse. And I thought oh, that is so St. Louis. We struggle with trying to do right, but it never gets solved.”
Four years ago, 15-year-old Sahele Wodede was gunned down in a drive-by shooting on Hodiamont Avenue. Tensions between immigrants and African-Americans flared. So Nadal went door to door with the help of a passel of kids, delivering flyers about a party.
She planned it for Amherst Park, a buffer area between the divided groups. She brought African drummers, mariachi musicians, poets, gospel singers, and flamenco dancers. A few Mexican immigrants sat in their windows the entire day and watched, scared to venture to the street. But most people gradually came out, and they started to dance and laugh, and everybody remembered that only one fool with a gun had killed Sahele, nobody else.
Today, the neighborhood’s even more diverse, with Syrians the next group of refugees expected. Andrew Stern, an earnest young father who’s active in the New City Fellowship church in University City, wants to plan another festival like Nadal’s. They meet at the Saint Louis Bread Co. in U. City. Stern brings a friend, the manager, over to meet Nadal, and the two burst out laughing. “We met in the desert of Morocco,” Nadal explains.
When the manager leaves, Stern tells Nadal that her 2010 concert was the best neighborhood unifier he’s ever seen.
“But it takes continuous work,” she says. “Like any relationship.”
“Is the concept to sell food?” she asks, wary but not showing it.
He nods. “Hopefully merchandise, too.”
“These are people who are poor,” Nadal says, leaning forward. “You can’t expect them to buy the way people at the Festival of Nations do.”
“You can and you can’t,” he replies. “These kids go to the corner store and buy a soda for $2.”
“But let me finish,” she urges, reminding him that people who live in the neighborhood could cook food and sell it cheaply. “One woman makes incredible tacos. If you help her buy the ingredients, she could sell them for 50 cents apiece, and there’s a lot of buyers. That follows the chain of making it local and investing in the community.”
They talk about getting the word out, convincing Burmese, Iraqi, Mexican-American, and African-American neighbors to come to the park together. They barely know each other. Nobody connects new immigrants to the lower-income African-Americans who live in the same housing complexes, so they remain suspicious of each other—yet they could help each other better than any social worker.
Nadal tells Stern to involve Christ Southern Missionary Baptist Church. “A group of Burmese moved in, six kids still wearing sandals in winter. We go to a Christmas party at Christ Southern, and there’s an elderly black woman cooking in the back.” The next time that Nadal saw her, she was on the ground with a piece of paper, outlining a kid’s foot. “She comes back in 45 minutes with a Kmart bag full of shoes.”
That’s the warmth of understanding Nadal believes will save us. It’s sometimes elusive, but she’s spent her life pursuing it.
That reminds me to ask about Cecic. No, she says, she hasn’t heard back from him. It would have been nice to have closure for the story, I say—a jubilant reunion and plans for a new festival.
She smiles. “When Jasmin is ready, I will hear from him.”
