Angela Carrington stood out.
She was a dancer with the wild and woolly street band, the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band, and even in that psychedelic crowd, all eyes were on the bewigged and bedazzled Angela.
“She was a queen, she was the face of the band,” said Patricia Pichardo, the “Bookie” for the Abominables. “She had a knack for finding her way to the front, wherever we were performing.”
Angela Carrington also stood up. When a president-elect criticized her beloved Congressman John Lewis and her beloved Atlanta, she joined protests in the freezing cold, probably wearing the “Nasty Woman” shirts she had printed up.
“If she didn’t like something she would tell you straight up,” said friend and fellow artist Gwen Newman Fryar. “She didn’t mince words. Don’t ask her a question if you don’t want an honest answer.”
She helped raise the children of Inman Park as a teacher and aftercare provider and fought to keep her community intact when the city planned a highway through the middle of her neighborhood.
Angela Carrington died in her sleep in the early morning of Jan. 17. She was 76. There will be a celebration of life at 11 a.m. Feb. 15, at the Inman Park United Methodist Church, when her band will perform.
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Credit: Jenni Girtman
Carrington grew up in three different towns in South Georgia, the daughter of Methodist minister Ernest Veal and Lucile Brantley Veal. Her father insisted on welcoming Black and white worshippers to his churches in the 1950s and 1960s, a time when Southern cities were exploding in violent opposition to integration. Friends said her father’s beliefs made the family’s life difficult. “Her father and their family paid dearly for his activism,” said Laura Hardy Hawkins, also a dancer with the Abominables. (Dancers are called Despicables.)
In Vidalia, the young clarinetist Angela Veal met trombonist Howard Gibson. Each went their separate ways, she to Wesleyan College in Macon, he to military school and Georgia State University, then to Vietnam. Each married young and was divorced. In 1976, Gibson was in traffic on North Highland Avenue when he saw a familiar face in a nearby vehicle. They rolled down their windows to say, “I know you.”
Their first date was a get-together at Angela’s apartment near Piedmont Park, where they watched a horror movie on Bestoink Dooley’s Friday night television show, “The Big Movie Shocker.”
She offered him something to eat. He looked in the fridge. There was one lonely egg. He took her to the International House of Pancakes, and resolved that he would handle the cooking from then on. “Anybody who would give me her last egg, I’m going to take care of her for the rest of her life,” he said.
They married in 1981 and bought a house on Alta Avenue in Inman Park. Carrington taught elementary school, then preschool and then created an aftercare program called the Petites Ya-Yas for the girls at Mary Lin Elementary School.
She would pick up the girls in her hand-painted van and bring them to her house where they could play outside in a yard filled with concrete art from friend Christine Sibley. Or they would make their own art inside Howard and Angela’s highly decorated interior. “She raised just about every girl in the neighborhood,” said Gibson.
Jordan Echols, now a 35-year-old software manager living in the Old Fourth Ward, was one of those Petites Ya-Yas, and says Carrington modeled independence and caring. “A young child having an adult, someone other than your parents, that you could trust and confide in,” was a formative experience, she said. “Building that relationship with someone who was not judgmental and genuinely cared about children helped me be this woman who lives my life the way I want to live it.”
Those Petites Ya-Ya girls — some boys were included in later years — also learned about fighting for what was right and accompanied their leader on Stop The Road protests.
Even at Abominable gigs, in full Despicable gear, which included tutus, sequins and belly dancing bangles, Carrington wouldn’t let a wrong go unnoticed.
As an example, the Abominables perform at Charleston’s Piccolo Spoleto Festival every year, including in 2015, when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley removed the Confederate flag from the State House. That act prompted a group of Confederate enthusiasts to stage a protest during the festival, parading the battle flag past the Abominables’ motel during lunch time. Carrington launched herself across the parking lot and went after them. “She wouldn’t let something like that go by,” said trombonist Charles Bohanan.
In later years, Carrington slowed down and got her friend Hawkins to drive her to gigs. Carrington dealt with a seizure disorder through medication, but was generally in good health, said her husband. He said she may have experienced a seizure the morning of Jan. 17.
The Marching Abominable Band, which had its first public parade at the Inman Park Festival, will miss its stylish drum major, as will Inman Park itself.
Carrington educated, entertained and protected her neighborhood from its scruffy days in the 1980s until today, shooting it full of her own brand of creative energy.
“She was a shining light in the city of Atlanta and just a joy to be around,” said Echols.
Neighborhoods have a soul, said Hawkins, “and she was one of the keepers of that soul.”
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