James Herndon, aka Sweet Evening Breeze. When I was in the third grade, about 1964, my mother enrolled me in Sayre School on N. Limestone in Lexington. We had only been in town a year or so. We lived on Summit Drive so she would drive down Euclid to Limestone and head north, which took us right by Good Samaritan Hospital. One day I saw this large black man dressed in a nurse’s outfit sashaying across the street towards the hospital. I asked Mom “Who’s that?”. She said “Why that’s Sweet Evening Breeze.” as if she had been in town all her life and knew everything.
Sweets as they called him was a cross dresser, perhaps the only one in Lexington for many years. He had lived in and around Good Sam since his youth. I know little about his life except for the fact that he was an excellent cake baker and his cakes were in demand by many of the society ladies. He was friends with the wife of Harry Lancaster, the athletic director at UK. This story was related to me by Dick Rushing who played football under Coach Bear Bryant. Evidently Sweet Evening also liked men’s clothes and had a real nice sports coat. Some of the football players found it and took it. Sweets complained to Mrs. Lancaster who complained to her husband. It got back to Coach Bryant who raised hell with the players. The sports coat mysteriously turned up. That’s power.
Cormac McCarthy wrote a novel entitled “Suttree” which is set in Knoxville. The book is named for the primary character who lives on a shantyboat docked on the Tennessee River near Gay Street in downtown Knoxville. He hangs out with some drunks in a nasty little bar up above the street. At one place in the book it is recounted that a local cross dresser named “Tripping through the Dew” is visited by Sweet Evening Breeze from Lexington. Nothing more is said about it, but it is told me that “Tripping” was a real person. The fact that he and Sweets made it into a McCarthy novel seals their status as legends.
If my mother had known what she was exposing me to by allowing me to walk through downtown Lexington on the way to the bus stop she may have thought twice. Worthy of another post altogether is the the story of Carlos Toadvine aka Little Enis pounding out tunes at the Zebra Lounge on North Limestone.