Remembering James Lloydovich Patterson

James Lloydovich Patterson, poet, child film star, and former naval officer of the Soviet Black Sea fleet, passed away peacefully at the age of 91 on May 22.

Though he spent the last 30 years of his life in Washington D.C., James’ life began in Moscow, where he was born in 1933.

James' father, Lloyd Walton Patterson, was an African-American from New York seeking an occupation in the arts. Though Lloyd studied design at the Hampton Institute, racial prejudice in America limited his job opportunities to manual labor. In 1932, in an effort to seek new opportunity, Lloyd responded to a newspaper article asking for African-American volunteers to work on a “Soviet film on negro life.” He was accepted, and in June of that same year Lloyd arrived in Moscow among an impressive team of 22 African-American writers, actors, and poets, including Langston Hughes, Dorothy West, and Wayland Rudd.

Though the project fell through, while in Moscow Lloyd met James’ mother, the Ukrainian set-designer Vera Aralova. While most of the American team returned home, Lloyd stayed and married Vera. In 1933, James was born.

James was immediately thrust into a life of art, cast as Jimmy in the popular 1936 Soviet film Circus (Цирк). He played the biracial child of Lyubov Orlova's Marion Dixon, a famous American circus performer who flees to Russia to protect Jimmy from violent persecution. She finds work in the Moscow Circus, and the film culminates as her jealous and abusive agent angrily interrupts her act to reveal to the audience that Marion has a black son. The agent expects a scandal, and is stunned when the audience laughs at his rant, uniting around Jimmy and singing him lullabies in the various languages of the ethnic groups within the Soviet Union. Though the film’s messaging was overt and propogandist, Marion’s journey of finding an accepting home in Russia reflected that of James’ father, and he himself, like Jimmy, was celebrated and loved in Russia from early childhood as a symbol of unity and acceptance.

When James grew up, he enrolled in the Nahkimov Naval Cadet School, and later the Naval Academy in Leningrad. He served as a submarine officer of the Soviet Black Sea fleet until 1957, when he began his literary career.

A Russian poet of mixed-race heritage, James was inspired by and compared to Alexander Pushkin, whose African ancestry formed a central, though often overlooked, part of his identity. James studied at the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, graduating in 1964. In the same year, his first book, Chronicle of the Left Hand, was published.

James’s father passed away in 1942 due to complications with an injury he had received during a Nazi raid on Moscow. Vera continued to enjoy success as an artist, eventually becoming the head of Moscow’s House of Fashion. She and James both maintained flourishing careers, finding prominence in the world of Russian art.

Vera and James moved to the United States in 1995 after struggling in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. James continued to work as a poet, but after Vera’s death in 2001, he eased back from public life. James spent the last years of his life in Washington, D.C., enjoying the city’s poetry, art, and culture among friends and loved ones.

James Patterson’s legacy as a child star, naval officer, and celebrated poet, as well as his remarkable life story, will be remembered by Russians and Americans alike.