In February 1892, a twenty-four-year-old Black woman walked through the back door of the White House. Not the front door. The back door. She was there to sing for President Benjamin Harrison in the Blue Room.

Her voice – described as “clear as a mockingbird’s” – filled the room. When she finished, the president and his guests stood and applauded. Two months later, she sang at Madison Square Garden before 75,000 people. They called her The Black Patti – comparing her to Adelina Patti, the most famous opera singer in the world.

She hated that nickname. She wanted to be called Madame Sissieretta Jones. Over the next twenty-three years, she would sing for three more US presidents. She would perform at Carnegie Hall, Covent Garden, concert halls across Europe, South America, Australia, India and southern Africa.

She would become the highest-paid African American performer of her time. And she would die in 1933, penniless and alone, buried in an unmarked grave. Because in America, even genius couldn’t break every barrier.

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner was born on January 5, 1868, in Portsmouth, Virginia. Three years after the Civil War ended. Her father, Jeremiah, was a former slave who’d somehow learned to read and write. He became an African Methodist Episcopal minister. Her mother, Henrietta, sang in the church choir and took in washing and ironing to support the family.

Sissieretta had two siblings. Both died in childhood. She was the only one who survived.

When Sissieretta was six, the family moved to Providence, Rhode Island – to a house at 20 Congdon Street on the East Side. Two years later, her parents separated. Her mother raised her alone, washing and ironing other people’s clothes. But Henrietta noticed something: her daughter had a voice. A remarkable voice.

So despite having almost no money, Henrietta made sure Sissieretta got singing lessons. At age fifteen – in September 1883 – Sissieretta married David Richard Jones, a twenty-one-year-old hotel bellman at Providence’s Narragansett Hotel. That same year, she enrolled at the Providence Academy of Music.

She studied under Ada Baroness Lacombe, a noted Italian diva. Later, she studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Her husband, David, became her first manager. It seemed like a partnership. It wasn’t.

In 1887, Sissieretta performed at Boston’s Music Hall before an audience of 5,000. On April 5, 1888, she made her New York debut at Steinway Hall.

During a performance at New York’s Wallack’s Theatre later that year, Adelina Patti’s manager was in the audience. He was stunned. He immediately recommended that Sissieretta tour the West Indies with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. She did – twice, in 1888 and 1892.

The tours were wildly successful. The press started calling her “The Black Patti.” She hated it. She preferred “Madame Sissieretta Jones.” But the nickname stuck.

In February 1892, President Benjamin Harrison invited Sissieretta to sing at the White House.

She entered through the back door. Black performers weren’t allowed through the front. She sang operatic arias and ballads. The president was impressed. Two months later – April 1892 – Sissieretta performed at the Grand Negro Jubilee at Madison Square Garden.

The crowd: 75,000 people.

She sang Swanee River and selections from Verdi’s La traviata. The ovation was deafening. She was invited to perform at the Pittsburgh Exposition later that year. Then the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

At the Chicago performance, the venue was packed an hour before she was scheduled to appear. When she sang Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster, the crowd erupted.

In June 1892, Sissieretta became the first African American to perform at the Music Hall in New York – renamed Carnegie Hall the following year.

She sang Gounod’s Ave Maria and Verdi’s Sempre libera from La traviata.

The New York Echo wrote: “If Mme Jones is not the equal of Adelina Patti, she at least can come nearer it than anything the American stage has yet produced.”

Over the next few years, Sissieretta’s star rose internationally. She performed for President Grover Cleveland. President William McKinley. President Theodore Roosevelt.

For the Roosevelt performance – finally – she was allowed to enter the White House through the front door.

She sang for the British royal family. The Kaiser of Germany. European nobility.

She toured South America, Australia, India, southern Africa and Europe for ten months in 1895.

Everywhere she went, critics raved. The Washington Post described her voice as “clear and bell-like… Her low notes are rich and sensuous with a tropical quality. The compass and quality of her registers surpass the usual limitations and seem to combine the height and depth of both soprano and contralto.”

European audiences loved her. American audiences loved her. But American opera houses wouldn’t hire her. The Metropolitan Opera refused to book Black performers. Major opera companies enforced strict colour barriers.

No matter how talented she was, she couldn’t get a leading role in a staged opera production. She could perform arias in concert halls. But she couldn’t perform on an opera stage. Because she was Black.

Meanwhile, her personal life was falling apart. Her only child – a daughter – died at age two. Her husband, David, was drinking heavily. He gambled away their money. He mismanaged her finances.

In 1898, Sissieretta filed for divorce, citing his drunkenness and lack of support. The divorce was finalised in 1899. She was alone. But she kept singing.

When Sissieretta returned from her European tour in 1896, she found the concert circuit shrinking. Opportunities for African American classical singers were disappearing. So she did what she had to do: she reinvented herself.

In 1896, Sissieretta became the star of a 40-member, all-Black musical comedy troupe called the Black Patti Troubadours. The troupe was managed by two white managers.

The show included blackface minstrel songs, acrobats, comedians, dancers, jugglers. Sissieretta hated the format. But it allowed her to keep singing.

In the troupe’s shows, she confined herself to dignified operatic arias and traditional songs. She wore beautifully crafted gowns and jewellery. She displayed the seventeen medals she’d been awarded by heads of state across Europe. She remained the highest-paid African American performer in the country.

For nineteen years – from 1896 to 1915 – Sissieretta toured with the Black Patti Troubadours. They performed in forty-six of the forty-eight contiguous states and Canada. They gave hundreds of performances.

The troupe launched the careers of many young African American entertainers, including Bob Cole, who went on to write the first full-length all-Black musical comedy: A Trip to Coontown in 1898.

Despite the success, Sissieretta was tired. Physically. Emotionally. And her mother was getting old.

In 1915, Sissieretta’s mother fell ill. Sissieretta retired from performing immediately. She moved back to Providence to care for her mother. By then, she owned four houses and had accumulated significant wealth. She thought she’d be comfortable. For a while, she was.

She sang occasionally at Congdon Street Baptist Church. She cared for her mother.

She took in two orphaned boys as wards. She gave shelter to homeless children.

But the money ran out. She had to sell three of her four houses. Then her medals – the ones she’d worn so proudly on stage.

By the early 1930s, Sissieretta Jones was living in poverty. The president of the local NAACP chapter helped pay her taxes and water bills.

The NAACP provided her family with coal and wood to heat their home. The woman who had sung for four presidents, who had been paid more than any other Black performer in America, who had dazzled audiences on three continents, was destitute.

On June 24, 1933, Sissieretta Jones died from cancer at Rhode Island Hospital. She was sixty-five years old. She was buried at Grace Church Cemetery in Providence next to her mother, who had died three years earlier. In an unmarked grave. She was too poor to afford a headstone.

For eighty-five years, Sissieretta Jones lay in an unmarked grave.

Then, in 2018 – the 150th anniversary of her birth – the Providence community raised money for a headstone.

In 2013, she was inducted into the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame. In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary.

In 2012, biographer Maureen Lee published Sissieretta Jones: The Greatest Singer of Her Race, 1868-1933.

Slowly, her story was being remembered. Here’s what we forget about Sissieretta Jones:

She was the daughter of a former slave and a washerwoman who sang in a church choir. She trained at prestigious music academies when Black women weren’t supposed to have access to that kind of education.

She sang at Carnegie Hall when no other Black performer had.

She sang for four US presidents – entering through the back door for three of them, the front door for only one.

She performed for 75,000 people at Madison Square Garden.

She toured the world and received seventeen medals from European heads of state.

She was compared to Adelina Patti – the most famous opera singer alive – and critics said she came closer to matching Patti than any American singer. But American opera houses wouldn’t hire her because of the colour of her skin.

So she spent nineteen years touring with a vaudeville troupe, singing operatic arias between blackface minstrel numbers and acrobats, just to keep doing what she loved.

She was the highest-paid African American performer of her time. And she died penniless. Buried in an unmarked grave. Forgotten for eighty-five years.

Because talent, in America, has never been enough to overcome racism. But Sissieretta Jones sang anyway.

“Clear as a mockingbird’s,” they said.

• A Tell Media report / Courtesy: The Fame Diaries