Certain People (15 page)

In Chicago, Mrs. Doris Lowe Zollar is very much a social leader in the black and white communities, and her name adorns the boards of
some eighteen different civic, cultural, and social organizations. Her husband is a successful pediatrician with his own private clinic, and Mrs. Zollar is able to fly to Rome and Paris twice a year to shop for clothes. (
Ebony
voted Doris Zollar one of the ten best-dressed black women in America, an honor which she takes seriously, and for a while she served as Fashion Editor for Bettie Pullen-Walker's
MsTique
.) Dr. Zollar, the son of a laborer, is a self-made man, but Doris Zollar—fair-skinned, with ash blond hair and green eyes—is of the Old Guard South, and there has been money in the family for three generations. Her family, the Lowes, are prominent in Arkansas, where Grandpa Lowe owned a large tract of land outside Little Rock and ran an extensive farming and lumbering operation. As Little Rock grew, white developers began eyeing Grandpa Lowe's property, and presently a group of whites came to him with an offer to buy the land. But Grandpa Lowe refused to sell and, less than a month later, his house was set to the torch. He rebuilt the house, and it was burned again. Stubbornly, he rebuilt it a third time, and this time his white antagonists permitted it to stand. The Lowe family still has its Little Rock property, and Doris Zollar derives an income from the family lumbering operations.

But the family has suffered a misfortune common to many black families of property. Grandpa Lowe's will, when it was written, was vague and imprecise—the work, it seems, of a black attorney who lacked real expertise in such matters. There were at least two members of the family, for example, with the nickname “Buddy.” It is impossible to tell, from Grandpa Lowe's will, which Buddy was intended to be his heir. There were also two Ernests in the family and, though an Ernest is mentioned in the will, the will does not specify which one. Grandpa Lowe's estate has now been in litigation for more than twenty years, and the family has begun to wonder if it will ever be settled and, if it is—after legal and court costs—whether there will be anything left.

V

Pride and Prejudice

11

Embattled Washington

Perhaps nowhere in America is a black Old Guard more well grounded than in Washington, D.C. And almost nowhere else has the Old Guard come into such sharp conflict with the more newly moneyed black middle class.

In Washington, which is now 75 percent black, one speaks discreetly of “the black presence.” It might be more accurate to call it a black omnipresence. There are, however, within the omnipresence, at least three distinct and separate presences. There is, to begin with, the mass of poor blacks at the bottom. They are the most visible—idling on street corners in the southeast quarter of the city, in vacant lots, sitting on cracked stoops, and leaning against boarded-up storefronts of the ghetto. A white feels uncomfortable in these streets, where the blacks give him daunting looks, and mutter unintelligible words to him as he passes by. It is said, however, that a “foreign” black in these neighborhoods is in even greater danger than a white outsider; he might be a policeman in plain clothes, or a narcotics agent. He might be armed.

Then there is a much smaller group, which might be called the New Black Achievers—men and women who, in recent years, have attained power, prestige, and no small amount of money in politics (Mayor Walter E. Washington, for one), business, education and the professions. In large, expensive homes along such racially integrated streets as Blagden Avenue—the main artery of Washington's so-called Gold Coast, which nestles between Rock Creek Park and Sixteenth Street—or on Kalmia Road, Argyle Terrace, and Colorado Avenue,
these affluent blacks are less conspicuous behind their carefully pruned hedges and manicured lawns. They have, however, a significant voice in the community.

Then there is the Old Guard, Washington's black “cave-dwellers,” people whose roots in Washington go back three, four, even five generations. These families, who have had money, social position, and—most important—education, since the turn of the century and earlier, live in three- or four-story town houses in quiet, tree-shaded streets in sections such as the Logan Circle area, a neighborhood that was once quite fashionable, went through a period of having seen better days, and is now on its way up again. Quiet, conservative, devoted to thrift, probity, and, for the most part, to the Episcopal Church, these families generally have not, though they could have, moved to glossier, newer neighborhoods. They have stayed where they are because their friends and relatives are there, just as their grandmothers' and great-grandmothers' friends were there. They might be said to form the backbone of the Washington chapter of Links. Some of the newer-rich blacks might like to join the Links but, since no Links chapter may contain more than thirty women, it is not easy, and the Links selects its membership strictly from the top. (The newer-rich blacks sniff, “A Link is a fur-bearing animal.”)

The Old Guard is not unaware of the blacks in the ghetto. Much of the Links' fund-raising effort goes to support such organizations as the N.A.A.C.P., the Urgan League, and the United Negro College Fund. But socially, of course, they are beyond the pale, a painful embarrassment. Recently a woman from an Old Guard family demonstrated the prevailing attitude toward ghetto blacks. Driving with a friend through a run-down area of Washington, her car was stopped by a traffic light at an intersection, and she watched as a drunken young black man in a “Super Fly” outfit reeled across the street, bottle in hand. “Disgusting,” she whispered. “There is the cause of all our problems.” Her friend, more perceptive, said, “No, that is the
result
of all our problems.”

Of the newly rich blacks, the Old Guard is disdainful. It considers these people gauche
arrivistes
. The Old Guard is critical of their conspicuous spending—on big houses, costly automobiles, and lavish entertaining. The new rich, meanwhile, call the Old Guard Uncle and Aunt Toms, for these are people who, after all, have lived quietly and peacefully, and have even prospered, for many years alongside whites by adopting a don't-rock-the-boat philosophy. The new rich would
very much like to rock the boat—not only the boat manned by whites, but also the one manned by the Old Guard. The members of the Old Guard have no use for black revolutionary movements, Africanism, Afro hair styles, and even dislike the term “black.” “Those people who shout Black Power are not going to include people like me when they get it,” says one Old Guard member tartly. Another says, “I do
not
think black is beautiful. Some black people are beautiful. But a great many are not.”

Mrs. Anne Weaver Teabeau is Washington Old Guard. Though she has lived most of her seventy-odd years in other cities, she returned several years ago as a widow to Washington, the city she has always considered home. After all, Mrs. Teabeau is the great-granddaughter of Frederick Douglass, the great Abolitionist who moved from Rochester to Washington in 1871. Mrs. Teabeau is a dainty, light-skinned woman, and she sits in the equally dainty drawing room of her Washington town house, surrounded by family memorabilia-portraits of the white-bearded patriarch, antique china and silver, photographs of the Douglass mansion on Capitol Hill and the twenty-room family country house, “L'Ouverture Villa,” in Anacostia. Though Frederick Douglass died in 1895, before Mrs. Teabeau was born, she is full of tales of him that have been handed down—of his daring escape from a Maryland plantation, of how his name had been originally Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, and how he changed it to Douglass after a favorite character in “The Lady of the Lake.” She tells of the period when he joined John Brown, how he made his way to Canada and then to the British Isles, where he was taken up by London society, and why he first settled in Rochester—it was an Abolitionist center. Even in Rochester, however, there was discrimination. When Douglass's daughter, Mrs. Teabeau's grandmother, was first sent to school the principal made her sit in a cloakroom. When Douglass learned of this, he removed his daughter from the school and had her educated privately.

Frederick Douglass was, among other things, an avid croquet player, and the Anacostia croquet court was the scene of many family battles. Mrs. Teabeau produces an 1875 letter from Douglass to her grandmother, describing a contest between Douglass and his son: “Lewis is the son of his father and is mad as a March hare when he is being badly beaten. His voice grows hoarse and he fairly trembles with rage. The worst of it is, he always thinks that I presume upon my parental authority, and I in turn think that he presumes on his
filial relation.” Most of all, Mrs. Teabeau is filled with
hubris
and family pride. “A lot of people named Douglass claim to be related to us, but aren't,” she says. “The other day a man telephoned me claiming to be a cousin. ‘I'm descended from John,' he said. I told him, ‘There was no John.'”

Of the younger, more vocal activist groups in Washington, Mrs. Teabeau says, “They stereotype us. They don't give us credit for all we've done for them. To hear them tell it, only the activists have done anything.”

Mrs. Teabeau is a former president of the Washington chapter of Links, and once, when she suggested to her membership that it might be nice if the Links at least
visited
Washington's relatively new Museum of African Art, the Links, to a lady, politely refused. “We have nothing to do with Africa,” one member told her. When the museum celebrated its tenth anniversary in the summer of 1975 with a large reception—honoring, among other notables, Hubert Humphrey, Chief Justice Warren Burger, and Henry Kissinger—over six hundred invitations went out, to all of the Old Guard. An attendance of at least a thousand had been hoped for. Fewer than three hundred people showed up, only one of them a Link—Mrs. Teabeau. Even she had originally not planned to attend the party, and knew that her appearance there would be unpopular with her friends. But the museum's director, Warren Robbins, finally persuaded her to put in a brief appearance. She was, he pointed out, on the museum's board of directors. Also, the museum is housed in her great-grandfather's A Street mansion.

The Museum of African Art is only one of the battlegrounds that have Washington's blacks divided against each other. “Nothing of interest or importance came out of Africa,” says Mrs. Mary Gibson Hundley, another member of the Old Guard. “Our civilization gained from Greece, from Rome, from Europe and the Mediterranean, even from China. It gained from Egypt, but from nothing south of the Sudan.” But this is only part of the problem. With no support from the Old Guard at the top, and no support from the ghetto blacks at the bottom, the museum is also getting only minimal support from the new-rich blacks in the middle. Partly this is because Mr. Robbins, the museum's founder, is white. In these black circles, it is also whispered that Mr. Robbins is Jewish. It is also suspected that Robbins is running the museum for his personal profit. (Actually, he has for some time been trying to turn the museum over to the Smithsonian
because running it has become such a heavy financial drain.) Also, Mr. Robbins may have been unwise in choosing the Douglass mansion to house his collection. Frederick Douglass's place in black history has, over the years, grown somewhat shaky. Though an Abolitionist, he has become, in time, a symbol of Old Guardism. It was his son who established the exclusive summer resort at Highland Beach on Chesapeake Bay, which was and still is only for “certain” black people. And Frederick Douglass's second wife, who carried him into Washington society and dinners at the White House, was white. To some people, Frederick Douglass has become, of all things, an Uncle Tom.

Dividing Washington is more, however, than a simple conflict of the Old Guard versus the new, old money versus new, ancient family versus upstart, native Washingtonian versus out-of-towner—though that has a lot to do with the situation. Mayor Washington, for example, born in Georgia, is considered a parvenu. But his wife, the former Bennetta Bullock, is Old Guard and, according to a friend, “The Bullocks are an old and distinguished Washington family. When you say ‘the
Bullocks
,' you lower your eyes to half-mast. Her father, Reverend Bullock, was
the
black minister.” But another Old Guard Washingtonian sniffs and says it is more a difference in styles of living and styles of speech. “Her family came here from North Carolina in the twenties, only fifty years ago!” (“Mayor Washington talks like a Negro,” one woman says, “but of course his wife doesn't.”) But even more it is a difference in caste, and a caste based on texture of hair and color of skin and quality of facial features. Most of Washington's Old Guard blacks have straight hair, fair skin—some are even blond with blue eyes—and straight noses and thin lips. For these reasons, they set themselves apart. They are members of what is informally called “The Blue Blood Club”—that is, if one's skin is light enough so that the blue veins in the wrist show through, one is a member. The resort that Frederick Douglass's son established at Highland Beach was restricted to these people.

The Old Guard families include, in addition to the Douglasses and Bullocks, the Terrells, the Langstons, the Wormleys, the McGuires, the Bonds (“Max Bond's wife is a Clement from Atlanta”), the Bruces, the Gibbses, the Gibsons, the Syphaxes, the Cobbs, the Francises, the Brookes, and various combinations thereof as Terrells married Langstons, and so on. Though it is considered poor taste to mention it, most of these families have white ancestors of whom they are
privately rather proud. Perhaps the most extraordinary black family in Washington—though they are not very black—are the Syphaxes. The first Syphax, William, was an itinerant preacher who arrived in Washington from Canada in the early part of the nineteenth century and settled in nearby Alexandria. As a minister, he was a spellbinder, and as a spellbinder he prospered. Whether he had ever been a slave, which is unknown, he had by 1820 purchased his freedom because his name appears in the census of that year as a free man. In ancient times, a Syphax was a Numidian king. A Syphax was also a general in Hannibal's army during the Punic Wars. William Syphax's name was originally Anderson, and so today's Syphaxes cannot claim these illustrious ancestors. But it is a point of family pride that their forebear was clearly a man of scholarship to have chosen such a distinguished, if unusual, name.