Certain People (16 page)

William Syphax prospered sufficiently to buy freedom for his wife and three daughters. His son, Charles, however, worked as a slave on the Virginia plantation of George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington, where, in his capacity as chief butler in the Custis dining room, he was quite happy. Charles was a great pet of the Custis family, and chose not to be manumitted. George Washington Parke Custis, meanwhile, had a daughter, Maria, by a woman named Arianna Carter, one of his house slaves. Charles Syphax and Maria fell in love and, saying that she would rather marry a black man than lead the life led by the other mulattos on the plantation, Maria asked for permission to marry Charles. Her father, Mr. Custis, was delighted, and gave the pair a formal wedding in the parlor of the great house, with an Episcopal minister presiding at the ceremony. Upon their marriage, furthermore, Custis freed both Charles and Maria and, as a dowry, gave Maria fifteen acres of his Arlington estate.

Custis had no white sons of his own, but he did have a legitimate white daughter, Mary, who became the heiress to the plantation. Mary Custis married Robert E. Lee, who was connected with all the great families of Virginia. The family-proud Lees of Virginia may be surprised to learn that they have black half-cousins named Syphax living nearby. And Barnaby Conrad, the author, lecturer, and San Francisco socialite, who also descends from Martha Custis Washington, and who takes his Eastern ancestors very seriously, was surprised not long ago to find a Sephardic Jew named Levy in his family tree. He may be amused to know that he also has black relatives.

Charles and Maria Syphax had ten children—William II, Elinor, Cornelius, Charles, Cobert, Shaulton, Austin, Ennis, Maria, and John—a sufficient preponderance of male heirs to assure a profusion of people named Syphax in the Washington telephone book today. Nearly all of Charles and Maria Syphax's children achieved an education and some degree of success. John Syphax, for example, was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. William Syphax II was perhaps the most illustrious member of his generation. An outspoken civil rights activist, he was hired in 1850 by the Department of the Interior, where he worked for the next forty years as the chief receptionist in the offices of nine Secretaries. In his desk, William Syphax kept an autograph book which he asked each distinguished visitor to sign. The blue leather book, which has been preserved by the family, is dog-eared and worn, but the signatures are still vivid. The book contains the autographs of six United States Presidents, headed by a humble “A. Lincoln,” as well as of Frederick Douglass, who wrote, next to his name, “Truth is of no color.” After the Civil War, the Secretary of the Interior, who appointed the trustees of the newly established Colored Public Schools of Washington and Georgetown, selected William Syphax as the schools' first president and superintendent. A school is named after him today.

During the Civil War, the Custis-Lee estate was confiscated by the federal government for nonpayment of taxes, and with it went Maria Syphax's fifteen acres. But William Syphax, who had influential friends in Washington, succeeded in getting a Congressional investigation into the family's title to his mother's land. Congress passed a special bill, signed by President Andrew Johnson in 1866, returning the acreage to the Syphaxes. At the time, to avoid “sullying the name of the Father of Our Country,” by affirming the fact of Maria's illegitimacy, Congress sidestepped the matter of her descent from Martha Washington, but did concede that George Washington Parke Custis obviously “had a paternal interest” in Maria.

For years, many Syphaxes had houses in the little compound in Arlington which, indeed, was a small village with a main street and a trolley stop called “Syphax.” During those years, however, the Arlington Syphaxes became somewhat estranged from their cousins who lived in Washington because of Virginia's segregationist policies. The minute the trolley crossed the Potomac River, all blacks had to move to the last three rows of the car, a move the Washington Syphaxes
were not willing to make, even if it meant not visiting their Virginia relatives.

Syphaxes have been prominent in Washington for four generations, particularly as educators, and they continue to be a force in the city today. Dr. Burke Syphax, for example, is chief of surgery at both Freemen's Hospital and the Howard University Medical School. John W. Syphax is a retired, Harvard-educated foreign affairs official with the State Department, and his father, another John, spent fifty-two of his seventy-odd years as a Washington school principal. William Custis Syphax, Jr., a grandson of Charles Syphax, Jr., attended Howard and American Universities, and for thirty-six years worked at the Department of Labor, specializing in veterans' affairs. His wife, Orieanna, has worked in Washington education and nursing programs for twenty-nine years. His aunt, Carrie Syphax Watson, was another influential school teacher. Syphaxes always marry well. Mrs. John W. Syphax, for example, was Melba Welles, whose father, James Lesesne Welles, was a prominent minister, and whose mother was a college dean of women. Though the Welleses are from Columbia, South Carolina, the family, on the Reverend Mr. Welles's mother's side, descends from ancient French Huguenot stock. With money on both sides, John and Melba Syphax live in a four-story town house in Q Street that was a family wedding present to them in 1920.

During World War II, when more land was needed for Arlington Cemetery, the Roosevelt administration persuaded the Syphaxes to part with their Arlington acreage, which adjoined the cemetery, in exchange for another piece of property. The Syphaxes feel that they got a much more desirable parcel in the trade, and the family cemetery in Syphax Village was moved to Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. It is on the new property that William T. Syphax now lives. William T., whom the family calls Tommy to distinguish him from some half-dozen other Williams, is probably the richest Syphax, though he and his wife live in a modest, almost Spartan, brick house. In 1954, William T. Syphax and his wife, Marguerite, started Syphax Enterprises, Inc., a construction and management firm that today earns $8,000,000 a year, and is one of the twenty leading black firms in the United States. In Fairfax County, there is a Syphax Drive, where the company built a 324-unit apartment complex in 1965. In addition to managing apartment units that now number in the thousands, the Syphaxes are currently building the National Children's Center in
Washington. It pleases the family, too, that Tommy's firm is handling the million-dollar reconstruction of the old Cairo Hotel, right around the corner from where the first William Syphax had his house at Seventeenth and P streets. Tommy Syphax, an urbane, pipe-smoking man in his middle fifties, says, “None of us has ever accepted being second-class. I set out to do something for the race. Even if it wasn't because of my family, as a black man I wanted to accomplish something in life.” Both Syphaxes are members of more than twenty civic boards; for more than twenty years, Tommy Syphax has directed the choir at Mt. Olive Baptist Church (his father founded St. John's Baptist Church in Washington), and his chic, pretty wife is one of the two black women in the country who are certified property managers.

The only living descendant of the autograph-collecting William Syphax is his granddaughter, Mrs. Mary Gibson Hundley, a trim, light-coffee-colored widow with manners and bearing quite befitting the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the wife of the first President of the United States. Mrs. Hundley lives in a small, elegant town house in a residential block on Thirteenth Street, where she is surrounded by antiques and other family heirlooms, including her maternal grandfather's autograph collection. Mrs. Hundley, an honors graduate of Radcliffe who for years taught languages at Washington's prestigious Dunbar High School, had no children because she was a victim of another kind of prejudice; women teachers used to lose their jobs if they became pregnant. Still, she is enormously family-proud and, speaking in a broad-A Boston accent, is a woman of strong opinions. “I am
not
black,” she says, “and I do not like to be called black. I don't have black features, hair, color, or speech. I don't like to be called Negro, either, because ‘Negro' is simply the Spanish word for black. I like the expression the French use. I am an
Américaine de couleur
.” Mrs. Hundley produces a portrait of her grandfather, an arrestingly handsome man with piercing eyes and high cheekbones. “Do you notice the thin lips? That's his Custis inheritance, and he was very slim and tall—like the Custises. His wife was a Miss Mary Browne, another very old and distinguished family here—there's also a school named after her—and the Brownes were part Cherokee Indian. The finest Indians, of course, were the Cherokees. In fact, when Grandmother Syphax died, she was listed as an American Indian on her death certificate. So I am part white, part black, and part red, and it is simply
incorrect
to call people of mixed ancestry black, and I
deplore
the term. I deplore people who go
around looking like savages with their bushy hair. It is
not
an African style, and anybody who knows anything about African history knows that the African tribespeople kept their hair cropped short, for cleanliness. At Radcliffe, I was just another one of the girls. Why, I was invited to parties in Boston houses where they wouldn't even receive the Irish!”

Mrs. Hundley recalls that Grandpa Syphax was “always impeccably tailored, and terribly pious. He had a quotation from the Bible for every occasion. The children had to be at the table every morning at 8
A
.
M
. for an hour of prayer. He was even opposed to going to the theatre, and they say that the only time he ever went inside a theatre was to pull one of his brothers out. My mother was more liberal. She tried to convince him that some theatre was like a sermon. Once, as a girl, when a young man had taken Mother to the theatre, and she told Grandpa about it, all he said was ‘My, you're getting worldly.'”

When she was a child, Mrs. Hundley's model for decorum and behavior was her mother's close friend, Mrs. Mary Church Terrell. “Notice how Mrs. Terrell speaks,” her mother would advise young Mary. “Notice how Mrs. Terrell does things. She does everything with perfect ease.” One thing that Mrs. Terrell did with perfect ease, it may be remembered, was to walk into a segregated Washington restaurant several years ago, sit down, and demand to be served. Her lawyer, Charles Huston, had discovered an obscure District of Columbia statute which stated that no public restaurant could refuse service to any “respectable” customer. It had been decided that of all the women in Washington, black or white, Mary Church Terrell was one who
no one
could say was not respectable. She won her case. “She was magnificent,” says Mrs. Hundley. Mrs. Terrell, an educator, lecturer, and the president of the National Association of Colored Women, had a celebrated feud with Mrs. Mary Bethune. Said Mrs. Bethune to Mrs. Terrell, “I'm glad I'm black because I know I'm legitimate.” Said the light-skinned Mrs. Terrell to Mrs. Bethune, “I wouldn't be too sure about that.” They never spoke again. “Mary Bethune was highly overrated,” says Mary Hundley. “She latched onto Mrs. Roosevelt and hung to her coattails. Now, Charlotte Hawkins Brown was something else again—she was of Mrs. Terrell's breed. But Mary Bethune did more to spread prejudice among black-skinned people against light-skinned Negroes than anybody I can think of. She used to talk about ‘my black girls,' and she started that
whole ‘black is beautiful' nonsense. She said that she used to look into her mirror and say, ‘Mary, you're black and you're beautiful.' Beautiful! She was ugly as sin. But Mrs. Terrell was a
lady
.”

Like Mrs. Hundley, Mary Church Terrell came by her ladylike ways through both training and inheritance, and it is worth spending a moment to consider Mrs. Terrell's extraordinary background. Though she made her home in Washington, she was “a Church of Memphis,” and the Churches of Memphis are often considered—and certainly consider themselves—the grandest black family in America. For nearly three quarters of a century the earthly remains of various illustrious Churches have reposed in the vast marble Church mausoleum in Memphis's Elmwood cemetery, which is now regarded as something of a family shrine. Mary Terrell's father, Robert R. Church, was born in slavery and, as a youth, worked as a cabin boy on the Mississippi River steamboats. After the Civil War, he settled in Memphis where, working quietly and with the required amount of obsequiousness within the framework of the black power structure, Mr. Church started his business rise. He began as a saloon-keeper, and soon he acquired a hotel. In the riots of 1866 he nearly lost his life when he was shot in the back of the head and left for dead on the floor of his saloon. But he recovered and went on gathering up more parcels of Memphis real estate. He built a large auditorium, which became the city's leading meeting-place for black organizations and was, at the time, the largest black theatre in the United States. He also developed an amusement park on Beale Street, which became the black recreation center, and opened the city's first—and for many years only—black bank. By the turn of the century, Robert R. Church was unquestionably the richest black man in Memphis and was touted as “the first black millionaire in the South.” The huge gingerbread Church mansion at 384 South Lauderdale Street was a Memphis landmark. After the city of Memphis was devastated by a yellow fever epidemic, Church was the first person to purchase a City of Memphis municipal bond, as a token of his faith in the town's economic recovery. He was the first black in Memphis to be selected for grand jury duty and, as a power in the Republican Party, he served as a delegate to the Republican national convention in 1900.

After divorcing his first wife, who was Mary Terrell's mother, Robert R. Church made an imposing second marriage to the former Anna Wright, who became Mary Terrell's stepmother. The new Mrs. Church had a dizzying ancestry, and was descended from a Kentucky
colonel who was related to the Kentucky Breckenridges; from an English-born Philadelphia Quaker named Benjamin Wright; from a wealthy Memphis plantation owner; as well as from a Chickasaw Indian family who were distinguished not only by the fact that they owned a prosperous brickyard but also by the fact that they had a relative who lived to be a hundred and ten years old. Anna Wright's Grandfather Wright, in fact, was a man of such consequence that he imported white private tutors from the North to educate his children. Though Anna Wright Church was so fair as to be hardly recognizable as a Negro, she became the unquestioned leading
grande dame
in Memphis's black society.