Certain People (2 page)

What the legendary “Miss Charlotte” Noland was to her exclusive, all-white Foxcroft School in Virginia, Charlotte Hawkins Brown was to the blacks who attended Palmer. Of matronly bearing, she had short hair and wore tiny round spectacles. Being from Boston, she
wore her skirts unfashionably long and always wore sensible black oxford shoes. She was always gloved, and always hatted. She had two favorite coats—a mink with a matching hat, and a Persian lamb with a matching mink-trimmed toque. She also had—or had had—a husband, who was something of a mystery. He was never mentioned, and had obviously vanished from her life long before she founded Palmer.

She was an unabashed snob. It was better, she taught, to be an Episcopalian than to be a Baptist. Her niece, Marie, had married Nat “King” Cole, of whom she thoroughly disapproved, since she had little use for Negroes who went into sports or show business. But when Nat Cole visited Palmer, and played the piano for an informal gathering of students, the students loved him, and finally convinced Dr. Brown that her nephew-in-law might actually be a legitimate person, even a gentleman. Her two “best friends,” she liked to say, were Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded Bethune-Cookman College, and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt. Her conversation was sprinkled with references to “dear Mary” and “dear Eleanor.” In reality, this was not quite the case. Her relationship with Mrs. Roosevelt was cordial, but hardly intimate; the two women did not even call each other by their first names. And, on Mrs. Roosevelt's part, it involved a certain amount of condescension. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was one of those whom Eleanor Roosevelt often referred to as “our good colored people.” In the case of Mrs. Bethune, the two women were actually archrivals. Dr. Brown regarded Mrs. Bethune as her chief competitor in the field of Negro education. Mrs. Bethune was also on good terms with Mrs. Roosevelt, and the two black women vied fiercely for the First Lady's attention. Whenever Mrs. Bethune was handed a new honorary degree, Dr. Brown struggled for one of her own to match it and to even the score.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was, needless to say, a strict disciplinarian. Everyone at Palmer had to learn to recite the school's credo, a verse that Charlotte Hawkins Brown had composed:

I have to live with myself and so

I want to be fit for myself to know
.

I want to be able as days go by

Always to look myself straight in the eye
.

I don't want to stand with the setting sun

And hate myself for the things I've done
.

Dr. Brown stood daily at the door of Palmer's chapel with a box of Kleenex in one hand. Whenever a girl appeared with rouge on her lips, Dr. Brown would say firmly, “Palmer girls
do not
wear lipstick,” and, with her Kleenex, she would just as firmly wipe the offending lipstick off. When she was on the warpath, she signaled it by wearing purple. Once, a small infraction of the school rules had been committed, and the students decided to stick together; no one would name the person who had committed the misdeed. So, in purple, Dr. Brown expelled the entire student body, and presented each boy and girl with a ticket home. One young man, who was from San Francisco, was quite sure that, in time, Dr. Brown would relent and invite her students back. So, instead of going to San Francisco, he went only as far as Chicago, where he had an uncle he could visit, and cashed in the balance of his ticket. Sure enough, after a few weeks Dr. Brown told her students that they could come back to school. But when the San Francisco boy returned, and Dr. Brown discovered what he had done, she sent him to San Francisco all over again—for dishonesty and not doing what he was told.

Dr. Brown never used the term “black.” To her generation, to call someone black was to call him a dirty name. She occasionally used the word “Negro,” and, less occasionally, “colored,” or “people of color.” Most often she would say “one of us,” or “our kind,” or “our sort.” But when she asked, “Is he one of us?” or, “Is she our kind?” she was not asking simply whether the person was a Negro. These expressions had special connotations. A person who was “our kind” was, first of all, an educated person. He was also a person from a good, and educated, family. He was a person who was well-spoken. He was also, in most cases, a person with light skin and white features, whose nose didn't spread and whose hair didn't kink. Even though white features were an indication of illegitimacy somewhere back in the family tree, it was Dr. Brown's unspoken belief that it was probably a good thing to have good white ancestors as well as good black ones.

Though Dr. Brown liked to say that her school contained not only “the best Negroes,” but also offered “the best in Negro education,” not all of her students agreed with her. “I thought, if this is the best, then God help the rest,” recalls one alumna of Palmer, who was particularly struck by the fact that, for all the emphasis on politeness, gentility, and good manners, Palmer students often behaved very badly. “They were snobby, rude to the help, acted as though they
owned the world, and did terrible things to each other,” she says. Once a group of older boys invited a group of newly arrived freshmen to go “snipe-hunting” with them. The newcomers innocently accepted the invitation, and discovered that snipe-hunting involved a fairly brutal initiation ritual, at the end of which the younger boys were left hung by the waist from their belts in the branches of trees.

Still, everybody who was anybody in the black world, as Dr. Brown put it, sent their children to Palmer. Madame C. J. Walker of Indianapolis, a lady tycoon who became, with a hair-straightening device, the first black woman millionaire, sent her children and grandchildren there, as did Madame Sarah Spencer Washington, whose Apex Hair Company made her rich in New Jersey. Paul Robeson's nieces went to Palmer, as did the daughter of Mantan Moreland—the big-eyed black comic character actor of early Hollywood films. The wealthy banking, real estate, and professional families from Atlanta—the Partees, the Yanceys, the Alexanders—many of whom have been rich for three or four generations—all sent their sons and daughters to Dr. Brown's school. Concert singer Carol Brice (whose father was the school's chaplain) is a Palmer alumna, as is Muriel Gassett, whose mother was a Dobbs, of the distinguished Atlanta family. Then there were Funderburgs, an illustrious family from Monticello, Georgia, and numerous sons and daughters of successful professional men—doctors, lawyers, educators, clergymen, and the like—all members in good standing of the black upper crust, or Establishment.

And the school was, in many ways, innovative. In order that her students might have a taste of what was being offered to the sons and daughters of upper-class whites, Dr. Brown instituted a program under which Palmer students spent several weeks each year at a New England prep school—usually Northfield and Mount Hermon Academies in Massachusetts. Dr. Brown was one of the first educators to offer “Negro History” as a regular, required course. She was also determined that her students be exposed to culture—to art, literature, and music—and, once a year, at Christmastime, the entire student body was required to perform Handel's
Messiah
. No Palmer student, however, ever learned a Negro spiritual. Spirituals, after all, were from the lower classes, the men who lifted the bales, toted the barges, and stooped to pick cotton in the fields.

But for all this the main emphasis at Palmer was on acquiring good breeding, social poise, and polish, and on imitating the ways, deportment, and social values of the white world. In 1941, Charlotte
Hawkins Brown wrote and published a slender book of black etiquette called
The Correct Thing—To Do, To Say, To Wear
, with a subheading describing the contents as “A Ready Reference for The School Administrator, The Busy Teacher, The Office Girl, The Society Matron, The Discriminating Person.” Dedicated to “The Youth of America,”
The Correct Thing
became required reading at Palmer and is, in many ways, an interesting volume. On the surface, the book seems merely a rewording, if not a copy, of the rules of behavior delineated by Emily Post, and Dr. Brown fully acknowledges her debt to Mrs. Post in a bibliography. But, when examined closely, it is something else again. Under familiar headings such as “Table Service,” “Grooming,” “The Earmarks of a Lady,” “Invitations, Etc.,” “Travel,” “Introductions,” “How to Behave,” one discovers that, though this is intended as an etiquette book for black ladies and gentlemen, never once is any mention made of the single most important factor that sets blacks apart—the color of their skin. In fact, the only reference to blackness or black people is in an oblique, almost shyly tentative sentence in the “Grooming” chapter, in which Dr. Brown selects a WASP, a Scandinavian, and a black to make her point:

The arrangement of one's hair adds to or detracts from one's general appearance as it increases or decreases one's power of personality. Study the contour of your face carefully. What makes Katherine Hepburn or Greta Garbo or Marian Anderson
personality plus
may make you
personality minus
.

Black hair has, of course, always been a problem, as has been the black's alleged fondness for gaudy, ostentatious styles of dress. Dr. Brown's little book makes several allusions to this but, again, they are so oblique as to pass almost unnoticed. For example, in a section on how to behave “At the Dance,” she advises, “Avoid being bizarre in dress or make-up. Do not be too conspicuous in an unbecoming hair dress. You will attract attention, but those whom you will attract will mark you as an ill-advised, poorly bred, unartistic creature.”

In Emily Post's
Etiquette
, Mrs. Post uses quaintly fictionalized names of characters to illustrate her bits of advice—“Mrs. Wellbred” and “Mrs. Goodblood” always do the right thing in
Etiquette
. In
The Correct Thing
, however, Dr. Brown tends to use the names of prominent American black families which, perhaps, only a black would
recognize. Her sample letters and invitations go out to “Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Washington,” “Mr. and Mrs. W. A. Dobson,” and “Mr. John Thomas Jones,” and Dr. Brown's informal notes go out to persons with the somewhat flowery, labial, and foreign-sounding names which mothers of Dr. Brown's generation often gave their daughters—to Dear Lula, Dear Arona, Dear Yvonne, Dear Vesta, Dear Cecie, Norvelle, Raven, Ghretta, Olivia, Mamie Ella, Elise, Nadine, and Mayme.

If there is one underlying theme in
The Correct Thing
, it is Know Your Place—know your place in the white world, and in the black. The book abounds in references to “your status” and “your social equals,” and “your station in life.” In a section on “Calling,” for instance, Dr. Brown suggests:

Making people in your neighborhood feel comfortable with a call, whether or not they are one's social equals, is a gracious thing and has its own reward in the satisfaction usually sought by people who embrace Christianity as a source of ethics. This call may be supplemented by an invitation to visit “our Sunday School,” or to hear “our minister” or to come to the lecture at “our Community Center.” …

No one, needless to say, in Dr. Brown's book is invited to a function at a country club but, instead, to hotels, church social rooms, or college halls. “Don't go where you're not wanted,” Dr. Brown reminds. “You, of course, cannot be invited to all of the parties in town, or out of town.” And in a section on business etiquette, Dr. Brown outlines rules of classic black subservience to the white ruling class: “Don't argue with the employer. Assume at least that he is right. Answer promptly always. Don't be afraid of being too courteous. Go out of your way to serve your employer. He will remember the little kindnesses not included in the pay envelope in a larger way some day.” Finally, in an extraordinary section titled “Doors,” Dr. Brown says:

If one must knock on the door of a room or office, it must be a gentle tapping. When bidden to enter, take firm hold on the knob, turn it gently, pull the door open at least two-thirds of the way so as not to touch either the door or door jamb, pause for just a second to recognize the person who may be looking your way, and as gently close the door as you opened it. Do not make the mistake of letting
a self-closing door push you into the room, for it will embarrass you and prevent you from presenting your best appearance. Your doom may be sealed before you speak a word.

From Palmer Institute, Charlotte Hawkins Brown did her best to get her graduates into the best Eastern colleges—Wellesley, Vassar, Smith for the girls, and Yale or Harvard for the boys. Failing this, she tried to get them entered in the various emerging black colleges and universities in the South, particularly the “fashionable” ones, such as Talladega College in Alabama. A number of Palmer alumni are also graduates of Talladega. At Talladega, a girl was expected to join one of the “good” black sororities—Alpha Kappa Alpha or Delta Sigma Theta. Sigma Gamma Rho and Zeta Phi Beta were considered sororities for lower-class blacks. Fraternities were somewhat less important for the men, but a Palmer graduate was also expected to join a good one like Alpha
Phi
Alpha.

In 1950, when Charlotte Hawkins Brown was sixty-six, a fire badly damaged Palmer Memorial Institute. The school quietly went out of business not long after that and became a part of Bennett College in Greensboro. There was, after all, at that point no real need for an elite black prep school, since prep schools in New England and elsewhere in the country were by then clamoring to take in black students. Upper-class black boys and girls now go to Hotchkiss, Groton, Middlesex, and St. Marks. Still, the Palmer influence lingers on, and it is still considered “quite the thing” to have gone to Palmer.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, of course, represents the thoughts and values of upper-class blacks in the thirties and forties, and to people in the 1970s her views and the way she ran her school might seem ridiculously antique. And yet, in a sense, she represented great progress toward a degree of black self-confidence and self-assurance. She had, for example, at least one predecessor in the black etiquette-book field. He was Edward S. Green of Washington, who, in 1920, published
The National Capital Code of Etiquette Dedicated to the Colored Race
. Mr. Green's is a much more fawning, self-effacing volume—virtually a textbook on Uncle Tomism—and reflects poignantly the much sadder state of affairs that existed then. In his book, Mr. Green advises, “Strive to please … be a good ‘listener.' You will be amazed at the reputation you will presently gain for being intelligent, without having to express any opinions yourself.” In his preface, he explains that “This volume has been prepared with the end in mind
of properly fitting the young man or woman to occupy their proper place in society; to assist them in acquiring the poise and bearing that is absolutely essential for their future happiness and welfare.” Say little, Mr. Green counsels; strive to be inconspicuous; wear dark colors, black stockings.