Certain People (7 page)

George Johnson smiles contentedly at this thought, and accepts a cup of coffee that his black butler offers him on a silver tray. George Johnson continues smiling and with, perhaps, more than just a trace of smugness adds, “Johnny Johnson's son was a high school dropout.”

Meanwhile, as the Johnsons bicker and jockey for position, another dissatisfied voice has been heard from in Chicago—this time from a woman. She is Mrs. Bettie Pullen-Walker, an animated auburn-haired lady in her middle thirties, who edits and publishes
MsTique
magazine, which she calls “the very first magazine to be published anywhere that gives a consistently positive view of the black female.” With fiction and articles on such subjects as “Are You a Sex Symbol,” “When the Affair Is Over,” “Unmasking the (Married) Players,” and “Living In or Shacking Up,”
MsTique
is clearly intended as a black answer to
Cosmopolitan
, and Bettie Pullen-Walker has been referred to as a black Helen Gurley Brown. Mrs. Pullen-Walker, whose maiden name was Thompson (her hyphenated name combines the names of two previous husbands), is both a member of the black Old Guard and of the new achievers. She traces her ancestry back to Columbia, South Carolina, where, in the middle 1800s, her maternal great-grandmother inherited considerable property, which has remained in the family to this day. This great-grandmother married a man named Ben Frazier, a Muskogean Indian from Mississippi, and family legend has it that Ben Frazier's ancestors were early Indian activists—moving across the plains attempting to frustrate the white man's efforts to relocate all Indians to reservations and to induce them to give up all their tribal ties. Ben Frazier himself made a tidy fortune as a fur trader.

Most of Bettie Pullen-Walker's family have been educators, and it was as a teacher that she started out after graduating as a psychology major from Roosevelt University in 1964. In 1973, as a woman of some means, Mrs. Pullen-Walker decided to branch out, and
MsTique
was launched—complete with a
Cosmopolitan
-like cover girl
and centerfold (though not nude). It is probably too early to say how successful
MsTique
will eventually be, and it is still not running completely in the black. Mrs. Pullen-Walker blames this on advertiser—and advertising agency—indifference to “approximately fifteen million black females in this land,” and she complains of being “shoved around” by agency representatives. She says, “I have never experienced a more circular pattern of referrals, unkept promises, requests for marketing material that are not ever acknowledged, unreturned telephone calls, and a whole range of disrespectful and unbusinesslike behavior as I have had from agency representatives.”

Her new venture, she points out, has been more than adequately publicized in the news media in general. But she claims that
MsTique
has been largely ignored by the black press because of the fierce competition for advertising. She also blames sexism. “Sexism is also rampant among black males, who dominate the black press,” she says.

From this, one assumes she is talking about men like John Johnson.

III

The Old Guard

5

Family Trees

George Johnson insists that his personal philosophy is based on two principles. “First, I believe in the Golden Rule,” he says. “It really works. It's a great formula for success. Second, a man has got to believe in casting bread upon the waters. I'm more concerned, with what I give than with what I receive.” To put this theory to work, Johnson has established two foundations. One of these busies itself contributing funds to 290 different charitable organizations—black, nonblack, “and even Jewish”—on an annual basis. The second is dedicated to minority youth, primarily black, who want an education. “We have a hundred and twenty kids in school right now that we're supporting,” Johnson says.

Education has always provided the principal avenue out of the ghettos for all minority groups. But, Johnson feels, too many educated blacks have gone into teaching, or the clergy, or have become doctors or lawyers—where the opportunities to make money are limited. “There haven't been too many blacks venturing into
business
,” he says. “And that's what my foundation's for—poor black kids who can handle responsibilities and who want to make it in
business
. Because that's the only way they're going to make it—in business.” This is one reason why, he says, he put his new office building where it is—in the predominantly black South Side and not, as John Johnson did, on fashionable Michigan Avenue. “School buses with black kids go back and forth in front of my building every day,” he says. “They see it, and maybe they say to themselves, ‘There's a black man who's got a big business. Maybe I can start a business like that someday.'” Tours of
his factory are conducted regularly for black schoolchildren in the area, and the message offered by the tour guides is always the same: “If there's going to be improvement and progress among our people, it's going to come about through more black
business
.”

Not all the members of America's black elite would agree with George Johnson's emphasis on business education—nor, for that matter, would many upper-class blacks agree that either George or John Johnson qualifies as spokesman for either the upper class or for blacks in general. “After all, who
are
the Johnsons, anyway?” sniffs one black woman from Chicago, whose family
hubris
has been pronounced for several generations. “I knew that I was of the elite when I was born. We were the family that other blacks looked up to. Nobody really looks up to those Johnsons. Oh, of course they've gotten very fancy, with their big houses, their yachts and Cadillacs. We have an expression for people like that—‘nigger rich.'”

There is more to black improvement and progress, many people feel, than simply making large sums of money—much more. It is a question of breeding, manners, speech, family background, and a way of “doing things.” Seemliness and probity count for more than property or possessions, and many Old Guard blacks regard such families as the Johnsons as vulgar upstarts,
nouveaux riches
who, with their ostentatious ways, are little more than an embarrassment and, as a result, do their race more harm than good. It is very much like the way Old Guard Jewish families regard the Jews who show up at Miami Beach hotels and wear mink stoles and diamonds with their swimsuits, or the way the Old Line Irish mocked their new-rich countrymen who hung lace curtains at their windows. It is the classic battle between the established family and the newcomer. If you've got it, the Old Guard feel, you
don't
flaunt it.

Mr. and Mrs. John W. Fleming live on a winding, tree-lined street called Iris Avenue in Cincinnati. Iris Avenue is a street of private homes in the $40,000 to $75,000 range and, because the street dead-ends, it is quiet with very little traffic. It is in an area called Kennedy Heights, which is not only expensive but also integrated. Though Lina Fleming says, “White people don't like you if you look too much like them,” she gets along well with her white neighbors. Most of her friends, however, are black or, like herself, the color of coffee with lots of cream.

Lina Fleming, in her middle fifties, is a woman of promptly revealed opinions, who admits that many of her tartly expressed
sentiments have ruffled feathers on both sides of the racial fence. “I don't think integration is the answer. I think the Negro schools did a great job.” (Like many Old Guard blacks, she eschews the fashionable word “black” for the more traditional “Negro.”) She also says, “I don't believe in busing. I don't think it's necessary.” More than anything, she is infused with an overwhelming sense of family pride, and has outlined a book that she intends to write, to be called, simply, “The Family.” Sample from Mrs. Fleming's outline: “Note their dress, their speech, and their habits of walking, greeting, etc. Note their table manners, manners of cleaning their houses, making and unmaking their beds, preparing their meals, especially specific kinds of food, etc.” “We were
somebody
,” she says. “We were people of status. We were of good stock.” She also admits that her black-skinned husband is not of as good stock. “I'm an Episcopalian,” she said. “My mother thought the Episcopalians were more liberal. He's a Baptist, and a member of the Bethel Baptist Church. Bethel Baptist is headed up by Reverend and Mrs. Harry Brown. She's the social arbiter of the church. He was a janitor and she was a beautician. But Brown went to the University, and took speech lessons, and they both went to a seminary and got degrees. Mrs. Brown puts on weddings. She puts on big banquets, with flaming baked Alaska. But some of those Baptists have never been outside the city, have never been to a hotel.”

John Fleming's father was a minister from Somerville, Tennessee, who came to Cincinnati in 1915. But when John Fleming was ten, his father departed for somewhere in the South, never to be heard from again, and his mother was left with eight children to raise. John Fleming was the only one of his brothers and sisters to go to college, walking five miles from his home in downtown Cincinnati to the city university in the suburbs, and another five miles back each night, stopping to change the sheets of cardboard in his shoes three times along the way. Lina Fleming's background was much different.

She was taught, as a little girl, that there were two kinds of people—“people like us,” and “those other people.” If she brought a new friend home from school, her mother would ask, “Are they people like us?” If they were not, and were “those other people,” her mother would see to it that the friendship was promptly terminated. Lina Fleming's grandmother was equally class-conscious. “Grandmother felt that being in sports or entertainment wasn't proper. I was horrified when I found out that I was related to Joe Louis! When I
found out, I confronted Grandmother with it. She said, ‘I know, I'm sorry. I hoped you'd never know.'”

On genealogical matters, Lina Fleming is almost dizzyingly well informed. “My father's grandfather came from Jamaica with two brothers and a sister. He worked his way across Virginia. I don't know if they were Negroes or Indians. One of my great-great-grandfathers was a white man named John Meadows, who had a lot of property. John Meadows had a mulatto daughter, and he didn't want her to marry just
anybody
. My great-grandfather was Elbert, and he worked for John Meadows,
not
as a slave, and Elbert took the name of Meadows, and married John Meadows's daughter. Elbert's brother was elected to the House of Representatives under Rutherford B. Hayes, and was lynched on his way to the House. Elbert's store, a blacksmith shop, was on the Meadows acreage—about five thousand acres, all told. Daddy's grandmother looked white. My father's mother was a Meadows, and the Meadowses supposedly had slaves of their own. She fell in love with a former slave boy named Wright, who shod her horses, and married him. It was considered a great
mésalliance
. Daddy went to Tuskegee where he met Mother. He was Nathan Wright.

“Mother was a Hickman. My mother's grandparents were custodians of the Eclectic Medical School, and my grandfather practiced medicine in Paris, Kentucky. He was on the board of Berea University, which was founded for the children of white men who had mulatto wives. My great-grandmother laid the cornerstone of the Union Baptist Church. After Mother and Father were married, they lived in Louisiana. He worked in insurance. He taught the poor black farmers the importance of insurance, and made enemies among the whites. They were going to lynch him, but we were warned and my mother and I got on a train for Cincinnati, where Mother's family had property. For a long time, we didn't know where Daddy was.”

The Hickman property was at Camp Denison, a former Army base just behind Indian Hill, Cincinnati's most expensive suburb. The large main house had been at one time a barracks, and was surrounded by extensive gardens. At Camp Denison, life was decorous and mannered. Since Grandmother Hickman was very much a
grande dame
, other black women in the area came to her for advice on how to do things properly. Her house was meticulously kept, furnished with antiques, many of which Lina Fleming has inherited, and meals were served on the dot, on fine china, a table of gleaming mahogany,
with silver napkin rings. Grandmother Hickman was famous for her food, and for her Sunday dinners there were often as many as thirty cars parked in the driveway. “We didn't
eat
what colored people ate,” Lina Fleming says. “We ate mushrooms, asparagus, broccoli—I never heard of Soul Food until I went to work for the Welfare Department. Both my mother and my grandmother were recipe cooks. Grandmother Hickman reared us by the book. Our table manners had to be perfect. We had to say ‘please' and ‘thank you,' we had to say good-night to everyone before we went to bed, and to say good morning when we came down for breakfast. We wore prescription shoes. We went to museums, the symphony, to plays. We read from Charles Lamb's Shakespeare. In those days, Negroes couldn't go to the Summer Opera, but Grandmother had been to New York, where she had season tickets to the opera, and heard Caruso. So we went to the park on opera nights, and sat outside on benches so we could hear the opera.”

When Lina Fleming's father finally managed to join his family in Cincinnati, he was penniless, and had to go to work for a private white family—the Krogers, who own a supermarket chain—as a gardener. This was a terrible blow to Nathan Wright's pride, and it also pained him to have to live more or less off his wife's family. He did, however, become executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. Still, Lina Fleming says, “Grandmother Hickman always felt that Mother had married beneath her station.”

Again, it was the women who seemed to carry the family. “All the women on my grandmother's side were free women,” Lina Fleming says with pride. “None of them ever worked for white people. My grandmother's sisters were black and tall, with lots of hair, but my grandmother was a light olive color. My cousin Ella is very, very white. She could pass for white if she wanted to. A lot of people pass, of course. They cross over, and are never heard from again. When I was a young girl, seeing all these light-skinned relatives gathering at family dinners, I once said to my grandmother, ‘Didn't some of those white men get at them?' She gave me a look I'll never forget, and said to me, ‘Don't you ever mention that again!'