Certain People (8 page)

“My grandmother's friends were an international group. Anybody who was anybody who came through Cincinnati stopped to see her. People came from London, Paris, Rome. Doctor King used to come to Sunday dinner, and used to tease her about all the food she gave away to the poor. At Christmas, we'd go around with baskets of food
for the poorer families. Marian Anderson was a friend of the family, even though she was in entertainment. After all, she sang
opera
.” When Lina, her sister and two brothers weren't being trained, they played, but even their games were educational. “We played math games, and read to each other from Proverbs and Aesop's Fables.” From the time she was two years old, Lina's sister Lydia wanted to be a doctor, and would play with her grandfather's stethoscope. Brother Nathan wanted to be a minister. “Sometimes when Lydia was playing doctor, she would kill off her patients and let Nathan conduct the funeral.” When Lydia, who is now a doctor as well as married to one, was doing her residency in Boston, there was no place for her to live except with a white family, where she had been asked to help out as a baby-sitter. Because this meant “working for whites,” Lydia Wright wrote to Grandmother Hickman for advice. Her grandmother replied, “Any work, as long as it's honorable work, is all right—as long as it helps you go through school.”

Lina, her sister, and two brothers all graduated from Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati's public high school for gifted children. “My mother and grandmother always told us we were superior—we were the best, and the brightest. We had to be, and we
were
.” Even at Walnut Hills, though, the Wright family detected racial slights, either real or imagined—such as the fact that black children were assigned to use the swimming pool during the last period on Fridays, just before the pool was emptied for the weekend. Lina Fleming herself graduated from Fisk University, and her brothers and sisters are all college graduates. “There are twenty-eight college degrees in my immediate family—and nine Ph.D.'s!

“My family would compare with
any
upper-class family, white or Negro,” she says. “And I'd have to say we'd come out better than most whites. My brother Nathan's first wife was a Cardoza—there's old Jewish blood there, the
best
Jewish blood. My brother Hickman was an executive with
Ebony
, but he couldn't get along with the first vice president. So he left, and went as an executive with Clairol. Later, the man who was first vice president left, and Hickman was asked back to
Ebony
to replace the man he couldn't get along with! Now Hickman is second in command! My brother Nathan was an Episcopal minister, but he left the church when he got his divorce. Now Nathan teaches at the State College of Albany—sociology and Black Studies. He's married again, to a white girl. We weren't too happy about that. She could have been hostile, but she was nice.
When I met her, I said, ‘Well, now you're in the family, I suppose we'll have to be friends.' We are, more or less. Her name was Carolyn May—she's related to that Mr. May who was married to Marjorie Merriweather Post. She's from an old Philadelphia family, related to Longfellow—she's a D.A.R. and in the
Social Register
. Let's see if they drop her for marrying Nathan! She's all right. They live in a big house in Selkirk, New York, with thirteen acres and eight acres of lawn—an old mansion they fixed up, full of antiques. They have a couple—a white couple—that keeps house for them. My daughter Diana went to St. Anne's Academy in Arlington, Massachusetts, and from there to Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio, which is now a part of Miami University. My niece, Debbie Wright, went to Yale, and was senior class orator in 1973. Another niece, Patty, speaks five languages. Another niece is in a training program at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. The other day, she had lunch with David Rockefeller. My sister Lydia is quite rich. She's probably the richest of us all. She made a lot of money in the stock market. She has a huge house in Buffalo, full of museum-quality antiques and beautiful paintings—but not
showy
, like some of those other, those trashy people. I mean, my family is
distinguished
. White people may not know it, but
we
know it—we're superior.”

And yes, Lina Wright Fleming admits, she has her own firm set of prejudices. “I'm prejudiced against Catholics,” she says, “and I'm prejudiced against WASPs, and I'm prejudiced against some of my fellow blacks. I mean Negroes. It's those people in the ghettoes who say ‘black.' We say ‘Negro'—people like us.”

6

Roots

In the middle part of the 1800s, near the little town of effingham, Illinois, a small community of mulattos came into existence. There was a similar settlement near Lawrence, Kansas, and there were others scattered across the Middle West and Southwest. Behind these families was white money, for these people were all descendants of the white landed gentry—men who, unlike the common image of the cruel slave-owner, acknowledged their love-children, and maintained two, or in some cases more, families. These children were sent away to be educated at the finest schools and colleges in the United States and Europe. When they came back, they took positions in various corporations, and helped found the first black universities and churches, became the first black professionals as educators, lawyers, and physicians. Thus, even before the Emancipation, there was a black middle class in America.

Gradually, these families moved to the larger cities, where they lived so quietly as to be almost invisible—which was exactly the state of affairs they preferred. They could not be, and in most cases did not wish to be, assimilated into the white world, and at the same time they were envied and resented by the black have-nots for the simple reason that they had more. Their chief philanthropic endeavors centered around the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In its early years the N.A.A.C.P. operated as a kind of exclusive club.

In many cities, these families have been living quiet, comfortable, but isolated lives for as many as five generations. Proud, conservative
and tradition-bound, they have placed the emphasis of their lives on refinement and good living—good silver, good linen, good antiques. In many cities, when integrated neighborhoods opened up, these families refused to move to them because they preferred to live near their friends and relatives. In Chicago, for example, families like the Gillespies, McGills, Abbotts, and George Cleveland Halls remained in their big houses on the South Side after it became unfashionable, where they kept chauffeurs and maintained summer homes on Cape Cod or Martha's Vineyard. Still, conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, and costly items were acquired only if they were also useful. When the father of Mr. Leonard Evans of Chicago was criticized, by a less-well-off black, for driving a Cadillac, he carefully explained why he needed a big car. When he drove his family to visit their relatives in the segregated South, the children could sleep in the car, and not suffer the indignities of “colored-only” motels.

These upper-class blacks, furthermore, have always carefully referred to themselves as “middle-class.” The phrase “middle-class” has a special meaning to blacks. To whites, it is essentially an economic consideration. Any family with, say, an annual income in the $20,000 to $35,000 range would be considered middle-class. Archie Bunker would be considered middle-class; he owns his own home, has a steady job, and his wife does not need to work. But in black America, class is a question of dignity and, more important, stability. To own your own home, unmortgaged, and to own your own car, unfinanced, is class. To be in debt, or to drift from job to job, is not class. Divorce is anathema, and illegitimacy is worse. Upper-crust blacks routinely express pity for poor blacks on welfare, but along with this pity are great feelings of disdain. Upper-class blacks voice concern over “street blacks,” and blacks who are drug-users, criminals, or pimps, but beneath this concern is something very close to contempt. Twenty years ago, a foreigner might have been puzzled by the patrician status accorded to Mr. A. Philip Randolph of Washington, D.C. It is true that Mr. Randolph had all the courtliness, dignity, and refined good manners of a Clifton Webb. But, after all, the Nashville-born labor leader was a sleeping car porter. Could he be upper-class? In black America he can indeed. In Denver, for many years, the women who were the leaders of black society were
all
the wives of Pullman porters. They owned their homes, had stable marriages, sent their children to college and, while their husbands traveled, formed their own exclusive little social circle, where, over teacups
and silver services, they hemmed sheets for the needy. “To be middle-class among blacks is mainly a way of life,” says one woman. And to say “we are middle-class” is merely a more genteel way of saying “we are upper-class.”

To a white, black standards of class can be confusing. In Washington, for example, Dr. and Mrs. John Bulmer live in a strikingly modern house, designed for them, on the west, or white, and more fashionable, side of Rock Creek Park. Dr. Bulmer is a dentist, his wife is a social worker, and their joint income is comfortably above $50,000 a year. But more important than their earnings is the fact that both Bulmers are Old Line black, light-skinned, born with a sense of family roots and status. The Bulmers' house is decorated not only with good taste but with a proud sense of understatement. The light upholstery is kept stain-resistant not with plastic slipcovers but by a family that is simply careful not to stain it. The Bulmers' architect used much glass in his design, but there are no imposing cerise-shaded lamps to dominate their windows, and the Bulmers have resisted the temptation, noticeable among newer-rich black families, to cover their walls with African art or sculpture. They have a color television set, but it is not enormous and ensconced in a Chinese modern console; it is small, and can be rolled out of sight when not in use. To newer-rich black families, trips to Europe, Africa, Hawaii, and cruises in the Caribbean are a mark of status. The Bulmers vacation at an old farmhouse in upstate Vermont.

And yet, when they first moved into their new house, Mrs. Bulmer says, “My neighbor came around one morning, and we had coffee. She asked me where we came from, how much we'd had to pay for the house, and what my husband did. Can you
imagine
that?” A white person certainly could imagine, and would probably see nothing wrong with, such friendly curiosity. But the black upper-class are, by inbred tradition, much more reticent, and consider it poor taste to ask, on short acquaintance, such personal questions. After all, your new neighbor might have to answer that she was from a farm in rural Mississippi, and that her husband sorted mail for the Post Office—answers that might pain and embarrass her to divulge. In black society, such information is to be conveyed gradually, discreetly, indirectly, over a polite period of time. All this is a part of having “class.”

In Chicago, Leonard Evans's antecedents came from the little mulatto community outside Effingham, Illinois. He himself, a tall,
courtly, white-haired man, with very light skin, has the same sense of family past and deep roots in American history. One of Evans's great-grandfathers fought for the British in the American Revolution, thereby earning his freedom from slavery. At the time, blacks had a choice—they could remain as slaves or fight for the British, and Mr. Evans's ancestor chose to fight. After the war, he worked as a fur trapper on the Ohio River, and prospered. In the early 1840s, he went to Louisville, Kentucky, where—whether out of a sense of justice or not—he purchased the old slave auction house, turned it into a church, and became a minister. His son—Leonard Evans's grandfather—helped feed the Union soldiers who came through Louisville during the Civil War. Evans's father was born in Louisville in 1882, graduated from Fisk and Columbia School of Architecture and, after fighting in World War I, returned to Louisville and founded the architectural firm of Evans & Plato, which designed many of the city's churches and temples.

On his mother's side, one of his great-grandmothers was a slave who was sold in Charleston and ended up in Macon, Georgia, where she worked in the household of a wealthy banking and shipping family. She had nine children, five of whom were lost in the Civil War. A sixth child died from a spider bite, and two of her sons were kidnapped and never heard from again. Only one daughter survived. She married a man named James Claybrooks, who had fought with Teddy Roosevelt and who was a member of another old-line family. But when Leonard Evans's mother was born in 1882, she was rejected by her mother because she was the result of a rape by a white man. She was blue-eyed and blond and was raised by her great-grandmother. Her father, she has hinted, was a member of one of the greatest retailing families of the United States. But she has proudly refused ever to acknowledge them, or to say who they were. “A mixed-blood background has distinct advantages,” Evans says. “But in families like ours, we are told never to admit having white blood. It's a fact, but it's never mentioned. To do so is considered to be in very bad taste.”

Evans's mother was sent to Spelman, a private school in Atlanta, and then to Fisk, where she graduated
magna cum laude
. For a while she taught mathematics at Tuskegee under Booker T. Washington. At Fisk, she had met Evans's father. When she married him and moved to Louisville, Evanses had been in the city for over seventy years, and were definitely among the black Old Guard. Still,
haunted by her illegitimacy, she was afraid she would have trouble establishing herself socially in Louisville. “So Mrs. Booker T. Washington wrote letters of introduction for her to all the Louisville elite. With those introductions, she was accepted,” Evans says. “And of course Mother had been taught all the proper things.” Later, when the senior Evanses moved to Hinsdale, Illinois, Mrs. Booker T. Washington did the same thing, and helped ease the Evanses smoothly into the upper class there. In Hinsdale, for example, Mrs. Washington wrote to Mrs. George Cleveland Hall, whose husband was a noted physician. “Mrs. Hall was
the
social leader in Hinsdale,” Evans says. “This was around 1912, and all the old-line families have a similar background and history—Thurgood Marshall, the Bond family in Washington, the Tanner family in Philadelphia, and the Alexanders. This was a pattern. It reflected a quality of life, a quality of taste and refinement in art, literature, speech, manners. In families like these, the genes show.”