Common Ground (10 page)

Erwin Griswold, former dean of the Law School and now the U.S. Solicitor General, spoke of “differing perspectives in Cambridge and Washington.”
Nicholas Katzenbach, the former Attorney General and now Under Secretary of State, spoke of respect for the law.

Kevin White spoke of the agony of the American city. “The holocaust that has ripped through our cities over the last two years, indeed during the past three weeks,” he said, “gives us ample testimony to the magnitude of the problem. I bring tonight the conviction that if we are somehow to escape destruction, we must accept without reservation the proposition that the plight of the black man is the greatest single crisis in America today—the axis around which every other problem revolves.”

The Kerner Report, he said, had outlined the alternatives open to American cities. They could stick with present policies, relying on economic growth to improve the condition of blacks. They could choose “enrichment,” increasing spending for social programs, but leaving the Negro isolated in the ghetto. Or they could opt for integration, reversing the nation’s drift toward two societies, black and white, separate and unequal.

White declared for integration. “The time has come for me after one hundred days in office, and for this nation after one hundred years, to put, as Lincoln did, the preservation of the Union above all else, the creation of a single society of white and black above all else. This is our commitment in Boston. I need your assistance. I hope there are those here among you, among the very best young lawyers America has produced, who will choose to join us in this commitment.”

As the Mayor’s words died away, there was a split second of silence, then the rustle of hundreds of napkins against dinner jackets as the phalanx of lawyers rose to give him an ovation.

At his table in the rear, Colin Diver stood transfixed, staring at the youthful Kevin White behind the rostrum. On the ride back to Cambridge, he and David Mann shared their enthusiasm for the Mayor’s speech. Somehow White had captured just the sense of urgency, of moral commitment, of sacrifice that had been gestating in them all through that long winter. Back at the Divers’ apartment on Flagg Street, Joan Diver and Betsy Mann were waiting. Over coffee, their husbands told them about the Mayor’s speech. For more than an hour, the two couples talked of cities, blacks, integration, and community control.

It was well past 1:00 a.m. when Colin turned abruptly to David Mann and said, “I dare you to come down with me next week and take the Mayor up on his offer.”

“What offer?” Mann countered. “That wasn’t an offer.”

“Sure it was,” Colin replied. “He said he hoped some of the bright young lawyers in the room would help him out. There were only twenty-four guys in the room who’re graduating this year. We’re two of them. He must have meant us.”

“Oh, who knows if he even has any jobs.”

“Let’s find out.”

Joan and Betsy reinforced Colin’s enthusiasm. Neither woman wanted her husband to sign on with a corporate law firm. The more Joan thought of Colin’s idea, the more she liked it. “It’s the right thing to do,” she said. “We’ve been saying all along we don’t care that much about money. What’s important is doing something for people, helping the city survive.”

On Monday, Colin called Barney Frank to set up an appointment. Barney seemed taken aback, but said, “Sure, come on down.” On Thursday, he met with the two law students for an hour but could promise nothing concrete; he was simply unprepared for volunteers. When the Mayor heard that two
Law Review
editors had actually responded to his speech, he was flabbergasted. It had never occurred to him that anybody would take him literally.

Put off by Barney’s vagueness, Dave Mann backed out, deciding to stick with his Cincinnati job. But Colin wasn’t easily discouraged. He called Sam Merrick, one of the mayoral aides who Frank said might need an assistant. Merrick did and offered him the job. It paid only $8,000—a $6,000 cut from what he could have earned in Washington. But by then Colin’s mind was made up. He called the partner who had hired him for Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering and told him he’d changed his mind. The partner made it plain that he regarded the young man at the other end of the line as a naïve fool.

Colin didn’t care. In July he went to work as an assistant to the Mayor. For the first time in months he felt that life held some purpose. He was confronting society’s critical issue—nothing less than the American dilemma itself.

A
bout the last of August came in a dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars,” John Rolfe, a Virginia colonist, recorded laconically in 1619. The first blacks to enter an English settlement in the New World, their arrival marked the start of American slavery.

The “Negars” were landed at Old Point Comfort, a sandy spit which divides the James River from the broad sweep of the Chesapeake Bay. Later the point was incorporated into Hampton, the village to which the English settlers repaired after they abandoned Jamestown in 1610. Over the next two centuries, Hampton became an unusual antebellum community, combining small-town intimacy with the refinement of Tidewater planter society. Living side by side for 250 years, master and slave reached a rough accommodation. Laws against teaching slaves to read and write were widely ignored. Many whites permitted their slaves to hire themselves out to factories or artisans, returning a fixed payment to their masters.

But the Civil War put Hampton in immediate jeopardy. By then on Old Point Comfort reared Fortress Monroe, a powerful Union bastion manned by 6,000 Northern troops. In May 1861, command of the fort was assumed by Major General Benjamin Butler, later governor of Massachusetts and a great favorite of Charlestown’s Irish. Butler confronted a difficult situation. Only weeks after his arrival—and eighteen months before the Emancipation Proclamation—three slaves belonging to Colonel Charles Mallory of the Virginia militia escaped to the fort, claiming that their master wanted them to work on Confederate fortifications in North Carolina. Needing laborers of his own, Butler granted the Negroes asylum. When Colonel Mallory protested, invoking the Fugitive Slave Act, which required that slaves be returned to their rightful owners, Butler said he was seizing the slaves as “contraband of war.” Butler’s dictum raced through Hampton. Within days he was besieged by hundreds more “contraband” seeking refuge at what they called “Fort Freedom.”
Slaveholders, realizing that they could no longer maintain their property in the shadow of the Union fortification, fled North with their valued chattel.

Among the departing slaves were the Jenkinses—George and Amy, both in their mid-seventies; their son, Frederick, and his wife, Charlotte; and their grandchildren, James, Amanda, and Frederick Jr.—who in early 1861 set sail with their masters for Nova Scotia. Although 850 miles to the north, the peninsula was a logical refuge for Virginians. Trading ships had long shuttled between Nova Scotian and Tidewater ports. Moreover, though Canada had for many years been a haven for runaway slaves, it served Southern whites too as a shelter from the approaching apocalypse. Slavery had been abolished in Canada, but slaveholders could import their chattel as “servants.” In the months just before the Civil War, hundreds of Southern whites and their Negroes arrived in Canada.

Landing on the Bay of Fundy, the Jenkinses and their masters soon settled thirteen miles to the south in the village of West Nictaux, which was populated by New Englanders who had arrived there soon after the British expelled the original French settlers. By 1861, West Nictaux was a tiny farming community, its hills dotted with orchards which produced apples for export to Boston, New York, even London.

The Jenkinses were the only black family in town. Elsewhere in the Annapolis Valley were remnants of earlier waves of black immigration—“loyalist” blacks who had gone over to the British cause during the Revolution and were later settled in Nova Scotia; the slaves of American Tories, brought by their masters to the peninsula; and Negroes who had served in British units during the War of 1812—but these Negroes had clung together in tight little settlements.

While remaining in the service of their “masters,” the Jenkinses didn’t feel free to join one of these black enclaves. Even after the master-servant relationship dissolved, they stayed on in West Nictaux, doing odd jobs for white farmers and orchardmen: butchering pigs, threshing buckwheat, sawing wood, splitting birches for the hoops on apple barrels. At first they lived on the Nictaux road next door to the two-room schoolhouse, where the Jenkins children were the only blacks. In class, they were regarded as quaint curiosities, the white kids chanting, “Thick lips, flat nose / On the head, the wool grows.” The family attended the Nictaux United Baptist Church, where they were assigned a special pew on the side aisle.

Soon after George Jenkins died at ninety-one, his family moved from the schoolhouse site to the Middle Road, a desolate track where the village’s poorest residents lived in tar-paper shacks. But they retained a sense of their own uniqueness, their special relationship with white folks. They never mixed with the blacks of North Street in Middleton, a settlement barely four miles away. North Street was called “the bog,” partly because it was built on swampy ground, partly because it was the home of indigent 1812 refugees known for their drinking and other “low behavior.” Charlotte Jenkins would warn her kids, “Stay away from those niggers in the bog!” It was a strange life. Embraced
by neither whites nor blacks, they occupied a sort of racial no-man’s-land in which conventional allegiances were suspended.

By 1885, Frederick Jenkins, Jr.—then twenty-five—was growing restless. He had become a lumberman, cutting white ash, black birch, and rock maples, then riding the logs down the river to a sawmill in the valley. But there wasn’t much money in that, and other opportunities were scant. Black Nova Scotians had begun migrating to New England, where jobs were more plentiful, and when Frederick heard of a job with a Massachusetts lumber company, he packed his meager belongings and took the overnight ferry to Boston. When the job fell through, he worked successively at a tannery, a coal yard, and an asphalt company, while moonlighting as a janitor and rag merchant. Eventually, he settled in Lower Roxbury, where he married Rachel Baker, a recent migrant from Virginia. In 1905, their only child—Helen—was born.

The Jenkinses lived in Lower Roxbury for more than thirty years, nineteen of them on Flagg Street. Predominantly Irish and Italian, their block had only a smattering of blacks, and the races lived side by side with little tension. On warm summer nights, the neighbors gathered on someone’s front stoop to drink beer and play cards. Maintaining his family’s tradition of association with whites, Frederick Jenkins exchanged visits with two Scottish families from Nova Scotia and often played the fiddle at Irish wakes.

Helen was raised on sausage and sweet pastries which her mother sent her to buy at the Italian markets on Northampton Street. Only one childhood incident marred her sense of well-being. In 1923 her cousin Moses Baker was temporarily stationed as a seaman at the Charlestown Navy Yard. One night, walking the Charlestown waterfront on his way back to base, Moses was assaulted by several men and beaten so badly he spent weeks in the hospital and eventually had a kidney removed. Helen, then eighteen, was horrified and resolved to stay away from Charlestown.

After graduating from the High School of Practical Arts in 1925, she went to work for the Marshalls, a Yankee family who lived in a big house in Jamaica Plain. She never regarded herself as a maid, more as a companion and helper. In the summers, Helen accompanied the family to their house in New Hampshire, where she had her own room all through the hot weather. They were good to her.

One Sunday in 1930, when Helen was twenty-five, she was walking down Camden Street, coming home from the Zion Methodist Church, when someone hailed her from across the street. It was Jim the laundryman, but Helen noticed he had another man with him, a nice-looking fellow. So she said, “You come over here to talk with me and leave your friend over there?”

“Well, he’s single, so I didn’t bring him over,” Jim said. It wasn’t considered proper for single men and women to meet in such circumstances. But later that afternoon, Jim came by the house and introduced Helen to his friend Quinnie Walker, who had found his way to Boston by a very different route from the one the Jenkinses had taken.

•    •    •

If Hampton’s slaves enjoyed certain dispensations, seventy miles upriver at Richmond many blacks were at least nominally free. Many Virginians, taking the rhetoric of independence with utmost seriousness, had recognized the irony of fighting for freedom while denying it to others. “The glorious and ever memorable Revolution can be justified on no other principles but what do plead with still greater force for the emancipation of our slaves,” said a petition from Hanover County in 1785. Although Thomas Jefferson retained 150 slaves, many of his neighbors invoked his ringing phrases to justify the liberation of thousands of their own chattel between 1785 and 1800.

But soon this fervor cooled. After a number of free Negroes joined Gabriel Prosser’s and Nat Turner’s rebellions, they were denounced as “degraded, profligate, vicious, turbulent, and discontented” persons whose “locomotive habits fit them for a dangerous agency in schemes wild and visionary.” Although they continued to work as tobacco processors, coal miners, iron forgers, and draymen, the legislature imposed stern new restrictions on their religious and educational activities, and vigilante bands made sure that they knew the penalty for violating such regulations.

Free blacks had to remain alert for another breed of freebooter—the kidnapper. For, with the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, “cotton fever” had seized the Deep South, sharply raising the price of slaves needed to pick the crop. By the 1830s, Virginia’s depleted soil was no longer suitable for large-scale cotton production and slaves themselves became the state’s most valuable crop. Pressed by creditors, many old families turned their plantations into giant breeding farms, until the state resembled “one grand menagerie where men are reared for the market like oxen for the shambles.” Between 1830 and 1840, no fewer than 117,000 slaves were sold into other states. Virginia Negroes were in particular demand along the frontiers of Georgia and Mississippi, where every rustic seemed to hanker after a Virginia-bred black as his coachman, a Virginia slave as his lady’s maid. Bands of kidnappers roamed the state, seizing free Negroes and selling them into slavery in the Deep South. Richmond’s 2,000 free Negroes—feared, despised, and now particularly vulnerable—were prime targets for such raiders.