Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (54 page)

The woman closed her eyes. “Last name.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Capital
L, E
. Capital
G, U-A-R-D-E
.

“U.S. citizen?”

“Yes, ma’am, but I’ve been living in—”

“Place and date of birth.”

“New Orleans, October 11, 1895.”

“Education.”

“High school, but I plan to—”

“Experience.”

The young man shifted his weight and cleared his throat. “None, really—this will be my first job if I get—”

“Race.”

“Pardon?”

The woman repeated the word, somewhat louder, as if he were deaf. “Race … what is your race?”

The young man, confused by the question, was desperately trying to come up with the right answer. “Uh, I’m not quite sure what you mean. Human race, I guess? Is that right?”

The woman looked at the clock. “Negro or white.”

“Oh, can’t you tell by looking?”

She looked at him with tired, dead eyes. “That’s not my job, sir. Negro or white?”

The young man wiped his sweaty palms on his pants. She waited. “Sir, I’m going to repeat it one more time. Negro or white?”

The young man began to flush. “Well, it’s just that I don’t think I’m either one. Can’t you just put down neither one?”

The woman was losing what little patience she had. “Look, there are fifty people behind you. Make up your mind, one or the other.”

She waited.

“Well, I think my grandmother had some Negro blood but—”

“How much?”

“Oh, I don’t know, not much. Just a little, I think.”

“Half, more than half?”

“Maybe half, I’m not sure …”

The woman stamped the letter
N
by his name. “Any known health problems?”

“Uh, no. But wait a minute. I think that’s not right. I think you need to put down white, I’m more of a white person than anything else—my father is white.”

“I don’t make the laws. I just work here.” She stamped his application again and held it out. “Section D, take a seat and wait for your name to be called.”

She looked around him. “Next.”

“Wait, where do I go?”

“Section D, in the back. Step aside, please.”

James turned to look at the large board that said
SECTION D
, where ten or twelve Negro men dressed in worn and tattered work clothes were sitting. He felt his body start to break out in a clammy sweat.

“Miss, I think there’s a mistake. I’ve always been a white person. This is—”

She did not look at him. “If you want a job, go wait in Section D; if you don’t, fine. I don’t care one way or the other. It’s up to you. Move on, please.”

“But isn’t there some other place, a place in between where I can wait?”

She pushed his application to the right side of the desk and motioned for the man behind him to move up. “Next! Move up, please!” A spare, older man in a brown suit stepped up and looked at him.

“Name?” she droned.

The young man moved aside and looked down at his application. It had fallen off the desk and was now lying on the floor. After a moment, he bent over and picked the paper up and walked slowly back to Section D and sat down on the wooden bench beside a Negro man who earlier that morning had tipped his hat to him. The man began to grin. “Well, lookie here. Look who’s a nigger just like me. You a dressed-up, white nigger but you a nigger,” he said, for the benefit of the other men sitting there. “Them fancy clothes and them blue eyes didn’t help you none.” He laughed. “You ain’t nothing but a nigger … just like me … nothing but a white nigger.”

A few men nodded and laughed. The young man looked straight ahead and gritted his teeth and tried to hold back the hot tears he felt forming in his eyes.

The set of circumstances that had placed James Le Guarde in Section D had all started on June 17, 1808. His grandmother, a mulatto woman from the West Indies, had fled from Santo Domingo to escape the many political upheavals. She escaped with the family she had been working
for and she came into the port of New Orleans carrying all she owned in a cloth bag and carrying the unborn child of the white planter.

Upon entering New Orleans, a free black, she was given the title of
femme de colour
, which automatically placed her above the black slave population.

Her daughter, Marguerite Delacroix, James’s mother, grew up to become one of the beautiful red-haired quadroons of New Orleans. She in turn married a young Frenchman from Alsace-Lorraine named Philipe Le Guarde, who had met her and fallen in love with her at one of the world-famous quadroon balls held on Bourbon Street.

When their son, James, was five, they had moved to France. A bright boy, by the time he was eighteen he was determined to go back to the land of his birth and become a great doctor, make his parents proud. He had read of all the wonders of America and had stars in his eyes and the hope of a great future before him. He went on scholarship, and when he arrived at the school he did not have much money and was told that there might be a small job on campus for him. All he had to do was to register with the employment office and get a work permit.

He hadn’t even thought about race. In France, he had not been a Negro. His mother had barely mentioned it.

Two days later he was called into the admissions office. A man sat with a copy of his work permit before him.

“Mr. Le Guarde,” he said somewhat apologetically. “I’m afraid there is a problem. I have looked over your records that were sent and there was no mention of you being a Negro.”

“No, sir, that’s wrong, I’m not. I tried to tell that lady that my grandmother had a little Negro blood but not me. She made a mistake. I tried to explain it to her but she wouldn’t listen.”

The man looked at the young boy. He hated this part of his job. This sort of thing had happened before and it was never pleasant.

“Mr. Le Guarde, I’m sorry but we don’t accept Negroes here. That’s our policy. But I’ll tell you what I will do. I will write a letter to my friend at Howard College and see if they won’t be able to take you.”

James was baffled. He had just come from France, educated like
his father before him in the strictest of Catholic schools, and had been trained to believe that to lie was a sin against God. He had not been told what the letter
N
beside your name meant, how it would become the most important fact about you. He didn’t understand that in America, one sixteenth of Negro blood canceled out all your white blood and made you a Negro under the law. How could anyone understand that? “But I was
accepted here
, I wanted to study here.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do for you. Howard is a fine school and I think you’ll find that you are happier with your own people. Your grades are excellent and I know you will be a credit to your race one day.”

James walked out the door with his records, a letter of recommendation, and the words “a credit to your race” ringing in his ears. He did not know what to do. He did not have the money to return to France. A few weeks later, he entered Howard College and found there were a few light-skinned, blue-eyed Negroes there and he eventually accepted his fate as God’s will and made the best of it.

After graduation James applied to study with a doctor in Vienna whose papers he had admired, and was elated when he was chosen out of a field of over a hundred young men. On his application, the word
race
was missing. They did not ask, and James did not volunteer; after all, Europe was not America. He trained in Vienna for two years, working under his mentor, Dr. Theodore Karl Lueger. When he was not at the General Hospital of Vienna, he was often a guest at Dr. Lueger’s home. Sometimes on Saturdays he would join the Luegers’ daughter, Gisele, and a group of her friends to take the streetcar around the Ringstrasse and ride the giant Ferris wheel and see all of Vienna. It was a splendid city, a splendid time to be young, and they fell in love. Gisele was madly in love with the young American doctor and wanted to marry him. James had not meant to have this happen because he knew he did not want to take her home to a segregated America. He tried to explain the problems they might have. But Gisele, who had black hair and dark eyes and skin darker than his, laughed when he told her. He could not be a Negro. He had blue eyes and light, honey-colored straight hair. He could not make her understand. When he tried to explain to her father that
because of his race, he would not be able to work in a white hospital or live in a white neighborhood. Dr. Lueger sat and listened, and after James had finished he slowly took off his glasses and wiped them with his handkerchief and said in a quiet voice, “Dr. Le Guarde, if you do not wish to marry my daughter, be a man and tell her so, but do not subject her to such a fantastic falsehood.”

James was miserable, guilty about letting it get this far with Gisele. It was too late to turn back without breaking both their hearts. He walked the streets of Vienna all night, agonizing over what to do. Along the Danube, he stared at the bright stars reflected in the dark water, despondent and confused. But by the time the sun came up over the city, he had made a decision. He knew what he was going to do. After all, he had told them he was a Negro, hadn’t he? He had been honest. But he would not take Gisele home to America. No, he loved her too much. He would not subject her to that. He would marry her, and they would stay in Vienna and raise their children there, where they would be safe from prejudice. But James had not counted on Adolf Hitler.

When Dr. Le Guarde returned to Washington to take over as chief of staff at Freeman Hospital, he immediately found himself listed among what W. E. B. Du Bois named the “talented tenth.” He soon belonged to the Urban League, the NAACP, the Columbian Education Association, the Music and Literary Society, Boule, all the clubs and organizations of elite black society. He was certainly thought of as one of the leading black aristocrats of Washington, who vacationed in the exclusive holiday spots—Sarasota Springs, Highland Beach, Maryland. They moved in rarefied air.

But his wife and children had not been happy. Over the years Dr. Le Guarde had come to believe that he had a duty to try to be a credit to his race, to help his people; his children held no such beliefs.

Dr. Le Guarde often thought about that morning when the letter
N
had been stamped on his work permit. It had only taken a second, but that one second, that one letter, had changed the course of his life, and of his children’s lives. And even today, as he sat in his
office so many years later, he still wondered if he had done the right thing by telling the truth. Having seen his wife die an unhappy, misplaced woman, and his children so tormented, he wondered if he had the chance to go back and lie, would he?

He was a deeply religious man, but he still did not know. All he knew was that he had lost his beloved son. His beloved Theo was gone, and now he might be losing his daughter, Marguerite, as well. He could feel her slipping away, withdrawing.

He opened his desk drawer and pulled out the only thing he had left of Theo and reread it, as he had almost every day for the past five years.