Saving Savannah

by Tonya Bolden

  From her balcony Savannah stood amazed at what it meant.

  “It is called a murmuration,” she heard nasally Mr. Neval tell her class years back.

  During this season of murmurations, Savannah let her parents know when she planned to visit Nella and Miss Gertie. During one visit, she inquired about that bready thing, that cross between a doughnut and a biscuit that had tasted so good.

  Bakes, she learned.

  The name, along with how to make the batter and fry them up.

  Whether morning, afternoon, or evening, Savannah walked to, from Southwest intrepid, took delight when she ran into Spencer, Glenna even. Sometimes Savannah popped in on the Fletchers and left with wax paper packets of pickled pigs’ feet.

  Constantly she thought about how Mother had started with nothing.

  Would you rather you lived in a shack with an outhouse out back?

  No, I would not! Savannah thought one day en route to old man Boudinot’s, a place she frequented often, scanning the shelves for books about Africa, the West Indies, India, ordering titles the squirrelly old man thought she might like, plucking from a shelf, now and then, a book that quietly beckoned. The Heart of a Woman, a slim volume of verse, was one.

  “The author, Georgia Douglas Johnson, she’s local, you know,” said old man Boudinot as Savannah handed him four Walking Liberties. “Lives over on South Street,” he added.

  From musing on Mother’s “nothing,” Savannah thought even harder on how she might take the SO much that was in her lap, within her grasp, and fashion it into a force for the way things ought to be.

  She read up on socialism, communism, wondering if she could really fully embrace either. After all, while her mind often wandered in church, deep down she did believe in God.

  Savannah didn’t much study anarchism. For one, she wanted nothing to do with bombs.

  Practical knowledge—she sought that too.

  “No, Charlie, I mean if you didn’t have the studio, how much would your rent be?”

  She tallied up what her allowance came to a year.

  “Well, about how much do you spend on groceries a week? … Do things costs the same in New York as they do here?”

  She sounded out her parents about how much they spent on clothing for her a year. Later, looking through her wardrobe, chiffonier, dresser, she knew she really wouldn’t need any new clothing for two, maybe three years.

  More questions for Charlie: “Where is Hubert Harrison’s Liberty League headquartered? … How far is that from you? … The magazine the Crusader? How far is that from you? … Do you know the editor?”

  She visited Uncle Madison—“Charlie has told me about a school called Cooper Union where I can study art for free.”

  And Savannah had not abandoned Lincoln Heights. On more than one autumn day she took the streetcar there to help her friends break down garden plots, corral leaves, save seeds for next year.

  And she had questions for them too.

  The cost, the length of a voyage to Haiti, to Liberia?

  Would Principal Burroughs ever let someone with just a high school diploma teach at her school?

  Probably not, Savannah said to herself a beat before Mona shrugged.

  And maybe, Savannah reckoned, maybe going to Howard wasn’t such a bad idea after all. She began to see herself, not as an art major—

  Methinks I see …

  “Mother,” she asked one day. “What course of study must one take to be a journalist?”

  And photography … maybe she’d take it up after all, apprentice with Uncle Madison, not with an eye on mastering the portraiture of prominent race men and women, not to cover events like the Sandersons’ fete, but to document lives that newspapers ignored. The forgettable, the forgotten.

  During these days of thinking, asking, reading, questing, seeking, Savannah was most proud of getting Yolande out to Lincoln Heights.

  Raking leaves, stuffing them into croker sacks, breathing in all that crisp autumn air, attending a Friday night social, a lecture by Dr. Woodson—Yolande was truly renewed.

  Saturdays when not out at Lincoln Heights, Savannah made a point of spending some time with Yolande.

  A photoplay.

  A meal at Gaskins’.

  Sometimes both.

  To, from Dunbar they walked, often arm in arm.

  During one of those walks, Savannah hit upon something else to do, something that might not be wholly impossible.

  Methinks I see … mewing her mighty youth.

  First she spoke with Nella.

  ON THE EDISON AMBEROLA

  Mother, Father, Savannah were in the living room, dinner done, dusk on duty.

  Playing on the Edison Amberola was the brassy, bluesy “Indianola” by Lieutenant Jim Europe and his Hell Fighters Band.

  Savannah cleared her throat, spoke her hope.

  Father, his thinking face on, said nothing for the longest while.

  “What brought this on?” Mother finally asked. She looked shocked, but not repulsed—nothing like when Savannah broached the subject of helping out at Nannie Burroughs’s school.

  “What brought this on?” responded Savannah. “The difference your Ma Clara and Dorcas Vashon made in your life. The notion that there are things that need to cease immediately and then there are our far-off hopes and dreams.”

  “The grandfather would, of course, have to agree,” said Mother.

  “We would need Calvin or another attorney to draw up papers so that all is decent and in order,” added Father.

  “I will take him to and from school. I will help him with his homework. You can take most or all of what you’d spend on clothing for me and …”

  “Let us sleep on it,” said Mother.

  “That’s all I ask,” replied Savannah.

  In a few days’ time, Mother and Father said yes to adopting Bim.

  MOST OF ALL THERE IS LOVE

  There is roast goose, braised ham, lamb chops.

  There’s parsley new potatoes, peas, carrots. Brussels sprouts too.

  A pumpkin pie, a strawberry shortcake, along with miniature custards grace the burl and marquetry buffet opposite the dining room table around which there had been prayer.

  For family. For life and limb.

  For strength of mind.

  Friendship.

  As platters and serving bowls are passed around this table laid with Tiffany candlesticks and two sets of salt and pepper cellars, there is laughter too.

  Most of all there is love.

  That of two handsome middle-aged couples and a man in his thirties with a Charlie Chaplin mustache and probing eyes—an ebullient fellow who insisted on taking photographs of the spread before everyone took their seats.

  There is the love of a bright-smiling lad in a tweed Dubbelbilt suit and with more meat on his bones than he had a few months back. And of a young woman in a royal-blue taffeta dress chattering away about the last meeting of the Bethel Junior Literary Society. By her side sits another young woman. This one wears an emerald-green velvet dress with an overlay of emerald-green chiffon. Around her neck, a string of coral beads.

  Next to her, tickling her from time to time, sits another man in his thirties. Tall, angular, dark, velvety skin, razor-thin mustache. His hair is pomaded. He has on a nice suit.

  Yes, Charlie came home for Christmas.

  On Monday, December 29, 1919, two days before her eighteenth birthday, Savannah Riddle sat in the Madeline Beauty Parlor very much in an Excelsior! state of mind.

  What part in this great drama of the future …?

  And Savannah was crystal clear about the part that she would play—and how she would make a life.

  She removed The Heart of a Woman from her handbag, flipped to page fifty-six, and for the umpteenth time read “Pendulum.”57

  About swinging to “the uttermost reaches of pain.”

  About “the echo of sighs,” a “deluge of rain.”

  About rebounding “to the limits of bliss.�
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  And also about “an infinite kiss.”

  From the pages of the book she brought out an envelope with a winsome stamp: against a background of coral red, a two-horse chariot speeds a sovereign across a sea.

  Just as with “Pendulum,” Savannah read the letter for the umpteenth time.

  Dear Miss Ting,

  I hope this finds you still brave. As for me, I’ve had the good fortune to find work at …

  When the Madeline Beauty Parlor’s proprietor, Madame Mary M. Smith, had Savannah’s hair in her hands—hair shampooed, conditioned by staff—the regal caramel-colored woman sighed. “Are you sure you want to do this, Savannah? There are girls who would kill to have your hair.”

  “She’s sure,” said Mother, glancing up from a recent Crisis.

  “If you say so, Mrs. Riddle.”

  Madame Mary M. Smith then picked up a pair of scissors, proceeded to clip, clip, clip, snip, snip, snip her way to giving Savannah a Dutch bob.

  Savannah looked into the mirror, studied the woman’s handiwork, watched hair fall, float to the checkerboard floor.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The year 1919 was a long goodbye to the Great War, as World War I was called, with its 37 million civilian and military casualties. That year also saw the waning of an influenza pandemic in which possibly as many as 50 million people died worldwide (and which, by the way, didn’t originate in Spain, but in Kansas). And there was so much more in that single year.

  Revolutionaries reacted to the status quo with bombs.

  Suffragists rallied around and roared for passage of the Anthony amendment so that women in America would have the national vote.

  And New Negro sentiment surged.

  And conservatives railed against certain immigrants.

  And progressive workers sought to unite in the fight for better working conditions and better pay too.

  And in the spring, summer, and fall of 1919, there was that horrific spate of race riots, more than twenty in all.

  In his book 1919, William K. Klingaman called it “the year our world began.”

  A “year that changed America”—that’s what Martin W. Sandler dubbed it in his book also titled 1919.

  February 17, 1919: The 369th infantry regiment marches up Fifth Avenue in New York City. Today the regiment is often called the Harlem Hellfighters, but back circa 1919 they were more commonly called simply the Hell Fighters.

  As a child of the turbulent 1960s, with its civil rights, black power, women’s liberation, and antiwar movements—and with its riots—I wondered, What was it like to be a young woman in 1919? To witness such a hurricane of events without realizing that you are in fact part of history?

  Savannah came to me as a privileged young woman in a nose dive of discontent. Discontent with her life, her social set, with what others think she ought to be, do, want. She’s pulsing for change, new vistas, while facing some frightening events.

  As I imagined Savannah’s life, troops of historical figures came parading through in person and by mention: Booker T. Washington; Frederick Douglass; scholar-activist W. E. B. Du Bois; Carter G. Woodson, the “father” of black history; millionaire Madam C. J. Walker, whose company provided thousands of black people with jobs. As did the St. Louis–based Poro, another black-owned beauty-care company, the one for which Nella Walcott is a sales rep. At its helm was the tenacious Annie Turnbo Malone, for whom Madam C. J. Walker (née Sarah Breedlove) once worked.

  Into Saving Savannah also strode firebrand Nannie Helen Burroughs. She opened her Lincoln Heights school for young women in 1909, the same year that Du Bois, Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and several white activists founded the NAACP.

  Circa 1900–1920: Nannie Helen Burroughs, born in Orange, Virginia. In 1964, her school was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School.

  Burroughs, fierce feminist—someone who did “specialize in the wholly impossible”—is not as well known as she ought to be. Often when the subject is the early-twentieth-century suffragist movement, typically if black women are mentioned …

  Maybe journalist and antilynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett, who launched the first black woman’s suffrage organization (Chicago’s Alpha Suffrage Club in 1913).

  Maybe the millionaire’s daughter Mary Church Terrell, a founder and first president of the organization to which Mrs. Riddle belongs, the National Association of Colored Women formed in 1896 (today’s National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs). Outside of academia, rarely is Nannie Helen Burroughs mentioned.

  Burroughs is just one of legions of today’s lesser-known early-twentieth-century DC lights, agents of change on so many fronts at a time when Jim Crow was so virulent.

  Before the Great War: Students at Nannie Burroughs’s National Training School for Women and Girls.

  Portraits of black life under Jim Crow rightly present the abuse and humiliations endured, the possibilities denied, the potential stymied, but many portraits stop there, leaving the impression that all black people—or most—were downtrodden, living lives of quiet desperation and deprivation. When black agency is brought into view, the focus is usually on lawsuits, marches, and boycotts.

  But there’s more to the story. More than the efforts of the Du Boises and others who are household names today. When you dig deeper into history, you find troops of black people—people galled by Jim Crow, people who loathed Jim Crow—people whose names rarely show up in the history books. People like Savannah’s parents. People to so admire for the things they did when don’t prevailed. In doing well for themselves, they delivered a whole lot of good to their people.

  This unsung black phalanx did more than dream a world. It created one. In 1919, black DC (soon to be supplanted by Harlem as the “capital of black America,” as the “Mecca”) had much to offer her people, especially in its famous U Street corridor, with Howard University the crown jewel.

  So maybe white newspapers weren’t always kind to black people or gave them short shrift. Savannah and her family had, among other newspapers, the Washington Bee with the slogan “Sting for Our Enemies—Honey for Our Friends.” Launched in 1882, this weekly endured for forty years, until 1922, a year after the death of its editor, lawyer William Calvin Chase.

  When black people of means from New York City or Chicago or from San Francisco visited DC, no they couldn’t stay at a first-rate white-owned hotel, but then John Whitelaw Lewis, laborer turned excellent entrepreneur, stepped in. Shortly before the Riddles’ 1919 Christmas dinner, Lewis’s five-story, U-shaped brick-and-limestone hotel and apartment building (twenty-two hotel rooms and twenty-five rental units) opened at 13th and T Streets. This Italian Renaissance Revival style structure was designed by black architect Isaiah T. Hatton, a graduate of M Street School. During the week of the Whitelaw’s grand opening, the Bee reported that some seven thousand people turned out—dressed to the nines—for a series of public programs.

  And if guests at the Whitelaw wanted a fine dining experience outside of the hotel, thanks to other enterprising black minds, they had options, as did Savannah, her family, her friends. One was Gaskins’ Cafe and Lunch at 320 8th Street NW, “the House of Quality and Service.”58 Another was Dade’s Palace Cafe at 1216 Pennsylvania Avenue NW.

  While A. J. Gaskins and Moses H. Dade created places where black people could dine in dignity, others catered to different needs. Mr. Pinchback’s men’s clothing store was inspired by ads I came across in the Bee for Robert Harlan’s Toggery Shop at 1848 Seventh near the corner of T Street. While my description of beautician Mary M. Smith is fictional, her establishment, the Madeline Beauty Parlor, was real, located at 905 U Street.

  Circa 1912 and circa 1907: Annie Brooks Evans (left) and her daughter Lillian Evans, both by Addison N. Scurlock.

  While black do-ers in DC were building businesses and institutions they were readying their young to pursue success in a range of fields.

  1917: Dunbar High from the March 1917 Crisis.

  Take sopra
no Lillian Evans, one of whose concerts Yolande and her parents attend. Shortly after Saving Savannah ends, Evans became an internationally renowned concert singer. Stage name: Lillian Evanti. Her mother, Annie Brooks Evans, a photograph of whom Savannah sees on display in Madison Spurlock’s window, was a music teacher in DC public schools. Lillian’s father, physician William Bruce Evans, was the founding principal of Armstrong Manual Training School, one of DC’s two high schools for black students when Savannah was a teen. Armstrong (which in 1925 became Armstrong Technical High School, and today is called Friendship Armstrong Academy) was where one of DC’s most famous sons, Duke Ellington, studied art and design. (The career of this legendary composer and bandleader will take off after his move to the Big Apple in 1923.)

  Hallie E. Queen, who held a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and a master’s from Stanford University, and who did speak several languages, was likely not one of black DC’s favorite daughters.

  Queen began working for the Department of Military Intelligence when America entered the Great War. Documents attesting to her spying on the black community include a September 1917 memo on her findings while in New York City. Example: a German doctor trying to recruit black physicians for the German medical corps. Queen also warned that William Monroe Trotter of Boston, civil rights activist and publisher of the Guardian, “was a radical colored man who might make trouble.”59 This was, as historian Mark Ellis has pointed out, “undeniably true but also common knowledge.”60 Hallie E. Queen was apparently not much of a sleuth and prone to wild imaginings. (And, by the way, Miss Queen was at Madam C. J. Walker’s 1918 Christmas party, which Savannah’s brother, Charlie, covered.)

  1908: Halle E. Queen from a Cornell University yearbook.

  From high-profile to everyday people, one of the greatest chroniclers of black DC during Savannah’s days (and beyond) was Addison N. Scurlock, the man on whom I based Savannah’s play uncle, Madison Spurlock.

  Addison N. Scurlock, a native of Fayetteville, North Carolina, was in his late teens when, around 1900, his family moved to DC. There, he apprenticed with a white photographer. Then, in 1911, Addison opened his first studio at 900 U Street. Sons Robert and George followed in his footsteps and, thankfully, the Scurlock legacy has been preserved, cared for by the National Museum of American History. This treasure trove includes roughly 200,000 prints, negatives, and color transparencies. That’s a whole lot of history, a whole lot of insight on the rest of the story, a source of gems to be found when we dig deeper into history.