by Mia Bay
Admittedly, Ida had some cause to resent the lack of activism among other middle-class black contemporaries, who sometimes used money to bypass the indignities of discrimination rather than defending their race. Through the 1890s, black travelers were still permitted to purchase tickets for the deluxe Pullman accommodations offered on many trains—which were sold without restrictions as to race by Chicago’s Pullman Palace Car Company, which owned and operated the cars. Such services allowed many affluent blacks, as Wells complained in an early article, to dodge discrimination rather than contest it. “Railroad officials don’t bother me, in traveling,” they would maintain, content to buy their way out of Jim Crow travel.30
But whatever her quibbles with the black elite, Wells’s struggles were not as isolated as she remembers. The years of country teaching that frame Wells’s account of her legal struggles in her autobiography ended less than six months after she began her first suit, when she secured a teaching job in Memphis. As the case stretched from the fall of 1883 through the spring of 1887, Wells was no longer a lonely country teacher, reading by the firelight, but instead led a very active social life in Memphis.
Indeed, during the period covered by Wells’s Memphis diary, 1885 through 1887, she mentioned her lawsuits far less frequently than her clothing purchases, romantic life, and professional activities. Displaying an emotional equanimity in the face of hardship that seems to have been one of her particular gifts, Ida simply went on with her life as her case was appealed. When the case headed to the Tennessee State Supreme Court, she had to stretch her small budget to pay Judge Greer’s traveling expenses, and pledge that she would pay court costs. But despite the financial burden the case imposed on her, and the smear tactics the railroad used against her, Ida expressed little anxiety about the case in her diary. When the trial date was set, she reported it, also referring briefly to the railroad’s campaign against her. But she concluded on a calm note: “I shall watch and wait and fear not.” And true to her promise, Ida did not mention the case again until after it was decided.31
“Every Young Woman’s Ambition”:
Work and Womanhood
Rather than portraying her as a lonely political martyr, her Memphis diary reveals a lively, flirtatious young woman struggling to find her place and purpose in the world. In her midtwenties as she wrote, Wells was at the age when young women of her day were expected to be married, or energetically pursuing the goal of marriage. Black women were far more likely to work for wages than white women, and it was not uncommon for even married middle-class black women to work. But, employed or otherwise, like all nineteenth-century women, African American women were expected to build their lives around marriage. “Every young woman’s ambition is to have a home of her own someday,” wrote the editor of The Indianapolis Freeman, a black newspaper, in 1893. Marriage was a woman’s God-given purpose in life. A woman must be able to achieve a home that is “just right,” the editor advised. Otherwise, it would make “no difference how much wealth, how much beauty you may possess, your brilliant talents, if you are void of purity of purpose, [and] nobleness of soul, you are not what God intended.”32 Clearly aware of such ideas, Ida chafed under the expectation of marriage. She enjoyed male company, but was not anxious to marry. Aware that she was unusual in that regard, Ida wrote in her diary, “I am an anomaly to my self as well as to others. I do not wish to be married but I do wish for the society of gentlemen.”33 Still responsible for her siblings, Ida may have feared that marriage would mean a lifetime of uninterrupted motherhood and domestic drudgery. Certainly she did not romanticize marriage. “Went…to call on Mrs. Neal,” she wrote in her diary of a young married acquaintance, “who is very bright complexioned, with fair skin & dark hair, and rather pretty—was more so before she married. The inevitable baby is there with the habits peculiar to all babyhood.”34
The oldest of eight children, Ida knew babies, but men were another matter. Memphis introduced Ida to a whole new world of male companionship, which she was anxious to explore to its fullest. During the years her family responsibilities had kept her teaching in the country, she had little opportunity to meet eligible men. But that changed when she moved to the city. There, Wells had a continual stream of suitors. Described in an 1885 newspaper account as “about four and a half feet high, tolerably well-proportioned…of ready address,” and elsewhere as “young and comely,” Wells was admired for her striking dark eyes and ready wit.35 “Just now there are three [men] in the city,” she wrote in her diary at one point, “who with the least encouragement, would make love to me; I have two correspondents in the same predicament.” Expressing no ambivalence about juggling her plethora of suitors, Ida continued: “I am enjoying my existence very much just now; I won’t wonder longer, but willingly enjoy life as it comes.”36
Dating for the first time after years of isolation and hard work, Ida reveled in the experience. Beyond male companionship, Ida’s abundance of suitors and men friends opened up a world of new social and cultural opportunities. She was taken to the theater, lectures, and parties—all new experiences for the young country girl. As a single woman with no parents, Wells was more dependent than most young women on male escorts to accompany her to such events, since women of her era did not socialize by themselves. Her reliance on her beaux as companions can be seen in a February 1887 diary entry where she bemoaned a falling-out with an unnamed male friend. “Expected to attend a party given last week,” she wrote, “but my escort did not come.”37
Ida’s escorts, however, often resented her ability to see them as little more than friends and escorts. “I must try & curb myself more, and not be so indifferent to the young men,” she chided herself in her diary, “they feel & resent it.” She lamented in another entry, “It seems that I can establish no middle ground between me and my visitors—it is either love or nothing.” Ida wrote the latter comment while reflecting on two of her most persistent suitors, I. J. Graham and Louis Brown, whom she never managed to choose between. “I feel that I have degraded myself in that I had not the courage to repulse one or the other,” she noted in her diary. “I know not which of the two I prefer. I don’t think I want either for a husband but I would miss them sadly as friends—and that of course would be the intermission of friendship if I said nay.”38
A fellow teacher in Memphis, Graham courted Wells for over a year without ever being sure of her. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship in which her feelings for Graham seem to have never been entirely clear, even to Ida. As the relationship progressed, she grew impatient with Graham for not proposing marriage. Meanwhile, Graham was evidently reluctant to take this step without some kind of invitation from Ida, because he knew both from town gossip and from Ida herself that she was seeing other men. However, his diffidence only made her more impatient. On February 14, 1886, she wrote in her diary: “Mr. G[raham] and I had a bout last week…He renewed his question from a former occasion as if I would tell him I cared for him without a like assertion on his part. He seems to think I ought to encourage him by speaking first—but that I’ll never do. It’s conceding too much and I don’t think I need to buy any man’s love.”39
Yet it is unclear that Ida ever truly wanted to marry Graham. Her desire for a proposal from him seems to have been spurred by an indiscretion on her part. Reflecting that their physical relationship had gone past the very narrow bounds of Victorian middle-class propriety, Ida wrote that she was willing to bid good-bye to Graham as a suitor, but “blush[ed] to think I allowed him to caress me, that he would take such liberties and yet not make a declaration.”40
Moreover, when the hapless Graham finally declared his love to her, Ida’s response was lukewarm. She wrote in her diary, “I told him I was not conscious of an absorbing feeling for him but I thought it would grow. I feel so lonely and isolated and the temptation of a lover is irresistible.” Even after that admission, however, her feelings for him did not blossom. She remained reluctant to commit herself to him, and questioned his feelings f
or her, complaining, “I wish to be loved with more warmth than that.” In the end, the problem seems to have been more hers than his. In a diary entry written August 2, 1886, Ida recorded: “received a letter from Mr. G[raham] who…wishes to know if I love him & will live with him. I fear I don’t but then I also fear I shall never love anybody.”41
Ida might well have feared that she did not love Graham, since his attentions never inspired her to drop any of her other suitors. Indeed, even after telling Graham that she thought her feelings for him would grow, she did not regard herself as “pledged to anyone.” Most prominent among her other suitors was Louis Brown, a journalist whom she met as she began writing for The Living Way, a local black Baptist newspaper. Still more tempestuous and stormy than her relationship with Graham, Ida’s relationship with Brown seems to have been marked by a strong sexual attraction, combined with doubts about Brown’s strength of character and professional prospects. Brown’s kisses “blistered” Ida’s lips but also made her “humiliated in my own estimation,” since her feelings for him were entirely uncertain and she “believed him to be incapable of love in its strongest best sense.” A man who “bounce[d]” from city to city and job to job, Brown struck Ida as a young man “still hunting for his place.” Even at her most optimistic, she saw him as a man who would have to change himself to earn her love. Her most favorable assessment of him in her diary came after receiving a “manly” letter from him, after which she wrote: “He is developing symptoms more to my ideas of what becomes an earnest man and I told him so, as well as that if he succeeded in this new venture & in winning my love in the meantime, I would help him prove to the world what love in its purity can accomplish.” However, Ida’s fantasy of redeeming Brown through her love was undercut by an additional note in the same entry. “Dreamed of Mr. P[oole] last night,” she wrote, referring to yet another suitor.42
The strength of Ida’s feelings for her various suitors is also called into question by her trip to California in the summer of 1886. She was in fact many miles away from Brown, Graham, and other beaux, even as she wrote them the letters in which she questioned their affections. That July she left them all behind, leaving for Visalia, California. Uncertain when or whether she would return to Memphis, Wells traveled to the West Coast for an extended visit with her aunt Fannie, Fannie’s children, and her two younger sisters, Lily and Annie. Fannie had moved to Visalia several months earlier, taking Ida’s sisters with her. But they all missed Ida and had been urging her to move to California to join them ever since they left. Anxious to see her niece rejoin the family permanently, Fannie assured Ida that she could find work in California, instructing her to arrive by mid-June so she could take the state exam for new teachers on June 15. Ambivalent about any permanent move, Wells ignored these instructions. Instead, she took her time traveling west, stopping first in Kansas City, attending a National Teachers Association meeting in Topeka, Kansas, visiting Manitou Springs and Denver, Colorado, and stopping in San Francisco, before finally proceeding to Visalia. En route, Wells expanded her journalistic repertoire, writing letters back to The Living Way describing the cities she passed through. Far from pining for Graham or Brown, Wells seems to have enjoyed her trip immensely and attracted new suitors as she traveled, including one who “was ready to propose on the spot almost,” and another whom she liked “better than any one I’ve known so short a time.”43
Wells proved no more ready to settle down in California than she had been in Memphis. Indeed, despite Aunt Fannie’s hopes, Ida traveled to California still uncertain as to whether she planned to visit or to stay. On arriving, she was very glad to see her sisters, who she noted were “near my height and look very much like women.” In her diary, Wells usually speaks of her siblings primarily in terms of her obligation to them, but their reunion in California moved her to express a sense of kinship with them evidently brought on by the growing maturity that she saw in her “little sisters.” Amazed by the changes in them after months apart, she described them as “shooting into my own world, and ripening for experiences similar to my own.”44
But as much as she enjoyed her sisters’ company, Wells was dismayed to find Fannie pressuring her to “stay the year” in Visalia—regardless of whether or not she secured a teaching job. Wells did not like Visalia, which she found “hot & dusty” and “dull and lonely.” “Not a dozen colored families lived there,” and Ida sorely missed the active social life she had enjoyed in Memphis, perhaps all the more keenly because several of her suitors there continued to write. Left to her own devices, she confided in her diary, she would have left immediately, taking her sisters with her if at all possible. But finding Fannie “careworn…with hard work and solicitude for the children,” Wells sold her return ticket, resolving to “help her share the responsibility” for at least a year.45
Wells regretted her decision almost immediately. Her aunt had been drawn there by “good work and good wages,” and a climate more suited to her health than that of Memphis, but Ida felt isolated and depressed. Even her journalism suffered, as she found it “a trial to get the opinions of others.” Securing work was not difficult, even without California teachers’ credentials, but Wells found a job that only made matters worse. The beginning of September found Ida registering Visalia’s eighteen colored students in a dilapidated one-room school devoted exclusively to their use. Given her Southern background, Wells could not have been surprised to find herself teaching in a segregated school. But she was disgusted to learn that this separate school was not mandated under California law. Rather, it had been requested by “the colored people themselves,” who chose to be educated in isolation while Visalia’s white, Indian, “half-breed,” and Mexican children all attended school together in a “commodious building on a hill.” Doubly unhappy to be “helping to perpetuate this odious state of things,” Wells became ever more determined to leave Visalia as soon as possible.46
Fortunately, she already had an exit strategy in the works. Even before school started, Wells had confided her doubts about Visalia to a number of people, including her mentor Froman, to whom she wrote for advice. And once school started, she also informed her aunt of her change of heart. Wells simply could not reconcile herself to life in the sleepy little town, she told her aunt. Even Fannie herself granted that Visalia was dull. “It is worse for me,” Wells told her: as “a young woman, to have nothing to look forward to, as I was just beginning to live and had all my life before me.”47 Sorely disappointed, Fannie Wells told Ida that if she left she must take her sisters with her—an ultimatum meant to keep Ida in Visalia, since, as Fannie well knew, Ida lacked the funds to cover three tickets east.
But Fannie underestimated Ida’s resourcefulness. Encouraged by Froman, who reminded Ida of her railroad lawsuits and advised her that she should not seriously consider staying in California until they were resolved, Ida sought out teaching positions in both Memphis and Kansas City, and then went to work figuring out how to get herself and her sisters out of California. If the Kansas City job came through, she was confident that she could borrow the train fare she needed from friends there. But the long trip to Memphis was an expensive proposition that would cost Ida far more than she could hope to borrow from any of her friends. Undeterred, she wrote Robert Church, the wealthy Memphis businessman. Church had hailed from Holly Springs, and was likely a onetime acquaintance of Ida’s late father. But Ida knew him only by reputation, which did not keep her from asking for a loan of $150 to finance her return home. Wells told him that she sought his help “because he was the only man of my race that I knew who could lend me that much money and wait for me to repay it.”48 By way of security, she referred him to the Board of Education; if it reappointed her that fall, Wells would be able to repay the money.
Ida’s audacious plans worked, but not easily. Her hopes for working anywhere but California rested on the fact that the school term started later in Kansas City and Memphis than it did in Visalia, allowing her to take a job in California with
out giving up on her other prospects. Indeed, Wells had already spent several “dreary days” teaching in Visalia before she heard back from either city, receiving a job offer from Kansas City. Now even more anxious to go, she faced serious opposition to her departure. Her aunt Fannie did her best to persuade her not to go and then “cried all night & half the morning at the thought of her leaving,” while Annie refused to leave California with her sisters. Shaken to the point of second thoughts but very unhappy at the prospect of staying, Ida wrote with reference to Fannie in her diary: “I know I owe her a debt of gratitude but she makes it all so burdensome for me as to be very distasteful. Forced acts of gratitude are not very sincere I should say.”49 In the end, Ida decided against the dictates of gratitude. On receiving a letter from Robert Church not only informing her that she had been reappointed by the Memphis School Board but containing a bank draft in the amount of the loan she requested, Ida left the next day. She took only Lily with her, as Annie remained steadfast in her desire to remain in California.
Though now in the company of one sister, Wells left California as she had come, not quite certain where she was going. She was willing to work in either Kansas City or Memphis, depending on where she could arrive in time to secure a position. Missing the first day of school in Kansas City, she arrived to find a young woman teaching in her place, which made Wells’s appearance the subject of some controversy among the teachers there. So she moved on to Memphis, where school had not yet started. By then Wells had taught, as she proudly recalled in her autobiography, “in one month in the states of California, Missouri and Tennessee.”50
Among other things, Ida’s sojourn across these three states illustrates her continuing doubts about her future. California seems to have appealed to her primarily as a refuge from some of her suitors. Writing from Visalia, she told one longtime correspondent that she felt torn “between marrying and staying here to raise the children.”51 Yet, in the end, Wells seems to have realized that she could remain in Memphis and unmarried. For although she returned, she did not end up marrying any of her Memphis suitors. Less than a month after Ida returned from California, Graham surprised everyone who had witnessed his courtship of her by abruptly marrying someone else. And Louis Brown never lived up to her expectations.
