by Josh Levin
The case began again in January 1967, this time under the purview of a different probate judge. But Constance and her attorney would fail to show up for their new day in court. Her bid to pry loose Lawrence Wakefield’s money was finished for good.
* * *
Based on his own snooping, Norris Bishton thought Constance Wakefield may have worked for Lawrence in some capacity, or that they could’ve had a sexual relationship. It’s possible that Constance’s alleged surrogate parents in Arkansas, Jim and Virginia Collins, brought them together: In the sworn statement they provided in advance of the heirship hearing, the husband and wife said their son had worked for the policy king in the 1950s, before the young man was shot and killed.
All that mattered to the probate court and the local press, though, was that Constance and Lawrence weren’t related by blood. On November 17, 1964, the day after Kogut dismissed her petition as “unfounded in fact,” the Chicago Tribune ran a photo of the “phony heiress” in section two, one column over from a wire story on Russia banning the importation of chewing gum. For the Chicago papers, the comeuppance of a moneygrubbing charlatan was an amusing curiosity. For Constance herself, it was a life-altering catastrophe.
As a child and a young adult, the phony heiress had never really had a steady home. In Chicago in the early 1960s, in a series of houses on the city’s North Side, she’d found something close to stability. The last of those places was in Ranch Triangle, a residential district not far from Lincoln Park. The house at 1715 North Fremont Street stood a half block south of a formerly vacant lot that locals had transformed into an ice-skating rink—one of the more prominent markers of a revitalization project called Operation Pride. While nearby communities drew large numbers of Puerto Rican and Mexican immigrants in the 1960s, the gentrifying area around Lincoln Park became less diverse. When white families moved in and restored old row houses and bungalows, poor black and Puerto Rican residents got priced out and displaced.
Shortly after her failed inheritance gambit, Constance Wakefield told her kids Johnnie and Sandra that it was time for them to go. In 1965, the family moved to South Calumet Avenue, in the heart of the South Side neighborhood of Bronzeville. In a segregated city, this eight-mile journey to the south was a voyage to a different world. Lincoln Park was 95 percent white. The area abutting South Park Way—it would be renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Drive three years later, after King’s assassination—was more than 99 percent black.
Bronzeville was the long-standing cultural, economic, and intellectual center of black Chicago, the home of luminaries such as Louis Armstrong and Ida B. Wells. The Wakefield family’s new home at Forty-Third and South Calumet was just north of the lavishly appointed, Byzantine-style Regal Theater. By the mid-1960s, though, the Regal’s grand staircases and marble floors served as more a reminder of Bronzeville’s past than an indicator of its current state. The newly completed Robert Taylor Homes, the nation’s largest public housing complex, sprawled a few blocks to the west of South Calumet Avenue. Rather than spread public housing units around the city, Mayor Richard J. Daley’s administration concentrated low-income black Chicagoans in places that white people didn’t live. The construction of the Dan Ryan Expressway, which separated Daley’s own Irish enclave of Bridgeport from the Taylor Homes’ twenty-seven-thousand inhabitants, ensured that white Chicagoans wouldn’t have to see or think about the all-black ghetto.
It’s possible that Constance Wakefield chose to relocate her family because she needed affordable housing. Johnnie thought they’d moved because his mother no longer felt comfortable in a place like Lincoln Park. In probate court, a white judge had waved away the testimony of her friend and employee Betty Day, dismissing Day’s account as the unreliable statement of “a colored person.” That same judge and a bunch of white lawyers hadn’t said a word when Constance’s uncle called her a nigger in open court. White people had done nothing but malign and abuse her. In Bronzeville, she’d have the chance to be something other than a pariah.
For Constance, starting over didn’t mean letting go of the Wakefield name. When Jack Sherwin arrested her on August 25, 1974, he found the birth certificate she’d fashioned a decade earlier, the one in which she’d willed Constance Beverly Wakefield into existence. A year after that, she would sign Patricia Parks’s death certificate as Linda C. Wakefield. And in 1977, when she stood trial for defrauding the State of Illinois, she didn’t identify herself as Taylor or Walker or Bennett or Brownlee. Her name, she said in criminal court, was Linda Wakefield.
The self-professed Wakefield descendant didn’t always stick to the story she’d told in probate court. Six years after her petition was denied, she’d place an ad in the Defender indicating that she was the daughter of Jasper Herman, the Florida spiritual adviser who’d supported her heirship claim during the Wakefield case. But regardless of what Linda Taylor truly believed about her relationship with Lawrence Wakefield, Johnnie and Sandra both thought something had snapped in their mother in 1964. Later in her life, Taylor would maintain that she’d started hearing voices after Lawrence Wakefield’s death. She also said she’d felt the urge to kill someone, and to kill herself.
The people who were supposed to love her unconditionally had cast her aside when she was a child, but they’d cared enough to come all the way to Chicago and destroy her plan to secure a better life. Hubert Mooney had said his niece’s father couldn’t possibly be a black man like Lawrence Wakefield, because there were no Negroes anywhere in the Mooney family tree. He’d testified that her real father, an Alabaman named Marvin White, was “a Portuguese or something.” Sarah Jane Mooney had said her granddaughter Martha was a white woman—or at least “she is supposed to be.”
Martha Louise White’s uncle had been telling the truth when he said her father wasn’t Lawrence Wakefield. He’d been lying when he said her father was Marvin White.
Norris Bishton spent a lot of time with Mooney, and the refrigeration man came to trust the attorney. In a quiet moment away from the courtroom, Mooney had confessed that Martha’s biological father wasn’t “a Portuguese or something.” He was a black man. Mooney hadn’t traveled to Chicago because he cared about the truth. He’d come to make sure a family secret stayed buried in the past.
* A judge eventually dropped all charges against Sill in connection to his 1963 arrest for selling barbiturates. In 1970, though, Sill was arrested again after selling prescriptions to undercover cops on twenty-seven separate occasions.
Chapter 12
Bottom Rats
Lydia Mooney White went into labor during a rainstorm on a frigid winter day. Her family’s home, which stood on stilts as protection against the Mississippi River’s periodic floods, had no running water, no telephone, and no electricity. It also had no insulation, and the wind off the Mississippi poured through the cypress walls. She tried her best to get comfortable, lying down on a bed next to a small heater. Her mother, Sarah Jane, shooed away Lydia’s four-year-old brother, Hubert, confining him to a room on the other side of the small wooden house.
Sarah Jane Mooney had midwifed hundreds of babies, and she knew what to do if a newborn came out feetfirst or looking blue. But there was nothing unusual about this delivery, no reason to call a doctor to tend to the mother or her healthy baby girl.
Even so, this wasn’t a wholly joyous occasion for the Mooney family. Lydia’s husband, Marvin White, wasn’t around, and it wasn’t clear if he ever would be. The baby also didn’t look like Marvin, and she didn’t have Lydia’s features or coloring.
Sarah Jane sometimes wrote up birth certificates on behalf of the parents she’d assisted, but this time she didn’t bother. There would be no official record to mark Martha Louise White’s arrival, nothing signed by a county clerk or state public health director to indicate she’d been born in a particular place at a particular time to a particular mother and father. As far as the Mooneys were concerned, it would be perfectly fine if the outside world had no idea this little girl existed.
* * *
Although Hubert Mooney would later report that his sister had given birth in Alabama, Lydia had actually fled her home state before having her second child. Prior to setting out for Tennessee, she’d spent a week in jail. In the summer of 1925, “Lyda White”—she went by Lyde and Lydie in addition to Lydia—was arrested twice for vagrancy. The State of Alabama stipulated that a vagrant could be “any person who is a common drunkard,” “any person who is a prostitute,” and “any person leading an idle, immoral, or profligate life.” Lydia’s transgression was infidelity.
In 1923, her father, Ike Mooney, had sent an Alabama judge a handwritten note to grant his daughter permission to wed. The groom, Marvin White, was twenty-three. Lydia was fourteen, though the county paperwork listed her as three years older. The form specified that the bride and groom were of no blood relation, and the couple’s race was penned in with a single W—a second dashed line would’ve been superfluous, as interracial marriage was illegal in Alabama.*
White, a farmer, filed for divorce four years later, alleging that his wife had “[taken] up with one Arthur Head and did commit numerous and various acts of adultery with the said Arthur Head for a long period of time.” He later helped send Head to prison, testifying that his romantic rival had defied Prohibition laws by manufacturing whiskey in a still hidden in a thicket of sugarcane. In his divorce petition, Lydia’s husband attested that his wife and her paramour had both been arrested for adultery and locked up. White said that Lydia had “voluntarily left my bed and board in the fall of 1925,” and that she’d never returned home.
The seventeen-year-old Lydia Mooney White left Alabama with one child in tow—her daughter Mary Jane—and pregnant with another. Lydia’s parents and six of her siblings had made the same move a few months earlier, traveling 220 miles northwest to a part of the state known as the Tennessee bottomlands. Golddust, Tennessee, got its name from a paddle wheel steamer that had carried Mark Twain as a passenger, a stint he documented in his memoir Life on the Mississippi. In August 1882, shortly after the town had been christened, the Gold Dust exploded due to a faulty boiler, a calamity that killed seventeen people. The town of Golddust, which had a population in the low hundreds, continued on as a small farming community comprising a couple of general stores, a pair of cotton gins, some churches, a post office, and a schoolhouse. The Mooneys worked Golddust’s soil with mules, and chopped and picked cotton by hand. Residents of nearby Ripley, a relatively bustling city of just more than two thousand, had a nickname for the laborers who did that brutal work: “bottom rats.”
Lydia arrived in Golddust in September 1925, the time of year when the fields bloomed into a bright white blanket. The family matriarch, Sarah Jane, ran the household, took care of expectant mothers, and worked in the fields. She couldn’t afford not to earn a wage because her ill-tempered husband had a habit of gambling away whatever money he earned. When she finished baling cotton, she’d harvest pecans and peel bark off trees to make medicine. Sarah Jane covered her thin frame in long-sleeved dresses with a dozen or more buttons down the front, and she laced her long hair into a pair of braids that she wore wrapped around her head. She rarely put on shoes, leaving her bare feet to get dusted with the flour she used to bake tea cakes. Sarah Jane had given birth to ten children, but she liked to say her husband had never seen her knees. If a woman showed off her body, she thought, she deserved whatever trouble came her way.
Sarah Jane Yates had married Ike Mooney in 1898, when she was fifteen years old. Mooney had been born in rural North Alabama to a family that didn’t have much money or property. His grandfather Boaz Mooney, who’d owned some land in Blount County, had been lynched in 1861—tied to a tree and shot after being accused of harboring able-bodied men who’d refused to take up the Confederate cause. One of Sarah Jane’s great-great-grandfathers, a man named Henry Hill who’d lived in Tennessee, was recorded in the 1830 U.S. census as the owner of eight slaves. Her maternal grandfather had been captured by Ulysses S. Grant’s army along with thousands of other Confederate soldiers at the Battle of Fort Donelson. Five months later, in July 1862, he’d died in a fetid, overcrowded Union prisoner-of-war camp. Camp Douglas—a breeding ground for dysentery, smallpox, and tuberculosis that became known as “eighty acres of hell”—was just outside the city limits of Chicago. By the early twentieth century, the Civil War site had been torn down and forgotten, and the neighborhood of Bronzeville had sprung up in its place. When Linda Taylor lived on Chicago’s South Side, she was a few miles away from her great-great-grandfather’s final resting place, a mass grave in Oak Woods Cemetery known as the Confederate Mound.
Martha Louise White may have gotten her name from Sarah Jane’s aunt Martha Louise Rutledge Brown, who died in Cullman County, Alabama, in 1928; her gravestone describes her as “a tender mother and a faithful friend.” While Sarah Jane loved her family, she was inclined more toward toughness than tenderness. She’d tell her granddaughters stories about fairies and witches, then remind them to go to sleep with God on their minds, because they might not wake up to see another day. Sarah Jane also warned the girls to stay away from men they wouldn’t want to be with for the rest of their lives. Her own husband made her miserable, but she was too devout to consider a divorce.
Lydia had already had one child out of wedlock by the time she got to Tennessee. She’d given birth to Mary Jane at age fourteen, eight months before Lydia’s father had signed the letter allowing her to marry Marvin White. When Sarah Jane would take the stand in the Wakefield case, she’d say that Lydia had been impregnated by her first cousin, a man in his early twenties.
Given the absence of a county or state record, Martha Louise White’s birth date is also uncertain—it’s possible that Martha herself didn’t even know it. One of Lydia’s younger sisters remembered the birth falling on a cold and stormy school day, and Sarah Jane would testify in 1964 that Lydia had been in Tennessee for roughly three months before Martha was born. Between December 1925 and February 1926, there was just one rainy weekday—January 21, 1926—when the daytime high temperature dropped below fifty degrees in the vicinity of Golddust, Tennessee. A little less than two decades later, when “Connie Reed” was arrested in Oakland for malicious mischief, she told the police she’d been born on January 24, 1926. It was perhaps the only time she gave a cop, a lawyer, or a bureaucrat a plausible date of birth.
Thirty-eight years later in Chicago, the then eighty-something Sarah Jane Mooney would say that Martha’s father was “Marv White.” When asked how she could be certain, she’d explain, “Well, they was living together. That’s all I know now.”
* * *
Sarah Jane knew more than she was letting on. Like her son Hubert, she’d confess to the lawyer Norris Bishton that she’d deceived the court. Marvin White and the bootlegger Arthur Head were white men. In their conversations with the attorney, Hubert and Sarah Jane Mooney would both divulge that Martha’s father was black.
Lydia and her relatives had good reason to obscure the truth. In Alabama, where Martha had been conceived, the state code criminalized sexual relations between “any white person and any negro,” with violations of the statute punishable with a prison stint of between two and seven years. That law had been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in 1883 that Alabama had been within its rights to convict a black man and a white woman who’d been living “in a state of adultery and fornication.” This precedent would stand until the high court’s ruling in McLaughlin v. Florida, which decreed that prohibitions on interracial cohabitation were unconstitutional. The Supreme Court would make that decision in December 1964, one month after Lydia, her brother, and her mother lied about Martha Louise White’s parentage in Cook County Probate Court.
Even within the Mooney family, the circumstances of Martha’s birth were discussed only in whispers. It was a mystery how, in a part of Alabama where black people were de facto prohibited from settling, Lydia had made the acquaintance of Martha’s biological fath
er. In private conversations, Hubert and Sarah Jane would say Lydia had professed that her second daughter was conceived in rape.
That sort of allegation could be incredibly dangerous. In May 1926 in Osceola, Arkansas—a town just across the Mississippi River from Golddust—a twenty-two-year-old black man named Albert Blades would be mutilated, hanged, and burned by a mob of twelve hundred after an eleven-year-old white girl said he’d sexually assaulted her in a park. Doctors would later examine the girl, according to the St. Louis Argus, and find that “she had not been attacked.”
Lydia’s accusation of sexual assault never became public; if any acts of violence were perpetrated against Martha’s father, they weren’t reported in the local newspapers or inscribed in Mooney family lore. But neither Sarah Jane nor Hubert believed Lydia had been a victim. While Hubert was too young to have firsthand knowledge of his sister’s assignation, he’d later say he’d heard that she would sneak off to a barn with an unnamed black man, and that their sexual relationship had been consensual.
From the 1920s on, the identity of Martha’s father shifted depending on the audience. In 1964, Lydia would erase herself from her daughter’s origin story entirely, testifying that the girl had been left on her doorstep as a three-month-old infant. That lie embodied a larger truth: No one wanted to lay claim to Martha Louise White. It was a fact she understood from the time she was a very small child.
