I’ll bid the South good-bye
No longer shall they treat me so,
And knock me in the eye.
The Northern States is where I’m bound.
In short, Chicago became the Promised Land.
AS ETHEL PAYNE NEARED the completion of her years at Copernicus Elementary School, the city completed the construction of Lindblom Technical High School. Towering over the squatting wooden bungalows of West Englewood and consuming an entire block, the massive stone edifice was fronted by stout Ionic limestone columns and ornamented in Beaux-Arts style. It was an emblem of civic pride. “The finest high school in the country,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune.
Just as its design was inspired by Chicago’s new passion for Classical Revival–style architecture, triggered by the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, its education philosophy reflected the fashionable progressive notions of Chicagoans like John Dewey. It offered the usual array of vocational classes in pharmacy, automobile repair, and printing, as demanded by the business community, but the centerpiece of its curriculum was a four-year college prep program.
Lindblom’s facilities and top-notch faculty were intended for white students. But because Payne’s house fell two blocks inside its enrollment district, this educational paradise was open to her. Reaching the school, on the other hand, was not easy. Payne’s parsimonious parents were unwilling to pay the daily fare for the streetcar that rattled down nearby Sixty-Third Street. So instead Payne had to walk the mile to the school and cross Loomis Boulevard, a frontier line past which blacks were not welcomed. “And when you crossed it, boy, you were in all-white territory,” Payne said. She endured taunts, epithets, and the occasional rock thrown at her. “Sometimes I stood my ground, sometimes I got a bloody nose from fighting,” she said. “But that was the way it was.”
It was not much easier for Payne inside the building. She was only one in a handful of black teenagers among the 2,500 students roaming the cavernous, high-ceilinged halls. And there was little sentiment that they were welcomed in their ranks. Only the year before, rough play in a basketball game against a Negro school emptied the stands and sparked a brawl involving more than 200 students. Razors and revolvers were flashed in the melee before police reached the gymnasium. The blame for any violence of this sort was always put on the black students. “White parents are cautious about stirring up trouble,” said one principal, “for they know the emotional tendency of the colored to knife and kill.”
ETHEL PAYNE FOLLOWED LINDBLOM’S college prep curriculum, taking history, English, algebra, geometry, botany, French, and four years of Latin, a requirement her mother, the former Latin instructor, placed on each of her children. But she struggled academically. “I think it was because I was under stress and trauma all the time,” Payne said. She was also, by her own admission, “a daydreamer.” However, to Bessie’s delight, history and English appealed to her, especially English. “My mother, early on, discovered that I had a flair for words and writing, and she encouraged that,” Payne said.
Miss Dixon’s English class provided a second endorsement. A compact woman with black hair parted and drawn back and somewhat masculine features, Margaret Dixon had come to Lindblom from Oak Park, where she had been a favorite teacher of the teenaged Ernest Hemingway, whose novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms had just turned him into a household name. The veteran teacher had left her mark on students. “I don’t believe I ever had any professors at Dartmouth or Illinois who were better instructors, and I majored in English,” recalled one of her Oak Park students. Filled with a kind of nervous energy, she talked rapidly and loudly, pushed students to make creative use of their imaginations, and left little doubt about her opinion of a student’s work. “She was,” said another student, “salty in her criticism, proud and full of praise for our efforts, and quite ready to rip at what was not good.”
Payne fell under Dixon’s spell. “She encouraged me to write, and she asked me to do little short stories.” Seeking a subject for a composition, Payne wandered out of her neighborhood and headed northeast to Maxwell Street, well-known for its open-air pushcart market manned by Eastern European Jews. Although the neighborhood was now inhabited mostly by African Americans, Jews continued to remain an important presence on the street. There she found a quiet spot to sit, notebook in hand, taking it all in. “I thought the people on the row were like characters out of a book,” Payne said. She was happy simply recording what she saw. “You could smell the fish frying, you could smell meats cooking and hear the banter that would go on from upstairs and downstairs, as the women sat in the yard and did the quilting.”
At home she read aloud from her efforts to describe what she found on Maxwell Street to anyone in the family willing to listen. Her mother, who was a good writer herself, was a patient listener and would occasionally offer a criticism. “It usually was on grammatical construction more than content,” said Payne. “I don’t think she ever criticized what I was trying to say, so much as she wanted me to have it correct in punctuation and grammatical patterns.”
Payne’s story about Maxwell Street was published in the school newspaper. But despite her journalistic contribution to the paper, joining its staff was not an option for Payne. “It just wasn’t the code at the time,” she said. “It just wasn’t. So the fact that I have even had this accepted was really something.”
One day as English class began, Dixon handed Payne back some of her work. Dixon had scribbled illegibly in the margins. Payne approached her desk. “Miss Dixon, what did you write?” she asked. Smiling, Dixon replied, “Your handwriting reminds me of another pupil I used to have when I taught in Oak Park, Illinois,” referring to her now-famous student.
It was, for Payne, a treasured affirmation.
ONE MONTH AFTER PAYNE started her new life at Lindblom, her father came home from work complaining of a headache. Forty-six years old, strong, and physically fit, William was rarely ill. But this time was different. He soon developed a fever and a rash that turned patches of skin a brownish gray. The pastor’s son, who had just graduated from medical school, was called to the house. He concluded that William had contracted a bacterial infection known as erysipelas, or more commonly called Saint Anthony’s fire, perhaps from the soiled linens on his train runs. In addition, his kidneys were failing. There was little that could be done in the preantibiotic days of the 1920s.
Thelma, the second-oldest child, who was now twenty years old and nicknamed the Boss by her father, mounted the stairs to peek in the room where their father lay. None of the other children were permitted to see him because the doctors feared his condition was contagious. He asked Thelma if she had taken care of the bills that he wanted paid. “I said yes, and he seemed satisfied,” she recalled. “To the last, he was a responsible person looking after the needs of his family.”
On the evening of February 2, 1926, at a few minutes before ten, William Payne died. Ethel couldn’t cope. “It was my first real encounter with death, because people didn’t die that fast in Englewood,” she said. “I was so hysterical about it that a neighbor took me in and kept me.” She even avoided the funeral three days later at St. John’s. “I just couldn’t deal with the idea of death. It was just too alien to me.”
The following month was the snowiest on record in Chicago. Bessie faced a future with six children and no husband to provide for them. William had left a small life insurance policy, and thankfully, the house was paid for. But the loss of his wages was devastating. Bessie’s only remaining income came from her job teaching Sunday school at St. John’s and from her hobby of painting china. Alice, the oldest child, was working at a dressmaking shop, and Thelma, the second eldest, was employed as a public school teacher. Lemuel left school and took a job as a runner with an insurance company but continued taking classes at night. Ethel remained at Lindblom.
In the fall of 1929, Ethel posed for her yearbook photo with a large corsage of small white flowers, her hair tightly combed back, exp
osing her earrings, and a long strand of pearls falling across her open-necked dress. On January 31, 1930, she received her diploma in a midyear commencement held to accommodate students who entered the school in the winter rather than in the fall. But no inspiring oration or uplifting recessional music could lift the pall cast by the descending economic storm.
CHAPTER 3
DRIFTWOOD
THE 1930S DID NOT GREET ETHEL PAYNE’S GRADUATING class with open arms. The fury of the Great Depression lashed Chicago’s South Side with devastating force. Merchants on State Street and Grand Avenue, at the center of Bronzeville, shuttered their storefronts, and the Binga Bank closed its doors. At the Royal Gardens Cabaret, where a jazz orchestra once wailed into the night, eight hundred men slept in long rows of army cots.
Like canaries in a coal mine, black workers were the first to feel the effects of the Great Depression. “It is well known that when an unemployment wave strikes the country,” warned the Chicago Defender in the early months of 1930, “race workers are the first and hardest affected, as many jobs which they hold ordinarily are taken from them and given to white workers.”
The Payne family was more fortunate than most. Ethel joined her brother doing clerical chores for an insurance company while her older sisters clung to their jobs in the schools and the youngest one toiled in a dress shop. Among African Americans in Chicago, nearly 60 percent of the men and almost 45 percent of the women were without work. But even holding jobs, the Payne family was destitute. By April 1931, the Chicago school system ran out of funds to pay its teachers. For the next two years, the two oldest Payne sisters received real paychecks only four months out of the year. The remainder of the time they were given scrip that they could redeem for eighty to ninety cents on the dollar, at least until the banks and stores lost faith in the IOUs and ceased accepting them.
But no matter how dire their circumstances, Bessie refused charity and remained determined to keep her family together and get her last child through school. She took on domestic work and turned their residence into a boardinghouse by stuffing the six children into two or three bedrooms. At every turn, she devised a way forward. Meeting as a council, the family decided to pool its resources so that the youngest child, Avis, could go to college. “So we would all save up,” Ethel said. “I would work or go work in people’s houses, clean, and I’d put aside a little money, maybe a dollar.” The funds, combined with a scholarship, sent Avis to West Virginia State University.
Bessie’s indomitable spirit remained an anchor for the children throughout the turmoil of the Great Depression. Even when bone-tired she never let up in providing structure and stability for her family. At night, when the children were at the dining room table finishing their homework, an exhausted Bessie would manage to call down instructions from upstairs.
“Bed the fire.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t forget to wind the clock”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t forget to empty the icebox pan.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
As for herself, Bessie’s strong faith and her job as a Sunday-school teacher gave her strength to carry on. “My mother,” said Ethel, “was the most devout, religious person you’d ever want to meet. She just prayed, prayed, and prayed all the time.” The children found respite in the family’s abiding habit of reading. “This was our entertainment, as well as a broadening of education and culture,” said Thelma. “So if we were poor in purse, we had a wealth in books and an appreciation of the classics to an uncommonly high degree.”
At night the family took turns reading aloud from the Bible and treasures such as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Alcott’s enduringly popular novel about four daughters growing up with a mother and a much-absent father mirrored Ethel’s own life. In the Payne family, Ethel was Jo March, a tomboy frustrated by social limitations, infatuated with reading, and driven ceaselessly to write. Marmee March, Jo’s mother, could well have been Ethel’s own mother, holding the family together through difficult times, providing unconditional love to her children, and dispensing sage counsel. Until the end of her life, Ethel said she could recite Little Women by heart, just as she never forgot her mother’s advice. “You may not have what you want or what you even need,” Payne said her mother used to tell her, “but always remember that using what you have to improve your mind is more important than material things.”
IN THE MIDST of the hard times, Ethel Payne pressed on with her education. She hoped to become a lawyer. “Just as I was fierce about protecting my brother, I had a strong, strong, deeply embedded hatred of bullies,” she said. “I just felt that if you’re strong, you had no right to pick on weak people.”
The odds, however, were stacked against her. Less than 3,500 of the nation’s lawyers were female. Few professional schools were open to African Americans. And she certainly did not have the kinds of grades a law school required. Undeterred, she entered Crane Junior College, which was near West Englewood. Open to African Americans, who made up 15 percent of its student body, Crane was a haven for low-income students who hoped to eventually enter the University of Chicago or Northwestern University. But Payne was soon bored. “I was just majoring in English and history, the routine things that most people did,” Payne said. “But I was always thinking of doing something else more creative.” That thing was writing.
When she began at Crane, Payne learned of a national essay contest for high school and junior college students sponsored by the American Interracial Peace Committee, a group of African Americans allied with the American Friends Service Committee and under the direction of Alice Dunbar Nelson, who had once been married to Payne’s favorite poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The essays, one to two thousand words in length, were to address subjects ranging from general ones such as “Youth Looks at World Peace” to rather specific topics like “Russia and China in Manchuria.”
Payne decided to enter the competition and submitted an essay about “Interracial Relationships as a Basis for International Peace.” It made the then rarely heard link between domestic racial justice and decolonization. The peace committee winnowed down the entries to nine finalists and sent them off to a group of judges that included, among others, W. E. B. Du Bois, the most famous African American intellectual and civil rights leader of the time, and Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, who had recently established Negro History Week, the forerunner of Black History Month. When the winners were announced in July, Payne was on the list. First place went to a Harvard University student. Payne tied for fourth and earned a $10 prize.
Despite this success, Payne’s writing ambition was neither in essay writing nor in nonfiction. She wanted to be a writer of stories and novels like Jo March in Little Women. And like March’s mother, Bessie Payne encouraged her daughter. “I happen to be one of the great mass of aspiring writers,” Ethel confessed in a letter at the time, “who hope to some day pen the ‘Great American Novel’ and earn a place in the sun.”
THE GREAT DEPRESSION HAD NOT put an end to cultural life in South Side. Rather, in some ways the hard times reinvigorated musical and literary enterprises, which were well used to surviving on the economic margins.
In the fall of 1930, newsstands in South Side and other centers of African American populations carried a new magazine. Publisher Robert S. Abbott, working off his phenomenal success with the Chicago Defender, had launched a new general-interest magazine bearing his name. “Abbott’s Monthly has just made its bow,” reported the New York Amsterdam News, “and its contents warrant the expectation that it will be the magazine the people have been waiting for.” Monthlies catering to black readers then were primarily the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity. Unlike the two civil rights–oriented publications, however, Abbott’s new entry was more akin to the New Yorker, which had been launched five years earlier. Magazines that served white r
eaders were flourishing, and Abbott’s faith in his publication seemed to be confirmed by its initial reception. “There have been many literary ventures of this sort, and magazine upon magazine, but not of the caliber of Abbott’s Monthly,” reported the Detroit Independent. “It has outstripped the imagination of all and upon perusal proves to surpass any other endeavor.”
Abbott’s Monthly put out a call for work from writers and artists in Chicago, an acknowledgment that by 1930 the center of African American cultural life had shifted away from the East and Harlem. Payne immediately sent off a short story. To her delight, it was accepted for publication.
Well-crafted and clever, Payne’s tale was heavy in autobiographical overtones but with dark notes her mother could not have applauded. In the story, entitled “Driftwood,” eighteen-year-old Madge Barton, whose father died when she was twelve years old, moves to a great Midwestern city in hopes of becoming a novelist. “Eighteen had seen the dawning of her conviction,” Payne wrote. “She would forge ahead and strike out for herself.” In contrast to her roommate Vivian Lasham, “the embodiment of all the spirit of wild, revolting youth,” who haunts stage doors in hopes of becoming an actress, Madge devotes her time to writing.
Vivian’s failure to obtain work drives her into the arms of a sleazy white-suited gambler with black patent leather shoes brilliantly shined and a black-banded tan derby worn angularly and whose plump fingers at the end of oily hands sported ruby and gold rings, “Hello there, baby. C’mon. Come sit with papa,” he says upon spying Madge.
Her roommate’s descent into the gambler’s world solidifies Madge’s literary plans. “The idea had been playing in Madge’s mind for weeks that she would write a novel dealing with the sordidness of the dens of vice and evil and the evils of the city,” wrote Payne. “Why! She would make this her masterpiece; she would point out all the evils so as to bring about great reform.”
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