Slaves in the Family

by Edward Ball

  In 1896 Edwin enrolled at the Avery Normal Institute, where his graduating class numbered six students. Edwin went on to Atlanta University, a black institution where, among the faculty, W. E. B. Du Bois had a job as a humanities professor. In Atlanta, Edwin studied a quasi-classical European curriculum, played football, and sang in a quartet. In time, the ambitiousness of the Charleston mulatto could be heard in the nickname that other students gave him—Teddyseus.

  The year Edwin went to college, Du Bois was writing The Souls of Black Folk. Harleston the student and Du Bois the teacher became friends.

  In 1904 Edwin Harleston applied to Harvard University, from which Du Bois had graduated, and was accepted in the fine arts department. At the time, according to Mrs. Whitlock, Harvard admitted black men with bachelor’s degrees but required them to enter the university as third-year undergraduates. Rejecting this second-class policy, Harleston opted to enroll at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts instead. When he arrived in Massachusetts in fall of 1905, he found he was the only black student in the program.

  To earn money, Harleston worked as waiter at one of the Harvard student clubs. In the self-portrait that Edwina Whitlock showed me in her living room, Harleston wears a bright white shirt and black bow tie—the uniform of a waiter.

  After graduation, Harleston stayed in Boston until 1913. In Charleston, his father had built a new funeral home, and he insisted that Edwin come home to work in it. Obediently, the painter enrolled in a three-month course at the Renouard School of Embalming, in New York, then moved home to Charleston and entered the funeral business.

  Within a few years, Edwin was a prominent businessman and president of the local NAACP. He detested being an undertaker and worked in off-hours to develop his painting career. The trouble was that no economic place whatsoever existed for black artists in the South during the early 1900s. Charleston black society was small, and never flush enough to support a painter who might document it. Many of Harleston’s portrait commissions came from out-of-state rich blacks, and from whites.

  After Edwin married Elise Forrest, a Charleston-born schoolteacher whom he had been seeing for seven years, the couple decided to attempt an artistic partnership and open a studio, in which he would paint and she would be a photographer. Before they married, Elise Harleston left teaching and was sent on Edwin’s money to study photography in New York, at the E. Brunel School of Photography. She finished training at Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, and returned to Charleston for the wedding. The Harleston Studio opened in 1922, and the collaboration worked for a time. Elise would photograph her husband’s subjects when they came for a sitting, and later Edwin would finish the paintings, using Elise’s photographs as a guide.

  In the early 1900s, French Impressionism and its derivatives enjoyed a vogue in America, long years after they had been superseded in Europe. The “new” painting dwelled on gardens and flower paths, which meant that artists had to do on-site outdoor painting from life. Edwin wanted a teaching job in art that had become available in Washington, D.C., but in the period’s stylistic changes he was told he could not be hired unless he painted landscapes. Edwin had trained in the academic tradition of the Beaux-Arts, with its emphasis on portraiture and realism. To extend his range, and perhaps to get away from the funeral business, in 1924, at forty-two, Edwin enrolled in the School of the Chicago Art Institute, where he stayed for two summer sessions. When he returned to South Carolina, Edwin knew he would have trouble with his painting, especially turning out the floral scenes that had become so popular. The South had a unique problem he had not faced in Illinois, namely, segregation, which kept him from visiting public parks and gardens.

  Magnolia Gardens, a languid preserve of lily ponds and flower beds on the Ashley River near Charleston, was one of South Carolina’s most beautiful parks. The only blacks (or mulattoes) permitted on its grounds were the black workers who kept the gardens. Edwin wrote to park officials asking permission to enter the gardens in order to paint. When, as expected, he was refused, Edwin, in pursuit of the Impressionist materials of the late Claude Monet, decided to go undercover. At Magnolia Gardens, there was a group of latticed wooden bridges that arched over meandering streams, decorative follies that, as it happened, were built and maintained by one of Edwin’s cousins. Disguising himself as a workman on one of his cousin’s maintenance crews, Edwin managed to get onto the grounds, carrying a satchel with some carpenter’s tools, as well as a camera. In several visits, the painter secretly photographed the dogwoods and tulips, rose walks, and lilies. Back in his studio, working from the pictures, he made more than a dozen paintings.

  In 1926 the Charleston Museum was asked by the mayor, Thomas P. Stoney, to put on a retrospective of Edwin Harleston’s work. By then he was known to whites as “Charleston’s colored artist.” Anxious to please the mayor, museum director Laura M. Bragg consented to the unprecedented plan for a show of paintings by a Negro. When approached, Edwin agreed and began to crate his paintings for the move across town to the museum. According to Edwina Whitlock, Edwin was thrilled that at last recognition had arrived. But political maneuvering occurred, and three weeks later a letter arrived from Bragg explaining that the trustees of the museum had met and vetoed the idea of the show. “The exhibit would hurt and not help you at the present time,” she wrote.

  Edwin Harleston’s last major work was the collaboration with painter Aaron Douglas on a series of murals at Fisk University in Nashville, in 1930. The ambition of Aaron Douglas, who brought Edwin on the job, was to chronicle black history from before enslavement in Africa to the American present. Edwin moved to Nashville to execute the project in the Fisk library reading rooms. As he worked with Douglas, from time to time Edwin wrote home to describe the murals to Elise.

  “The figures in both rooms are conventional—after the the Egyptian manner—and deal with the general history, economics, and culture of the race,” he told Elise. “The whole thing will fit very nicely with the architecture of the building, which is Gothic, the adaptation being from far back in African architecture as exemplified in the ‘set back’ treatment of towers, as in old Timbuctoo.”

  In October 1930, the painter wrote Elise: “We are done! Finished!! Completed!!! 670 linear feet of mural decorations of a unique type done by Us, of Us and for Us.”

  The Douglas-Harleston murals, depicting a black saga that begins before contact with whites, represent an early achievement of Afrocentric American art.

  A few months later, in May 1931, Captain Harleston, the painter’s father, fell ill with pneumonia in Charleston. As the old man lay dying, Edwin bent over and kissed him on the lips. Ten days later, Edwin Harleston himself was dead of pneumonia, at forty-nine.

  Two years after his death, the painter got the show he was denied in life, when some of his work was exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington.

  “All of them,” said Mrs. Whitlock, wrapping up her story, “all the Harlestons, right on through, we are writers, artists, musicians. There is a whole lot of talent. I have a first cousin who is a music arranger. One of the Harlestons was president of City College in New York. There is a General Harleston, in the Pentagon.” Even as Mrs. Whitlock boasted of her family’s high standards, it did not sound like vanity.

  Another descendant of Kate Wilson and William Harleston, and one of the various Harleston progeny involved in the arts, worked in the music business, and could be found living in Los Angeles. Ray Maith Fleming was born in Charleston and raised as one of the heirs to the family funeral business. As a youth, however, Ray Fleming had left his heritage behind. In California, and now somewhere in his fifties, Fleming worked as a music producer, with an inventory of pop credits behind him.

  It was a mild, cloudless afternoon in Los Angeles when I first visited Ray Fleming. His apartment building resembled countless others in southern California—low, beige, rectangular, with balconies and sliding glass doors—conforming to the local genre of sunbelt Modernism. The building
stood inside a block-long compound surrounded along the sidewalks by a high iron fence. Security gates controlled access, and tenants who entered the compound looked around before punching in their numbered codes.

  Ray Fleming came down to one of the iron gates, and we made our way past two swimming pools surrounded by patio furniture. He wore a red polo shirt, khaki pants, and loafers, stood medium height, and was handsome. The Pacific sun against the poolside patio created an incandescent field of light that seemed to whiten my skin, while Ray Fleming’s color was tawny brown, like maple syrup.

  As we arrived in his apartment, a vivacious woman wearing sandals and a housedress entered the room. She had straight brown hair cut in a bob, a bright manner, and was white. Ray Fleming introduced me to his wife, Tina De Fazio. Tina brought soft drinks, left the room, and a boy of about four rushed over and jumped on Ray Fleming’s lap. The child had curly hair and skin the color of blond wood.

  “Say hello to your cousin, Giovanni,” said Ray, flashing his eyes and laughing. The child looked at me with wide eyes before he went off to join his mother.

  Ray Fleming had a fine baritone voice, and his gaze was direct. He had the aura of a person who was not afraid to talk about anything.

  “You’re married to a white woman,” I said.

  “I’m married to the right woman,” Ray answered. “She happens to be white. She was born in Italy, but raised in Canada. I met her in New York City twenty-five years ago, and we never parted. It gets better every day, because she has expanded me as a person.”

  “What do you think about fact that you and I are distant cousins?” I asked.

  “I always knew you were there,” he came back. “I just didn’t know you. It was like a missing link, but you always knew what the components were.”

  “The connection is distant,” I said.

  “But it’s real,” Ray replied. “And not only that, it’s a journey.”

  Ray Fleming’s grandmother, Katherine Harleston, was a sister of the painter Edwin. Ray was a great-great-grandson of Kate Wilson, and Giovanni the next generation down.

  “We knew we weren’t complete Africans,” Ray began. “I knew the Harlestons were from England. I’ve known that for a very long time. You just know that there were English in your background, among other things. That was a matter of fact. I love all of me, that’s how I think of it. I love all of me.”

  Ray Fleming spoke emphatically but did not gesticulate. He merely raised a finger now and then, or at the most shifted his shoulders when he finished a thought. Like his cousin, Edwina Whitlock, Ray Fleming used his voice to hypnotic effect, spinning out his sentences in a flourish.

  “I don’t love black people any more than I love white people, or people I haven’t met,” Ray said. “Because love is open and universal. I don’t even love my kids more than I love other people’s kids. I have more responsibility for them, but it has nothing to do with my overall love.”

  Ray Fleming had left home in his youth, and now spoke in a way that would be unfamiliar in parts of the South. It was as though he had invented a second person, and added him to the Southerner with the deep black-and-white history.

  The apartment had an L-shaped carpeted living room, an open kitchen, and two bedrooms down a hallway. The most noticeable piece of decor hung on the wall—four gold records, trophies from Ray Fleming’s years in the music business, markers of the distance he had come from home. I asked Ray to tell me his story, and he unrolled it smoothly, as though used to talking about himself.

  “I was born on Calhoun Street, Charleston, South Carolina,” he began. “My father was a bachelor, and my mother died when I was two years old.”

  “The Harleston funeral home was on Calhoun Street,” I remembered, “with the apartments above.”

  “The Fleming family owned it by that time,” Ray said, speaking of the family of his grandfather. “Or it was a Harleston-Fleming partnership. The Flemings were from St. Augustine, Florida, and all the black professionals in the South knew each other. One of the Flemings married a Harleston woman, and that’s how they got into the business.

  “My father moved in the mulatto world. He was mulatto, a very handsome guy, with a mustache. All the women loved him. He was a bachelor, he had a building, and he had money. He was rich, simple as that. My grandmother used to say, ‘They were well-to-do.’ ”

  Ray laughed and rocked forward, but he pursed his mouth. It was a restrained laugh, as though he was unsure how to feel about his connection to an old black elite.

  “The mulattoes had more money than darker-skinned people,” I said.

  “They had more money and more education,” Ray said. “The Harlestons were like that. A lot of the moneyed blacks adhered to a societal standard in everything they did, from their dress to their food. They could afford it, and they knew the best of everything.”

  “Did they shun darker-skinned people?”

  “No! My father did not shun. All of his girlfriends were dark-skinned!” Ray laughed. “I wasn’t dark, but I wasn’t mulatto. I was in-between. I was welcome on both sides. But a funny thing I noticed about a lot of mulattoes around Charleston is that the women didn’t always marry. It’s as though the women, if they couldn’t find a matching mulatto, couldn’t have a family. A lot of the darker black men were afraid of them. They didn’t think they could rate, so they didn’t approach them.”

  As a child, Ray lived for a time in the house with the funeral home. “We had five-course meals,” he said. “Edwin Harleston’s paintings were on the walls.” Downstairs, the mortuary business never stopped. “The clients were the mulattoes, and I would be in there during the embalming sometimes. But the motto of the funeral home was, ‘No one is denied services because of financial condition.’ The Harlestons were always altruistic people. They always had, so they always gave.”

  I could see a handsome youth in Ray Fleming’s aging face. But Ray’s physique was strong, his wit intact, and he moved gracefully through a story.

  “It was a charmed life,” he went on. “For instance, the city pool was right behind our house, on George Street. I used to stand in the backyard as a kid, and all the whites would be swimming, and I’m looking right through my gate at their fun. I had a friend named Tony Haynes, who was light-complexioned and could pass for white. He used to say, ‘Man, I’m not going all the way over to that colored pool.’ He would say, ‘I’ll meet you all later’—and he would go jump in the white pool!”

  This time Ray let go a laugh that opened all the way, then he put on a conspiratorial look.

  “He could have been put in jail, or a reformatory,” Ray said. “They would have said, ‘He’s got plenty of nerve! He’s an uppity nigger! The next thing you know, he’ll be with one of our daughters!’ We were just playing a trick on the white man.” Ray shifted his shoulders. “We knew white people weren’t doing anything different than we were. We were just doing it in a different place.”

  From time to time as a young man, Ray also got into trouble over the rules of the skin game.

  “The mulatto women were very fair,” he remembered. “I had instances where the police stopped me because they thought I was with a white woman. I will never forget, I was walking on Rutledge Avenue with Ella Sanders. The Sanders family were very fair. It was dusk, and the police pulled over. They made me come over and identify myself. ‘What are you doing with her?’ the cop said. ‘We go to school together,’ I said. ‘Oh, you mean …’ he said. ‘Yeah, that’s what I mean—she’s black.’

  “You see, the police were all white,” Ray remembered. “The funniest thing, when the first blacks came in as cops, they picked men who were nasty to black people. The black cops wanted to prove they weren’t lenient, and they got to be hated by black people. We used to say, ‘Bring back the white folks, this Negro’s beating me to death!’ ”

  Ray Fleming made the whole race business seem comical, almost foolish. It was easy to laugh with him.

  “Everybody has their story
, but the stories are really the same story,” he went on. “Put some color in it, it’s no different. White people came from Europe, they had nothing. They fought and survived. An ‘indentured servant’—that’s just a pretty name for a slave. At any time you could be bought, sold, whipped, raped, no matter what your color. The Irish have the same story. They came over in boats, in what they called the ‘coffin cabin.’ So many of them would die on the way over here. They would write back to Ireland, telling people not to come because the plantation owner was working them to death.”

  “The Irish had it as bad as the blacks?” I asked.

  “Had it worse in some ways,” Ray answered, “because the blacks were worth something. The Irish owed money, but the blacks were paid for, so they were more protected.”

  Giovanni came back into the room and sat on his father’s lap. Ray resumed his own story.

  “I knew I wanted to choose my own course, that they couldn’t hold me down there, in the South,” he said. “I told my old man, ‘I’m not going to be an undertaker! I don’t want to go to the Cincinnati School of Embalming!’ So nobody took over the funeral home. When my father died, that was the demise of the family funeral business. I moved to New York, about 1957.”

  In New York as a young man, Ray said, he took to Greenwich Village. It was the beginning of the white counterculture of the period, and instead of living entirely in Harlem, Ray crossed back and forth between the white and black worlds. In downtown Manhattan he hung out in coffee shops, met women, attended poetry readings.