by Carla Kaplan
No physical evidence supported the claim. At no time did either woman act as if she were recovering from a savage attack. No witness confirmed their stories. Yet in trial after trial, the Scottsboro Boys, as the defendants were called, were found guilty and sentenced to death. The case rose to prominence among progressives partly because such unfounded accusations had become so commonplace in the country. As Dan Carter, one of the historians of the case, puts it, Scottsboro “was a mirror which reflected the three hundred years of mistreatment they [blacks] had suffered at the hands of white America.”
“By the spring of 1932,” historian Glenda Gilmore wrote, “the Scottsboro case had traveled around the world and back again.” As whites began to grasp the workings of southern racism, the case created “tectonic shifts” in racial attitudes. Artists and writers came out strongly in defense of “the boys.” The case became a referendum on the nation’s racial future not only as a test of racism’s blind injustice but also as a referendum on political strategy, with militancy and caution at odds. Spearheaded in part by Mary White Ovington, the NAACP reluctantly took up the case. The Communist Party, in a campaign in which Nancy Cunard played an important role from Britain, did so as well, aiming to show up the NAACP as timid. Wrangling between the NAACP and the Communist Party continued for years. The case revealed to the nation what many in Harlem had long known: blacks were at risk of death at any time, for any infraction, real or imaginary. And white women played a very particular role in that threat; it was a role that was so deeply ingrained in history that saying no to their complicity in racist violence seemed nearly impossible. Some white women antilynching activists distanced themselves from the case when it became known that both Bates and Price had not only worked as prostitutes but also accepted black clients. “The women of the ASWPL [Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, founded in 1930] were at a loss for how to address consensual interracial sex, something they had never considered possible before. . . . Consensual sex could not be officially imagined.” In this, as in myriad other ways, race and desire were conflated and collapsed.
Part Two
Choosing Blackness: Sex, Love, and Passing
Nancy Cunard dancing with an unidentified man.
Chapter 3
Let My People Go: Lillian E. Wood Passes for Black
The crusade of the New England schoolma’am . . . yet to be written . . . [is] the tale of a mission . . . more quixotic than the quest of St. Louis. . . . Rich and poor they were, serious and curious . . . women who dared. . . . They did their work well.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
Nothing at all could be found.
—Bibliographer Ann Allen Schockley on Lillian E. Wood
Lillian Wood and the Morristown College faculty, 1925. Wood is in the front row, fourth from the right.
Because Harlem was an “imagined community,” as well as a geographic center, it attracted emotional and intellectual adherents from across the country and, indeed, from around the world. Writers in the 1920s, both black and white, wrote with an eye toward Harlem and a hope of attracting its attention, just as international modernists wrote about the Left Bank. Those who succeeded, like Julia Peterkin, writing from a South Carolina plantation, might be part of the movement no matter who they were or where they lived. The myriad submissions to “The Poet’s Page” (originally “Poet’s Corner”) from Los Angeles and Kansas City, St. Louis and Denver, Hoboken and Detroit, all reflected the hopes of whites who wanted in on the new black movement. One white woman writer, Lillian E. Wood of Pleasant, Ohio, succeeded so well in that endeavor that she erased all traces of her effort.
In 1925, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Wood published a novel that attempted to tell the full history of black people after slavery up to the Harlem Renaissance. Stopping just short of it was an important, deliberate omission. Wood lived in Morristown, Tennessee, a small Appalachian community, to which she moved in 1907 and where she stayed until 1954. Her novel, Let My People Go, was written, in part, to convince southern blacks—Wood’s students of more than four decades—that they need not rush up to New York to make a difference in the world. It was also written to prove that a white woman could understand and serve the black community, and without moving to New York City to do so. Wood always said that her novel was written as a friendship gift for her black students but for an intended audience of other whites. As a novel about the sexual abuse of black women and the lynching of black men, Let My People Go was inspired by Wood’s perception that white women were failing to act responsibly to end lynching and racial violence. It was designed to encourage other white women to put social responsibility ahead of their fear of being labeled “Nigger lovers” and losing social status. In that sense, it was also written to and for Miss Anne, in the hope that she’d recognize a kindred sister tucked away in the South. As a friendship offering to southern blacks, her book succeeded admirably. But as either a lesson for inactive white women or as a smoke signal to Miss Anne in Harlem, the book failed spectacularly, and for reasons Lillian E. Wood could never have predicted.
Until now, Let My People Go has been listed in all the standard reference works of early African-American fiction and Lillian E. Wood has been thought to have been a black woman. Hers is a case of passive, not active, passing. Wood never claimed to be black, as far as I can tell. But feeling flattered, perhaps, she did nothing to correct the error. And for almost a hundred years, in spite of a general feeling that “a more in-depth study of this obscure author seems warranted,” the prevailing assumption has been that “nothing at all” could be found out about “African-American novelist” Lillian E. Wood, as the Fisk librarian and eminent bibliographer Ann Allen Shockley maintains. Wood’s biography appears in anthologies as a blank: a double question mark inside a parenthesis where her birth and death dates should be: “(??–??).”
This racial misattribution and the ability to hide in plain sight are part of Miss Anne’s history. Even to black bibliographers, it seemed unimaginable that a white woman would declare blacks “my people” in the way that Let My People Go does. Such are the expectations of Miss Anne’s racial choices. And such, as well, are the assumptions of what Miss Anne would and would not dare. Wood’s disappearance from the historical record is part of the long history of Miss Anne’s obstacles to finding a place for herself.
The white women of the Harlem Renaissance were not the first to try to make a place for themselves in black communities, to bring to that experiment their own biases and desires, or to discover that their experiences of race-crossing changed them in deep, unexpected ways. That history begins with white women such as Nell Butler, who married a black slave in 1681; Ann Wall, who became a slave after marrying one in 1702; Dorothea Bourne, who took a black slave lover in Virginia in 1824; and suffragist Helen Pitts, who married Frederick Douglass in 1884 and found herself denounced by both blacks and whites. It includes female abolitionists such as the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina; and Susan B. Anthony. And it continues with Miss Anne’s immediate predecessors, the Yankee schoolmarms, white women who went south, largely from New England, to teach in the Freedmen’s Bureau schools immediately after the Civil War.
Those forebears cast an especially long shadow over the Harlem Renaissance. On the one hand, intellectuals such as Du Bois saw them as pioneering heroines to be emulated by other white women. He was especially moved that those “few” whites had “dared to know and help and love black folk” and that, against terrific odds, they had created some “brave and splendid” interracial friendships. Those white women, he insisted, were “the finest thing in American history.” But derisive stereotypes also dogged the New England spinster teachers, making any woman who followed in their footsteps easy to dismiss and minimizing the importance of the interracial friendships they forged. Heroic and bumbling, determined and terrified, thoughtful and thoughtless, these schoolteachers haunted Miss Anne. And because they did, the story of Miss
Anne in Harlem rightly begins with the Yankee schoolmarm in the freedmen’s schools and historically black colleges of the South.
During a brief few years, from 1861 to 1871, thousands of white single women, mostly from New England, went south to teach in the hastily founded new black schools. While there was some support from church mission societies and somewhat less support from the Freedmen’s Bureau (which existed more on paper than anywhere else), these women were largely untrained, poorly equipped, and ill prepared for what they’d find. They traveled alone into territories where they were “shut out” by a still bitter, defeated population. “Ostracized by white society,” they were also intimidated by groups such as the Klan, which threatened to whip, shoot, poison, or burn them out of their schoolhouses. Locals blamed them for leading “their” black people astray. “Schoolmarms, not native blacks, were the primary targets of resentment” in much of the South. These teachers faced “bitter opposition.” Damned as zealots and meddlers, they were relentlessly mocked and caricatured. Teaching in a black school was considered “disgraceful, shameful. . . . Among some groups, teaching blacks was a treasonous act.”
They were often all too easy to caricature. Many of the women who went south were out of their league. Few had traveled extensively before making the difficult trip. Most had never seen large numbers of black people; they were unfamiliar with southern habits, untrained as teachers, and woefully unprepared for the climate. Some reported shamelessly that they could not tell black people apart: “All the men looked just alike, and so did all the women and girls.” Many had strong racial prejudices and were “condescending toward African Americans and oppressively maternalistic.” One white Methodist from Wisconsin remembered “‘a positive antagonism to the idea of working with the Negroes.’” Her fellow missionaries, she said, and most of the whites she met in church missionary and educational work, did not see “‘the Negro as a person with feelings.’” Many went south full of good intentions, only to depart as quickly as they could, once their sub-spartan conditions became clear and their harassment from local whites commenced.
Many also stayed, braving ostracism and assault, demonstrating a “striking” willingness to rethink their own “preconceived opinions” and often developing “deep affection” for their black students. Their very insistence that blacks were educable and deserving of education served to challenge racist claims of innate black inferiority. Yet, historians have been hard on those women. “By the 1940s and 1950s, it was commonplace for white historians to mock these missionaries.” Those who stayed were generally either more stubborn and more deeply committed to an interracial life than the rest or else they were the ones who had nowhere else to go. In black schools such as Morristown, negative stereotypes of spinster teachers did not prevail. There, the Yankee schoolmarm commanded respect and admiration, was still regarded as virtuous and brave. And though they were isolated within their colleges, such teachers could also maintain independent households, a rare privilege for women at the turn of the last century. White women were not, by and large, allowed into men’s colleges and were denied a classical education. Teaching at a black college, with a classical curriculum, was also a route to self-education for some of the women who stayed. Their isolation in black colleges proved lonely, but it also provided an escape from the strictures of femininity they were raised with. These schoolteachers could go from being socially limited to being women in charge by traveling to the South.
One of those women was stubborn Almira H. Stearns, Lillian Wood’s immediate predecessor and role model at Morristown College. A New Jersey Civil War widow born April 12, 1823, in Vermont, Stearns went south in 1868 to replace a departing Mrs. Hanford from Ithaca, New York. In an inadequate frame building that had served variously as a church, a slave market, and a hospital for both Confederate and Union soldiers during the war, Hanford taught every imaginable grade and level, attempting to instruct nearly a hundred black students of all ages (including one 110-year-old man) in basic literacy and grammar. Hanford hated it.
Stearns and her twelve-year-old daughter boarded a train in New Jersey for the difficult two-day trip, traveling through a postwar landscape of “graves and graves.” A fellow passenger pointed to the “woman on her way south to teach the ‘niggers,’” and mother and daughter were shunned for the trip. When they eventually alighted at the small brick station in Morristown, Hanford, who had survived an arson attempt and appealed to the governor of Tennessee for protection, wasted little time getting out of town. She departed as Stearns was unloading her bags.
At first, Stearns fared little better than Hanford. She was taken with the wide views of the Appalachian Mountains and the Nolichucky and Holston rivers across the valley from her hilltop school. And the students welcomed her warmly. But the hardscrabble white community was often hostile and “occasionally violent.” They had no universal education for their own children, so why should black students get special teachers from the North? The school was set on fire numerous times, and Stearns lost the few things she had brought with her on the train: “a gold watch, gold glasses and various pieces of bric-a-brac.” Students were fired upon. Homes were burglarized. Stearns faced “verbal abuse and ostracism.” Locals pressed “their faces to the windows with all sorts of hideous contortions of countenance and with howling and cries; getting under the house and beating on the floor with sticks and such other doings.” They spat on her daughter and followed her whenever she ventured off school grounds. Stearns was unable to shop in town. Forgoing “white society to minister to the needs of another race” and preferring black company to white was intolerable to the local whites, and they made sure Stearns knew it. For a recently widowed middle-aged white woman, alone in the South, with a twelve-year-old daughter to protect, the situation must have been terrifying. She could not appeal to the local whites for forbearance. To them, she was a “race traitor” and as “alien” as if she had “come from another planet.” Nor could she expect much protection from her students. In that part of eastern Tennessee, blacks totaled only 3 percent of the population. They could not afford confrontations on her behalf. Stearns later described the constant threats from the white community as “earthquake-like shocks.” She never “entirely recovered” from their “mental and nervous strain,” she said.
A few photographs of Stearns survive. All were taken after she had spent many years in Morristown. In them she looks every bit the Yankee schoolmarm stereotype: grim, thin, sharp-featured, determined, and steely, with tightly pressed lips and closely coiled braids. Was that her look when she alighted from the train in Morristown? On the day she married her late husband? Did the New England schoolteachers arrive looking unhappy and severe, or did they acquire that pinched look after years in the field?
“One of the most persistently stereotyped Americans of the age,” the Yankee schoolmarm was depicted, even by northerners, as “horsefaced, bespectacled, and spare of frame . . . a dangerous do-gooder who had rejected Victorian norms of behavior for women . . . at best a comic character, at worst a dangerous fool, playing with explosive forces which she did not understand.” Once a cultural icon of moral rectitude, the spinster teacher lost social status steadily over the first decades of the twentieth century, in white communities, until, by the 1920s, she had become an object of considerable ridicule from other whites. She was already maligned as “meddlesome” at best and tyrannical at worst, and popularized Freudian notions of what was sexually normal made her unmarried state—often mandated by district regulations—seem increasingly “queer.” To a resentful South, still bitter over northern missions aiding blacks rather than whites, any opportunity to paint the teachers as social outliers was irresistible. The more unnatural the schoolteacher could be made to seem, the more she could be punished for her racial choices with the loss of white femininity, her chief social capital.
Characters of comedy to some, race traitors to others, but potential heroines to their black students, women like Stearns led unpredicted liv
es. Those who stayed put when the waves of missionary teachers returned north experienced interracial socialization unprecedented elsewhere. Pushed out by white locals, such women often became honorary members of black communities. At a time when women of their race and class were especially constrained and immobilized by expectations, they moved aggressively into new worlds. “New understandings are arrived at and misconceptions brushed away,” many of them found. They “came to help and were helped.” In the Great Migration many of their students went north to cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., and to Harlem. They took with them memories of those Yankee teachers. Sometimes they measured other white women by that yardstick. According to historian Edward Blum, “positive memories of these schoolteachers and their influence could be found far and wide . . . examples of mercy in a world of madness . . . as if something transcendent happened during black-white encounters.”
At one point in Let My People Go, a white man speaks admiringly of blacks and the challenges they face. He wishes, he says, that he were black: “It’s a hard thing to be a Negro, but I’d give a million dollars for the chance! . . . Your people are looked down upon—spurned from the sidewalks in some parts of the world. They are appointed and confessed servants of the whites. Every man’s hand is against them. You have a tough job—a hard job. . . . I’d just like to tackle a job like yours.” That was Lillian Wood’s thinly veiled confession. Like Edna Margaret Johnson, she looked to blacks to infuse her life with purpose. And like the missionary teachers for whom Reconstruction’s “call to moral arms” had offered the “great thing” of “something better to live for,” Lillian set out to find herself by leaving all she knew behind.
