Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  53 Worthing began to receive: “Helen Lee Worthing,” part three.

  53 “gradually withdrew from society”: “Carry Mixed Marriage,” 3.

  53 isolating herself: “Follies Beauty Will Always Remember Kindness and Love of Colored Hubby,” 2.

  53 Two years into the marriage: “Helen Lee Worthing.”

  53 By November 1932, she was confined: “Faces Insanity Complaint: Helen Lee Worthing Held in County Hospital at Los Angeles,” 22.

  53 A few years later she reappeared: “Helen Lee Worthing on Comeback Trail,” 3.

  53 “Worthing’s decline and her banishment”: Bogle, Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams, 59.

  53 “it was a sign of insanity”: Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 319.

  53 “white women who voluntarily married”: Mumford, Interzones, 13.

  54 interracial sex had a “‘cosmic’ significance”: Rogers, Sex and Race, quoted in Pascoe, What Comes Naturally, 190.

  54 “the white wives of Harlem”: McKay, Harlem, 233.

  54 “white Delilahs”: Wells, quoted in “An Anti-Lynching Crusade,” 421–22, cited in Hodes, White Women, Black Men, 191.

  55 “riding the rails” . . . “Bates and Price must have”: Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 120.

  55 “was a mirror”: Carter, Scottsboro, xi.

  55 “By the spring of 1932”: Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 128.

  55 “tectonic shifts”: Gilmore, Defying Dixie, 124.

  55 Artists and writers came out: Among the many protesters were Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Franz Boas, Ezra Pound, John Dos Passos, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Bernard Shaw, Malcolm Cowley, Heywood Broun, Waldo Frank, Floyd Dell, Mike Gold, Mary Heaton Vorse, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorki, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Symons, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf, Norman Douglas, Lincoln Steffens, Bronislaw Malinowski, Leo Tolstoy, and André Gide.

  56 “women of the ASWPL”: Apel, Imagery of Lynching, 62.

  Chapter 3: Let My People Go: Lillian E. Wood Passes for Black

  59 “The crusade of the New England schoolma’am”: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, reprinted in Writings, 380.

  59 “Nothing at all”: Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, xiv. Shockley describes a number of Afro-American women writers about whom “nothing at all could be found” in the biographical record.

  60 “imagined community”: Anderson, Imagined Communities.

  60 In 1925: In fact, the novel was published by the African Methodist Episcopal Book Concern with no publication date. Bibliographers have assigned it various dates, including 1922 and 1923. In an unpublished autobiography, Wood gives two dates for the novel: 1914, which is impossible on the basis of internal evidence, and 1925. She wrote her unpublished autobiography at the end of her life, in 1953, and acknowledges that many of her dates may be wrong. Nevertheless, both internal evidence from the novel’s story—which draws heavily on contemporary history—and the confirmation of former students of Wood’s suggest that 1925 is the most probable date for the novel’s publication. No archives of the AME Book Concern, originally based in Philadelphia, survive. Nor have I been able to locate either book advertisements or book reviews. The book refers to historical events into the early 1920s and seems unaware of some after 1925. In her memoirs, Wood also indicates that she began taking creative writing courses in the teens. It is most likely, then, that she began the novel around 1914, completed it in the early 1920s, and published it, as she claims, in 1925.

  61 Until now: Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers; Roses and Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, 349; Rush, et al., Black American Writers Past and Present, 781; Fairbanks and Engeldinger, Black American Fiction, 299: Margolies and Bakish, Afro-American Fiction; Ammons, Conflicting Stories, 21; Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, 237; Lovell, Black Song, 522; Rado, ed., Rereading Modernism, 126; Davis and West, ed., Women Writers in the United States, 219; Davidson, Wagner-Martin, and Ammons, The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, 375; Ansón, La Negritud, 255; Wallace, Black Macho, 222; Matthews, Black American Writers; Adams, The White Negro, 165; Williams, American Black Women. I discovered that Wood was white in the mid-1990s after being asked to edit Let My People Go for the Schomburg Series of African American Women Writers, 1910–1940. I am grateful to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for initially drawing my attention to Wood. Thanks to my discovery that Lillian E. Wood was a white writer, we were able to pull her from the series. Another misidentified writer, however, Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, the author of the novels Megda and Four Girls at Cottage City, did make it into the series, only to be pulled after many years when her white identity was revealed. It is widely agreed that Kelley-Hawkins, who was often on the syllabi of African-American literature courses, would have received very little attention as a white writer. She was most interesting as a black writer who seemed to write only about whites. In the Kelley-Hawkins case, misidentification stemmed from an ambiguous, dark photograph and an old case of bibliographical error. On the Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins case, see Jackson, “Mistaken Identity,” D1; Jackson, “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley,” 728–41.

  61 “a more in-depth study”: Roses and Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, 349.

  61 “nothing at all” could be found: Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, xiv.

  61 Wood’s biography appears: Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, 392.

  61 That history begins: Hodes, White Women, Black Men; DeRamus, Forbidden Fruit.

  62 “dared to know” . . . “American history”: Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 708. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 380, 432.

  62 “shut out”: McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 172.

  62 “Ostracized by white society”: Small, “The Yankee Schoolmarm,” 385.

  62 “Schoolmarms, not native black”: Small, “The Yankee Schoolmarm,” 386.

  62 Teaching in a black school: Butchart, Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction, 185–86.

  63 Most had never seen large numbers: “My own rearing had been in a quiet New England town, and I hardly think I had ever seen a hundred colored people when I went South on this mission.” Rice, “A Yankee Teacher,” 152.

  63 “All the men looked just alike”: Rice, “A Yankee Teacher.”

  63 “condescending” . . . “antagonism” . . . “feelings”: Frederickson, “‘Each One Is Dependent on the Other,’” in Visible Women, ed. Hewitt and Lebstock, 310, 316.

  63 served to challenge racist claims: Jonsberg, “Yankee Schoolmarms in the South,” 77. “Preconceived opinions” is from the diary of a teacher, Elizabeth Botume, First Days Amongst the Contraband, published in 1893. These teachers, as Jonsberg notes, also write of their desire to escape the “drudgery” of marriage.

  63 “By the 1940s and 1950s”: Blum, “‘The Contact of Living Souls,’” 91, 94.

  63 independent households: Hoffman, “Inquiring After the Schoolmarm,” 108.

  64 In an inadequate frame building: Wells, A School for Freedom, 1–2. I am deeply grateful to Wells’s mother, Mrs. Mary Coleman, for providing me her daughter’s excellent history (one of the most comprehensive and reliable accounts of the college available), helping me gain insight into the early days of Morristown, and taking me on a personal tour of the abandoned campus, which her vivid memories brought back to life.

  64 “graves and graves” . . . “south to teach”: Wells, A School for Freedom, 1.

  64 often hostile and “occasionally violent”: Wells, A School for Freedom, 1.

  64 “a gold watch . . . shop in town”: Stearns, A Highway in the Wilderness, 8, 13, 20, 28, 35, 36, 40.

  65 “white society”: Small, “The Yankee Schoolmarm,” 385.

  65 “come from another planet”: Small, “The Yankee Schoolmarm,” 385.

  65 “earthquake-like . . . strain”: Stearns, A Highway in the Wilderness, 36.

  65 “persistently stereotyped”: Small, “The Yank
ee Schoolmarm,” 381, 383, 402.

  65 already maligned as “meddlesome”: In The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash called her both “meddlesome” and “a dangerous fool.” Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, 6.

  65 To a resentful South: Cavanagh, “Spinsters, Schoolmarms, and Queers,” 421–40; Oram, “‘Embittered, Sexless or Homosexual,’” in Not a Passing Phase, ed. Lesbian History Group, 99–118. The culture that placed a high premium on maternity gave would-be teachers a double message: teaching was seen both “as a poor substitute for marriage and family” and “as the only career compatible with mothering.” Hoffman, “Inquiring After the Schoolmarm,” 107.

  66 The more unnatural: Hoffman, “Inquiring After the Schoolmarm,” 107.

  66 “New understandings are arrived at”: Frederickson, “‘Each One is Dependent,’” in Hewitt and Lebstock, eds., Visible Women, 316.

  66 “positive memories”: Blum, “‘The Contact of Living Souls,’” 98, 93.

  66 “It’s a hard thing”: Wood, Let My People Go, 20.

  66 “call” . . . “to live for”: Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love, 41, 40, 42.

  67 Lillian, whose legal name was Elizabeth: This seems the most reliable date, but her death certificate lists her birth year as 1865, probably a typographical error. The 1880 census, for example, in which she appears as “Elizabeth,” gives her age as twelve.

  67 two older sisters: Lillian had two other sisters who did not survive: May, born in 1857, and Jane, born in 1859. Both appear in the 1860 census but not the 1870 census and are never listed with the family again.

  67 Lillian loved a local farmer: Wood refers to a failed love affair in her autobiography. The Franklin sisters, who lived with Wood in the 1940s, confirmed this romance and added that it was with a local farmer. Interview with Lady Bee, Odessa, and Violet Franklin, White Pine, Tennessee, November 2007. The Franklin sisters lived with Lillian Wood for two years in the mid-1940s. I am enormously grateful to the Franklin sisters for sharing with me their home, memories, family photographs, documents, and inscribed copy of Let My People Go.

  67 a decent wage: The most highly skilled workers could make a very good salary indeed, but most milliners failed to achieve even a living wage. However, millinery work was especially friendly to Irish workers and the Wood sisters were half Irish on their mother’s side, half British on their father’s. By 1916, 86,000 women across the nation were employed in the millinery trade. Only dressmaking and housekeeping employed more women. One contemporary historian described it as “a trade than which none seems more attractive because of its artistic requirements and its handicraft-stage, its demand for creative skill and its high remuneration for the best work.” See Perry and Kingsbury, Millinery as a Profession for Women.

  67 “disaster again overtook us”: Wood, “Memoirs.”

  68 At that point, Lillian received: Lillian’s early life story is reconstructed, in part, from available census, birth, and death records, and from her unpublished memoirs, written in the final year of her life and not always reliable, especially regarding dates. I have also been able to piece together her early story from census records, her death certificate, and other national and genealogical records. I am profoundly grateful to Chris MacKay of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture for her help in tracing Wood.

  68 At that time it was highly unusual: McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 181.

  68 “God then designed”: Wood, “Memoirs.” Unless otherwise noted, throughout the rest of this chapter, all direct quotes from Wood are from her unpublished “Memoirs.” I would like to express my thanks to Marlayna Gates, librarian at Yale University, for helping me track down Wood’s unpublished autobiography.

  68 “By about 1900 it was possible . . . descend into blackness”: Williamson, The Crucible of Race, 327, 467.

  69 Hampton Institute: See Anderson, The Education of Blacks, 35.

  69 “refrain from participating”: Anderson, The Education of Blacks, 38. Industrialists and white educators such as Charles W. Dabney, president of the University of Tennessee, approved. “‘The place for the Negro in the immediate future is upon the farms and in the simpler trades,’” Dabney maintained. Bryan and Wells, “Morristown College,” 67.

  69 “Southern white opposition”: Butchart, Northern School, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction, 182.

  69 Morristown was without any public hospital: Hammond, “A Historical Analysis,” 96.

  69 Classes were crowded: Hammond, “A Historical Analysis,” 81.

  69 “to care for the boys and girls”: Witten, “The History of Morristown Normal,” 7.

  70 “shunned”: Hammond, “A Historical Analysis,” 57.

  70 “Taunts and threats were part”: Wells, A School for Freedom, xii.

  70 “Nigger Hill”: The Christian Educator, May 1913, 16; Hammond, “A Historical Analysis,” 57.

  70 “Our friends among the white people”: Hill, “Retrospection and Prophecy.”

  70 “did not necessarily think”: Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 45.

  70 “I found to my surprise”: Witten, “The History of Morristown Normal,” 8.

  70 “lived in [the] New Jersey Home”: Witten, “The History of Morristown Normal,” 8. Witten gives Hepler’s first name as Amanda.

  70 At Morristown, Lillian attempted: Author’s interview with Toby and Barbara Pearson, Morristown, Tennessee, September and November 2007.

  70 Even Alain Locke: Harris and Molesworth, Alain L. Locke; Stewart, ed., Race Contacts and Interracial Relations.

  70 student exchange program: Even into the 1920s few such programs existed.

  71 She was rumored: Author’s interview with Toby and Barbara Pearson, Morristown. On the Yankee schoolmarm as an erotic, “physically attractive” figure, complicating the sexual boundaries of southern culture, see Baker, Turning South Again, 45–60.

  71 Fulton was a former slave: Fulton’s mother was also sold, for $1,800, as were his sister, for $2,500, an uncle, for $1,900, and an aunt, for $1,300. Fulton was six at the time and remembered the sale and his terror that he would lose his mother vividly. The Christian Educator, October–November 1895, 135, cited in Hammond, “A Historical Analysis,” 51.

  71 “the ugliest furniture”: Author’s interview with Clara Osborne, Rose Center, Morristown, November 2007.

  71 “nearly all the race’s ordeals”: Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, 392.

  72 With the explosive growth: The black press mushroomed in the early 1920s from roughly two hundred to roughly five hundred newspapers. Vincent, Voices of a Black Nation, 23.

  72 “believes the old threadbare lie”: Wells-Barnett, The Red Record, 7.

  72 “If Southern white men”: Wells-Barnett, The Red Record, 7.

  72 “‘Tie the wretch’”: Quoted in Giddings, Ida, 212.

  73 The threat of lynching: As Isabel Wilkerson has noted, then—as now—“scholars widely disagreed over the role of lynchings in sparking a particular wave of migration.” As Wilkerson notes, however, this violence often “planted the seeds of a departure that may have taken months to actually pull off.” Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 533. On the “threat of violence” and the Great Migration, see also Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?,” 1–47, and Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret.

  73 “hurried to the lynching”: Pfeifer, Rough Justice, 34.

  73 “If we must die”: McKay, “If We Must Die,” 21.

  74 “The nation’s callous disregard”: Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret, 19–20.

  74 “the recent horrible lynchings”: Du Bois, “Postscript,” 203.

  74 “The Negro women of the South”: Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 93, ellipses and brackets in original.

  74 “There must be good people”: McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy, 364–65.

  75 “true friend of the Negro”: Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 102.

  75 “a slow process”: Hall, Revolt Against Chivalry, 223.

  75 “The h
our has come”: Mary B. Talbert to Mary White Ovington, October 21, 1922. NAACP Papers, Part 7: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912–1955, Series B: Anti-Lynching Legislative and Publicity Files, 1916–1955, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (hereafter abbreviated LOC).

  75 “most white women simply”: Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, xix–xx.

  75 “Lynch law” . . . “our people”: Wood, Let My People Go, 131–32.

  76 Feeling for “his sisters suffering wrongs”: Wood, Let My People Go, 19.

  76 “She took a chance”: Author’s interview with Clara Osborne and Barbara Mason, Rose Center, Morristown, Tennessee, November 10–11, 2007.

  76 “the new black woman”: Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, 393.

  76 modest print run: One of Wood’s former students who lived with her in the 1940s, believes that only 500 copies of the novel were printed. Author’s interview with Odessa and Violet Franklin and Lady Bee Coleman, White Pine, Tennessee, November 10–11, 2007.

  77 “tremendous impact”: Author’s interview with the Franklins and Coleman, November 10–11, 2007.

  77 “What she believed in”: Author’s interview with the Franklins and Coleman, November 10–11, 2007.

  78 “like Negroes . . . best friend”: Wood, Let My People Go, 25–26.

  78 “friend[s] of the Negro”: Wood, Let My People Go, 65.

  78 “A crowd of white women”: Wood, Let My People Go, 48–49.

  79 “the rights of men”: Wood, Let My People Go, 37.

  79 Wood published: The AME Book Concern maintains no archives. Author’s interview with Reverend William James, former Morristown College trustee, June 10, 2007, New York City; phone interviews, AME church officials, 1997 and 2007.

  79 In African-American literature: On the role of “authenticating machinery” in rendering black storytelling credible, see Stepto, From Behind the Veil.

  79 roll their eyes: Wood, Let My People Go, 59.

  80 “remarkable women”: Stearns, A Highway in the Wilderness, 42.

  80 Lillian Wood died of a heart attack: Certificate of death, Lillian E. Wood, State of Tennessee, Certificate 55-2733, December 7, 1955. “Race: White. Birth Date: June 17, 1865. Age in Years: 90. Length of Stay in This Place: 48 Years. Cause of Death: Coronary Thrombosis.” She was buried in Mount Sterling, Ohio.