The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  “She’s a student there? Presently?” Anita repeated, her voice rising with every word. “We are going to visit her at Radcliffe?”

  “Of course!” said Lottie, laughing at Anita’s disquiet. “Is that all right?”

  It was anything but. Anita knew only one girl at Radcliffe College—Gertrude Baker, class of 1900, a dark-skinned Negro from Cambridge. She had known her for many years, and if they encountered each other on campus, it was highly likely that she would acknowledge Anita like an old friend.

  Anita knew that traveling to Harvard with Lottie had its risks, with Frederick at school in nearby Boston and the rest of her family in the city, too, but she would never have accepted the invitation if Lottie had uttered the word Radcliffe.

  “Yes!” Anita said, trying to lighten her tone. “That sounds wonderful. A day on the Radcliffe campus. I just wasn’t aware. That seems like a very pleasant way to spend the morning.”

  Anita turned her face away from Lottie and rested her head against the thick glass of the train window. How could she have been so impetuous, saying yes to Lottie’s invitation without considering whom she might see? Running into Gertrude could be her ruin.

  Anita thought of her years at the Prince Grammar School in Boston, then at the Girls’ High School. At both she was enrolled as a Negro student. She was at the top of her class, and she was a Negro. At Dwight Moody’s Northfield Seminary, the boarding school she attended to prepare for Vassar, she had passed as white. Her roommate there was Elizabeth Baker—or Bessie, as she was known—her closest friend and Gertrude’s older sister.

  Bessie, too, was a light-skinned Negro, a quadroon, and she could have passed as white, like Anita, but she chose not to. On Anita’s application to the school, she had asked to room with Bessie, and because Mr. Moody’s academy was different from most, and because her request solved the school’s problem of where to house Bessie, the girls were placed together without question.

  Bessie was now attending Wellesley College as a Negro student, where the color line had been broken in 1883, but Anita had no communication with her during the school year. They did not exchange letters because Anita was terrified to have Bessie’s name appear anywhere on her correspondence. The Vassar students had too many friends at Wellesley, and everyone there knew the name Bessie Baker. Anita was able to see her occasionally during the summers and other holidays at home, but only when she was with the Negro community, never as a white Vassar girl.

  But Gertrude did not resemble Bessie. She was much darker.

  When the train pulled slowly into Cambridge, expelling steam as it braked, Anita’s nervousness stayed with her. She didn’t know what it would feel like to be close to Boston in the company of someone so removed from her own domestic life, and the fear of crossing paths with Gertrude only heightened her uneasiness. She had decided that if she saw her on campus, she would have to turn and flee, praying that Gertrude, who knew of her situation at Vassar, would understand and not follow her.

  They headed to their hotel, the Magnolia Inn, and Lottie spent the hour they were at tea telling Anita whom she should bother speaking to at Harvard the next day and who was a waste of breath.

  “The men from the Middle West are the kindest, which of course bores me, but that might sit well with you. You have to leave me all of the men from New York. It’s states’ rights,” she said. Anita promised she would ignore the Empire State, and they changed and headed to dinner in town.

  “Thank goodness for hansoms,” said Lottie as the hotel doorman helped them into the carriage. “The restaurant’s not far, quite close to the campus, but it is still too hot to walk, I’m sure you agree.”

  There were hansoms all over Boston, just as there were in Cambridge and New York City, but when Anita returned home, she was never allowed to hail one. They charged seventy-five cents an hour, far too much. But Lottie had been opening her little purse since they left Poughkeepsie, insisting that because the trip was her idea, it would cost Anita nothing. “Father is practically forcing us up here,” she said as Anita tried to purchase them refreshments at the Albany train station. “Save your money for school.” Lottie might not have known how little money Anita had, but she was used to the fact that she was always the richest person in the room, unless a Vanderbilt was about.

  As they finished their dinner of lemon-glazed chicken with morels and Lottie settled the bill, a fashionably dressed woman approached their table with her husband, looking unsure at first, but then rushing toward them as Lottie glanced up.

  “Is that Lottie Taylor?” the woman asked. She had the arm of a slight, elegant man in a white vest and dinner jacket, though he moved considerably more slowly than she did.

  “Nettie!” exclaimed Lottie, standing up. “Nettie DeWitt. But of course, you live in Cambridge now, don’t you?” They exchanged greetings, Nettie pushing back her high-crowned velvet hat, and Lottie introduced her friend. “Miss Anita Hemmings,” she said as Anita rose. “My roommate at Vassar this year, and the reigning class beauty.”

  “That’s apparent,” said Nettie, taking Anita’s hand. “It’s lovely to meet you. I’m a Vassar girl myself, but before you both arrived on campus. I’m a proud member of the class of ’92. Such an old girl now.”

  “Nonsense,” said Lottie, interrupting her. “You only missed us by a year, and you still look like a freshman, with a good seamstress.”

  Nettie waved away the compliment, her thick, sable hair bobbing as she moved. “You were always a delight, weren’t you?” She turned to Anita and said, “Lottie and I grew up around the corner from each other in New York. I remember her when she was a three-foot terror. I’m still terribly bitter that she was able to stay in the city and attend Brearley while I was shipped off like a parcel with legs to Emma Willard in Troy.”

  She turned her wide eyes back to Anita and asked, “Where did you prepare for Vassar, Anita?”

  “I’m from Boston, and I stayed in the state. I went to Dwight Moody’s Northfield Seminary. It’s very far north, on the Vermont border.”

  “Dwight Moody’s? That’s an awfully liberal place, I hear,” said Nettie. Had even one other girl from her time at Vassar prepared at Northfield? “Students from far-off reaches of the globe, of all creeds and colors.”

  “It was quite modern in that sense, but deeply religious,” Anita replied, hoping to protect her beloved school. “Everyone certainly left a committed Christian.”

  “Of course, of course. You ladies and your religious educations.”

  “Nettie! You sound like a heathen,” said Lottie, laughing.

  “Blame my husband,” she said. “He may be a Harvard English professor but lately he’s also become a naturalist or a nationalist, or something like that. Isn’t that right, dear?” she said, turning to nudge the silent man behind her.

  “My husband, Talbot Aldrich. I’m Nettie Aldrich now. I’ve abandoned the Dutch.”

  “A pleasure to meet you both,” said Talbot. His passive face suggested that he was quite used to standing behind his wife.

  “Will you be attending the Harvard game tomorrow?” Lottie asked Talbot. “My brother John is in his third year at Harvard. We’re here on Papa’s orders to make sure he isn’t failing out or ruining lives. Last summer he threatened to elope with one of the maids. You can guess how that was taken.”

  “It’s a good thing you’re here,” said Nettie, laughing with Lottie. “Are you, or we, attending the game, Talbot?” she asked her husband.

  “Afraid not, my dear. The last time we took in a game, you complained from the first moment about the weather and we left after twenty minutes.”

  “That’s right,” said Nettie. “I just remembered that I detest football. Barbaric sport. But have a grand time, you two, and please call on me the next time you’re in Cambridge. We’ll be here for simply ever as Talbot is such a to-do at Harvard now. Running his whole department. Number 7, Brattle Street. Nettie Aldrich. Don’t forget the Aldrich or you’ll never find me!” She
waved goodbye, showing off the Belgian lace pulled tightly over her hand.

  “But you must have heard stories about Nettie,” said Lottie, as the girls left the building in another hansom. “She was a terror at Vassar. She somehow skated by and graduated—she is awfully bright—but she’s a monster.”

  “Monster? How exactly?” Anita asked, already learning to be skeptical of Lottie’s colorful language.

  “She loves a prank. Really, she once found herself stranded on top of Main with her dress caught on the bell. And in the rain. She’s legendary.”

  “I have a feeling they’ll say the same thing about you one day,” Anita said.

  “We shall see,” said Lottie, closing her eyes. “The worst fate I can think of is not to be talked about.”

  That, Anita was sure, would never be a problem for Lottie Taylor.

  CHAPTER 4

  The next morning found them leaving their hotel by carriage for Radcliffe. Lottie had cabled her cousin to say they would arrive at nine, after attending the 7:30 A.M. church service in town.

  “Have you visited Radcliffe before?” asked Lottie as the carriage wound its way to the small campus.

  “On one occasion,” said Anita, trying to calm her palpitating heart. “When I was home from Northfield. But it was just a brief visit. And in vain as I already intended to take the entrance exam for Vassar.”

  “Me, too. I was sure, even as a child, that there would be nowhere more splendid than Vassar.”

  As a child, thought Anita. It was when she knew, too.

  When she was ten years old, and already a very promising grade school student, Anita had overheard a white woman at her Episcopalian church telling the Reverend Phillips Brooks that her daughter was graduating from Vassar College in the spring. Other Trinity Church parishioners had overheard her and had gathered around to hear the story, as a woman pursuing higher education in 1882 was extremely rare. Vassar had been founded only twenty-one years earlier but already the women who had converged spoke about it as if this woman’s daughter had obtained a golden ticket to heaven. She called Vassar the most exclusive and the best school for women in America, and everyone around her agreed. So that was the way Anita first viewed a Vassar education, as something that could make well-to-do white women beam with pride and envy.

  The same summer, following worship at Trinity, Anita met the daughter in question, a confident fair-haired girl named Cora Shailer. Anita came down from the seats in the back upper gallery, which were free of charge and where the colored members of the congregation were relegated to, and walked to the first floor, where wealthy white parishioners rented the pews. She hovered on the edge of the group of women who had gathered after the service to hear about Cora’s time at Vassar. Halfway through her stories, Cora had seen Anita and smiled familiarly.

  “Anita Hemmings, I remember you,” she said with a welcoming expression. “Do you remember me?” she asked.

  Anita nodded yes, not because she remembered Cora, but because she had been imagining her for many months.

  “I’ve heard you’re a bright girl,” she said in the same kind tone. “You should attend Vassar in a few years.” She smiled again as the older women looked down at the young girl, all unaware that Anita was colored. “Keep it in mind,” said Cora before launching back into the gossip of her college days.

  From that moment on, Vassar never left Anita’s thoughts.

  She had always loved her studies and the way her parents beamed at her when she came home happy and with perfect grades, which was in part due to their reverence for learning. Anita had begun grammar school later than most, as her parents had waited to send her until there was a place open for a colored girl at the Prince School on Newbury Street in affluent Back Bay. They thought, even when Anita was young, that she showed too much intelligence to be just another face at the poorly funded schools in Roxbury. And their foresight had paid off.

  It wasn’t until five years after the conversation in church, when the dream of Vassar was still very much alive in Anita, that she became aware that her race would keep her from gaining admission, even if her character and intellectual capacity were worthy. She was, without question, her grammar school’s most promising student, and because of her academic standing, she had grown quite close to her teachers, and felt more kinship to them than to her peers. It was in this phase of intellectual curiosity, a year before she entered the Girls’ High School, that she spoke to someone other than family about Vassar.

  It was her seventh-year teacher at the Prince School, a stern yet well-meaning woman from a long line of Bostonians, who listened to Anita as she disclosed her desire to attend Vassar with the intention of becoming a teacher herself. With remorse, she informed her dedicated pupil that attending Vassar was out of the question for a Negro woman and urged Anita to consider Wellesley or the newly founded Radcliffe College.

  Shocked by the news, as Anita had thought Cora knew the truth about her race, she shared the brutal admissions policy with her mother. The following Sunday, Dora Hemmings confided in her close circle at the church. Her extremely bright daughter had had her dreams stamped out. It was within that supportive community that a young woman named Margaret Marshall—Mame to her friends—pulled Anita aside after worship and told her that of course there was a way. Very light-skinned herself, she recounted to Anita how she had passed as white to attend the good grammar and high school down in Christiansburg, Virginia, walking ten miles a day and lying to everyone about her race so that she could learn to read and write, unlike her siblings.

  “Passing to continue your education, to better your mind at the best school in America is not something you should look at shamefully. It is not an escape,” Mame had said while speaking to Anita in private. “People may try to scare you, carry on about psychological repercussions and betrayal, but I do not regret what I did. To live life without the Negro marker by your name, even for a short period of time, can expand your world. It’s something you should consider, Anita.”

  In the community of Roxbury, where the complexions ranged from dark to light, the subject of passing was often heard in conversation. Some believed it was the ultimate sin against the Negro race, and others—those who had relatives who had passed or had passed themselves—saw it as an occasional necessity. “They make us pass,” Mame had said. “If they would give us good schools, any rights at all, then we wouldn’t even have to consider it, would we? People escaped slavery through passing, saved their own lives, the lives of their families. It’s not all just a traitor’s behavior to live an easier existence. Anita, please heed my advice: do not waste your strong mind because some might disagree with the practice, might chastise you. When one passes for a higher purpose, it’s worth it. Go on and prove to those Vassar women that we can be them, too.”

  At fifteen years old, Anita hadn’t fully understood the strength of Mame’s words or the varying perspectives of her community on passing, but she was no stranger to the concept, having often been mistaken as white when she was without family or friends in Boston. And she knew stories of women who had passed to improve their positions in the world, and had heard them labeled as weak, as defectors, but it was the first time she ever considered passing herself. For education, thought Anita, it felt right.

  When she shared Mame Marshall’s idea with her parents that evening, an idea that she had quickly embraced, they agreed. A Vassar education was worth lying for.

  Anita still held that conviction close to her heart and she let the powerful memories accompany her as she and Lottie approached the school. The hansom soon deposited both women in front of Fay House, the building that housed every aspect of life at Radcliffe. With its mere three floors, it resembled an elegant but diminutive family mansion more than it did their college’s soaring Main Building.

  “We’re to go to the reception room, and one of the maids will send up a visitor’s card,” said Lottie.

  “Just like at Vassar,” Anita said, looking all around her for Gertrud
e’s recognizable face.

  “Not quite. The girls do not reside on campus here, no exceptions, but Lilly promised she would be in the library studying. She’s doing so on purpose, I’m sure, to appear as diligent as possible.” Lottie paid the carriage driver and they walked into the building, past the Radcliffe girls, who looked nearly identical to the Vassar girls—the same capriciousness, same chatter, same airs of privilege and intelligence.

  “Miss Louise Taylor to see Miss Elizabeth Taylor,” said Lottie to the woman monitoring visitors that day. She handed the young woman her card and explained that Lilly was her cousin.

  “Of course, miss,” she replied, and left to fetch Lilly from the third-floor library.

  “It’s pretty here,” said Lottie, looking up at the ceiling. “Is it prettier than Vassar, do you think?”

  “Certainly not,” Anita said, looking around her at the small single staircase. “Not even a fair competition.”

  Suddenly, they heard Lottie’s name called out in a high, melodic voice. They turned to see Lilly approaching, all smiles and with the same blond curls, deep blue eyes, and cherubic features as her cousin.

  “Lottie and Anita!” she said, stretching out her arms. She gave the Vassar girls each kisses on the cheek, her plaid taffeta dress swishing against them, and took their hands. “I’m so happy you’re both here! Lottie warned me that you were the prettiest girl at Vassar, Anita. Isn’t she brave to room with you?”

  “Oh, that’s not—” Anita tried to protest, but Lilly stopped her.

  “People see what they see, Anita dear.” She smiled, and Anita was happy to note that she shared her cousin’s gaiety.

  “Are you two really going to that brutish football game today?” Lilly asked as she led them out of the parlor.