The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  She boarded ten minutes later, apologizing as her bag grazed passengers’ legs, and moved to the center of the cold, crowded car.

  She was staring out the window at the city’s slushy streets, thinking about the younger siblings she hadn’t seen since September, when a familiar voice rang out.

  “Miss Hemmings! Is that you there in that pretty plaid coat? I glimpsed you boarding at the station and said to myself, that girl with the noble profile looks just like Miss Anita Hemmings!”

  Anita looked and saw that it was indeed the voice of Lillian Peoples, a prominent Negro member of Trinity Church, where she had been a communicant since her childhood.

  “Hello, Mrs. Peoples, how nice to see you,” she croaked. “I’m just returning from school,” she added, letting her eyes make a circle around her. She did not want to be seen talking to a Negro yet. She started to turn her back, though she knew it was a slight, but she couldn’t risk it until she was safe within the confines of Roxbury.

  “I’ll see you and your family at church on Christmas morning?” said Mrs. Peoples before Anita could turn around fully.

  “Of course,” she replied, still angling her body away from her yet showing her face slightly so as not to be overtly rude.

  “And will you be in town until then?” the woman said, oblivious to Anita’s unease. Anita wished for just one moment that there were segregated sections on cars in Boston. If someone who knew her from school saw her speaking colloquially to Mrs. Peoples, she would be in a terrible position. Next time she would have to save her money, or take on extra tutoring hours, so she could hire a hansom.

  “I’ll be in Cambridge a few days,” Anita replied softly, accepting that this conversation with the dark-skinned Mrs. Peoples was not ending soon. “My friend Elizabeth Baker of Cambridge is marrying—”

  “Mr. William Henry Lewis!” Mrs. Peoples shouted for the whole car to hear.

  “Yes, William Henry Lewis,” said Anita in a faint whisper, starting to sweat from dread.

  “One of the best and the brightest,” said Mrs. Peoples with pride, as if she’d raised the man herself. “Amherst football star, Harvard football star, captain of the Harvard team, all-American, beloved coach—the first one they ever paid, mind you—famous lawyer, good friend of the esteemed Mr. W. E. B. Du Bois, and so very handsome, too. What a lucky girl Miss Baker is. They’ll be moving over here, I hope, very soon.”

  “Elizabeth still has a year and a half left at Wellesley, Mrs. Peoples. She’s a year behind me. Class of 1898,” Anita corrected her.

  “Oh no, Miss Baker won’t be finishing up at the college,” said Mrs. Peoples, shaking her head with conviction. “She’s to be married, so she’s left Wellesley now. Didn’t you know, Anita?”

  “Of her marriage, of course,” said Anita, surprised. “I am her only bridesmaid. But not to finish Wellesley, I suppose I had hoped—”

  “But marrying Mr. Lewis is ever so much more important than a Wellesley College degree,” Mrs. Peoples cut in. “Elizabeth was at Wellesley College for several years. I’m sure she’s become quite an accomplished young lady. Strong in mathematics, they say. That should help with the housekeeping. She’ll be able to calculate the perfect cleaning timetable and how to divide the food and income among their future children. I do hope they’ll have many; he’s such a smart and handsome man. He has to pass along those good genetics. And Elizabeth, she’s a beautiful girl, too. That exquisite straight hair, just like yours, dear. She’ll make an excellent wife for that remarkable man. One of our true people. It is too bad she became acquainted with him before you did, Miss Hemmings.”

  Mrs. Peoples continued speaking, but Anita had ceased listening. She had heard the news about Bessie and William’s engagement just two weeks before from her brother, who had passed on Bessie’s request that she be her bridesmaid. And while she had been overjoyed for her friend, she was under the impression that Bessie would be staying at school, since Wellesley was so near Cambridge, where Mr. Lewis coached the Harvard football team.

  To leave school for marriage, even for a man like William Henry Lewis, who had pulled himself up from a family of former slaves in Berkley, Virginia, and gone on to Amherst College and Harvard Law, was unfathomable to Anita. She was sure a good man would wait for you to obtain a degree when you were so close. Bessie had turned twenty-seven that year, well past what society deemed the suitable marrying age for women, but Bessie was not like other women, thought Anita. She was far more intelligent. Why couldn’t they have a long engagement? It was true that Mr. Lewis was one of the most prominent men in the Negro community and a legend at Harvard, where he coached the football team—he had even authored a book on the subject. But surely a man with such an education would appreciate education in a wife?

  “Isn’t this your stop, dear?” said Mrs. Peoples loudly, knifing through Anita’s thoughts.

  Anita looked around. She saw the intersection of Tremont and Hammond streets on her left and picked up her bag. “Thank you for alerting me, and Merry Christmas, Mrs. Peoples,” she said as she stepped off the car, thrilled to have shed her surprise companion.

  Alone. Anita was finally standing three blocks from home, safely in her neighborhood and ready to slowly become the Negro Anita Hemmings again. She had been told at a young age that fewer than 1 percent of Negro children attended high school and almost none went to college, but that her family knew she was going to be exceptional. And it wasn’t just her family. It was her community, her church—women like Mame Marshall—her pastor, her teachers. In the Negro community of Roxbury, everyone knew that Anita Hemmings attended Vassar College, and that she was there as a white woman. A necessary evil, it was agreed, the price they had to pay to send one of their own to the best. But Anita was eager to shrug it all off for several weeks. She wanted to see her family, to spend Christmas in Boston, and to sit by a window and dream about Porter, about Chicago and the life that was waiting for her there.

  The way Porter continuously spoke about his parents had made a great impression on her, and made her just as hopeful about her life with him as Porter’s sterling character had. He called them “very modern.” And his mother was active in the suffrage movement and a firm believer in women’s education. The women who were behind the vote were often the same ones who believed in equality of the Negro.

  Anita imagined Chicago as a place where she could continue her education, perhaps even work as a professor, but also be a wife and mother with the full backing of Porter and his family. And perhaps one day, she could even tell them the truth. She had often thought during her first semester what it would be like to tell Lottie her secret, but she knew she never would. Lottie, even with her contemporary ideas, was from New York, and adhered to the city’s social mores. Porter did not. He was a world apart. And he loved her. One day, she thought, perhaps.

  “It’s you!” said Elizabeth when she opened the door. Anita’s sister was twenty now, and though she didn’t share Anita’s academic bent, she had the kindest heart in the family. Her gray wool day dress, which had been Anita’s, was too loose on her frame, and Anita knew that with her delicate bones, she would never fill it out.

  “I’ve been waiting by the window all day looking for you. I’m so glad you’re home safe,” she said wrapping her thin arms around her sister’s shoulders and humming a carol. Anita and Elizabeth had the same rolling soprano voice and wide, beautiful faces, but Elizabeth could not have passed for white. Anita had once overheard a woman in church, a light-skinned woman, say, “It is almost a blessing that Elizabeth isn’t as clever as her sister,” and since that day, Anita had fought to remind everyone that she was.

  “You’re home,” came another voice from inside the house, and out walked Robert Jr., the youngest Hemmings. At fourteen, he had just started high school and was looking more like Frederick every day, though he was already taller. Unlike Anita—who had the lightest skin in the family, along with her father—he would never be mistaken for anything but a Negro.<
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  Robert Jr. helped Anita with her case, and the three siblings went to the back of the small, two-story brick row house, where their mother was in the kitchen.

  “Anita!” she said, turning from the stove to hold her oldest child tightly. “I wasn’t expecting you until very late.” The fabric of their voluminous sleeves was pressed down by each other’s arms, and when Anita finally pulled away, she stayed within arm’s length of her mother to look at her. Anita’s mother always appeared blacker to her when she had been away for several months.

  “Are those tears on your face, Anita? Don’t cry, now. You must be simply exhausted. Eat something to warm you,” said Dora Hemmings, wiping her hands on a towel and taking bread and cheese from a shelf. “We are all so happy to see you. And we’ll all be together soon, so stop this crying. Your father isn’t home yet and neither is Frederick, but it shouldn’t be too long now.”

  Anita knew her mother was used to Elizabeth crying, but never her steel-spined eldest, and she worried for a moment that Dora might suspect something was wrong. In truth, it was the torrent of guilt about envisioning her blissful life in Chicago with Porter just moments ago that had her in tears. For if she were to have that, she would never be able to have this. Porter, a new city, it could mean never visiting her family, her home, again. For even if she told Porter the truth one day, that day was years, maybe even decades away. Her stomach turned at the thought. How unfair, the choices that faced her. How horribly unfair.

  “Yes,” said Anita, speaking of her father. “Frederick mentioned he had taken another job. He’s working two shifts as a janitor now, as well as being a coachman?”

  “He is, but it’s all right,” her mother said. “He likes the work fine. It just means he isn’t home as often, but we’ve all gotten used to it.”

  Anita thought about her father, a bighearted man with the work ethic of a penniless new immigrant, but who she worried lacked the strength to work two jobs now that he was in his mid-fifties.

  “Now sit with me, and tell me everything about college,” said Dora, drying her daughter’s tears and leading her into the living room to join Elizabeth and Robert Jr. In her small hands, she carried a tray with tea and Anita’s favorite cinnamon cake. Dora, with her extremely limited schooling, had never been able to help her daughter with anything academic, but every time Anita came home from college, Dora looked at her in greater awe. Her beautiful daughter, able to speak Greek, Latin, Italian, and French; who looked through telescopes at stars and spent evenings in chemistry labs, meeting women as intelligent as she was. Her husband came home with an aching back every night from sweeping school floors, cleaning windows, and driving ungrateful men around town. And she herself spent the summers making extra money running a small boardinghouse on Martha’s Vineyard. And each year, Anita returned a little more worldly, and increasingly different from her mother.

  “Frederick says that you’re rooming with one of the richest women in America,” said Elizabeth, as her mother handed her a cup of tea.

  “Don’t you dare say Frederick said this or Frederick said that,” Dora warned. “You know better than to gossip about your siblings.”

  But the face she showed Anita when she handed her a slice of cake and a cup of warm tea meant that she wanted to hear about her daughter’s wealthy roommate, too.

  “Yes, I am,” said Anita. “Louise Taylor—we all call her Lottie—she is a part of the Taylor family of New York. It’s true, she’s exceptionally rich, but more importantly, very charming and intelligent. She’s quite a strong chemistry student, like Frederick, and loves the Orient. She’s even sailed all the way to Japan.”

  “Japan is in the Pacific Ocean and is shaped like a string bean,” Elizabeth piped up.

  “Yes, that is somewhat correct,” said Anita, pleased.

  She leaned back in her curved wooden chair, not bothering to adjust her traveling dress, and let her body mold to it. She had missed her family deeply, she realized. It wasn’t something she let herself think much about at Vassar, but these faces were always with her, in everything she did.

  “And how are your studies?” asked her mother. “Did your first-semester examinations go well?”

  “Very well,” said Anita, putting down her empty plate. Her mother quickly put another slice of cake on it before she could protest. “I had the top grade in Greek for the fourth year in a row.”

  Dora Hemmings put down her china to clasp her hands together with evident pride. She had grown up in slave quarters in Virginia before the Civil War and had lived in not much better after the war ended. She was married at eighteen, had Anita a few months later, but somehow, by some miracle, God had turned her daughter into this woman. Watching her mother, Anita thought of what she had told her when she passed the Vassar entrance exam: “I had one hundred hands guiding me to school. But the two most important were yours.”

  At that moment, as Dora was studying Anita’s pensive face, the front door opened and in walked Frederick with Robert Sr., letting the winter inside with them.

  “Look what the snow blew in,” Anita’s father said when he saw his eldest.

  “Father!” said Anita, a warmth of feeling taking her completely over as he came into the room. She stood and embraced him and Frederick. His body felt spare, even in his layered winter clothes.

  “You’ve been working until now?” A clock somewhere in the house had just struck 9 P.M. Anita loved hearing the sound of clocks rather than bells.

  “Everyone appreciates a clean school, I imagine,” he said with a smile. “I’m cleaning at Frederick’s former high school. Not a bad place. And look at everything that institution did for my intelligent child. I should be giving it something back.”

  Frederick smiled and put his hand on his father’s left shoulder, which had started to slump unnaturally.

  That night the family stayed up later than they should have, and when Elizabeth and Robert Jr. went upstairs to bed, the Hemmings parents and Frederick and Anita sat by the fire in the small living room and watched the snow create a scene of undisturbed perfection outside.

  “Look at you two,” said Robert. “Six more months, and you’ll both have college degrees. How did my children turn out so intelligent?”

  “You told us we would sleep outside in the hail and snow if we ever came home with poor grades,” said Frederick, laughing.

  “Did I say that?” asked Robert, his light gray eyes smiling along. His thin face, different from Anita’s and Dora’s rounder ones, was covered in well-groomed whiskers, cut in the popular English style. Despite his evening of janitorial work, he had changed into a wool lounge suit before coming home to greet his daughter properly. “I’m so pleased I said such an awful thing. It seems to have been effective. Perhaps I should threaten Elizabeth and Robert, too.”

  “Anita,” said her mother, when her father had fallen quiet. “Are you lacking for anything in school?”

  Anita knew this was the way her mother had of asking: Do the others still think you are a wealthy white student instead of a poor Negro one?

  “I’m not lacking for a thing, Mother. I’m still tutoring in Poughkeepsie twice a week,” she said. “And I earn enough from that for my clothes and outings. You both do enough by paying the expensive tuition; I can manage the rest. As for the other matter, everything is as it should be.”

  “I’m so glad to hear it. We do worry so much about you there, hiding certain realities, and for what? To have the education you’re entitled to, I suppose. I wish things could be different for you.”

  “But they might never be,” said Anita, reaching for her mother’s hand while trying to keep Porter Hamilton out of her thoughts.

  “Don’t say that,” said Dora. “Just finish your year, come home to us, and be my daughter again.”

  “I’m still your daughter,” said Anita, feeling tears of guilt building in her throat.

  “Of course you are,” said Dora.

  Anita got up from her chair and went to sit by h
er mother, folding her body onto the floor and letting her head fall into her lap.

  “You’re my brave girl,” said her mother, smoothing her daughter’s straight black hair, identical to her father’s. “You’re my smart, brave girl.”

  For another hour, the four of them sat in the sparsely furnished living room and spoke about the Christmas holiday, about Anita’s and Frederick’s studies and what the two of them hoped to do after graduation. Knowing that her parents could not pay for any more schooling, as they had to save for her two youngest siblings, Anita did not mention her plans for graduate school and instead maneuvered the conversation toward her brother. Frederick wanted to start work as a chemist immediately, and was aware that his chances of obtaining employment were best in Boston, where the MIT professors could assist him.

  Anita looked at her father flush with pride as he listened to Frederick speak of his future. Robert Hemmings Sr. had never been able to make plans or weigh choices the way his two oldest children were now doing, brimming with optimism. His mother, Sarah, was illiterate her whole life. Impregnated by his white father as a young woman, she had never married and had little to offer her son in their tiny wooden dwelling in Virginia. She gave him love, rags for clothes, and a strong head for independence, but that was all. His children had been given so much more.

  In Robert’s rural southern town, there hadn’t been a school for Negroes until 1866, and by that time he was twenty-three, had seen the horrors of the Civil War and had dreams to leave the South forever. He and Dora had married at twenty-eight and eighteen respectively, and had left Virginia without a backward glance. Anita had come along shortly after their arrival in Massachusetts. Robert and Dora Hemmings had made it plain to their children that they had no fondness for the state of Virginia but refrained from speaking about their childhoods past that. Massachusetts hadn’t brought them wealth, but it had brought them hope. Their children went to fine integrated Boston schools; they weren’t scared for their lives. They were only scared for Anita.