The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  “Most are far down south,” Anita said, looking up at her friend in desperation. “Plus, I fear . . . who can say how the educated Negro community will feel about me now knowing I passed for four years. They might shun me as well.” She looked away from Bessie and down to the ground, which seemed to be wobbling back and forth like an anchored boat. “Even a high school or grammar school teaching job will be out of the question now. Who will want me, a woman who was in the newspaper for her deception?”

  “Don’t say that, Anita—” Bessie started but Anita, growing hysterical, cut her off.

  “All my work, the reason I went to Vassar in the first place was so that I could better myself and become an educator, and now that is entirely impossible. It was all for nothing. My efforts, my secrecy, have only achieved shame and public humiliation!”

  “Anita, that may not be the case,” her brother said, putting his hand on her bent-over back. “There could be schools that, after a certain amount of time passes, won’t remember this.”

  “Frederick, you know as well as I do that I will never be able to shake this notoriety,” she said without looking up. “The liar. The Negro girl from Vassar. It will bar me from employment for the rest of my life. And Lottie knew that being a professor was all I aspired to. She knew what the consequences of this article would be. I was such a fool. Forgive me, Frederick,” she said, looking up finally. “I made a terrible mistake.”

  Anita thought back to Mame Marshall, the woman who had first told her that even though Vassar barred Negroes from attending, she might make herself the exception. She cringed at the thought of Mrs. Marshall reading this article and the embarrassment she would feel for Anita, the guilt she might endure for having placed the idea of passing in her head in the first place. Mame had moved to Canada after Anita’s freshman year at Vassar and had not returned to Boston since, and for the first time, Anita was glad. Perhaps she would not see American newspapers where she lived. But others would. Cora Shailer, Lillian Peoples, the members of her church. She had been such a source of pride for them. What would she be now?

  Frederick didn’t respond to his sister, instead rereading the article, his eyes lingering on the passage that mentioned him as a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He took the paper from Bessie and read it aloud. “The other children, while they are fine looking, are not quite as light as Miss Hemmings. But this fact must be taken into consideration, that in colored families the children are likely to be graduated in tints from a dark brown to a very fair white, or the reverse.”

  The paper did not name the writer, but Frederick was quite certain that whoever this sensationalist, cowardly reporter was, this man who had followed his family around without their knowledge, was no Negro and no expert on the Negro race.

  Elizabeth looked down at her dark, bare arm and started to cry again “Should we stay here for the rest of the summer?” she asked, burying her face in Anita’s lap. “I don’t want to go back to Boston. They’ll be chasing us.”

  “No one will be chasing us,” said Frederick, hugging his sister. “You’ll be safe at home in Boston. You’ll be safe with us.”

  But he was wrong.

  CHAPTER 29

  When the Hemmingses returned to Boston some days later, they were immediately faced with newspaper reporters knocking on their door, clamoring to see Anita, to interview her and, Anita thought, to gawk at the shade of her skin and that of everyone else in the family. Robert Sr. did not let any of them past the stoop.

  Anita watched from her small upstairs bedroom window, but she never made herself available, choosing to stay locked inside for more than a week. She would not pose for a photograph. She would not discuss her days at Vassar. Instead she mourned losing her future educational possibilities, her career, and the identity that she had had for four years.

  One morning at the end of August when Robert Sr. left for work at his usual hour, rather than very early to avoid reporters as he had been doing, he was cornered by a man from the Globe who refused to leave him without a statement. Anita watched the scene from her window, unable to intervene. Her presence would only make things worse.

  The next morning, her father’s words were featured in the paper in another two-column story topped with an illustration of Anita.

  Frederick read it to the family in their small dining room.

  “Here is Father’s quote,” he said, pointing. “It’s rather long, Father. I do hope they leave us all alone after obtaining this much from you.” He moved as Anita leaned in to look at her likeness, a sketch that was far less flattering than the first one she had seen. “First, Father denies that Anita told her professors that she was a Negro. He also denies that her tuition was paid by a white benefactor. Where that rumor came from, I don’t know.”

  “Is that circulating?” asked Anita in horror, thinking about her father working two arduous jobs to send her to school. After the first article they had all read in Cottage City, Anita had been guarded from the ones that followed. This was the first she had read since that afternoon.

  “In several articles it has stated such,” said Frederick. “As if we were unable to send you to college because we are Negro. A white benefactor, such an offensive assumption. Father had been saving for our educations for decades.”

  “These reporters will invent anything to make us appear unworthy,” said Dora, with tears leaking from her brown eyes, her permanent state for the past week.

  “They will, and they have,” said Frederick. “But Father’s quote is very strong. Here is what he says about Anita and Vassar: ‘We know she went there as a white girl and remained there as such. As long as she conducted herself in a manner becoming a lady, she never thought it necessary to proclaim the fact that her parents were mulattoes. Anita was always a quiet, studious girl, and from the time she first went to school, books were her chief pleasure. She did not care for the play of other children, but much preferred the companionship of her favorite authors. Vassar was always her favorite college. She always wanted to go to college when she went to the girls’ high school [sic] in Boston, but there never seemed to be any doubt in her mind as to which college she desired to enter most. Vassar it was, first, last, and always.’ ”

  Anita tried to listen, but she could not stop looking at the illustration that accompanied it. She was in a newspaper, her likeness and her story, but for the worst reasons. For deceit. For lying. And not just once, but for years, to hundreds of people. She bent down and took her mother’s hand, crying with her.

  Later that day, Robert Sr. decided that to better shield Anita from the reporters, she would go to stay with Bessie and William in Cambridge and not be allowed to read the newspapers.

  The Lewises were happy to take her in, and Bessie tried her best to keep Anita from crying and sleeping her days away. She came in to check on her every morning, and every morning Anita had to apologize for her state, her bed a tangle of sweaty sheets, her eyes bloodshot.

  “I’m terrified,” she confessed one morning to her friend, while pulling her knees to her chest, still in her nightclothes. “I don’t know how to proceed. Who can I become now? School is out of the question and I am unemployable. I don’t recognize myself anymore.”

  “But I know how you should proceed,” said Bessie. “You are very hirable, Anita. You are. You are still a model for education in the Negro community. Even if that hateful girl shouted out your secret in the end, you still accomplished what you set out to. You, a Negro, graduated from Vassar College on your own merit. Don’t ever forget that.”

  Anita looked up at her with gratitude. She had already begun to forget it.

  “Now, a woman William knows quite well is employed at the Boston Public Library,” said Bessie brightly. “That would be a perfect job for you. Perhaps you have the strength to go and see her about possible openings. They have a foreign cataloguing department that would suit you well, with your strength in languages. Once they hear you are highly competent in not only Gree
k and Latin but French and Italian, as well, they’ll take you at once.”

  “Do you really think so?” asked Anita slowly, letting go of her legs. “Even with this notoriety? They wouldn’t. Would they?”

  “Mrs. Greenwood, the woman William knows, is a Negro and active in Negro education. I imagine she will be sympathetic to your story. I hope very much that she is.”

  The two decided that Anita would go to the library the next day to meet with Mrs. Greenwood and that Bessie would accompany her. It had been nearly a week since Mr. Hemmings had given his lengthy statement to the Globe, so they waited for the streetcar without making any special effort to avoid attention. Surely Anita’s story no longer held the public’s interest. But within minutes, two newspaper reporters from the Boston Post had approached them.

  “What should we do?” said Anita in a panic. She recognized both of the men from their numerous visits to her parents’ front door.

  “Let’s speak to them,” said Bessie firmly. “We each give one short statement, and then perhaps they will leave you alone for good and go on to the next story. I hope they will find one worthy of printing instead of trying to ruin another woman’s life.”

  After Anita had put off the reporters as best she could, with Bessie speaking on her behalf, they took the streetcar into Boston, changing twice to reach the library.

  “I’ll wait for you here,” said Bessie looking up at the McKim-designed building that had graced Copley Square for the past two years.

  Anita entered the library with timid steps, asking the man at the front desk for Mrs. Greenwood and praying that no one would recognize her face from the newspapers.

  “And who should I say is here to see her?” the man asked Anita.

  She looked down and murmured, “Miss Anita Hemmings,” letting him see only the top of her head.

  He left to fetch Mrs. Greenwood, and Anita took a seat near the entrance. She looked up at the vaulted ceiling and marble mosaic and thought about Lottie’s house and the one and only time she had slept in its marble halls. She knew now she would never sleep in such a place again.

  “Are you Miss Hemmings?” a middle-aged woman said, interrupting her reverie.

  Anita stood up at once and extended her ungloved hand.

  “I am, and you must be Mrs. Greenwood,” said Anita, following her through the middle one of three wide aisles.

  “That I am,” she said, her head and neck straight as a pin as she moved. “Come, we will walk to the Abbey Room and discuss your potential employment as a foreign language cataloguer. You would work mainly on translation and bibliography. Do you feel you have the competencies to do so?”

  “I do,” said Anita, hastening to keep up with her. “I just graduated from college and am competent in seven languages, including Greek and Latin.”

  After Anita had spent two hours with Mrs. Greenwood, writing and translating in several foreign languages, the woman seemed pleased and took Anita on a short tour of the library, pointing out the impressive mural paintings of the Quest for the Holy Grail.

  Anita nodded, excited to be near such artistic and architectural beauty again. This was not the dream she had nurtured since she arrived at Vassar and fell further in love with her Greek and Latin studies, but it might be the only place open to hiring her.

  After Mrs. Greenwood had finished her tour, she asked Anita if she had any questions. Anita had but one.

  “Do you not mind what has been written about me in the newspaper, Mrs. Greenwood?” she asked plainly. “That I am the subject of a story which has traveled from coast to coast, and not a flattering one at that. Are you not embarrassed to have me here?”

  “Your story?” said the woman, moving closer to Anita to let several patrons pass. “That you are a Negro? Is that even a story? I have been known as a Negro my entire life.”

  “Of course,” said Anita. “What I meant was not my race, but that I attended Vassar under false pretenses. That I have been branded a liar, publicly humiliated.”

  “What other choice did you have?” Mrs. Greenwood asked, not missing a beat.

  “None,” said Anita, the word feeling soothing as she said it. “To attend Vassar, I had no other choice at all.”

  “No, you did not,” said Mrs. Greenwood. “And from what Mr. Lewis wrote about you, they have educated you properly at Vassar and I am sure you will do quite well with us. I will see you on Monday, Miss Hemmings. Eight o’clock sharp. And please wear a dress you can carry books in. This job requires one to have one’s arms full.”

  Anita, shocked by the stranger’s open-mindedness, remembered to thank her and hurried out of the library, back to the safety of Bessie’s home.

  The next day, as Anita and Bessie expected, their statements to the reporters who had accosted them appeared in the newspaper.

  Anita’s was terse: “I have been unnecessarily drawn into public notice and refuse to say anything about the matter.”

  But Bessie had done her best to defend her friend, and the paper quoted her in full. “Miss Hemmings is entitled to all the honor of having obtained her education at Vassar, which has not reflected an atom of disgrace on that college nor upon any other pupils,” she said. “She is good and true, brilliant in many things, refined and always ladylike in her actions. Her reception at college tells the story in itself. She was admired there and put forward in all things. They loved her, no matter what you may hear, as to know her is to bow to her pleasing ways. She is an honor to her race and she is an honor to Boston, and, I must say it, she is better than many other American girls. Because her face did not tell her secret, why should she go about placarded ‘I am colored’ or, for that matter, what difference should color mean to one like Miss Hemmings, who could enter society and be not only an ornament but prove her wealth of refinement?”

  When she and Bessie finished reading, Anita glimpsed a newspaper she hadn’t been shown resting in the large book Bessie had been pretending to read. She had left it open accidentally to come over and console Anita. The paper was another issue of the Boston Post, and Anita could see it contained still another article about her, this one accompanied by a sketch of her parents’ home as well as another one of her face. MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMAN IN THE COLLEGE AND CHUM OF ARISTOCRATIC GIRLS, the headline read, followed by a subheading: THE DAUGHTERS OF WEALTH ARE SHOCKED. Anita could imagine Lottie writing that herself.

  She stood up and reached for the paper.

  “Oh, Anita, no!” cried Bessie. “Do not read that nonsense, please! It was obtuse of me to have left it out.”

  Anita ignored her. She read the headline again, then the first column, and started laughing until she bent double.

  “What is it?” said Bessie, smiling. She hadn’t heard her friend laugh since the day she ran to her on the beach in Cottage City.

  “ ‘Young men students had paid court to her. The flower of Harvard’s young manhood had eagerly asked for an introduction to the beautiful Vassar girl, and after the introduction had become her willing slaves, enchanted by her beauty, her refined manner, her air of aristocratic distinction, and the soft tones of her voice,’ ” Anita read aloud. “ ‘Not only among Harvard men was she a society idol, but Columbia men, Princeton men, and the democratic sons of Yale all alike fell under the spell of her charm.’ ”

  Anita’s laughter rang out again, and she dropped the paper onto the table. “Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous, Bessie? They make me out to be Helen of Troy! The only man who was ever enamored with me was Porter Hamilton, and now I have my doubts that he ever really was.”

  “I firmly believe that many men were desperately in love with you,” said Bessie, thrilled at this flash of her friend’s old lightheartedness. “As I told those reporters, to know you is to bow to your pleasing ways. Perhaps all these sons of Yale wrote to the paper en masse to declare their love for you just yesterday.”

  “Despite my race,” said Anita, serious again.

  “Despite your race,” Bessie echoe
d.

  In the days that followed, the Boston papers reported that the story about Anita was also appearing in dozens of publications across the country, from the New York Times to a newspaper in Hawaii. All of America was seeing her likeness and reading how she deceived the nation’s top women’s college and its elite community.

  Once Anita realized the reach of her story, she fell into her depression again, wanting only to shut herself indoors, but Bessie wouldn’t allow it. She saw her off to the streetcar on her first day of work at the library and didn’t turn around when Anita called her name from the road.

  Though it took several weeks, the library helped keep Anita afloat. Negro and white employees alike were kind to her, keeping reporters at bay and treating her as if she were not the eye of a page-one scandal, but simply another intelligent college graduate who had joined them in their important work.

  When Anita came home one evening after two weeks at the library, surprised to have made it to that milestone, Bessie greeted her and dropped several letters in front of her, only smiling when Anita looked at her in alarm. “I am hoping for the best from these, Anita. I don’t think people would write if they had hatred toward you. They would just ignore you,” said Bessie. She explained that she had been in Boston that day, as well, visiting Anita’s family to find out whether the flood of reporters coming to Sussex Street had started to thin. She assured Anita that it had, and left her alone to open her mail.

  The first two letters were from Belle and Caroline, both declaring their unfailing support. Anita held them to her chest for a moment before she opened two others, one from Miss Macurdy and the other from Medora Higgins, the former president of the Federal Debating Society. To Anita’s surprise and pleasure, they both expressed similar sentiments.

  But the last letter she opened came as a much bigger surprise.

  Dear Miss Hemmings,

  As you know, I guessed your true race the evening we were formally introduced at the opera, as I was certain I had seen you in Roxbury as the New Year approached. You also have similar coloring, similar striking features, to my sister Carrie. I do consider her my sister, if you wondered when we spoke, and not just someone I care for financially.