The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  With Darrow serving as my role model, I dared to believe in the impossible. He took on impossible cases and won. He made me want to become a lawyer. Thinking back to the time when my father gave me that Darrow book, I remember him being wistful, and how he told me of his regret that he had not become a lawyer.

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  If he answered, I have no memory of what he said. I remember more his sense of resignation. Maybe that interchange planted a seed; I don’t know. Maybe it made me think about how Bill and Lorraina led their lives; I don’t remember. I do remember wondering a lot about it, and that I didn’t feel comfortable with the thoughts I had—as if they were an invasion of my father’s world. I never asked my father about it again. On some level I knew I didn’t want to hear the answer, but that moment with my dad marked my fantasizing about doing something important with my life.

  That was around the time that Uncle Al stopped calling me Blackie and started calling me Counselor.

  3

  Culver Military Academy and Harvard

  On May 17, 1954, with Culver Military Academy’s commencement a few days away, something infinitely more important happened that would forever change the course of American life. There was no way I could know that it would be the cornerstone of my life’s work. Back then, however, I missed it entirely.

  As a cadet I was waiting for the marching band to blare the John Philip Sousa music that signaled the high spectacle of the garrison parade, with its precision marching, booming howitzers, and daring horsemanship. A little ambivalent, I was also thinking about the formal ball with the brilliant saber-arch salute honoring our regimental commander and his date. And I suppose I was also thinking about freedom from the strictures of military school as we headed off into the lazy days of summer, which would end with me entering my freshman year at Harvard.

  It was no time for the news of the day, no matter how momentous. Not even if the United States Supreme Court ruled in a case that would put an end to state-mandated public school segregation. The Court based its decision in Brown v. Board of Education to no small degree on the theory that segregation taught black children that they were inferior to white children, doing permanent damage to their self-esteem. That, the court said, irreparably harmed them, affecting their ability to learn and function in society. Brown described the fallout from segregation in stark terms, stating forcefully that its effects were hard or impossible to undo. Essentially Chief Justice Warren’s opinion signaled what should have been obvious but what was not to most white Americans: that segregation was directly responsible not only for the entrenched social inequality between black and white Americans, but all manner of other social ills. Based on its findings, the Court ruled that the South’s segregated schools violated the Constitution. Far more important than any of the speeches we cadets heard during our graduation was that ruling, joined by all nine justices, including one from the Deep South, which set the nation on a new course.

  I have no memory of that decision. I am sure there was a story about the case in the Indianapolis Star, and I am equally sure I didn’t read it. It probably led the nightly news too, though I had no way of listening at Culver. Faculty members must have talked about it, but not with us. Some, I am sure, would have applauded. But others might have reacted negatively. To put the ruling in perspective, Indiana was still home to school boards that openly segregated black from white children, and the Ku Klux Klan was still active in the state. Had I thought about it, I would have felt that the Supreme Court did the right thing. But I didn’t think about it, although as one of a handful of Jews, I had a few experiences of another form of discrimination at Culver—anti-Semitism. Even then, however, I knew better than to compare my tame encounters with what it was like to be black.

  Also at that point in my life, I considered segregation to be a Southern problem. I thought we were more enlightened in the North. Slaves hadn’t built our roads or our grand public buildings. We hadn’t based our culture and economy on Jim Crow rules. We celebrated Lincoln’s birthday, and let blacks ride anywhere they wanted on the bus. We weren’t still fighting the Civil War—but the South was, which was preposterous because we’d won it. I probably felt on some level that those backward Southerners needed to think more like us. In other words, I had no idea how widespread segregation was. Although slaves hadn’t built our roads or public buildings, I never then thought about the all-white workforces and unions in the various trades that built and maintained everything important. I was surrounded by discrimination, but I didn’t recognize it.

  We were cloistered at Culver. The campus was located in a rural county. Brown was about public schools, and I hadn’t attended public school since PS 6, so even if I had heard about the Supreme Court ruling the whole thing would still have been abstract.

  Anyway, I was a teenager. That alone was enough to explain my lack of interest in the news. My days were occupied by being worried about the way I looked and being seriously agitated about not having a date for the ball. Going with my twenty-seven-year-old cousin, Helaine, was mortifying, even if she was beautiful. She came from New York City with my family to attend my graduation, and I was grateful to her, but everyone would know she wasn’t a real date, and her presence only served to underscore the reality of my datelessness. That was way more important than some faraway Supreme Court ruling about what black children endured. Discrimination, to me, was personal. It was about being Jewish and dateless. Most of the other graduating cadets had dates, but in the wilds of Indiana, Christian girls almost never went out with Jewish guys. A friend of mine once offered to get me a blind date, but confided that he would have to tell the girl in advance that I was Jewish. It was humiliating. In addition to my excitement at going to Harvard, my outsider status as a Jew at Culver definitely contributed to my eagerness to move on. And I had heard it was easy to get dates in college.

  * * *

  Back in New York City, I had Bill and Lorraina to dote on me when I went to my grandparents’ house. I assumed they would stay there forever. Domestic work was not a job where you could easily leave a family and work for another, because that required references and answers that could be hard to wrangle. Thinking of the past—with Bill and Lorraina living in the servant’s room in our apartment off the pantry in a space just wide enough for a twin bed, a narrow passageway leading to a bathroom the size of two bath mats—was always pleasurable. That room had been a sanctuary before I was sent away to Culver. Curling up at the foot of their bed on the nights my parents were out on the town remains a fond memory. Whatever we talked about has been swallowed by the fog of time past, but the being-there part is imprinted on my memory like few other things from childhood—Bill with his hair slicked down and a stocking on his head, Lorraina in her robe and wearing a hairnet.

  Still, I would see Bill and Lorraina at Major and Bessie’s big Victorian house on a hilltop outside the city in a sleepy Westchester village, which they used for many years as a summer residence. I had spent a few summers there playing tennis at the country club where Major had been a founding member, and I remembered evenings at the house standing behind the men and looking at their hands while they played gin rummy. Major, I could see, was not one of the better players. He would hold high cards, and often got stuck with them when someone went gin or knocked. My dad was not like that. He was careful and held on to low cards. Bill would drive me to the club in Major’s giant car every day and pick me up later. We would chat about one thing or another as we sat next to each other. Mainly he would ask me what I was up to. It was rare, if ever, that I asked him what was going on with him and Lorraina. The focus on me and not on him manifested a not-so-subtle sort of racism and classism of which I was unaware. Bill’s life in my mind was fixed: He served my family. That was his role. And his life was as an appendage to my family’s, so there was little he could tell me. But as his boy—his Skippy—the nickname he gave me when he came back from the war—I had wide-open oppo
rtunities in front of me, and I thought he would like hearing about that. Bill, however, must have known far better than I that our dynamic was changing. Bill was still the smiling, friendly presence that settled me down, but he was no longer my security blanket. He knew I was fast outgrowing him. He asked questions to be sociable, but he knew what was going to happen long before I did. He was going to become a friendly servant rather than a father figure.

  On some level I was living in an imaginary world or, better, an imaginary state of mind. I loved Bill and Lorraina very much, and I assumed they loved me back, but our respective social positions made it hard to know how real that love was. They were domestic servants. They did not grow up in a privileged environment. But even if they had, how many kids got to fire submachine guns in the FBI headquarters or rub elbows with movie stars as John and I did when we visited the Warner Brothers studio and had our pictures taken with big stars like Doris Day, Virginia Mayo, and Ruth Roman.

  * * *

  I was thirteen years old when I was sent to Culver, following in the footsteps of my brother. My first roommate was Jewish. The administration probably thought we would be more comfortable with our own kind. Two of the smallest kids in the barracks, we knew why we were stuck together but didn’t really talk about it. The idea was to fit in and act like everyone else, but even though I came from a completely nonobservant family, fitting in was difficult. I was Jewish in the eyes of the other boys, and that reality was never far from my mind.

  Fortunately Culver’s plebe system didn’t care who was what. It was equally rough on everyone. Between the older cadets bossing plebes around, a demanding academic schedule, and mandatory athletics, there wasn’t much time to think about being different. I learned to do what I was told and stay out of trouble. I even got promoted as the years went by, and eventually became a cadet officer. It didn’t matter; I rarely felt at home at Culver. In part that was by design. Culver was engaged in character building, not mollycoddling. But even so I rarely felt a true sense of belonging. Although I had a few close friends, I never felt like one of the boys, as most of my classmates had never met a Jew. At times that made me feel special and maybe even a little bit smarter than the gentile majority. After all, I didn’t believe in the virgin birth. Sure, maybe there was a Jesus, and maybe he was a great philosopher and charismatic leader, but if there was no virgin birth, it undercut the idea that he was the son of God. That they accepted those Jesus stories of miracles allowed me to harbor a false sense of superiority.

  For the most part, however, being Jewish at Culver was not hard; it was simply the first time in my life that it was more than nothing. Race also wasn’t a dominating issue for me, although at Culver it came up occasionally because of the North-South divide among the students. There was no talk of segregation, I think, because everyone had internalized that we as whites occupied a higher place in the world. That was just the way it was. While the uniform for cadets was a leveler, we all looked pretty much alike. Some of the Latino cadets from Central America, Mexico, and Cuba were darker, but they came from rich and powerful families. As to them, there was a crystal-clear Culver point of view even if their skin had a darker hue. They were honorary whites; so instructed, we rarely thought about whether they had any “colored blood.” There was a different “normal” down there: “They’re just like you,” was the Culver message. “They’re being trained to be leaders in their countries.”

  The unspoken message about the black waiters who served our meals was equally clear: “They’re nothing like you.” They were probably about the same age as we were, but their race raised an impenetrable wall that no one tried to breach. Three times a day we marched into the huge mess hall and sat at tables laid out with military precision by a bunch of black kids who were not being trained to be leaders and who were less than citizens in their own country. They were there to serve us, and after they brought our meals they were trained to disappear just like the help after supper when we lived at Crail Farm.

  During my plebe year I hardly noticed the waiters, as I sat rigidly on the two outermost inches of my chair, ever ready to pass food to demanding upper classmen and answer their questions, no matter how frivolous.

  As a “yearling,” however, I could relax a little and observe the way things worked a little better, and the idea of those waiters started to bother me. At some point I learned that they had been recruited in the South and that they lived in a dormitory somewhere near the school, but I never knew where. During my four years at Culver, I never made any attempt to find out. Their dormitory was off-limits. And that was another Culver message: There was no reason for us to know how they lived. They didn’t figure in our lives. It was the same for Bill and Lorraina and other people who worked for our family and friends; the less we knew about the black people who provided services to us, the better.

  All we knew was that the black waiters stayed out of our territory, except to clean and serve. The South was a big place, and whatever its problems were, I was pretty sure they didn’t concern me. I didn’t know where the waiters came from and how they got to Culver. I didn’t know what they did in their spare time, or what life was like for them when Culver was not in session. I remember it did seem odd that they never appeared anywhere other than that mess hall. We sometimes went into town on Saturday afternoons to the movies, and we never saw them there either. Probably there were rules, and they weren’t allowed to be there.

  The Southern contingent at Culver, which was very large, felt right at home with the system in the mess hall. They liked to sing “Dixie,” and they liked their Confederate flags. They liked to argue that the South had beaten the hell out of the North in the Civil War, and they especially liked to be waited on by blacks. All the better if those blacks happened to be the same age. That bothered me, as did their bragging about knowing “how to talk to them.”

  I certainly didn’t know how to talk to the black waiters, but I was equally certain that the Southerners didn’t have a clue. The idea of those black boys living out there in the woods made me a little uneasy. I had no words for what I was feeling, no vocabulary for it. I could not cite any books to bolster my feelings with organized thought and argumentation. But another seed was planted in the fertile ground of my embryonic sense of where I stood on racial issues: They had every right to be angry at us, Northerners and Southerners alike. If I were in their shoes I certainly would be angry, I thought, watching a world of privilege and serving it, knowing that the opportunities that we white kids thoughtlessly enjoyed was something they would never know. Being Jewish might get me into a few fights and cause me to receive rejection letters from certain colleges, but I started to understand that was nothing compared to staying penned up in the woods and let out to serve white boys three times a day. Like most thoughts of unfairness, though, they were fleeting.

  While I passed the summer before my senior year worried about where I was going to college, the waiters were going back to whatever they did in the South. Working on a farm, picking cotton, cleaning up after white people, always avoiding eye contact and saying, “Yes sir” and “Yes ma’am,” tipping their hats, getting off the sidewalks so whites could walk by, and hoping nobody took offense because that might mean a late-night visit from a lynch mob. How was I supposed to know about any of that? The Southern boys said they treated them well and that “the coloreds” liked it that way. I was pretty sure they were wrong about that. What little I knew about the lynchings, chain gangs, and other horrors that polluted the South was enough to tell me that no black person liked things the way they were.

  By my senior year I had a small circle of friends who had started to question the way things were. I talked about the waiters with them, wondering if they went to school, somehow knowing that they did not. Our little group was pretty much in agreement that it was unfair. We were critical of the attitudes of the Southern boys. We liked to say they had a “mental block” when it came to blacks. A few Southern friends felt the same way, but they were the
exception to a fairly ironclad rule and would never say anything publicly. The republic of race was serious stuff.

  I do remember one incident about race at Culver that made me think harder about the waiters and Southern attitudes. I wrestled there, and I was pretty good until I couldn’t hold down my weight in my senior year. Then it was all over for me. I couldn’t beat the bigger guys who, like me, were struggling to make weight for the class that I barely weighed enough to be in.

  One afternoon, as our team was preparing for a match and I was struggling with my weight, a teammate announced some news that got everyone’s attention.

  “I hear there’s a black kid on their team,” he said.

  “I wonder who’s going to have to wrestle him?” another asked.

  For the whole week that was the talk around the mats. Wrestling was the type of sport where you could get your face stuck in someone’s armpit or crotch.

  “What if he smells?” someone wondered.

  The Southern boys didn’t like the idea one bit. The rest of us kept our mouths shut.

  “No remarks,” the coach warned. “Just go out and fight him like you would anyone else.”

  We were cadets at a military school, and we did what we were told. The match came off without incident, but I didn’t wrestle him because by then I was second string, and I am not sure who won. Also I don’t recall if there was any consensus regarding the way the black kid smelled. We all smelled bad, but there was that expectation—certainly among the Southerners and maybe among us Northerners too—that there would be a very telling difference, and I knew those expectations a little from being Jewish. But with us it was not smell. I was never sure what it was.