The Butler's Child

by Lewis M. Steel

  Shortly before the Civil War, Taney had authored the Dred Scott decision, which made the consignment of slaves to endless bondage a matter of settled law. This courthouse had been built thirty years after the abolition of slavery. But now, looking up, I didn’t care that Taney might have earned his place in the pantheon that floated above us on the basis of other decisions that had nothing to do with slavery. I felt my anger boiling up. This was no role model for me or anyone else to admire. Better a hole where the cold rain of November might get in than him! I wanted so badly to belong to the priesthood that practiced in this courtroom, but Taney’s presence had tainted the ceremony.

  That evening, after my negative feelings had dissipated, a bunch of us went to the Playboy Club to celebrate—not my idea. The club was new and occupied an entire building on Fifty-Ninth Street east of Fifth Avenue. Catering solely to a well-heeled crowd—looking exclusively white—the club issued symbolic keys to its members. The decor featured a lot of marble, overwrought brass, and crystal that screamed a spurious sort of elegance. It was the Culver mess hall for grown-up cadets, except that here there were girls, or—as I learned to say many years later—young women, in bunny outfits instead of black teenagers who lived somewhere in the woods. We ate upstairs in a softly lit dining room with pleasant music piped in—the whole thing an ornate put-on designed to foster the illusion of our importance. Like the courthouse I had left only a few hours earlier, this was a club that wanted its members to feel special. As for Kitty, who was eight months pregnant, and our other female companions, they acted as if it was a special place for them too, instead of what it was: a tease calculated to entice males to feel entitlement to fantasy pleasures.

  The waitresses bent low as they served us, and we tried to peek without getting caught. Our wives tried to dismiss our sideways glances as one of those things that boys do. And I did not then see the connection between the Culver waiters and the young women in bunny costumes. As for Chief Justice Taney, my outrage had long faded. New Year’s passed, and I continued living my legal double life working for Abe Pomerantz and volunteering at the NAACP’s legal department.

  Then, in February, Maria told me about an opportunity at the Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation, which had just started a program that funded paid one-year fellowships for people who wanted to do civil rights or other social-service-oriented work. Bob would support me if I applied for a grant, Maria said. If my application was successful, I would work full-time at the NAACP as an assistant counsel, and carry my own caseload. After that year was up, if all went well, Maria thought Bob could convert my job into a permanent position.

  I took the opportunity home with a little trepidation. Kitty had given up a budding career in musical comedy to marry me, and she had become a college student and had our first child. That was what she wanted. But she had paid a price in terms of her professional aspirations.

  Separated from her family and friends back in Los Angeles, Kitty found herself in a far different environment. Back home she had been the star of her Irish Catholic working-class family. In New York she was struggling to become accepted in a basically college-educated Jewish culture that had no connection to her past life. I hadn’t been a great help getting her acclimated, either. Often moody about the effort it took to keep up the pretense of interest working for Pomerantz, unsure about my role as husband and father, and afraid of what the future might hold for me, family money–wise, if I strayed too far from the conventional mold, I was feeling prey to a sort of ill-defined pressure to “do the right thing” even though I had no idea what that was. The prospect of working for the NAACP excited me, but it was a job that would force me to work long hours and travel to the South, where I was pretty sure Jewish civil rights attorneys were not exactly welcome.

  But Kitty didn’t hesitate. She knew where my heart was and had seen enough of our family’s dynamics to understand that fighting injustice could make me into the person she wanted me to be.

  * * *

  Everyone heard the news.

  “Lewis has joined the legal staff. He’s working for us full-time,” the NAACP staff at Freedom House was told.

  And just like that, in May 1964, I became a civil rights lawyer, someone who was supposed to know the law and be ready to engage in battle with opponents in the South, who were ready to go to extremes to defend their “way of life,” and in the North—who lived a lot like me. Despite my veneer of self-possession, every time I contemplated standing up for people who were struggling to free themselves from the weight of history and a racist system that I had begun to understand and was inextricably a part of, I felt unsure of myself.

  Adding to my fears, there was a group of black people in leadership positions whom I had barely met. Gloster Current, the director of all the NAACP branches and one of the people who helped steer the NAACP through many of its most turbulent years, was the friendliest. He would come by the office with a legal issue or problem, looking for advice, and was always appreciative of any help we could give him. The director of publicity, Henry Moon, and John Morsell, who was the deputy executive director, also dropped in from time to time. But both were older and seemed distant. The NAACP’s executive director, Roy Wilkins, was a slight-looking, light-skinned presence at Freedom House. Distinguished and urbane, he hardly ever came out of his office unless he was going on the road. The most tangible difference between my role as a volunteer and full-time employment was that Maria no longer played go-between and protector for me. Now I knew I would have to work hard to develop meaningful relationships with Bob as my boss and Barbara, who was a far more experienced lawyer. At the Pomerantz firm I had the experience of working with superiors. But they had been white, as had all my teachers, professors, army officers, camp counselors, summer-job bosses. Bill Rutherford had laid down the law for me now and then when I was a boy. But this was different. I would have to look beyond race, as race had always put me above those with black skin. What helped was that I had already developed a deep respect for both Bob and Barbara. Still, I remember feeling a fairly constant low-level anxiety about inadvertently exposing some hidden—or worse—subconscious racial prejudice lurking in my thinking. I worried all the time about saying the wrong thing. Equally troubling was a gnawing doubt regarding my commitment to equality: I feared that I might find out things about myself while working as a full-time civil rights lawyer that I didn’t want to know.

  Then there was the outside world of the civil rights movement, about which I knew little. The NAACP was only one of many civil rights organizations fighting for the allegiance of different black constituencies while simultaneously waging a multifaceted, several-front war against the widespread backlash seeking to weaken or ignore what the civil rights movement had accomplished in the decade since Brown v. Board of Education, culminating with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

  By the time I joined the legal staff, I was becoming aware through the media coverage that there were influential leaders in the Movement who thought the NAACP was too mainstream, too willing to acquiesce to whites retaining their hold on power. For example, the board president, Kivie Kaplan, was white, which was a defining characteristic from the organization’s inception, and therefore it could not be trusted.

  The organizations I had to learn about included Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which emerged during the 1955–56 Montgomery Bus Boycott and made King the country’s most visible civil rights leader. From what I heard, the NAACP and SCLC were competitors, and Wilkins resented King’s rise to prominence. It was all pretty disorienting, and I didn’t feel comfortable asking anyone in our office for direction.

  A year earlier I hadn’t left Kitty and our baby, Janine, in New York to attend the March on Washington. And now I knew I had not only missed out on Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but on all the gossip on the NAACP bus that had taken the staff to the march and back.

  When I started working full-time at the NAACP, a ne
w civil rights law was about to take effect, pushed through Congress by President Lyndon Johnson. On paper the new law appeared to be strong. It would make discrimination illegal under a wide variety of circumstances. In theory it would open up jobs and public accommodations, including hotels and restaurants, to all, regardless of their race. But even before it was signed into law, civil rights lawyers were making noise about it, complaining that it would be hard to enforce and that there would be little voluntary compliance.

  Tired of waiting, and because the act had no voting rights provisions, the more aggressive activist groups were getting ready to launch what they called the Mississippi Summer Project. Under the plan Northern students, black and white, would travel all over Mississippi trying to register blacks to vote, defying the segregationists who had killed or beaten anyone suspected of being a civil rights activist and burned down their homes and churches. All over the South activists were looking to Mississippi to give them inspiration and courage and calling us for legal advice and other kinds of support. Wedged into our already crowded offices at Freedom House, I dived into an endless stream of questions and requests for help that came in through the association’s more than eighteen hundred branches. One was trying to start a boycott somewhere, another was planning a march. If a judge ordered the NAACP not to demonstrate or conduct a boycott, we were asked for advice about how to respond. Often the branch would decide what to do without talking to us. At other times we would be asked to get demonstrators out of jail or oppose lawsuits seeking damages. In the South, LDF generally handled school segregation cases, so we rarely had that burden. In the North, however, branches would call to find out how much support we could provide if a school board refused to desegregate.

  * * *

  The national office at Freedom House had a small staff that could not respond to all the inquiries that poured down on them on a daily basis. The higher-ups at the association were swamped by the unending crises that threatened it, so it was all hands on deck, whether that meant Gloster Current or the NAACP’s education director, June Shagaloff, or the labor director, Herb Hill, or even a new assistant counsel like me. Whoever was around and willing to spare a few minutes did what they could in the daily life at Freedom House.

  Often I tried to get Barbara to take the phone calls that came my way because I had a hard time understanding the accents of callers from the Deep South.

  “You handle it, hon,” she would push back, singing out to me.

  I’d take the calls and do the best I could. When I did understand the accent on the other end of the line, I scribbled furiously to take down what was said and promised to get back with an answer, sighing with relief when I managed to escape the caller. Sometimes I had no idea what I’d been told. That’s just the way it was.

  When Barbara was inclined to educate me, she explained that most of the time the people who were calling were asking about the legality of actions they had no intention of undertaking.

  “It’s mostly just talk,” she told me. “And anyway, if we tried to give real advice to everyone who called us, we’d never have time to get anything done. Most of the time those people aren’t looking for any particular answer; they just want to know they’re connected to a place where they could get help if they needed it. And you’re the lucky one to give them that assurance.”

  I got what she was saying, but the person on the other end of the line had my name. It was fine for Barbara to be so cool about it. She was attuned to her own people. I wasn’t.

  What am I doing here? I’d ask myself at odd moments, when my anxiety had me in its grip. It was hard for most people to understand that the NAACP’s national office—the headquarters of that august organization—had virtually no control over the chaos that was the civil rights movement during the 1960s. We were caught up in the same maelstrom as everyone else. At least on the surface the world I came from appeared more orderly. Right or wrong, leaders had answers to questions about how to proceed. At the NAACP, however, even those staffers who could pick up the nuances of what was being said “out there” were often powerless to do anything about it. Just too many people involved, all in their own worlds, too far away. The local branches of the NAACP had to make things happen as best they could. Or they could back off and wait, and things would stay the same. Barbara’s cavalier attitude was a coping mechanism. It was her way of dealing with a stressful reality. As for me, the very fact that I didn’t know what to do or how best to help was a magnification of what propelled me toward the NAACP in the first place.

  * * *

  A few weeks after joining the legal staff, I attended a retreat sponsored by the Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation as part of the fellowship that paid for my position at the legal department. There were about forty of us at the retreat. We found ourselves thirty-five miles north of New York City in a converted mansion. The idea was to immerse us in a process of racial exploration and understanding to open us up to the problems we would confront. The retreat location was self-contained. Many of us never left the grounds the entire time, and no one except invited lecturers and support staff intruded on our isolation. Long sessions, led by skilled group leaders, were devoted to the examination of our feelings and beliefs when it came not only to race but to a whole kaleidoscope of social issues ranging from gender to religion, family, and politics. Hungry for change, we quickly made real progress in revealing little pieces of ourselves, and finding we could survive the inevitable questions and challenges that followed.

  I had to overcome my fear that the black attendees would either ridicule me or feel alienated by a white guy who wanted to talk about the confusion occasioned by his relationship with a butler and a maid. In response some of the black attendees talked about the pain of having their mothers or fathers work endless hours for white families at their expense. They told me what it was like to have parents they rarely saw, who came home exhausted and filled with resentment. Although they fought to conceal their emotions, I could feel their pent-up anger, and heard an affirmation of what I had always suspected about Duby and Sister Baby—that my gain was their loss. Without a thought, I had taken their place in important ways. I felt as if I was on slippery ground. My love of Bill and Lorraina was built on the degradation of their primary relationships with two children, an affront that was generative, creating the potential for dire social consequences. While I learned from my new black confidants what it was like to be on the losing side of my relationship with Bill and Lorraina, they got to hear something about white guilt. Bill and Lorraina had given me the nurturing that helped me to sense the pain inflicted by a racial caste system. It was hard to imagine my being at the retreat without that relationship.

  My internal conflicts at least began to find a way to be expressed. I could better understand black anger even in so-called integrated areas of the country. And I began to see why it was so hard to create a solid bridge between black and white people in the United States. We, the whites, had all the advantages of a caste system, and they were trying to create a life for themselves in an oppressive environment. In the meantime it seemed to be the consensus among the attendees at Tarrytown that we could begin the process of reaching out and being open to the difficulties ahead. When white people heard the basis of black anger expressed in a reflective mode, there was an opening for understanding. For their part the black attendees seemed willing to believe that at least the whites in attendance were ready to work with them to foster a more egalitarian society. And that made the isolation of all of us at the retreat easier to handle, creating some space for us to come together in that protective setting.

  Lectures and seminars also created an intellectual framework for our experience. Historians, social psychologists, activists, writers, and musicians visited us. We learned about the cruelty of slavery and the evolution of dispossession, how blacks were terrorized in the South after the Civil War and penned into urban ghettos in the North. We studied black resistance to prejudice in the United States and elsewhere, in countri
es like Algeria. We learned about black survival and the high price black people paid to exist in a hostile country that created new forms of bondage in the South and treated them as invisible in the North. Every second of our waking day was devoted to learning more about the issues that would drive us in our work as civil rights activists. The thoughtfulness with which the program was created and run, the caring of the participants toward one another, the high quality of the presentations, as well as my own desperate need to find the inner logic between the way I grew up and the work I was starting to do at the NAACP, were liberating. I began to feel I belonged to the struggle and that I could contribute.

  I left the retreat house filled with respect for black Americans who were ready to make our country live up to its promises. Though I remained inexorably part of the problem, cleaving to the advantages that flowed from my wealthy family, I felt much more ready to take the emotional risk of interacting with both black and white people to help create a more just society. I was one person starting to move in two distinct cultural worlds at the same time.

  8

  Dealing with Fear

  “Well, you have to go sooner or later,” Barbara Morris said in her laconic way. “It might as well be sooner.”

  I’d been working at the NAACP for a few months.