Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  John Fleming’s father was a minister from Somerville, Tennessee, who came to Cincinnati in 1915. But when John Fleming was ten, his father departed for somewhere in the South, never to be heard from again, and his mother was left with eight children to raise. John Fleming was the only one of his brothers and sisters to go to college, walking five miles from his home in downtown Cincinnati to the city university in the suburbs, and another five miles back each night, stopping to change the sheets of cardboard in his shoes three times along the way. Lina Fleming’s background was much different.

  She was taught, as a little girl, that there were two kinds of people—“people like us,” and “those other people.” If she brought a new friend home from school, her mother would ask, “Are they people like us?” If they were not, and were “those other people,” her mother would see to it that the friendship was promptly terminated. Lina Fleming’s grandmother was equally class-conscious. “Grandmother felt that being in sports or entertainment wasn’t proper. I was horrified when I found out that I was related to Joe Louis! When I found out, I confronted Grandmother with it. She said, ‘I know, I’m sorry. I hoped you’d never know.’”

  On genealogical matters, Lina Fleming is almost dizzyingly well informed. “My father’s grandfather came from Jamaica with two brothers and a sister. He worked his way across Virginia. I don’t know if they were Negroes or Indians. One of my great-great-grandfathers was a white man named John Meadows, who had a lot of property. John Meadows had a mulatto daughter, and he didn’t want her to marry just anybody. My great-grandfather was Elbert, and he worked for John Meadows, not as a slave, and Elbert took the name of Meadows, and married John Meadows’s daughter. Elbert’s brother was elected to the House of Representatives under Rutherford B. Hayes, and was lynched on his way to the House. Elbert’s store, a blacksmith shop, was on the Meadows acreage—about five thousand acres, all told. Daddy’s grandmother looked white. My father’s mother was a Meadows, and the Meadowses supposedly had slaves of their own. She fell in love with a former slave boy named Wright, who shod her horses, and married him. It was considered a great mésalliance. Daddy went to Tuskegee where he met Mother. He was Nathan Wright.

  “Mother was a Hickman. My mother’s grandparents were custodians of the Eclectic Medical School, and my grandfather practiced medicine in Paris, Kentucky. He was on the board of Berea University, which was founded for the children of white men who had mulatto wives. My great-grandmother laid the cornerstone of the Union Baptist Church. After Mother and Father were married, they lived in Louisiana. He worked in insurance. He taught the poor black farmers the importance of insurance, and made enemies among the whites. They were going to lynch him, but we were warned and my mother and I got on a train for Cincinnati, where Mother’s family had property. For a long time, we didn’t know where Daddy was.”

  The Hickman property was at Camp Denison, a former Army base just behind Indian Hill, Cincinnati’s most expensive suburb. The large main house had been at one time a barracks, and was surrounded by extensive gardens. At Camp Denison, life was decorous and mannered. Since Grandmother Hickman was very much a grande dame, other black women in the area came to her for advice on how to do things properly. Her house was meticulously kept, furnished with antiques, many of which Lina Fleming has inherited, and meals were served on the dot, on fine china, a table of gleaming mahogany, with silver napkin rings. Grandmother Hickman was famous for her food, and for her Sunday dinners there were often as many as thirty cars parked in the driveway. “We didn’t eat what colored people ate,” Lina Fleming says. “We ate mushrooms, asparagus, broccoli—I never heard of Soul Food until I went to work for the Welfare Department. Both my mother and my grandmother were recipe cooks. Grandmother Hickman reared us by the book. Our table manners had to be perfect. We had to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ we had to say good-night to everyone before we went to bed, and to say good morning when we came down for breakfast. We wore prescription shoes. We went to museums, the symphony, to plays. We read from Charles Lamb’s Shakespeare. In those days, Negroes couldn’t go to the Summer Opera, but Grandmother had been to New York, where she had season tickets to the opera, and heard Caruso. So we went to the park on opera nights, and sat outside on benches so we could hear the opera.”

  When Lina Fleming’s father finally managed to join his family in Cincinnati, he was penniless, and had to go to work for a private white family—the Krogers, who own a supermarket chain—as a gardener. This was a terrible blow to Nathan Wright’s pride, and it also pained him to have to live more or less off his wife’s family. He did, however, become executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. Still, Lina Fleming says, “Grandmother Hickman always felt that Mother had married beneath her station.”

  Again, it was the women who seemed to carry the family. “All the women on my grandmother’s side were free women,” Lina Fleming says with pride. “None of them ever worked for white people. My grandmother’s sisters were black and tall, with lots of hair, but my grandmother was a light olive color. My cousin Ella is very, very white. She could pass for white if she wanted to. A lot of people pass, of course. They cross over, and are never heard from again. When I was a young girl, seeing all these light-skinned relatives gathering at family dinners, I once said to my grandmother, ‘Didn’t some of those white men get at them?’ She gave me a look I’ll never forget, and said to me, ‘Don’t you ever mention that again!’

  “My grandmother’s friends were an international group. Anybody who was anybody who came through Cincinnati stopped to see her. People came from London, Paris, Rome. Doctor King used to come to Sunday dinner, and used to tease her about all the food she gave away to the poor. At Christmas, we’d go around with baskets of food for the poorer families. Marian Anderson was a friend of the family, even though she was in entertainment. After all, she sang opera.” When Lina, her sister and two brothers weren’t being trained, they played, but even their games were educational. “We played math games, and read to each other from Proverbs and Aesop’s Fables.” From the time she was two years old, Lina’s sister Lydia wanted to be a doctor, and would play with her grandfather’s stethoscope. Brother Nathan wanted to be a minister. “Sometimes when Lydia was playing doctor, she would kill off her patients and let Nathan conduct the funeral.” When Lydia, who is now a doctor as well as married to one, was doing her residency in Boston, there was no place for her to live except with a white family, where she had been asked to help out as a baby-sitter. Because this meant “working for whites,” Lydia Wright wrote to Grandmother Hickman for advice. Her grandmother replied, “Any work, as long as it’s honorable work, is all right—as long as it helps you go through school.”

  Lina, her sister, and two brothers all graduated from Walnut Hills High School, Cincinnati’s public high school for gifted children. “My mother and grandmother always told us we were superior—we were the best, and the brightest. We had to be, and we were.” Even at Walnut Hills, though, the Wright family detected racial slights, either real or imagined—such as the fact that black children were assigned to use the swimming pool during the last period on Fridays, just before the pool was emptied for the weekend. Lina Fleming herself graduated from Fisk University, and her brothers and sisters are all college graduates. “There are twenty-eight college degrees in my immediate family—and nine Ph.D.’s!

  “My family would compare with any upper-class family, white or Negro,” she says. “And I’d have to say we’d come out better than most whites. My brother Nathan’s first wife was a Cardoza—there’s old Jewish blood there, the best Jewish blood. My brother Hickman was an executive with Ebony, but he couldn’t get along with the first vice president. So he left, and went as an executive with Clairol. Later, the man who was first vice president left, and Hickman was asked back to Ebony to replace the man he couldn’t get along with! Now Hickman is second in command! My brother Nathan was an Episcopal minister, but he left the church when he got his divorce. Now Nathan teaches at the Stat
e College of Albany—sociology and Black Studies. He’s married again, to a white girl. We weren’t too happy about that. She could have been hostile, but she was nice. When I met her, I said, ‘Well, now you’re in the family, I suppose we’ll have to be friends.’ We are, more or less. Her name was Carolyn May—she’s related to that Mr. May who was married to Marjorie Merriweather Post. She’s from an old Philadelphia family, related to Longfellow—she’s a D.A.R. and in the Social Register. Let’s see if they drop her for marrying Nathan! She’s all right. They live in a big house in Selkirk, New York, with thirteen acres and eight acres of lawn—an old mansion they fixed up, full of antiques. They have a couple—a white couple—that keeps house for them. My daughter Diana went to St. Anne’s Academy in Arlington, Massachusetts, and from there to Western College for Women, in Oxford, Ohio, which is now a part of Miami University. My niece, Debbie Wright, went to Yale, and was senior class orator in 1973. Another niece, Patty, speaks five languages. Another niece is in a training program at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. The other day, she had lunch with David Rockefeller. My sister Lydia is quite rich. She’s probably the richest of us all. She made a lot of money in the stock market. She has a huge house in Buffalo, full of museum-quality antiques and beautiful paintings—but not showy, like some of those other, those trashy people. I mean, my family is distinguished. White people may not know it, but we know it—we’re superior.”

  And yes, Lina Wright Fleming admits, she has her own firm set of prejudices. “I’m prejudiced against Catholics,” she says, “and I’m prejudiced against WASPs, and I’m prejudiced against some of my fellow blacks. I mean Negroes. It’s those people in the ghettoes who say ‘black.’ We say ‘Negro’—people like us.”

  6

  Roots

  In the middle part of the 1800s, near the little town of effingham, Illinois, a small community of mulattos came into existence. There was a similar settlement near Lawrence, Kansas, and there were others scattered across the Middle West and Southwest. Behind these families was white money, for these people were all descendants of the white landed gentry—men who, unlike the common image of the cruel slave-owner, acknowledged their love-children, and maintained two, or in some cases more, families. These children were sent away to be educated at the finest schools and colleges in the United States and Europe. When they came back, they took positions in various corporations, and helped found the first black universities and churches, became the first black professionals as educators, lawyers, and physicians. Thus, even before the Emancipation, there was a black middle class in America.

  Gradually, these families moved to the larger cities, where they lived so quietly as to be almost invisible—which was exactly the state of affairs they preferred. They could not be, and in most cases did not wish to be, assimilated into the white world, and at the same time they were envied and resented by the black have-nots for the simple reason that they had more. Their chief philanthropic endeavors centered around the activities of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In its early years the N.A.A.C.P. operated as a kind of exclusive club.

  In many cities, these families have been living quiet, comfortable, but isolated lives for as many as five generations. Proud, conservative and tradition-bound, they have placed the emphasis of their lives on refinement and good living—good silver, good linen, good antiques. In many cities, when integrated neighborhoods opened up, these families refused to move to them because they preferred to live near their friends and relatives. In Chicago, for example, families like the Gillespies, McGills, Abbotts, and George Cleveland Halls remained in their big houses on the South Side after it became unfashionable, where they kept chauffeurs and maintained summer homes on Cape Cod or Martha’s Vineyard. Still, conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, and costly items were acquired only if they were also useful. When the father of Mr. Leonard Evans of Chicago was criticized, by a less-well-off black, for driving a Cadillac, he carefully explained why he needed a big car. When he drove his family to visit their relatives in the segregated South, the children could sleep in the car, and not suffer the indignities of “colored-only” motels.

  These upper-class blacks, furthermore, have always carefully referred to themselves as “middle-class.” The phrase “middle-class” has a special meaning to blacks. To whites, it is essentially an economic consideration. Any family with, say, an annual income in the $20,000 to $35,000 range would be considered middle-class. Archie Bunker would be considered middle-class; he owns his own home, has a steady job, and his wife does not need to work. But in black America, class is a question of dignity and, more important, stability. To own your own home, unmortgaged, and to own your own car, unfinanced, is class. To be in debt, or to drift from job to job, is not class. Divorce is anathema, and illegitimacy is worse. Upper-crust blacks routinely express pity for poor blacks on welfare, but along with this pity are great feelings of disdain. Upper-class blacks voice concern over “street blacks,” and blacks who are drug-users, criminals, or pimps, but beneath this concern is something very close to contempt. Twenty years ago, a foreigner might have been puzzled by the patrician status accorded to Mr. A. Philip Randolph of Washington, D.C. It is true that Mr. Randolph had all the courtliness, dignity, and refined good manners of a Clifton Webb. But, after all, the Nashville-born labor leader was a sleeping car porter. Could he be upper-class? In black America he can indeed. In Denver, for many years, the women who were the leaders of black society were all the wives of Pullman porters. They owned their homes, had stable marriages, sent their children to college and, while their husbands traveled, formed their own exclusive little social circle, where, over teacups and silver services, they hemmed sheets for the needy. “To be middle-class among blacks is mainly a way of life,” says one woman. And to say “we are middle-class” is merely a more genteel way of saying “we are upper-class.”

  To a white, black standards of class can be confusing. In Washington, for example, Dr. and Mrs. John Bulmer live in a strikingly modern house, designed for them, on the west, or white, and more fashionable, side of Rock Creek Park. Dr. Bulmer is a dentist, his wife is a social worker, and their joint income is comfortably above $50,000 a year. But more important than their earnings is the fact that both Bulmers are Old Line black, light-skinned, born with a sense of family roots and status. The Bulmers’ house is decorated not only with good taste but with a proud sense of understatement. The light upholstery is kept stain-resistant not with plastic slipcovers but by a family that is simply careful not to stain it. The Bulmers’ architect used much glass in his design, but there are no imposing cerise-shaded lamps to dominate their windows, and the Bulmers have resisted the temptation, noticeable among newer-rich black families, to cover their walls with African art or sculpture. They have a color television set, but it is not enormous and ensconced in a Chinese modern console; it is small, and can be rolled out of sight when not in use. To newer-rich black families, trips to Europe, Africa, Hawaii, and cruises in the Caribbean are a mark of status. The Bulmers vacation at an old farmhouse in upstate Vermont.

  And yet, when they first moved into their new house, Mrs. Bulmer says, “My neighbor came around one morning, and we had coffee. She asked me where we came from, how much we’d had to pay for the house, and what my husband did. Can you imagine that?” A white person certainly could imagine, and would probably see nothing wrong with, such friendly curiosity. But the black upper-class are, by inbred tradition, much more reticent, and consider it poor taste to ask, on short acquaintance, such personal questions. After all, your new neighbor might have to answer that she was from a farm in rural Mississippi, and that her husband sorted mail for the Post Office—answers that might pain and embarrass her to divulge. In black society, such information is to be conveyed gradually, discreetly, indirectly, over a polite period of time. All this is a part of having “class.”

  In Chicago, Leonard Evans’s antecedents came from the little mulatto community outside Effin
gham, Illinois. He himself, a tall, courtly, white-haired man, with very light skin, has the same sense of family past and deep roots in American history. One of Evans’s great-grandfathers fought for the British in the American Revolution, thereby earning his freedom from slavery. At the time, blacks had a choice—they could remain as slaves or fight for the British, and Mr. Evans’s ancestor chose to fight. After the war, he worked as a fur trapper on the Ohio River, and prospered. In the early 1840s, he went to Louisville, Kentucky, where—whether out of a sense of justice or not—he purchased the old slave auction house, turned it into a church, and became a minister. His son—Leonard Evans’s grandfather—helped feed the Union soldiers who came through Louisville during the Civil War. Evans’s father was born in Louisville in 1882, graduated from Fisk and Columbia School of Architecture and, after fighting in World War I, returned to Louisville and founded the architectural firm of Evans & Plato, which designed many of the city’s churches and temples.

  On his mother’s side, one of his great-grandmothers was a slave who was sold in Charleston and ended up in Macon, Georgia, where she worked in the household of a wealthy banking and shipping family. She had nine children, five of whom were lost in the Civil War. A sixth child died from a spider bite, and two of her sons were kidnapped and never heard from again. Only one daughter survived. She married a man named James Claybrooks, who had fought with Teddy Roosevelt and who was a member of another old-line family. But when Leonard Evans’s mother was born in 1882, she was rejected by her mother because she was the result of a rape by a white man. She was blue-eyed and blond and was raised by her great-grandmother. Her father, she has hinted, was a member of one of the greatest retailing families of the United States. But she has proudly refused ever to acknowledge them, or to say who they were. “A mixed-blood background has distinct advantages,” Evans says. “But in families like ours, we are told never to admit having white blood. It’s a fact, but it’s never mentioned. To do so is considered to be in very bad taste.”