Certain People

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Instead of leaders, there are factions, and factions within factions. The Old Guard looks askance at the newer-rich, and the “visiting friends” just visit one another. The newer-rich ridicule the Old Guard. The blacks in the South think little of the blacks in the North, and vice versa. The educators and professional people disdain the businessmen. The Episcopalians and Congregationalists think little of the Methodists and Baptists. The rich dislike and distrust the poor, and the poor hate the rich. Well-to-do blacks often despair of the poor. In New York, Guichard Parris, a longtime Urban League official, says, “There are children growing up in Harlem today whose parents have never done a day’s work in their lives. Their grandparents have never worked, and their great-grandparents have never worked. You have families who, for five generations, have survived on one form of charity or another. How can you talk about a ‘work ethic’ to people who don’t know what work is?” The talk, in this fractured world, of “Brotherhood” and “Sisterhood” has no real meaning, and these are terms that describe a situation that does not exist. A black traveler, returning from abroad, will not stand in a line that has a black customs inspector; he knows that his luggage will be more thoroughly ransacked for possible costly contraband than that of white travelers. Black entertainers and athletes exist in a social limbo of their own. Their success is assumed to have been based not on education or business acumen, but merely on good looks or muscle. Instead of racial unity there is disunity.

  Blacks cannot agree on what to call themselves—black, Negro, colored, or something else. Guichard Parris uses the terms “black” and “Negro” interchangeably, but his wife, who is fairer-skinned, refuses to use either term and the Parrises have been at an impasse over this throughout their marriage of nearly fifty years. Blacks cannot agree on what white motives really are, whether whites really want to help the Negro race or hold it back. Some successful black men—like Chicago’s late Dr. T. R. M. Howard—have given full credit to white benefactors for their achievements. Others, like George Johnson, say they had to fight a white Establishment all the way. At an integrated party at the penthouse apartment of Dr. William Clarke, another prominent black Chicago physician, a discussion started on the subject of whether a white person “could ever really understand what it is like to be black.” The discussion quickly turned into a rout, with blacks shouting profanities at each other, and the white guests fleeing through the kitchen door.

  Dr. Clarke’s three slender, handsome, college-age sons, meanwhile, are models of good manners and decorum—full of bows, handshakes, “sirs,” and “thank yous.” Dr. Clarke drills his boys with the authority of a Marine sergeant; whenever they appear, he peppers them with questions about their studies, about current affairs, about politics, science, and the Bible. To be sure, he gambles with them, and once, when one of his sons had won quite a bit of money from his father at cards, Clarke would not let the boy leave the game until he had won the money back. Like parents everywhere, successful blacks worry about their children: What will become of the next generation? John Johnson’s son, a high school dropout, got married at nineteen, and he and his wife live in his parents’ vast apartment. John Johnson, Jr., is interested in motorcycles, fast cars, airplanes—“anything fast, man,” he says. The Johnsons’ daughter, Linda, grumbles when the chauffeur is not available to take her where she wants to go. At a family luncheon party at the Johnsons’, guests wondered why the young people, who were at home at the time, did not join the family at the table; they took their lunch on trays in their rooms.

  Barbara Proctor’s only son is a withdrawn, introspective, studious teenager. The Eugene Dibbles’ children, on the other hand, are lively, outgoing, family-proud—having worked together to draw up the massive family tree connecting their family with their cousins in Africa—proud of their continuing connection with the Mount Hermon school in Massachusetts, each child firmly set on a future career: one to be a doctor, one already with his own car-washing business (the boy offers visitors his printed business card). In other words, successful blacks probably have the same degree of success—and failure—with their children as successful whites.

  Blacks cannot agree on whether black businesses should employ blacks or whites. John Johnson’s staff is almost a hundred percent black. Barbara Proctor, on the other hand, in her Chicago advertising agency, prefers to hire bright young whites right out of college for her copywriters. Blacks cannot agree on issues-of-the-moment such as busing and integrated schools. Most of the Old Guard are opposed to busing, and consider it an absurd crusade conducted by misguided whites and lower-class blacks. They point to the distinguished and successful men and women who have come out of all-black schools like Palmer and Dunbar High School, and out of black colleges like Lincoln and Howard Universities. Guichard Parris says, “I just won’t buy the idea that a Negro can’t get a decent education unless he’s in an integrated situation. If you say that, it’s the same as saying there’s no chance for anyone in black Africa.” Parris, however, a New Yorker since 1916, who went to Amherst—where he was one of nine blacks, six of them from Dunbar High School—never knew that there were black colleges in the South until he learned of them from his fellow blacks at Amherst. If there is one thing that there is some agreement on, it is that “we’ve got to change the system.” But no one is exactly sure what “the system” is.

  Is it housing patterns? Is it discrimination within the labor unions? Housing patterns have been breaking down—albeit slowly—in many cities, and so has discrimination in the unions. Is it the “system” that prevents George Johnson from expanding his business into manufacturing cosmetics for white people? In fact, George Johnson’s products could be sold to whites right now. It is a myth that skins of different colors require different cosmetics. A shade of mascara or face-powder tint will work equally well on a white face and on a black, and black hair-straightening products will straighten white curly hair also. All that Johnson would have to do, he admits, would be to start advertising his Ultra Sheen line to whites and, if that didn’t work—if the “black” connotations proved too strong to make Ultra Sheen acceptable to whites—he could issue the same products under a different label. And yet he is timid. The system seems not quite ready for that, and besides, he is happy with the success he already has.

  No one seems to agree on what success is, or how it is best attained. Is success money and possessions, as Ebony seems to say? Is it a good education, followed by a useful professional life, as Mary Gibson Hundley would insist? Is success achieved by dogged hard work and perseverance, as it was in the case of John and George Johnson, neither of whom went to college? Is it achieved by sheer luck, as seems to have been the case with Berry Gordy, who happened to have some lucky hits? For Barbara Proctor, success has alienated her from her mother and sister, neither of whom understands what she does or approves of it, since she leaves her son at home with sitters. There is one thing, however, that nearly all blacks agree on: a great deal, in the end, depends upon the color of your skin, and the shape of your facial features. It is as the Jews often say: “If you have a cute nose, you smell like a rose.” Blacks agree that if you have light skin and white features—or, in the current vernacular, “keen” features—you have a better chance in business. Features are even more important than color of skin. People with black skin and keen features also have an advantage in the business world, and in the world of entertainment. Most blacks believe that it is best to have “a nice brown color in between,” minimized Negro features, and that the person with black skin and Negro features, or even light skin and Negro features, is at a disadvantage. Such a person should not attempt a career in business or show business, and should compromise by going into one of the professions, the clergy, or the civil service. The rule could almost be stated as a mathematical formula: fair skin plus white features equals money, social acceptance, integration. The unspoken corollary of this rule, of course, is that it is better to have white ancestors.

  If having “Negro feature
s” is still at least a psychological handicap for a black man or woman, it might be supposed that there would be a heavy demand for cosmetic surgery among these people, just as Jewish children born with prominent noses routinely have them bobbed at a certain age. There is no shortage of skilled black surgeons; in fact, some white doctors claim that blacks make particularly good surgeons because they have especially deft and agile hands. But the fact is that people with black skin have a tendency, for some reason, to develop keloids—white, welt-like scar tissue—as a result of surgery. The lighter the skin, the less chance there is of keloids developing. And so, ironically, the blacks most willing to take the risk of facial surgery are those with the least need for it. Light-skinned, white-featured Doris Zollar says that she would certainly consider having her face lifted “if and when the time comes.” A black-skinned friend would not. Many blacks, meanwhile, correct protruding teeth with orthodonture.

  And yet why do some blacks achieve success while others, with similar background, equal intelligence, equal opportunities, and similar appearances, do not? In many cases, a kind of achievement drive seems to have been instilled in individuals by certain families for generations. Wade H. McCree, Jr., for example, is a United States circuit judge from Detroit who has honorary doctorate of laws degrees from seven different universities, from Tuskegee to Harvard. He was the first black placed on Harvard’s Board of Overseers. When Thurgood Marshall became the first black appointee to the United States Supreme Court, many people thought that Wade McCree was better qualified than Marshall and should have been the one appointed. (Was it because Mr. Justice Marshall has “whiter looks” than Judge McCree?) Achievement, a sense of justice, and a sense of history have been an integral part of the McCree family’s life for a long time (a distant McCree ancestor is said to be Robert E. Lee). Wade McCree’s mother graduated from Fisk and taught in the South for a while with Mary McLeod Bethune. At one point, McCree’s mother and another teacher purchased a ticket for a black sharecropper who was being pursued for not paying a debt, and helped him escape north to Pittsburgh. At the time, Mary Bethune criticized the two women for “not being consistent with the system.”

  Wade McCree’s paternal grandfather escaped from slavery in the Carolinas by swimming the Ohio River near Evansville and made his way to Illinois, where he joined Thomas’s army, and fought in the Battle of Franklin and Nashville. McCree’s father had been a dining car porter, and, on his trips across the country, he fell in love with the State of Iowa and decided to settle there. With the help of a black doctor in Des Moines, the senior McCree attended pharmaceutical school and opened the first black drugstore in Des Moines. During World War I, a black Officer Candidate School was opened at Fort Des Moines, and Mr. McCree operated what amounted to a black U.S.O. from a big room that was available above his store. His sister, Wade McCree’s Aunt Mary Ellen, knew all the local girls and so, as McCree says, “There isn’t a black officer from World War One who doesn’t know my family.”

  After the war, however, there were business reverses, and the family moved back to Massachusetts, where McCree’s mother had many relatives. In Boston, where Wade McCree attended Boston Latin School, where admission was by competitive examination only, McCree’s father worked as a federal narcotics inspector, a job he disliked. With his training, he felt, he should have been made a supervisor, but instead he was moved here and there about the country on assignments, and kept in his place. Mr. McCree wanted to institute a narcotics education program; it was turned down by his superior. At one point he inspected a drugstore, found some discrepancies, and reported them. A Boston Congressman wanted him to change his report. He refused and, for this, his son recalls, “He was given a lot of dirty jobs.”

  Still, growing up in Boston was pleasant. The McCrees lived in a comfortable house in an integrated neighborhood—Leonard Bernstein was one of Wade McCree’s boyhood neighbors—and Mrs. McCree conducted what amounted to a salon. Young black students and educators who came to Boston made the McCree house their headquarters in the days when blacks could not stay in hotels. Roland Hayes, the tenor, was a frequent visitor, as were Wade McCree’s favorite aunt and uncle, Aunt Laura and Uncle Julius. Aunt Laura ran a beauty parlor in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she dressed the hair of all the Smith College girls, and she was definitely an intellectual. Uncle Julius, an erudite man, had a vast library. Wade McCree grew up in an atmosphere of music, scholarship, and literature. Good conversation was encouraged, and reading. As a boy, Wade McCree fed himself avidly on a diet of Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Hawthorne, and Thackeray. He read the old Compton Encyclopedia in its entirety, and devoured Redpath’s Universal History.

  He loved to listen to the stories Grandpa Harper, his mother’s father, told. Grandpa Harper talked history. He talked of all the heroes—black and white—of the past, of Booker T. Washington and Abraham Lincoln, of Frederick Douglass and General Stonewall Jackson. Heroes were his theme. Though Grandpa Harper did not have a heroic occupation—he was a janitor at the Boston State House on Beacon Hill—he was always sure to make his grandchildren aware of visiting heroes when they came to Boston. When Charles Lindbergh came to Boston on his tour after his heroic flight, Grandpa Harper saw to it that his grandchildren got a spot front and center on the State House steps, where he could lift them up and give them a good view of Lindbergh’s face.

  When Grandpa Harper had had a drink or two, he would tell the children about how Stonewall Jackson had been killed by his own troops. Grandpa Harper’s father, Great-Grandpa Harper, had been a sexton at the church where Stonewall Jackson worshipped, and when the Confederate general was killed in 1863, it had been Great-Grandpa Harper’s job to dig Stonewall Jackson’s grave. When the grave was finished, Great-Grandpa Harper lifted his young son into the grave and said, “Now you can tell your grandchildren that you were in Stonewall Jackson’s grave before he was.” It is a story that has been told in the McCree family for over a hundred years, and through six generations. Wade McCree now tells his grandchildren, “Your Great-Great-Grandpa Harper was in Stonewall Jackson’s grave before he was.”

  Booker T. Washington was the hero and inspiration for Mary McLeod Bethune and her Daytona Institute, which later became Bethune-Cookman College. When she was a young woman, Booker T. Washington appeared to Mary Bethune in a dream. In the dream, she was sitting forlornly at the bank of a broad river when a man on horseback came riding up to her. He was wearing a uniform and perspiring from a hard ride and, as he drew near her, he dropped his horse’s reins and the horse stood still in front of her.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “I am Mary McLeod Bethune.”

  “Why are you sitting there, and why do you look so sad?”

  “I am trying to think how I am going to build my school,” she replied.

  The man on the horse said, “I am Booker T. Washington,” and he pulled from his pocket a handkerchief as though to wipe his brow. But as he opened the handkerchief Mary Bethune saw that within it was wrapped a large and glittering diamond. “This is for you with which to build your school,” he said, and handed her the stone. Then he rode away. When Mary Bethune awoke, the vivid dream and the vision of the shining stone stayed with her.

  Mary Bethune did not actually meet Booker T. Washington until several years later. By then, her school—helped not by diamonds but by philanthropies of such people as James M. Gamble (of Procter & Gamble, who supplied her not only with money but also with cases of Crisco and Ivory Soap), John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Madame C. J. Walker, and the Carnegie Foundation—had already opened.

  Like Booker T. Washington, Mary Bethune believed that Negroes should learn useful skills, and her Daytona women students were taught home economics, cooking, and housekeeping. Her greatest appeal was therefore to the blacker group, and to women who were less well off. These, as she used to say, were “my black girls”—not the fair-skinned daughters of doctors and lawyers and clergymen who went to Palmer. It was easy for the fair-skinne
d group to laugh at Mary Bethune. She took herself, and what she saw as her great mission in life, with such terrible seriousness. Though intimates called her “Mama Bethune,” and those less intimate referred to her, almost worshipfully, as “Mother Bethune,” she loved the thunder-roll sound of her full name, “Mary McLeod Bethune” and to hear herself presented at the speaker’s dais with, “Ladies and gentlemen, I present—Mary McLeod Bethune!”

  She was the first of seventeen children of a slave family to be born to freedom, and for this fact alone she considered herself “different” and special, even Heaven-sent. She liked to tell of how, when she was born, her mother held her up to show to her father and said, “She is a child of prayer, Samuel! I asked the master to send us a child who would show us the way out!” And how, at the time, her old grandmother, sitting in her rocking chair and puffing her corncob pipe, cried out “Thank you, Master, for another grandchild! This is a different one. Thank you, Lord!”

  Mary Bethune was a heavy woman, but she carried her weight with dignity, even majesty, and with what some people thought a bit of pomposity. But to watch Mary Bethune come into a room was like watching the entrance of a reigning monarch. Mary Bethune’s critics also say that she made too much of her “close friendship” with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Mary Bethune met when she became president of the National Association of Colored Women, that she used her White House connections for publicity purposes, and that she “tried to ride on Mrs. Roosevelt’s coattails.”

  Mary Bethune thought of herself as the most important Negro woman of the twentieth century, if not of all time, and probably as the most important Negro person. Surely this was one reason for the breakup of her marriage to Albertus Bethune after barely ten years. He went home to North Carolina, where he died of tuberculosis in 1919, while she went on to greater and greater things. Her sense of her own importance was, to some people, ludicrous. Grace Hamilton of Atlanta recalls telephoning Mrs. Bethune at one point to ask her support on some program Mrs. Hamilton was then involved in, and Mrs. Bethune’s reply: “My dear, you have nothing to worry about. I am at the helm!” Mrs. Hamilton says drolly, “It turned out that the program had already gone down the drain.”