In 1899, he crossed the Russian border, eventually settling in Moscow, perhaps because it was unlike any place he’d ever been. Alexandrov tells us that Thomas’s homes and businesses over the years were located in the “same northwestern sector of the city, in the vicinity of Triumphal Square.” There were probably not more than a dozen other blacks living in Moscow in the years he was a resident, but the city’s population of more than a million represented a great mix of languages and other races. It did not escape Thomas’s notice that Jewish people in Russia faced the kind of violence and official discrimination that black people experienced in the United States.
Thomas was good-looking, dark-skinned, a dandy, successful with women, and by 1903, he was maître d’hôtel at Aquarium, “an entertainment garden occupying several park-like acres,” a fantasyland of columns and arches, as Alexandrov describes it, of bands in pavilions, barkers, games, booths, electric lights, walkways, a concert stage in a garden, a restaurant in a Moorish palace, a large enclosed theater for fashionable operettas, and a “café chantant,” an open-air theater and restaurant, for variety acts. The public was invited to stay from dusk until dawn. Chorus girls and alcohol were in ample supply. An atmosphere of license hung over the entertainment gardens; the governor-general of the city, the tsar’s uncle, frequented Aquarium. Yet in 1907 Thomas’s boss was on the verge of bankruptcy. Thomas went to work at Yar, the restaurant garden where Rasputin later exposed himself—to many, a public confirmation of his depravity.
Thomas had learned the entertainment business, and, in 1911, he and two others took over Aquarium. In one year they made enough to purchase a variety theater where rich men watched belly dancers while sipping Turkish coffee laced with Benedictine, Alexandrov says. In 1914, Thomas and one of his partners set up what could have become “the biggest popular entertainment company in Moscow,” with a “total capitalization” of “650,000 roubles, the equivalent of $12 million today, consisting of 2,600 shares priced at 250 roubles, or about $4,600, each.” His success came as the world he catered to and flourished in began to fall apart.
When the 1905 Revolution reached Moscow, barricades went up in his street. The government crushed the revolt, but the violence did not subside. The imperial government executed thousands of terrorists in the years before World War I. The revolutionaries killed officials and police officers in the thousands: “The business risks that Frederick faced could not be separated from the bigger ones threatening the entire country, although the energy with which he pursued his personal ambitions suggests that he thought Russia would somehow get through it all.”
After 1910, Russia was convulsed by strikes, even though it was a boom time. Thomas’s bold plans for Aquarium included exhibition boxing matches featuring Jack Johnson, the black heavyweight champion of the world whose victory over a white former heavyweight champion in 1910 incited white mobs in fifty U.S. cities to kill scores of black people. Professional boxing had been forbidden in Russia until Thomas signed up Johnson. War interrupted their growing friendship. With Thomas’s help, Johnson hurried out of Russia. A decade later he published some tall tales in his autobiography about Thomas as a confidential agent of Nicholas II.
War brought Prohibition, but the tsar just disguised his cognac and lemon, and many others found ways around the ban. Thomas paid bribes, Alexandrov speculates, and had an important clientele. The inflated price of booze made him a millionaire in three years. He staged highly publicized benefits for Russian soldiers, and his patriotism was perhaps not entirely calculated. He had been an American in Russia at a time when the United States supported Japan in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Foreigners had been a large part of the Russian business community ever since Peter’s time. Thomas’s blackness got de-emphasized in the mix, and his Russian was good enough. “He was changing the very terms by which the world knew him.” Though he renewed his American passport at the U.S. embassy, again declaring that he was planning to spend only two years abroad, once war was declared he applied to become a subject of the tsar. He had to say where he belonged, after all.
In 1901, Thomas married a German woman from West Prussia. She died in 1909, after giving birth to their third child. He hired a nanny, a German from Latvia, whom he married in 1913, largely because the children were fond of her and he was so busy. But not long after his second marriage, Thomas fell in love again, with another German, a singer and dancer, and by 1915 they had two sons. Alexandrov argues that he may have been protecting her from the anti-German sentiment then prevalent in Moscow.
“By 1916, Frederick’s and Russia’s fates had diverged dramatically.” His businesses were still raking in money, but his “new homeland” was “bleeding men.” The success of the 1916 Brusilov Offensive alone cost the Russian army 1.5 million casualties. “Frederick did not see the coming cataclysm.” He leased his theaters and in 1917 purchased six adjoining rental properties in Karetny Ryad Street. One week after he paid 425,000 roubles for the buildings, the February Revolution broke out.
Thomas didn’t think the Bolsheviks would last, Alexandrov concludes, but he took advantage of the radical changes in marriage law to divorce his second wife, marry for a third time, and make legitimate his two youngest sons. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, by which the Bolsheviks got out of the war, brought the Germans to the Ukraine, where Thomas with great difficulty sent his third wife, a German, and four of his five children. His second wife and her commissar boyfriend somehow prevented his youngest daughter from joining them. In 1918, the Bolsheviks nationalized his establishments and introduced theatrical productions they thought would be of more benefit to the masses than French farce. He was reduced to running a cheap restaurant in a building he once owned. In August 1918, having heard that the Cheka was going to arrest him, he managed to conceal himself on a train out of the city, which was being ravaged by famine, cholera, typhus, and class warfare.
Many people in Odessa, where he took refuge, believed that once the Armistice had been signed, the Allied forces would aid the White Army. Thomas had the connections to get his family on board one of the few ships in the harbor before the French plan to evacuate their forces became public and caused panic. He couldn’t get word to his eldest daughter that the ship was boarding, and she was left behind. In 1919, Thomas set sail from Russia with not much more in his pockets than he’d had when he arrived two decades earlier. Constantinople was his second chance, although it was the pit of despair for thousands of penniless White Russians.
He found partners of different nationalities, and by 1921 they owned a restaurant theater and the preeminent nightclub in the capital. Thomas became a prince of its jazz life. But the Ottoman Empire was in a state of collapse, and once again Thomas was caught up in historical change. In 1923, Turkish nationalists overthrew the sultanate, and little was left of Jazz Age freedom. The Turkish Republic made it increasingly difficult for foreigners to live in Constantinople and for businesses like Thomas’s clubs to stay open. The government imposed taxes on alcohol and even on shop signs in a foreign language. To stay ahead of competition, he’d opened an even swankier place, but in the nationalist mood in the society he couldn’t get customers. He fled to Ankara in 1927, where he was arrested and died in debtors’ prison the following year, aged fifty-five.
Alexandrov tells us that all along Thomas had been trying to repatriate himself to the United States, but a racist official at the American consulate in Constantinople sought to punish him by sabotaging his application. Officials believed he was American but denied him the protection of being one. Thomas never told them that he had become a Russian citizen; the Turkish Republic rejected him for citizenship as well. He was, in effect, a stateless White Russian. His eldest son, whom he’d sent to a Russian school in Prague, settled in Paris and was in the Resistance during World War II. By the time of Thomas’s last contact with his eldest daughter, she was in Paris, pleading for money. Nothing is known of her after 1926. His youngest daughter committed suicide in Luxembourg some
years after her father’s death. His last wife died in poverty in Turkey, and his two youngest sons scraped by as waiters. One got to the United States in 1938 and the other in 1950, and they lived far apart.
Frederick Thomas was not a writer. He was quite unlike Richard T. Greener, a black Harvard graduate and the American consul in Vladivostok in 1904, who sent detailed reports to Washington assessing conditions in western Russia. Philip Jordan, the valet to the U.S. ambassador, had been taught to read and write from years before by the ambassador’s wife. He wrote colorful letters from St. Petersburg in 1916 and 1917. The few letters by Thomas that Alexandrov quotes are touching in their awkwardness, given the debonair impression he made on journalists throughout his career. Publicity was a part of his business. Then, too, like his parents, he had to deal with the “white power structure” and thus entered the official records. His story was retold by the white journalists and passport officials he encountered, all of whom he had to try to manipulate in order to survive. The remaining records are biased against him, but Alexandrov interprets them with great sensitivity. Thomas’s personal solution to the problem of being black in America was to get away. It worked for a while, until what had been the right place for someone like him got torn apart.
2013
HOW I GOT OVER
James Baldwin was the most famous black writer of my youth and also the most famous black expatriate, more so than the jazz musicians, actors, opera singers, painters, or unforgiven refugees from McCarthyism. As an adolescent in the later 1960s, I carried Notes of a Native Son (1955) around as if it were a training manual. Though Baldwin was very clear in his essays about where he was, I wasn’t. I had no experience, at least none I valued or was not ashamed of as a child of the Indianapolis suburbs. I had poses, which I did not learn until much later was not always the same as re-creating the self.
Baldwin was skeptical about the “fried chicken and jazz” tradition of African-Americans in Paris and scornful of veterans lingering there on the G.I. Bill, but when he accused them of being so incoherent in their reasoning that they’d come to a city that existed only in their minds, I believed more in the fears and temptations of his prose than I did in the suffering that informed his meaning. The deliberate isolation and “depthless alienation” struck me as glamorous, as the privileges of the impertinent and the lost.
However, Baldwin’s tone about his situation changed very quickly in his essays. Nobody Knows My Name spoke to me less about where he was sitting and more about where he and the rest of the United States were headed. There were sweeping phrases about the realizations to which his journey had been tending, the high price of self-delusion that haven dwellers pay, and his having overcome his reluctance to go home. Published in 1961, Nobody Knows My Name was in its fifteenth printing when I first read it in 1970. Elsewhere, Baldwin had already begun to describe himself as a commuter, not an expatriate. I thought he was talking about the cheapness, for him, of airfares.
In the summer of 1971, I went to Europe for the first time. I was seventeen years old and traveling alone. The rather empty cabin seemed to want to play cards all night. We disembarked; everything happened. On the return flight, a woman next to me said loudly that there was no better place than the good old U.S.A. Those were expressive days, when transatlantic passengers applauded after a safe landing. The woman fixed me with an expectant look. I had the uncomfortable sensation that everyone digging around in overhead compartments had stopped to dare the thin black teenager with the dirty Afro to disagree. I thought of Baldwin when a child on the train to Cherbourg peeked over the seat to touch my hair. I thought of Baldwin again as I smiled at the woman on the 747.
Patriotism was a coercive force, and so were other kinds of tribal belonging. I soon realized that when Baldwin said he was a commuter, he was defending himself against the charge leveled most frequently by black militants: that he was cut off from the struggle. He wanted to say that he had not forgotten, that there was, for him, not only as a black man but as an American, no getting away from it all. Nobody Knows My Name includes Baldwin’s uneasy memoir of Richard Wright in exile—estranged from other blacks, playing pinball alone in a café, “wandering in a no-man’s land between the black world and the white.” The irony was that what Baldwin said blacks had said about Wright—that he was out of touch—a new generation was beginning to say about him.
Baldwin, like Wright before him, stood in the light as a spokesman, and, because he was obliged to interpret the civil rights era, perhaps he dreaded becoming as obsolete as he felt Wright had, dreaded the paradoxical cognitive partition that goes up when the freight of the past appears to have no relevance to immediate events. The reinvigoration of the marketplace of discussion about that invention, race, has always depended on the passing of the torch, on another generation coming along as a corrective to the one before it, the assumption being that the next generation will be more real and finally tell it like it is. When Baldwin fretted about obsolescence, he was not only worried about being far from the highways the Freedom Riders traveled, he was also talking about becoming older, about falling out of touch with the streets and no longer speaking their language of desire. This was particularly urgent in Baldwin’s day, because the civil rights movement had become a youth movement.
Baldwin’s memoir did not introduce me to Richard Wright, but it had the effect of backing up what my father had gone on and on about. When I was growing up, Wright was, in our house at least, the preeminent writer of the migration, the writer who vivified why blacks left the tired fields of the South and what happened to them in the slums of the North. As my father saw it, the higher protest tradition was a straight line from Victor Hugo to Richard Wright. But this work—Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy (1945)—was accomplished before Wright went into voluntary exile. The lesson of my adolescence was that Richard Wright was a brilliant man who couldn’t take racism in the United States anymore, and so, like Paul Robeson, he went away.
Wright went to France in 1947 and died there in 1960. At first he had trouble getting a passport. Gertrude Stein and Lévi-Strauss intervened with an official invitation, which the State Department could not ignore without scandal. In his letters, Wright wanted to see himself as following the Lost Generation of Hemingway, but the picture of him in exile that emerged in subsequent biographies was that of a figure trapped in Foucault’s panoptic prison. His actions were watched, his remarks reported. Wright’s decision to live in France was a criticism of the United States, and the U.S. government took it as such.
Because of his fame and that of his subject matter, Wright was called upon to make statements about the racial situation in the United States, which, because of the Cold War, displeased white officials, white intellectuals, and some of his fellow black Americans in Paris, not all of whom were above envy. In 1950, Ebony, a black glossy, declined to publish his volatile essay “I Choose Exile.” Critics began to hint that he was ungrateful, that he had made a fabulous career in the United States and then went abroad to say things satisfying only to friends of the Soviet Union. As the political crisis deepened in France in 1958, because of the Algerian War of Independence, leading to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, Wright had to be circumspect: a foreigner too outspoken about French domestic affairs could be deported. According to one biographer, Wright, weakened by fever, kept a loaded revolver on his person in the last year of his life and talked about FBI and CIA conspiracies against him.
For a long time it was the fashion to talk about the books Wright wrote in France as failures, to say that he had succumbed to the influence of Sartre and de Beauvoir, misplaced the particular of black oppression in the general of the human condition, and ended up with an enervating fatalism. The personal relief of self-exile was said to have been paid for by a loss of inspiration. Baldwin was one of the few to praise Eight Men (1961), Wright’s last book of stories. There were elements of anti-intellectualism and condescension in the criticism of Wright, as if h
is interest in Existentialism, his wanting to explore through the use of white characters some of the themes that gripped him as a black man who wrote, were a form of forgetting himself, of getting above himself; as if he didn’t need to write anything other than what he knew as a black man in the United States and could only make a spectacle of himself in the realm of ideas; as if writing about race did not require profound ideas. Wright’s late fiction may be hard to defend, but the works of nonfiction that he wrote in his last years—his report from the Bandung Conference; his travels to Franco’s Spain at a time when no one was going there; his travels to Africa and endorsement of what he saw as modernizing dictators—have not received adequate attention.
In a sense, Wright went to Europe to unmake himself as an activist—he was disappointed that anti-fascist solidarity did not survive the war—just as Baldwin had to go to Europe to become one; radical politics in the United States were ruinous for black people in the war’s aftermath. Nevertheless, both were connected to a tradition that went back to the late nineteenth century, when the sons and daughters of the Talented Tenth began to study abroad. Life on the other side of the ocean as a playing field of equality became spectacular lore after World War I. Among the black soldiers who stayed when the troops went home were the musicians who ignited the Jazz Age in Europe, an era celebrated by the writers of the New Negro movement in the 1920s. They were, for the most part, champions of Negritude and Pan-Africanism, and they put the Paris garret and the champagne breakfast into African-American literature.
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 26