The Black Russian

by Vladimir Alexandrov

  Especially in the upscale dining rooms, the black waiter’s job in those days was complex, demanding, and competitive—more so than is usual today, and differently. By reacting immediately and cheerfully to the client’s wishes—and all the clients in the expensive restaurants were white—the black waiter could be seen as simulating the enforced obsequiousness and racial subordination that had been, and still was, the norm for all blacks in the South. Even if the diner was a lifelong northerner for whom slavery had been an abomination, he would still be likely to enjoy the sense of privilege and worth that an exaggeratedly deferential black waiter would confer on him for the duration of the meal. An efficient waiter who strived to be likable also got bigger tips.

  However, black waiters in Gilded Age America were not just gifted or cynical actors. They also took pride in their profession, which required tact, charm, dignified deportment, and mental and physical agility. Waiters who served the financial and political elite in the grand hotels and restaurants of the nation’s second-largest city acquired an enhanced sense of personal worth as well as a heightened social status in their own communities.

  If the first job one has in a given profession acts as a tuning fork for the career that follows, Frederick started at a pitch of the highest quality. The Auditorium Hotel, where he began as a waiter, was the most important new building in Chicago and had one of its most elegant and modern dining rooms. Built between 1887 and 1889 on what is now South Michigan Avenue, it was hailed at the time of its completion as the “chief architectural spectacle of Chicago,” a symbol of the city’s civic progress, and even hyperbolically as the “eighth wonder of the world.” Frederick had found his niche in urban life: after the Auditorium Hotel he spent the next “one and a half years as waiter” in other restaurants in the city.

  Frederick left Chicago around the summer of 1893, a momentous period in the city’s history. The World’s Columbian Exposition opened on May 1; on May 9, a banking crisis began, which led to a national economic depression that became known as the Panic of 1893. When the economy collapsed, thousands of workers, including those who had been attracted to the city during the boom period of the world’s fair, were left without jobs or prospects of any kind.

  Frederick decided that he could do better by heading to New York City. From all accounts, the situation was not as bad there as in Chicago. New York also had more of everything that had originally made Chicago attractive—more people, bustle, excitement, power, towering buildings, and hotels and restaurants where one could find work. New York was the only city in the United States that ambitious Chicagoans envied. And the only siren call that ambitious New Yorkers heard came from the great cities of Europe.

  Like Chicago, the New York metropolitan region was still over-whelmingly white in 1893. It was also filled with immigrants from all over Europe and their first-generation children. The wretched poverty of many of them, together with their foreign babble and alien customs, made longtime New Yorkers fear for the future of their city. To acculturate and redeem these motley newcomers, white New Yorkers initiated a variety of reform efforts at the end of the nineteenth century. However, they typically ignored the less numerous native-born blacks who were arriving simultaneously. Blacks were made to feel unwelcome in Manhattan, and many chose to live in the outlying areas. Brooklyn, which would remain an independent municipality until 1898, became especially popular with blacks after the Civil War draft riots of 1863, when white mobs attacked them throughout Manhattan. But even in Brooklyn the black population in 1893 was very small and amounted to only some 13,000 people out of a population of 950,000.

  The job that Frederick found after he arrived in Brooklyn was predictable, in both personal and broader social terms. New York was like Chicago, once again, in restricting most blacks to lower-paying, subservient occupations. Within this narrow range of possibilities, however, Frederick was able to carve out a superior position for himself, one that represented an advance over his work as a waiter in Chicago. The Clarendon Hotel in Brooklyn, where he became “head bell boy,” was a new, large, prominent, and strategically located establishment in its day. Opened during the summer of 1890 two blocks north of City Hall, it was also just a few steps away from an elevated railroad that ran to the Brooklyn Bridge a dozen blocks away. A cable car service took passengers across the bridge to lower Manhattan and dropped them off within easy reach of New York’s City Hall, thus putting the Clarendon at one end of a transportation system that linked the two municipalities’ administrative centers.

  Frederick was twenty-one at this time, and as the “head” of a crew of bellboys, he had a responsible position that reflected his skill in both serving and managing people. Bellboys would typically be on their feet all day, and because they were always in public view, their physical appearance, from uniform to grooming to deportment, would reflect directly on the establishment where they worked. It would have been his job to give individual bellboys their assignments, to keep track of their hours for payroll, to train beginners, and to resolve complaints made against them. Frederick would have had to balance being a figure of authority toward his coworkers—and since he was black, they could have been nothing else—with being an employee and a servant of whites. It would have been Frederick’s prerogative to go out of his way to provide exceptional service to an important client himself.

  Frederick’s subsequent career shows that he impressed guests at the Clarendon: after working there for some months, he left to become a personal valet to a leading local businessman. Percy G. Williams had taken up temporary residence in the hotel in the early summer of 1894, which is when he probably met Frederick and hired him for the traits that any successful servant would need—resourcefulness and a winning disposition. Williams was in his late thirties and was on the verge of making his mark on the history of American popular entertainment as the biggest owner of vaudeville theaters in the New York area. There is good reason to assume that Frederick learned some valuable lessons from witnessing aspects of Williams’s career and character.

  This is also the time when Frederick’s ambitions began to surpass the lowly roles that American society allowed him to play and at which he had begun to excel. With a good letter of recommendation from a well-known, rich, and respected man like Williams, Frederick could have continued in New York as a personal valet or even a household butler for many years. But in addition to his vocation, Frederick also had a passion for music. And it was strong enough for him to take the extraordinary step of leaving the United States to study.

  Years later, Frederick would explain to an American consular official that “he went to Europe on the advice of his German musical professor, Herman,” who told him specifically to go to London. Frederick hoped to become a singer. It is possible that his studying voice in New York reflected the famous legacy of black church singing, which he would have known in his parents’ chapel in Coahoma County. As far as the German teacher is concerned, nothing is known about the man except that his influence on Frederick was crucial. That he was a foreigner surely explains why he was willing to cross the American color line and take Frederick on as a student; it also explains why he would have looked to Europe as a place to which Frederick could escape to develop his abilities.

  In the 1890s, passenger ship traffic between New York City and London was frequent, quick, popular, and affordable. Approximately half a dozen ships left every week during the fall of 1894, transporting thousands of passengers with the most diverse backgrounds and incomes. The vast majority went in “steerage,” which was the cheapest way to travel, and which accommodated surprising numbers of laborers, workers, and others on the lower rungs of the economic and social ladders. International travel was also much simpler then than it is today: one bought a ticket and went. Americans did not even need a passport to leave the country.

  Frederick left New York in the fall of that year, apparently on October 9, aboard the SS Lahn of the North German Lloyd shipping line. Its ultimate destination was Breme
n in northern Germany, but on the way it was scheduled to call at Southampton, a major port on the south coast of England that was a popular entry point for Americans. The Lahn docked on October 16, after an uneventful seven-day crossing. Direct trains from Southampton to Waterloo Station in central London took two to three hours.

  Some of the novelty of arriving in London would have been mitigated for Frederick by the changes he had already experienced in the United States. In fact, the contrast between the Hopson Bayou neighborhood and Chicago was in many ways far greater than that between the two greatest English-speaking cities in the world—New York and London.

  But in another and more important way, the change between the United States and England was like climbing out of a ship’s dark cargo hold onto a top deck bathed in brilliant sunshine. “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” did not mean in England what they did in the United States. In London, for the first time in his life, Frederick experienced what most of his brethren back home would never know—being viewed by whites with curiosity, interest, even affection.

  It was not that Victorian England was a color-blind sanctuary. For generations, the British Empire had subjugated and exploited entire civilizations in South Asia, Africa, and many other places around the world. In the United Kingdom itself, unabashed racism was directed against the Irish, the Jews, and others. But because there were very few blacks in England at this time, and even fewer American “negroes,” the attitude toward people like Frederick was surprisingly accepting—“surprisingly” especially from the point of view of Americans who happened to be visiting the British Isles.

  The seeming contradictions of British snobbery dismayed one American visitor, who noted that in the great university towns of England, one could see “negroes” at college balls waltzing with aristocratic young women and ladies of high position, all of whom would have considered it grossly inappropriate even to acknowledge a familiar tradesman in the street. Another American was shocked by the sight of “two coal-black negroes and two white women” in a fashionable London restaurant. “My first impulse was to instantly depart,” the American admitted, “for such a sight in the United States would surely not have been possible.” But in the end there was little he could do except acknowledge ruefully, “In London a negro can go into the finest restaurants and be served just like a white man.”

  William Drysdale, a well-known American reporter making a grand tour of Europe—and who would soon have a memorable encounter with Frederick in Monte Carlo—wrote that

  no American negro who reaches London goes away again if he can help it. Here his color does not militate against him in the least, but rather the contrary, because it is something of a novelty. He is received in the best hotels, if his pocket is full enough, in the lodging houses, in the clubs; he can buy the best seats in the theaters, ride in the hansoms—do anything, in short, that he could do if he had the fair skin and rosy cheeks of a London housemaid. He is more of a man here than he can well be at home, because there is no prejudice against him.

  Drysdale approved of the way the English treated American blacks. He had also heard numerous lectures from Londoners about the barbarism of lynchings in the South and the general inhumanity of American whites toward blacks. But he got to know the English well enough not to be taken in entirely by their morally superior attitudes. He pointed out that their criticism of American failings

  would have more force if one did not find out in a short time the particular brand of darky that the Englishman despises most thoroughly and heartily, and that is the East Indian darky. The low-caste Hindu is a beast in his estimation; a creature to lie outside on the mat, and be kicked and cuffed and fed on rice.

  “So we all have our little failings,” he concluded wryly.

  After arriving in London, Frederick applied for admission to a school that he remembered as the “Conservatory of Music.” He must have had very little money after paying for the voyage across the Atlantic, because he hoped that he could make arrangements to pay for his tuition and living expenses by working for the school. However, his application was refused. Were it not for the descriptions of how American blacks were treated in London in the 1890s, one might have thought that Frederick was rejected on racial grounds. It was more likely that the school was unwilling to take on a student who wanted to work his way through the program. Or perhaps he was judged to lack sufficient talent, as is suggested by the fact that he did not attempt again to study music in England or in continental Europe. Given the kind of adventurer he had become, he could have tried to enroll elsewhere at a later time if he believed in his own abilities.

  He next tried to start his own boardinghouse in Leicester Square. He thus not only shrugged off his failure at the music school but also tried a new way to put down roots in a city that he found attractive. This was, moreover, an endeavor that capitalized on all the experience he had acquired in Chicago and Brooklyn. But whom could Frederick approach in London to borrow the money that he would have needed?

  The answer may in fact have been entirely elsewhere. On February 8, 1895, India, who was working as a cook in Louisville, Kentucky, mortgaged the family land in Coahoma County for a two-month loan of $2,000 at an exorbitant interest rate. How she came to be in possession of the land after everything that had happened and why she did this are unknown, but it could have been to get Frederick the money that he needed for his venture in London or to make ends meet as he was trying to set it up. The timing is plausible.

  In any event, Frederick overreached himself in London. The plan for the boardinghouse failed, and he had to take a step back into the occupations that he knew best. He first worked in a German restaurant that he remembered as being called “Tube,” and then in a “Mrs. James’ Boarding House.” Shortly thereafter, perhaps in pursuit of a better job, or because of wanderlust, or both, Frederick left England for France.

  Frederick’s arrival in Paris can be dated closely. He must have gotten there shortly before July 12, 1895, the day he received a letter of introduction from the American ambassador to France, J. B. Eustis, addressed to the Paris prefect, or chief, of police. Writing in French and using the standard phrases for a letter of this type, the ambassador expressed the hope that the prefect would welcome “Mr. Frederick Bruce Thomas,” who was residing at 23 rue Brey, when he presented himself to be registered. Among the duties of the office of the prefect was making note of foreigners who planned to live in the city.

  The distance across the English Channel between Dover and Calais, which was the port of entry for boat trains to Paris, is only thirty miles, and the thrice-daily ferries in 1895 could cover it in less than two hours. Nevertheless, Frederick’s move to France would in some ways be a bigger dislocation than his move to England. However strange the pronunciation and idioms in Great Britain might have sounded to an American at first, the language was still the same, especially for someone whose ears had gotten used to regional variations as different as those of the Deep South, the Midwest, and Brooklyn. But throughout much of the rest of the world in the 1890s, and well into the beginning of the twentieth century, French was the second language of business, government, and culture. A monolingual American arriving in a foreign locale would find few English-speakers outside the major tourist hotels. To live and work in France, or anywhere else on the Continent, Frederick would have to learn French without delay. He had the right temperament to do so: his willingness to leave a familiar world in order to seek new experiences indicates that he was sufficiently confident and extroverted to be a good language student.

  Frederick’s need to learn French was especially urgent because his job was once again that of butler or valet, which would require him to communicate quickly and easily with his employers, or, if these were English-speaking, with people outside the household, such as shopkeepers and tradesmen. Judging by the addresses he gave in several documents, his employers were well off: all the addresses are elegant buildings that have survived to this day and are located in fashio
nable districts of Paris near the Arch of Triumph.

  France, like England, was accepting of blacks. In fact, the attitude toward blacks in Paris at this time was even more liberal than in London. The reaction of James Weldon Johnson, a black American writer, composer, and intellectual who first arrived in Paris in 1905, conveys what Frederick may have also felt:

  From the day I set foot in France, I became aware of the working of a miracle within me. I became aware of a quick readjustment to life and to environment. I recaptured for the first time since childhood the sense of being just a human being…. I was suddenly free; free from a sense of impending discomfort, insecurity, danger; free from conflict within the Man-Negro dualism and the innumerable maneuvers in thought and behavior that it compels; free from the problem of the many obvious or subtle adjustments to a multitude of bans and taboos; free from special scorn, special tolerance, special condescension, special commiseration; free to be merely a man.

  The relative rarity of blacks in Paris made someone like Frederick an appealing object of curiosity and enhanced his chances of being employed. Because the French were far less conscious of class differences than their staid English neighbors, it is likely that he would have found working in Paris more congenial than working in London. In the streets and in the city’s shops, servants were greeted politely as “Mademoiselle” or “Monsieur” even by strangers who knew their actual status. A valet’s wages and hours would also have been better than a waiter’s.

  Because Frederick was also a very handsome young man (as photographs of him c. 1896 show), Paris would have been a wide-open field for romantic adventures. A white American who knew the city well commented, with a hint of envy, that “Frenchmen do not connect the negro as we do, with plantation days. Fair women look upon him with love and admiration, as Desdemona looked upon Othello.” Even more relevant to Frederick was the man’s remark that “everywhere you find the same thing. Colored valets traveling with Americans are raved over by pretty French maids.”