The Queen

by Josh Levin

  * * *

  Martha got a stepfather before her first birthday. In October 1926, a year before Marvin White filed for divorce in Alabama, Lydia Mooney White married a thirty-eight-year-old widower named Joseph Jackson Miller.** “Old Man Joe Miller,” as Sarah Jane took to calling him, had left his job at a Missouri slaughterhouse to find agricultural work in the Mississippi River’s alluvial plain. Soon after Martha started walking, Lydia and her new husband packed their possessions into a Ford truck that Old Man Miller had bought from his father-in-law, Ike. As of the 1930 U.S. census, Joe, Lydia, and their children—Miller’s teenage son, Sam, from his first marriage; a girl named “Murry” (probably Mary Jane); and four-year-old Martha—were living on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, on property owned by a wealthy planter named Edgar A. Stacy.

  Until the turn of the century, the area around Dell, Arkansas, had been a swampy, malarial timberland patrolled by wolves, bobcats, and bears. In the first few decades of the 1900s, loggers cleared thousands of acres of elm, ash, oak, and cypress; dredge boats dug out hundreds of miles of drainage ditches; and state and federal functionaries shored up levees to protect the region from devastating floods. In short order, Mississippi County, Arkansas, had been transformed, in the words of the local chamber of commerce, into the “greatest cotton producing county in the world,” home to “super-soil” that nurtured an agricultural bounty.

  At its height, the Stacy plantation had twenty-two thousand acres of land under cultivation. Farmhands like Joe Miller planted cotton in April and May, thinned out the crop with hoes when the plants broke through the dirt, and plowed the fields with the aid of mules in June and July. Picking season started at the end of August, whereupon women and children took to the fields to separate fluffy cotton locks from their thick, protective burrs, depositing the white fibers in nine-foot-long canvas sacks worn strapped around their shoulders. Most of the men on the plantation were sharecroppers rather than wage laborers—they were furnished with seed and beasts of burden and gave up half the proceeds from their harvests in return. The greatest cotton-producing county in the world didn’t produce anything close to a living wage for the Miller family. Stacy’s tenants were essentially indentured servants. At the end of the year, they might be told they’d run up a debt, and they’d have no recourse to contest the boss’s accounting.

  The front of the Stacy family’s residence, a stately two-story home with four towering white columns, looked a bit like the facade of Tara, the fictional plantation house from Gone with the Wind. The Millers lived in a shanty fashioned from cypress boards that had been fastened together vertically, with sheets of newsprint stuffed between the cracks. The laborers’ shacks had kerosene lights, outdoor pitcher pumps for water, and coal or kerosene stoves for heat. Joe, Lydia, and their children may have had a small garden plot and a pig or calf to raise and slaughter. They bought everything else they needed—cornmeal, flour, lard, dried beans—at the plantation commissary. When Stacy’s hands got paid, they received half their remuneration in groceries. If working men had too much money in their pockets, the plantation owner believed, they’d waste it all on moonshine.

  The late 1920s and the 1930s were trying years for cotton farmers in Arkansas and Tennessee. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927—what Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover called America’s “greatest peacetime disaster”—overwhelmed levees in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and elsewhere along the river. The cataclysmic flood, which left the Stacy plantation underwater, necessitated a large-scale, nationalized relief effort. That outlay of federal money primed the nation to support Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a package of programs that included Aid to Dependent Children. The disaster of 1927 also accelerated the Great Migration, impelling tens of thousands of black Americans to leave behind the deprivations of rural life and set out for metropolises such as Chicago and Detroit.

  In 1930, in the midst of the Great Depression, a ceaseless drought caused as many as 50 percent of the crops in Arkansas to wither and die. The Stacy plantation suffered catastrophic economic losses, ultimately forcing the family to give up all but two thousand of its twenty-two-thousand acres. With farmers unable to purchase staples and Hoover, who was elected president in 1928, slow to offer federal largesse, the Red Cross stepped in to provide food and clothing for hundreds of thousands of Arkansans. The planters and bankers who controlled the distribution of this aid fretted about the risks of excessive generosity, recalling “how hard it was to get labor after the ’27 [flood], when people were allowed to loaf and eat.”

  Seven years after the height of the drought, another great flood washed over more than a million acres of agricultural land in Arkansas and destroyed most every dwelling in Golddust. Lydia’s brother Sam, who lived on the Tennessee side of the river, woke up to water sloshing through the floor of his house. A barge eventually plucked him and his family off their tin roof and ferried them to a Red Cross tent city, where they found temporary shelter until the Millers took them in.

  Although Lydia and Joe moved from place to place frequently, they never strayed too far from her parents and siblings. Sometimes the Millers and Mooneys even ended up on the same plantation. Hubert would remember playing with Martha several times a week when they were young kids, “eating watermelons and crap like that on the farm.” A photograph taken in Arkansas around 1930 showed Lydia and her father, Ike, side by side, their arms touching at the elbow, the expressions on their faces totally blank. She’s wearing a dark-colored cloche hat and a rumpled, drop-waist, floral-print feed-sack dress, one that had probably been sewn by her mother. The mustachioed, dour-looking farmer and his heavyset, unsmiling daughter stood in front of an elevated, rough-hewn wooden structure with a busted window—either Lydia’s parents’ home or her own.

  * * *

  By 1940, the Millers were living on the Florenden Plantation, a thirty-five-hundred-acre farm on the outskirts of Luxora, Arkansas, owned by Frank O. Lowden, a former governor of Illinois who’d been touted in the 1920s as a potential Republican presidential candidate.*** Lowden, who aspired to build Florenden into “the star plantation of the South,” wrote to the farm’s manager in 1939 that he was “not only delighted but astonished at the yield of cotton…which the tenants have produced.” According to the 1940 census, the Millers paid $5 per month in rent to live at Florenden. While the census didn’t enumerate Joe Miller’s income, his adult sons earned $150 and $240, respectively, as wage laborers. That was well below the median annual income for American men, which stood at $298 for agricultural workers and $1,001 for those not employed on farms.

  The men and women listed above J. J. and Lyde Miller on the 1940 census included a pair of schoolteachers, five farm laborers, a grocer, and the manager of the Florenden Plantation. Eleven people on the Millers’ census page were classified as “Negroes.” In 1920, the U.S. Census Bureau had distinguished between “blacks” and “mulattoes,” with the former group encompassing “all Negroes of full blood” and the latter “all Negroes having some proportion of white blood.”**** That distinction had been erased in 1930, when the agency adopted the principle that became known as the “one-drop rule,” mandating that any “person of mixed white and Negro blood should be returned as a Negro, no matter how small the percentage of Negro blood.” The Census Bureau’s chief statistician, Joseph Hill, explained that it had been necessary to enact such a provision because the “very nature of things makes it impossible in a census to distinguish accurately between black and mulatto.” Until 1960, individual census enumerators were tasked with categorizing the race of every American. Hill reported that the “enumerator must either judge by appearances—which are often deceitful, and he does not by any means meet or see all the persons whom he enumerates—or he must accept the answer he gets to the question if he takes the trouble to ask it.”

  It’s not possible to know if the census takers who visited the Miller family in Mississippi County, Arkansas, scrutinized Martha’s pigmentation to determine i
f she had some “percentage of Negro blood.” What we do know is that Martha was marked as white in the 1930 and 1940 censuses, just like the rest of her family. This government-adjudged determination of racial purity affirmed that the Millers were law-abiding citizens. In 1911, the Arkansas legislature had prohibited the act of “concubinage”—that is, “the unlawful cohabitation of persons of the Caucasian race and of the negro race, whether open or secret.” Per that statute, “Any woman who shall have been delivered of a mulatto child, the same shall be prima facie evidence of guilt without further proof and shall justify a conviction of the woman.” If Martha had been declared a “Negro,” her mother, Lydia, would’ve been guilty of a felony.

  Hubert Mooney would testify in 1964 that he and his niece had played with black children in Golddust. “There are lots of them there, lots of them,” he’d say, remarking on the contrast between Tennessee’s Lauderdale County and lily-white Cullman, Alabama. The Millers had lived alongside black people on the Stacy plantation as well. All farmhands faced economic deprivation, but black sharecroppers and wage laborers also had to live with the constant fear of racial violence. Drivers traveling east and west on state highway 18, which bisected the sprawling farm, made a game of throwing rocks at dark-skinned workers they spotted walking down the road. Black men and women rarely left the Stacy property. They worshipped there, in a modest wooden church with a gable roof that itinerant preachers were always promising to fix up. They were also buried on the plantation, in a bamboo-covered cemetery laden with unmarked graves.

  Black children rarely had the chance to explore the world beyond the cotton fields. While white boys and girls went to a local public school, the sons and daughters of black laborers went to class on the plantation, if they went at all. Although the 1940 census indicates that the teenage Martha completed the second grade, her aunt Thelma Helms—who lived near the Miller family—didn’t remember her niece making it even that far. “She didn’t go to no school I went to,” Helms would say during the Wakefield heirship hearing, noting that Martha’s older sister, Mary Jane, had been given an education. Lydia would testify that Martha had been expelled from an all-white school at about age six. Despite refusing to acknowledge in court that her daughter was biracial, Martha’s mother would say that “they wouldn’t allow colored kids in the white school.” She’d explain that her daughter had gone with “colored people—colored women who took her to Dell and sent her to school.”

  In her 1964 interview with the Chicago Defender, Constance Wakefield said that Jim and Virginia Collins—a black couple who lived near Dell—had been her surrogate parents. The U.S. census, however, always listed her as living in a household headed by her stepfather, Joe Miller. Thelma Helms would say in court that she’d never heard of Martha moving in with a black family, though she did acknowledge that her niece had been a nomad from an early age. “She had been leaving and coming ever since she was about twelve years old, drifting in and out,” Helms would explain. “She would come back and stay awhile, and get into a fuss with her stepdad and take off again.…It was in and out so much I couldn’t keep track of a person like that.”

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  A light complexion could, in certain circumstances, allow a biracial person in the Deep South to travel between two very different worlds. In the fall of 1919, NAACP assistant secretary Walter White went undercover as a white man to investigate a massacre near Elaine, Arkansas, a town 115 miles down the Mississippi River from Dell. On the night of September 30, a group of roughly a hundred black farmworkers had gathered at a church to discuss forming a union; by banding together, they thought, they might be able to convince white plantation owners to share more of the proceeds from their cotton crop. Although it’s unclear who shot first, a conflict outside the meeting ended in the death of a white railroad policeman.

  The next morning, hundreds of armed white men descended on Elaine, and they were soon joined by five hundred U.S. Army troops who’d been brought in to quell a supposed black insurrection. (“Vicious Blacks Were Planning Great Uprising,” said an October 4 Arkansas Gazette headline.) Walter White would later estimate that more than two hundred black people were slaughtered, gunned down by “mobs [that] swept over the countryside hunting down and killing every Negro they could find.” He’d gathered that information in interviews with white citizens and public officials who’d believed that the NAACP assistant secretary was one of them.

  White—whose mother was purportedly the granddaughter of an enslaved woman named Dilsia and her master, future U.S. president William Henry Harrison—risked enraging those who’d been deceived by his racial passing. In a 1929 article for the magazine American Mercury, he reported that he’d fled Elaine after word began to spread about his identity. On his way out of town, he wrote, a white train conductor told him, “Why, Mister, you’re leaving just when the fun is going to start! There’s a damned yaller nigger down here passing for white and the boys are going to have some fun with him.” When White asked about “the nature of the fun,” the conductor explained that “when they get through with him, he won’t pass for white no more.”

  Martha Louise White’s family members were happy for her to pass on official forms, but they didn’t let her forget who she really was. Her uncle Sam Mooney, who’d found refuge with the Millers after the 1937 flood, didn’t allow his niece inside his home in Golddust. Sam’s daughter Sarah, who was more than a decade younger than Martha, thought her first cousin was incredibly beautiful, with shiny black hair and full lips. Sarah knew that Lydia’s daughter was different, and she knew she wasn’t supposed to talk about what made her that way. She mostly admired her cousin from afar. Martha spent one big family get-together sitting in a car, alone. None of the Mooneys spoke to her, and she didn’t speak to any of them.

  Martha, like her mother before her, would give birth to her first child when she was still a child herself. In 1964, Rose Kennedy’s attorneys would introduce into evidence a delayed birth certificate for a white male named Clifford Lee Harbaugh. That record, which had been filled out by an Arkansas physician in 1957, reported that Clifford had been born on July 27, 1940, in Dell, Arkansas. His mother’s “color” was listed as white, her name as Connie M. White, her home state as Louisiana, and her age upon Clifford’s birth as fifteen. The first of those data points was open to interpretation. The last three were incorrect. As of July 1940, Martha Louise White of Golddust, Tennessee, would’ve been just fourteen years old.

  Lydia would tell the probate court that she’d helped raise her grandson in his infancy. That arrangement would end without any warning. One day, when Lydia was away from home, Martha and Clifford disappeared. Lydia wouldn’t see her daughter and grandson again for years.

  In Mississippi County, Arkansas, Martha Louise White’s life had been circumscribed by events that preceded her birth. Everyone seemed to think they knew who and what she was, and who and what she had any right to be. In a different state, in a different part of the country, her history wouldn’t have to be her destiny. She could rewrite her past to tell whatever story she wanted.

  * Although the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1967’s Loving v. Virginia made state-level interracial marriage bans unenforceable, Alabama didn’t lift its prohibition on miscegenation until 2000.

  ** Lydia would eventually marry again, taking the last name of her husband Hubert Blount.

  *** While the ex-governor always managed the property, his wife, Florence Lowden—the daughter of sleeping-car magnate George Pullman—had been the one to buy the land in 1911. She willed the plantation to her husband upon her death in 1937.

  **** The 1890 census had included more discrete racial categories. “Be particularly careful to distinguish between blacks, mulattoes, quadroons, and octoroons,” the Census Bureau’s Instructions to Enumerators explained. “The word ‘black’ should be used to describe those persons who have three-fourths or more black blood; ‘mulatto,’ those persons who have from three-eighths to five-eighths black blood; ‘quadr
oon,’ those persons who have one-fourth black blood; and ‘octoroon,’ those persons who have one-eighth or any trace of black blood.” The octoroon and quadroon categories did not appear in the 1900 census or any year thereafter.

  Chapter 13

  The Two Mrs. Harbaughs

  The top sanitation official in Oakland, California, said the six buildings owned by William Viera were “the vilest the health department has ever seen.” The families that lived in Viera’s apartments told of clogged toilet fixtures, broken flooring, and wooden beams that had been gnawed by rats. The squalor at 778 Tenth Street, where tenants reported that “small flies gather around the rotted wood,” earned a front-page spread in the Oakland Tribune in 1942. Four years later, an Oakland jury found the landlord guilty of a host of violations owing to the “filth and rubbish” that continued to blanket his properties.

  The building on Tenth Street made the paper again in 1948, in an article about a pair of women who’d been arrested for abandoning their children. On February 4, the Oakland police got tipped off that a two-year-old and a three-year-old had been neglected by their mothers. The woman who called the authorities also lived at 778 Tenth Street; she explained that she’d agreed to watch her neighbors’ kids but had left the youngsters on their own because she had to go to town herself. The two mothers were taken to the city jail. Their babysitter, who called herself Connie Harbaugh, faced no charges for ditching her assignment. The cops would come back for her the following month.

  On a Thursday night in March, two officers showed up at Connie Harbaugh’s door; their ensuing report noted that they’d “received information” that she’d been seen consorting with “several different men.” What they saw inside her West Oakland apartment confirmed the tip. “When arrested the above had a Mexican, Gilbert Ortiz, in her room,” the report began. “On questioning, Ortiz admitted several acts of intercourse with above and stated that he has slept all night with above on three different occasions while [her seven-year-old] son, Clifford Harbaugh, slept on a couch in the same room.”