Many of the Kings—Mary Jane’s siblings—rose to high stations, living on Beacon Hill and the like. Miles across town was Roxbury, where their black mother and white father lived in a comfortable though not so prominent address. To visit their mother, they did so by prearrangement, so to keep their secret. But Mr. and Mrs. King could never visit them at their homes. The agreement was strictly abided by and never challenged.
The constraints were onerous but everyone knew their lot would be much worse in the South, so Mrs. and Mr. King remained in the North. Agatha’s grandmother, Mrs. King, had only one request, which her devoted husband granted—that she be returned to Charleston, South Carolina, when she died. Agatha’s grandfather Samuel King kept his promise and accompanied his wife’s body home on the train, their family in attendance. He had such disdain for slavery in the South that he refused to be buried there, in spite of his beloved wife’s last decision. Instead, when he died in 1908, he was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery of Massachusetts.
When the Wootens arrived in the Northeast, there was clearly a large and well-established family network. Some, like Grandpa King, who lived long enough to spend time with his granddaughters, gladly welcomed the North Carolinians into the fold, but others were more standoffish. In the former category was the dazzling Aunt Cash, one of Mary Jane’s sisters. Without exception, she swept her Wooten nieces under her wing—not only Marion and Agatha but also the much younger Theodora and Ruth, who came along almost a dozen years later—and gave each of them a taste of glamour and style that their own parents could not have provided.
Aunt Cash was probably the original woman of independent means in their lineage, going on to invest heavily in property with savings she inherited from her late husband’s tailoring business. At a time when most states wouldn’t give property deeds to people of color, the only way around that was to work through a white attorney. Aunt Cash paid whatever extra money she earned to her lawyer and he would, on faith, make the payments. Many African Americans lost their homes either due to bad business deals or the inability to pay taxes. But for those who could make the payments, during the ’20s and ’30s, opportunities arose for Negroes to acquire property in fancy areas around the Cape where foreclosures cropped up daily—like the magical gingerbread house that Aunt Cash bought on Martha’s Vineyard in Oak Bluffs, an area that became the black bourgeois section. By the early 1960s, though, the laws had changed. Aunt Cash had never gotten the deed switched to her name, something she had never told family members about and something that was not uppermost in her concerns at the nursing home where she was living out her last days. Her original lawyer had already passed away and so, too, would have the ownership of her jewel of a house on the Vineyard, if not for another lawyer who had followed the property’s history and went the extra distance by making repeated visits to the nursing home in the hopes of finding Aunt Cash lucid enough to sign papers to prove she was the rightful owner—and to stipulate an heir.
During a time when the civil rights movement of the 1960s was just gearing up, when the favorite son of Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, reached out to a nation to broaden its vision and to think beyond differences, this never-named lawyer—who stood to gain nothing other than the knowledge that he had done the right thing—was at last able to obtain her signature and her decision to deed her house to the third-born of her Wooten nieces, Theodora.
In later years, I would have occasion to visit Aunt T, as we all called her, and her grandchildren there, crossing over on the Woods Hole Ferry, mingling with the high society side of the family.
Aunt Cash was also famous in family lore for her magnificent head of lustrous black hair that cascaded down to the tops of her thighs, which she typically wore in a long braid that she could sit on. In their upper-crust Boston accents, the four Wooten sisters all said the same thing: “Aunt Cash’s hair was so thick, she would get migraines from it.” Finally, she subjected herself to scissors and transformed her black mane into soft curls. That was how I last saw her, when I was five years old and went with Agatha to her funeral.
I later figured out that one of the reasons Agatha encouraged me to become close to her sisters was because of the extremely positive influence their aunt Cash had had on them. Following in their aunt’s footsteps, each of the Wooten sisters was ultimately self-made, and all four were also property owners. Very early on, that stirred something profound in me. Proprietorship was power. The more uprooted I became in years to come, the more I yearned never to move or be moved.
The influence of their mother, Mary Jane, was clearly strong, too, yet she remained more of an enigma to me. From most perspectives she was tough, probably because of the kind of life she had lived by remaining in the South as a woman of color when most of her siblings and her parents went north. Most of her grandchildren would say that they remembered being scared of her. But in spite of her terse demeanor, Mary Jane was revered for her character and abilities. Her employment was initially what was then called “out in service”—which meant that she cooked and cleaned as a domestic in the homes of the well-to-do. Soon enough, because she was so in demand, she earned a level of independence by taking in laundry and hiring her daughters to help in their heralded pressing work. Mary Jane Wooten’s real claim to fame, however, was her cooking. In the late 1940s, her culinary talents and recipes were featured in Ebony magazine’s monthly column by Freda DeKnight. No wonder Agatha and her sisters were such outstanding cooks.
While the Wooten sisters took after their mother in their homes and gardens, their temperament was more warm and affable, like their father’s. By trade, John Wooten was a furniture maker with a top reputation in woodwork, caning, and upholstery, which explains why Ma became an expert in caning and furniture repair. Even though their father had never finished grammar school down South, he was apparently such a brilliant self-taught mathematician that he went on to tutor youngsters who found out what a wiz he was at numbers. The Wooten girls inherited his intellectual prowess, not only in academics and in their capacity to learn, diving into complex subject matter and professional interests outside of their background, but also in having such passion about everything they undertook. Above all, it was probably his talent at the violin that most influenced his daughters, each of whom was unquestionably musically gifted.
Or such is the opinion I developed in connection to Auntie Marion after going to hear her rehearse for an organ recital at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in downtown Boston. At this juncture, in early 1967, some months before the annual cookout, Agatha had started to ask my social workers to request a subsidy from the State of Maine for me to take bonafide ballet lessons. Until they approved the cost and a local teacher could be found, she was intent on exposing me to more arts and music. To that end, we made the trip into Boston, during which Ma filled me in on the unpredictable turns that her sister Marion’s life had taken.
Born in 1902, just a year before Agatha, Marion had also been beset by many of the same health crises that Ma had been through. As a young girl, Marion also had surgery for scoliosis. Later, she, too, was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy, causing her arm and hand to become swollen. Remarkably, this did not affect her playing the organ.
Their likenesses didn’t stop there. The two petite beauties resembled each other very closely and had the same pure, authentic essence. Both five foot even, arms always wide, single breasted, both with love. Marion had a gentleness and an ever so slight reserve that contrasted with Agatha’s more outgoing personality.
With Marion’s musical gifts evident early on, her parents managed to send her to study piano at the prestigious New England Conservatory of Music. She was flooded with offers but chose to recommend that her sister Agatha take advantage of the opportunities, at a time when she believed that it wasn’t practical to be a wife and mother and have a career at the same time. Putting the creation of a family first, Marion married Arthur Leroy Collins and they were soon blessed with a son—Arthur Leroy Co
llins Jr., or Sonny as we all called him—as well as a daughter, Margaret.
Then, quite suddenly, three years into her marriage, Marion was widowed. Arthur was stricken with tuberculosis. Marion resorted to moving back with her children, into her parents’ home in Alston, but she was determined never to be a burden on them and their household.
As it happened, a number of years earlier, after years of miscarriages, Marion’s mother, Mary Jane Wooten, had miraculously given birth to not one but two more daughters. Theodora and Ruth were still very young in that time. Marion vowed to support herself and her children, and to add to the welfare of her parents and younger sisters. To that end, she went to work out in service, as a live-in housekeeper and cook, in swanky Roslindale, Massachusetts. For the next eleven years, she was able to see her children only twice a week.
Never would I forget hearing this part of her story, or the image it gave me of Aunt Marion, an accomplished pianist who might have gone on to play on the world’s most illustrious stages, having to swallow her pride and her dream, having to put on an apron and work as a maid. I imagined moments when she would slip off her apron and sit upon the piano bench, unable to resist her truest self.
Moments like that must have sustained her until, thankfully, there came a time in the 1940s when she was able to return to the career that had been put on hold, and she was able to pick up, more or less, where she left off—as an accompanist for the popular black songstress Dorothy Richardson. In other words, like they say, it ain’t over ’til it’s over. By now she had met and married Alfonzo Williams, and the two were eventually graced with a daughter, Mary Jane Williams.
The importance of sacrifice was a value that Marion embodied in many ways, a value that she obviously passed on to her kids. Her firstborn, Sonny, joined the navy and fought in World War II, as did her daughter, Margaret, who served as a captain in the Nurse Corps of the army. Mary Jane became a champion of early education and went on to be the executive director of Head Start in New York, a program in which I had been lucky enough to participate before I went off to school, thanks to Agatha’s insistence and persistence.
In the meantime, Marion found a way to combine a musical career and her life of religious devotion when she became the lead organist for St. Richard’s Catholic Church.
It was a real honor that Ma chose to take me to hear Marion’s rehearsal. But when we arrived at the cavernous, empty church and took our places in a lonely pew, I privately wondered what the fuss had been about. There was Auntie Marion, looking smaller than ever as she sat down in front of the massive organ. But all at once, at the striking of the first note, I felt my body begin to shake. The reverberation of the sound emanating from the brass pipes pulsated through me, leaving me motionless, speechless, and dazzled. Aunt Marion’s command of melody and phrasing made an unforgettable impression on me, as did the sight of her—unhindered by scoliosis or any other previous infirmities, or by her diminutive, crooked form—in her grand dominion of music. It was as if I could hear the story of her life told in the emotion that she poured into her playing, freeing herself from her earthbound state, overcoming limitation, flying and connecting to infinity: another personal eyewitness account of the transformational power of art.
During a visit to Aunt Marion and Uncle Al’s home on Montrose Street in Roxbury, I wove my way through stacks of Uncle Al’s newspapers that he refused to throw away, making my way to the scent of a freshly baked lemon meringue pie.
During my adolescence in Boston, when long separations from Agatha found me missing her desperately, I would make my way to Aunt Marion’s house. On one occasion she wasn’t there and all I could do was sit on her front porch and cry for the whole neighborhood to see. Otherwise I was content with the briefest of visits—even if just for a hug, to nestle into that familiar contour, and to see that kindest, gentlest of all creatures, a woman who understood pain, loss, towing the line, never giving up, sacrifice, and never losing her dream or her passion.
Theodora Wooten Roberts, built like Eleanor Roosevelt, with conservative pressed gray hair, had an intelligent composure that was her special brand of beauty. Aunt T was private, and proper. Though Aunt T enjoyed playing the piano like her sisters, she did not pursue a creative career. Not at all a rabble-rouser or a trendsetter, in her own determined manner she had blazed a trail in the Wooten family by graduating from Boston Teachers College—working summers as a waitress on Nantucket—and then going on to work as a teacher at the Thomas Gardner School among others in Boston for forty years. Her husband, John Roberts, worked forever for Payne Furniture, a prestigious Boston store, the kind in which you barely stole your own reflection in the store window.
Between her beautiful Boston brick house and the home on Martha’s Vineyard that she inherited from Aunt Cash, Aunt T had every reason to be proud of the level of success and stature she had attained. I believed the secret was a combination of things Aunt Theodora epitomized—the power of education, consistency in pursuit of higher goals, and acute organizational skills.
It was by no accident that John and Theodora’s only child, Maryanne, was the family’s golden girl, the debutante and shining star whose future was unlimited. Untouchable in beauty, poise, and social standing, Maryanne was in the top of her class in nursing school, engaged to one of the most eligible, debonair African American bachelors in her circle, when the unthinkable happened and she was struck with polio on her twentieth birthday.
At a time in the mid-1950s when Dr. Jonas Salk’s vaccine was still new and many people were skeptical about the side effects, Maryanne was tragically not vaccinated—even when cases among her age group were rising. Maryanne, drawing from a well of willpower and faith, refused to go down for the count, telling her parents and everyone who asked that she was going ahead with all her plans. “I’ll walk down that wedding aisle on my own,” she promised, and, of course, with crutches, she did exactly that.
Maryanne Roberts Bradley then proceeded to become a nurse at St. Elizabath’s in Boston, where, without much of a disability from her wheelchair, she practiced for thirty-five years. During the days when she had been in training to become a nurse at what was Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, later known as Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Maryanne learned that her grandmother Mary Jane Wooten had been admitted for blocked arteries and acute heart disease. For all those years that many members of the family had feared their matriarch, Maryanne was one of the few not at all intimidated—something her grandmother loved about her. Now, at the end of Mary Jane’s many days, how comforting it must have been to have her granddaughter with her, gently and lovingly attending to her, holding her hand and telling her not to be afraid. Several years passed before I understood what a blessing it must have been for both of them. Little did I expect that decades later history would repeat itself with Agatha and me, in the same hospital.
Born a year after Theodora, in 1919, Ruth seemed to mix together all of her sisters’ exemplary traits with her own savoir faire. Her arrival at the annual cookout instantly raised the bar for style and elegance. Aunt Ruthie was pure glamour, beauty, brains, and ambition. She played the piano, as was the Wooten daughter tradition, but her professional path was as an executive secretary, the pursuit of which led her meteorically to the pinnacle of the political world in Massachusetts and around the world. As the secretary to Governor Paul A. Dever at the State House in Boston, Ruth Wooten Williams made U.S. history by becoming the first African American woman appointed as executive secretary to a U.S. governor.
In my childhood, Ma explained how her sister Ruthie received a Western Union telegram of congratulations from the legendary Josephine Baker.
MRS. RUTH WILLIAMS—1951 JUN 12 PM 12:04
SECRETARY OF GOVERNOR PAUL DEVER
GOD WORKS SLOWLY BUT SURELY I AM SO HAPPY AND
PROUD OF YOU AND OUR RACE
BLESS YOU—
JOSEPHINE BAKER
Aunt Ruthie was in newspaper(s) across the country. This was not only important fo
r black history, but also important for women. One Boston paper wrote,
Mrs. Ruth Williams…the first Negro to be appointed private secretary to a governor of Massachusetts. Prior to her appointment as secretary to Gov. Paul A. Dever, Mrs. Williams worked as a civil employee at the State House here since 1941…
Aunt Ruthie’s legacy gave me hope while Agatha continued to send appeals, on my behalf, to the State of Maine to underwrite the expense of pointe shoes. The birth of great expectations had taken place in my psyche.
Given the society circles in which Ruth Wooten was ensconced, nobody could believe that the man who turned her head, fine-looking though Harold Williams was, could barely read or write. Aunt Ruthie’s attitude was that his shortcomings weren’t anything that couldn’t be addressed with adult education. After she began teaching him to read, he attended night school and earned his GED in record time. The next thing the family knew, Harold Williams had become one of the premiere real estate brokers on Cape Cod and would remain so for nearly fifty years.
Meanwhile, Aunt Ruthie owned homes in Hyannis and Falmouth, and a vacation home in Jamaica. She and Harold traveled the globe and supported the arts and celebrated six decades of marriage.
After Ruth left the Boston State House, she went into business for herself and invested in a popular hair salon for ladies of color. She showered Ma with gifts of expensive wigs. Short, long, straight, curly bobs, flips, and teased updos. Gray, black, auburn, you name it. I loved to try on every single wig, making faces and creating characters, causing Agatha and me to roar with laughter.
The Women Who Raised Me Page 10