Discipline and routine, the hallmarks of prevailing penal theory, governed the women’s movements day and night. Awakened every morning at 5:00 A.M. except Sunday, the prisoners ate breakfast at 6:15.
Prison food, never wholesome or sufficient to sustain the laboring prisoners, was often rancid, cold, and infested with insects. The inmates especially hated Tuesdays and Fridays, when they had “fish that was neither fresh nor plentiful.” The prisoners ate in a large, gloomy, cockroach-infested dining room with rows of long wooden tables and benches each seating eight women. They used rusty tin dishes and cast-iron knives and forks. Breakfast consisted of corn syrup, bread, “hash,” and weak coffee. For lunch they had “meat, vegetable, bread and water, and supper a light meal of bread, and perhaps stewed fruit.” Almost all the food contained vermin.37
Work started in the sewing shop by 6:30 A.M., continuing until lunch. The inmates then had a rest period from 11:30 to 12:30 and then went back to work again until 4:30, the end of their nine-hour workday. After work, supper lasted until 6:00 P.M. and then the guards allowed the prisoners to walk outside in the yard. Friday after work, they cleaned their cells and bathed. On Sunday they ate breakfast later, then had church services and an outdoor exercise period. The inmates had to remain silent and could talk only during limited recreation periods. The men’s wing had a library, but women could not use it for the matron feared they could not be trusted to go there alone.38
The nine-hour shift six days a week in the sewing shop was consistent with the period when workingmen were required to put in a nine-hour day. House and Goldman were both seamstresses. However, the inmates trained two months to sew wearing apparel the state contracted for revenue. The prisoners received assigned tasks, or quotas, of work to complete each day. They sewed jackets, overalls, jumpers, and suspenders for delivery by the state to retailers. Operating in a double row of old “out of date” sewing machines in a narrow, badly lighted room, each inmate would be assigned to sew 45 to 100 jackets or 9 to 18 dozen suspenders in a day. In the clothing, the jailed women sewed the labels of private firms across the country. Goldman found the work onerous and tedious.39
G. R. Gilvin, the acting warden, pressed the women hard to produce their daily quotas. To compound the harsh labor conditions, the state prisoners received time off their sentences for good behavior if they made or exceeded their tasks. But this promise did not automatically extend to federal prisoners such as Callie House and Emma Goldman. The shop foreman, an unnamed twenty-one-year-old who had been in the job since age sixteen, would insult and intimidate the women verbally to keep them hard at work. The shop matron displayed a considerate attitude toward the inmates, but the head matron, Lilah Smith, in her forties and an employee of penal institutions since her teens, exuded hostility, except toward those who became her favorites.40
The earlier practice of flogging the prisoners had been dropped for the more “enlightened” practice of isolation in a cell for forty-eight hours from Saturday to Monday on a bread-and-water diet. The worst punishment consisted of the blind cell, an entirely dark hole four by eight feet in size. With one blanket, two slices of bread, and two cups of water a day, a prisoner might be kept there from three to twenty-two days.41
Emma Goldman appears not to have noticed Callie House among the sixty other inmates of color. Goldman described her fellow prisoners as “poor wretches of the world of poverty and drabness.” She wrote, “Colored or white, most of them had been driven to crime by conditions that had greeted them at birth.” She saw them as victims of economics and/or society and not as possible political actors like her. An unnamed “Chinese girl,” imprisoned for having killed her husband, warned Goldman against being so friendly with the “colored” inmates, whom she thought “inferior and dishonest.” Challenging the woman’s racial stereotyping, Goldman reminded her that Chinese men and women had been attacked in California by mobs, just as “colored” people were in the South. The “Chinese girl” said she knew this but whites had been mistaken because Chinese people “no smell. No ignorant, different people.”42
Goldman relied on the African-American prisoners, who helped her in “making the full task” quota. “The kindness of several coloured girls in the shop,” plus her five cents per jacket paid to these “girls” who usually finished their quotas an hour earlier than others, permitted Goldman to finish her shift. She thought perhaps they had greater physical strength or had done the work longer, but she did note that African-American women did the work much better than the white women. Most white prisoners could not afford a nickel to pay for help, but Goldman lent them money since they would not accept payment because she shared food and books with them.43
Goldman declared that she “never had any prejudice against coloured people,” but the race question had not been part of her politics. And she apparently missed the opportunity for sharing with her fellow federal political prisoner Callie House and learning about her fight for reparations.44
The foreman graded the prisoners’ work. The highest score, “A,” resulted in as much as half time off one’s sentence. Although sentence reduction applied only to state prisoners, Mrs. House somehow gained early release for her good work and was discharged from prison on August 1, 1918.45
The indictment of Callie House claimed that she had “fraudulently converted money to her own use” but noted that the government could not determine the “amount of money collected or converted.” The prosecution introduced no evidence of wealth. Nashville property deeds record that Mrs. House and her son Thomas House jointly purchased a lot in 1909 for $200. They paid $35 down and agreed to pay $4 a month for forty months, and then $5 for the last month plus 6 percent interest for the property on Currey Street in South Nashville. Seven months after her release from prison, Thomas sold his mother the lot for one dollar and “in consideration of the love and affection” he held for her. Whatever Mrs. House did in the ex-slave pension movement, she and her family did not profit financially from it.46
The federal government expected to destroy the reparations idea embodied in the ex-slave movement by jailing Callie House. But hundreds of thousands of African Americans had the same idea. Too many people had seen and heard Callie House and believed in the principle. “She kept it alive for years,” but other African Americans were willing to defend it in her stead.
CHAPTER 9
Passing the Torch
My Whole soul and body are for this ex-slave movement and are willing to sacrifice for it.
CALLIE HOUSE
(1899)
IN AUGUST 1918, after her release from prison, Callie House returned to her family home in South Nashville. It was the same shotgun frame house she had lived in since a few months after moving from Murfreesboro in 1898 at the start of the national ex-slave pension movement. For the next ten years, until her death, Mrs. House worked once more as a washerwoman and seamstress in her neighborhood of porters, laborers, washerwomen, and domestic servants.1
Mrs. House’s conviction had killed the national legislative activities of the Ex-Slave Association. But the work of the local chapters and the reparations movement continued. Mrs. House’s work did not occur in a vacuum. The final decades of her life came at a time when conservative Republicans and Democrats dominated politics; liberal social trends vied with religious fundamentalism for political attention. In the African-American community, art and literature exploded in the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance while brutal repression, in the form of lynching and racial riots, seemed to increase. The NAACP began a concerted effort to end racism and bigotry, which included an initiative focused at obtaining a federal antilynching law.2
In Nashville, the city and the Carnegie Foundation opened a “Negro” library. The “colored” Young Men’s Christian Association occupied a large building in the heart of the African-American business district, and national African-American organizations such as the Baptist Convention and National Medical Association held their conventions in the southern city. Afr
ican-American civic organizations abounded, their activities dutifully reported by the black-owned Globe newspaper. The state operated a segregated tuberculosis hospital to address the disease many whites saw as a “Negro disease.” Black churches flourished. So did taxpayer-supported all-black institutions, including Pearl High School, Tennessee A&I College for Negroes, which my eldest brother and numerous cousins attended in the 1950s and 1960s, and Hadley Park. These stood as accomplishments that local African Americans had requested successfully from politicians. In 1917, in response to another African-American demand, the state of Tennessee permitted a Nashville colored National Guard to mobilize for service in World War I.3
In the years following Mrs. House’s release from prison, the great migration of blacks to the North and West during and after World War I grew from a trickle to a stream. African Americans were drawn to economic opportunities made available because the war reduced European immigration and increased demands for workers in industry for military preparedness. About a half million African Americans left the South between 1916 and 1919, and nearly a million followed in the 1920s. In addition, within the South, many moved from rural areas to cities.
Mrs. House lived to witness the growth of South Nashville as thousands of African-American sharecroppers and other rural blacks moved into the city, either permanently or as a way station on the trip north. The local African-American population grew by 25 percent to 42,836 in 1930. Many of these migrants moved into South Nashville, where Mrs. House lived, in neighborhoods blacks had developed since the Civil War. Former tenant farmers and sharecroppers without other occupational skills, the migrants worked in low-wage, unskilled jobs like their neighbors. African-American women maintained their overwhelming presence in the low-wage workforce. Well over half of the Nashville female black population worked mainly in domestic or personal service occupations or as washerwomen like Mrs. House. Only a small number of black women were professionally employed; 57 African-American women held jobs as teachers or doctors, or in insurance and real estate, with 526 working in some area of the clothing and textile sector. Those African Americans in the professional and business class lived nowhere near Callie House’s neighborhood.4
Black business in Nashville and elsewhere reached its peak in the favorable national economy of the 1920s. Black downtown, Cedar Street (now Charlotte), from Fourth to Tenth Avenue, boasted the two black banks, physician and law offices, churches, printing and publishing houses, retail stores, the colored YMCA, and the Negro Opera House.5
The business and professional institutions were led by a coterie of younger black lawyers, doctors, public school teachers, college professors, and businessmen, who emerged to pick up the mantle left by James Napier, Richard Boyd, and Preston Taylor. These emerging leaders belonged to the NAACP, made ending segregation a major goal, and also showed great interest in the culture and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. They supported the student strike against the white president of Fisk in 1925, which took energy and time. After the city sent in policemen to beat the student protestors, working-class black Nashvillians joined the protests. Some 2,500 local blacks attended a rally at St. John’s A.M.E. Church to support the students and roundly denounced police brutality. The college’s white trustees refused to give in to the students; it was not until 1946 that Charles S. Johnson became the first African-American president of Fisk. In this period as in the past, except for the protest against police abuse, the activities of bourgeois African Americans mostly bypassed Callie House and other working-class residents of Nashville.6
On June 6, 1928, Callie House died at age sixty-seven. Living at home and “keeping house,” she had been hemorrhaging from uterine cancer for almost six months. According to her physician, George M. Kendrick, who saw her daily, she had bled for a week. Although Dr. Kendrick and his partners treated patients whether they could pay or not, an operation for Mrs. House was thought either not useful or too expensive. Her funeral was handled by P. M. Ransom and A. Morris, undertakers, an African-American firm.7
Callie House lies buried in Mt. Ararat Cemetery, organized in 1869 by the Sons of Relief (No. 1) and the Colored Benevolent Society as the city’s first black cemetery. Mt. Ararat is a thousand feet north of the junction of Murfreesboro Pike and Elm Hill Pike, next to the still existing dairy. Although the property was later sold to Greenwood Cemetery owner Preston Taylor, a historic plaque marks the Mt. Ararat location, but there is no map of the burial sites and no record of where individuals’ graves are located. Among the graves many markers are worn away. My nephew and I have tramped the entire grounds repeatedly, vainly seeking a marker for Callie House.8
Mrs. House’s funeral most likely took place at the same church where services were later held for her brother, Charles Guy, who died in 1933. Charles, an itinerant Primitive Baptist preacher, like most among the denomination’s clergy, supported his family as a laborer.9
The funeral arrangements for Mrs. House’s brother were handled by the most flamboyant Primitive Baptist minister in Nashville, Reverend Zema W Hill, the charismatic pastor of Hill’s Tabernacle Primitive Baptist Church. Born in rural Franklin County, Hill joined a local church and became a preacher as a teenager. After he moved to Nashville in 1916, his “elegance, good looks and magnetic preaching style” quickly developed a large following. By 1919, he had started Hill’s Tabernacle and his funeral home. Unlike other black Primitive Baptist churches—“primitive” wood structures with potbellied stoves—Hill built his tabernacle of brick with two furnaces; congregants could look down through the registers and see the coals burning. His congregation of washerwomen, domestics, and laborers contributed their mites. Hill’s “civic minded zeal” led him to arrange funerals for the destitute where he would pass a plate in a “silver service” to collect contributions from the congregation. His new funeral home, with six-foot concrete polar bears at the entrance, and his fleet of automobiles, with his name in gold letters, attracted attention and more customers.10
White and black civic and political leaders attended the church services, sitting among the working-class congregation. When she arrived in Nashville “from the country” in the early 1930s, my mother, Frances Southall Berry, joined Hill’s Tabernacle. My brother and I attended services there while we lived in the neighborhood with my mother’s eldest sister, Aunt Ever-leaner, and her family. The famous and the infamous showed up at Hill’s Sunday services, including my uncles—my mother’s brothers—inveterate sinners who drank and partied when not at work but would not have missed Reverend Hill’s church services on Sunday. My uncles used to tease my mother, saying that before Zema Hill even said anything, excited women threw their pocketbooks at him. During services those who could not squeeze inside the building stood or sat outside in good weather. In a period before air-conditioning, the congregation fanned itself with paper fans advertising local businesses as they sweltered in summer, and those outside poked their heads through the wide-open windows to see the spectacle.11
After her death, Mrs. House’s family can be traced through the city directories for the next few years. In 1929, the House family still lived at 1307 10th Avenue South, while her brother, Charles Guy, and his family remained nearby. Guy worked as a laborer until his death, and Mrs. House’s younger son, William, worked as a clothes cleaner at a shop on Fourth Avenue North downtown. In 1929, Thomas, Mrs. House’s eldest son, pressed clothes at the Just Rite Tailor Shop; William’s wife worked as a domestic, and Charles’s wife took in laundry.
In 1933, Callie House’s daughter Annie rented a place on Vernon Street, where Callie and Charles and their families had first rented rooms in Nashville when Mrs. House began taking in washing. In the same year, William’s wife was working as a maid at the James Robertson Hotel. Annie worked as a maid and Ross as a houseman. Thomas lived on Vernon Street also, with Annie and Ross, probably her son. The 1957 directory recorded their names as Howse. However, when Mrs. House’s daughter Mattie died in 1971, her last name was recorded as House in
the official city death records.12
Howse was the most popular spelling of the House name in Nashville. A white Howse family, including Mayor Hilary Howse and his relatives, had owned slaves. Like many African Americans, descendants of the Howses kept the name. Hilary Ewing House, born into a slaveholding Rutherford County family in 1866, served as mayor of Nashville from 1909 to 1915 and again from 1924 to 1938. The African-American Howses and the few Houses who live in Nashville today claim to know nothing about Callie House.13
Even though Mrs. House appears to have stopped working in the reparations movement after her imprisonment, some of the local chapters of the Ex-Slave Association continued their self-help activities in the ensuing years. The Atlanta council, led by Professor Brunsey R. Holmes, president of the Holmes Institute, held fund-raising drives to provide mutual assistance for the old ex-slaves in the form of “Warm clothing and something good to eat.” The affiliate repeatedly asked the public to send groceries, old clothes, or money and held “tag days” (yard sales) to raise funds. Two of Holmes’s female relatives, Savannah and Kizza, taught at the school where Professor Holmes served as the principal. The Atlanta Constitution published a photograph of “Holmes of The Ex-Slave Association,” which apparently gave weekly allowances for fuel, groceries, and clothing to old ex-slaves right before Christmas. The chapter, organized in the early 1900s, engaged in such self-help activities as late as 1931.14
Although the federal government defeated the legislative goals of the Association, the hope for and belief in pensions on the part of old ex-slaves remained alive. Their children and grandchildren also remembered the demand. In April 1928, some relatives of a freedman in Wetumka, Oklahoma, asked the U.S. attorney general, “Is there any money set aside for old ex-slaves by the U.S. Government?” An Arkansas freedman asked in December 1930, “Had there Ben a law in Congress that we people should draw a pension by being own by southern people?”15
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