The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  “Now you, Miss Mable March,” she said, singling out a young girl sitting in a pew in a starched yellow dress. “Are you going to study hard so you can have the same distinguished fate as Miss Hemmings? These ladies’ colleges don’t open their doors for just anyone. One has to prove oneself the best of one’s race, just as Miss Hemmings did.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Peoples,” the girl responded obediently. And that was the chorus that followed, as Mrs. Peoples cross-examined every Negro girl sitting near her about their commitment to education and to becoming the next Anita Hemmings.

  “I suppose it’s all right,” said Robert, pride battling concern on his face. “What is the risk in gossip now that she has graduated?”

  Anita wondered if Mrs. Peoples was unaware that she had passed for white at Vassar. She had never told her herself, assuming instead that her parents had, since almost everyone in her Roxbury community knew. But Mrs. Peoples seemed to think that Vassar had willingly invited a Negro into its halls and would happily do so again. Anita decided to let Mrs. Peoples maintain that belief. She made her way back to her family, and Elizabeth moved over to make room for her.

  “They have it all wrong,” Elizabeth whispered in her ear. “It’s me who wants to be the next Anita Hemmings.”

  “No, Elizabeth. You’re already so much better,” said Anita, squeezing her hand. “Just stay exactly as you are.”

  CHAPTER 28

  It was in late June that Anita decided to prepare for the entrance examination for graduate study in Greek and Latin at New Haven’s Yale University, which had recently started accepting female graduate students. The family agreed that she would live at home in Boston while she studied, since Frederick was moving to his own quarters on Pearl Street, and there would be more room. Anita was to work as a tutor in foreign languages for the summer, as she had done in Boston every year since starting at Vassar. Dora would spend much of the season in Martha’s Vineyard, running her small boardinghouse in the Highlands of East Chop, part of Cottage City, the only town in Martha’s Vineyard where Negroes could buy property. Unlike many of the boardinghouses in the area, Dora’s house did not cater to Negroes, and because of it, she was able to charge a higher rate, a decision she had made with her children in mind. A portion of her wages would go toward Anita’s future schooling.

  “As a graduate student,” Anita wrote in a letter to Bessie, whom she had not seen since returning to Boston, “I know I’ll be able to make the journey to Greece and perhaps even Italy. My scholarship to study abroad did not materialize while at Vassar, but I feel that it will at Yale. And to be even closer to New York, Bessie! Have you and William made the trip together? I imagine you have, with the Harvard football team traveling there so often. I visited in January and fell more in love with it than ever. My trip was made at a time where everything felt so right in my life, and I’ll always associate the city with that rare sentiment.”

  The summer was a busy one for Anita. With her Vassar degree, she was in much higher demand as a tutor than she had been as a mere student. Life at home soon resumed its normal pulse, and she slowly began to feel a sense of peace she had forgotten was possible.

  “But of course you feel that,” said William Henry Lewis one evening when Anita was dining with Bessie and her husband for the first time since returning to Boston. “You are where you should be. You must always have pride in being a Negro, Anita. For if we do not, why should they?” he asked rhetorically. “You and Bessie, you are destined to lead a whole generation of Negro women who long to be educated as you both were, who dream of opportunities our mothers could scarcely imagine. My parents were slaves. They lived in terrible conditions in Virginia. But my father, after serving as a sergeant in Virginia’s First Regiment for colored troops, worked his way up from a dockworker to a Baptist minister, all because he could read and write. He pushed me in the right direction and now I am a Harvard-educated lawyer and paid to run their football team. Bessie came into this world in difficult circumstances, and now look at what she has done. Look at all the other Negro women gaining college degrees. Alberta Scott at Radcliffe was raised right here in Cambridge. Her family moved from Virginia to Massachusetts, like both of yours. Martha Ralston at Mount Holyoke is from Worcester. All these bright, young Negro women are here in this state, Anita. Massachusetts will be the force driving Negro rights going into the new century. This is where you need to stay.”

  “I’m in touch with the National Association of Colored Women, the group formed last year in Washington,” said Bessie, when her husband had finished. “There are strong women at the helm along with the founder, Miss Ida B. Wells. Harriet Tubman is involved. Mary Church Terrell, who graduated from Oberlin in the eighties. And Boston’s own, Josephine Ruffin. We could join them, too, Anita, especially you. Your graduation from Vassar will interest them greatly.”

  “Bessie is right,” said William. “I know you’ve lived differently for four years, but you’ll see. You will gain a renewed sense of pride working with other Negroes.”

  “I have a great sense of pride in being a Negro,” Anita replied. “Just as much as you do. I did not want to attend Vassar just for myself; I wanted to attend Vassar to show that a Negro woman is just as intelligent as a white woman. That we deserve to be at Vassar, that we deserve to be in every school that admits white women. In my own way, I did that. But William, if I could have attended the school as Negro, I would have.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” he said, raising his glass to her.

  What Anita was afraid to tell him and Bessie was that she would have to apply to graduate school as a white student. If she didn’t, she would expose the secret President Taylor had urged her to keep. She felt she had no choice but to continue passing, at least until her education was complete.

  “You’ve done very well, Anita,” said Bessie, taking her friend’s hand. “We are all,” she said, glancing at her husband, “all, very proud of you.”

  By August, Anita’s entire family was on Martha’s Vineyard helping with the boardinghouse. Bessie and William had promised to come up to stay with them in a few weeks, and Anita, surrounded by the tight-knit Negro community on that crescent of beach, started to shed the layers of anxiety she had built up over the past four years.

  Cottage City had been established decades earlier as a place to summer by white Methodists and Baptists who came year after year for revival meetings, at first pitching tents, then gradually building small, colorful houses. When the revivalists moved their fervor elsewhere, tourists gradually took their place, Negroes as well as whites. When Anita told her Vassar classmates that she spent the summers in Cottage City, it wasn’t a locale black enough to cause alarm, but if anyone had been paying attention, it might have given them pause. The area was part of the Vineyard, but in many ways it was a private town, which not only accepted Negroes but largely let them run their own community.

  Anita found herself walking on the Cottage City beach on one of the warmest days of the year feeling as if the wrongs and worries she had endured were behind her. It was mid-August, and she was strolling for the sake of strolling, Elizabeth and Robert Jr. running on ahead. She trod in the wet sand by the water’s edge, not caring about her shoes, and thought of the hard lessons she had learned about kindness. The world was kinder to the educated, and kindest of all to whites—and she knew that in a way that almost no Negro ever would.

  But that was all over for now.

  As the morning slowly rolled into afternoon and the boardinghouse was miles behind them, she called out to her brother and sister to turn around. They had to return by two o’clock to help their mother prepare dinner. Cooking for fifteen people took many hands and many hours.

  “But there is Bessie!” Elizabeth called suddenly, running even farther ahead. Anita looked and saw her friend hurrying toward them. She must have just arrived on the Vineyard, thought Anita. She started to run, too, her long bathing costume scratching her legs.

  “Anita!” Bessie exclaimed,
grabbing her friend when she reached her.

  “I didn’t know you were coming today!” said Anita, laughing. But Bessie took her by the shoulders and started to cry.

  “Anita, oh, it’s just horrible,” she said, her eyes full of tears. Elizabeth started to cry because Bessie was crying, and Robert Jr. implored her to compose herself and listen.

  “It’s in the paper, Anita,” Bessie said. “The Boston Daily Globe. The very front page. They know. Someone told them. They know you’re a Negro.”

  Anita cried out, and the four of them ran for the boardinghouse on Wayland Avenue. Walking as composed as they could past several white guests, the group bowed their heads and moved to the back of the house, to the cramped quarters where the Hemmings family slept. Dora cried out at the sight of her daughter, panting for breath after her run to the house, and Frederick motioned to the paper they were reading, his face more panicked than Anita had ever seen.

  “It can’t be. It just can’t be,” said Anita, her voice cracking as soon as she saw the unfolded paper. Though she glimpsed her name in the body of the article, she couldn’t take her eyes off the headline. Elizabeth moved past Bessie to Anita’s side and held her hand as tightly as she could. Anita knew that Elizabeth, the most sensitive of them all, could not bear to see her sister upset. She was the sister she had shared a room with for years, the one she called Lillybug.

  Anita let a tear fall onto her cheek but wiped it away before her mother could see. It was worse for them, she thought to herself. The notoriety, their names in a newspaper. It was worse for them.

  The family and Bessie stared at the bold headline at the very top of the paper, centered on the front page—DARK, BUT BEAUTIFUL—in a size they had seen when important men had died. How could a story about Anita merit the same size print?

  “ ‘Globe Extra! Five o’clock. Dark, but beautiful. Colored girl went through exclusive Vassar College,’ ” Bessie read the three-tiered headline aloud.

  “What is this, Anita?” her father asked, distraught. “What is all this?”

  “They knew,” Anita confessed, crying now. “The president, the lady principal, even my Latin teacher, Miss Franklin. They all found out the truth just weeks before commencement.” Frederick led her to a chair. “I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to upset you. I was graduated, that is all that’s important.”

  “But this, Anita!” said Bessie, holding up the paper. There was a large likeness of Anita, drawn from her official graduation portrait, which must have been provided to the Globe.

  “Lottie knew?” said Frederick, guessing correctly.

  “Yes,” Anita said, barely able to say the word. “My roommate Lottie was aware of my race. She discovered it first, and she told them all.” As she recounted what had unfolded those last weeks at school, her mother took her hand and held it against her heart. “But the president asked us all to keep quiet,” Anita told them. “He implored us not to share the story.”

  “But someone certainly did share it. Your roommate. It must be your roommate who told the papers,” said Robert Jr. “The story of ‘the roommate’ takes up half the article. Look.” He took up the paper and read to Anita. “ ‘The denouement came in the senior year and was directly traceable to the girl’s roommate.’ It goes on from there about her suspicions and her father hiring a private investigator. Anita, she must have been the one to tell the newspapers. And not just the Boston papers; it’s already been printed in New York, too. Read this,” said Robert, pointing. “It says ‘Historic Vassar College is in a state of ferment over an announcement in a local paper that among this year’s graduating class was a colored girl.’ That means Poughkeepsie.”

  “Lottie is the one who exposed your secret. And who would dare question her?” said Frederick, his voice bitter. “How could she act so wickedly?”

  “My poor Anita,” said Bessie, wrapping her arms around her friend. “What you must have gone through those final days. And not confiding in any of us. You are so brave. You’ve always been brave, but this, I can’t imagine what it must have taken to endure it.”

  “I didn’t want you to worry,” said Anita, her face flushed with emotion. “What would you all have thought? I had only two things to accomplish in college: hide my race and graduate. And I only succeeded in one.”

  “The important one,” said her father, resting his hand on her head. “The other you were only doing for them, their school, their rules.”

  “They cannot take back your diploma, can they?” asked Dora weakly.

  “Of course not, Mother,” said Frederick. “As Anita said, the president allowed her to graduate. They may not have admitted her knowing she was a Negro, but in the end, they approved of her being there or they would not have awarded her her diploma. It was just this hateful roommate.”

  “It won’t just be her now,” said Anita quietly. “Now that this news has broken, I won’t hear from any of my friends again. I knew the administration might not be pleased if I returned to campus, but now my classmates will surely forbid it.”

  “Don’t say that yet,” said Bessie. “I know I’m always welcome at Wellesley. I’ve been back to campus once already.”

  “It’s a different school,” said Anita. “A different circumstance. You know that. And attending graduate school as a Negro woman who was in the newspapers,” she croaked. “That will be extremely difficult.”

  “Anita,” her father said sternly. “You have already proved that nothing is impossible. Look at you, you have already accomplished the impossible.”

  Anita glanced down at the paper. The story about her, with the enormous headline, took up a quarter of the front page. She scanned the words, certain passages leaping out and dealing hammer blows to her confidence.

  Anita Florence Hemmings, “a colored girl—beautiful it is true, but nevertheless colored.”

  Colored. She would now forever be known as Vassar’s colored student. The Negro. The only one.

  “ ‘It is an outrage that the imposing institution founded by old Matthew Vassar should have sheltered within its ivy-clad walls a real, true colored woman. Such is the prevailing sentiment of the townspeople.’ ” Anita tried not to cry out again as she read this, knowing that her tears were directly causing her mother’s.

  “ ‘The faculty sat, so it is said, in secret conclave, and decided that, as the girl had completed her course satisfactorily, a diploma could not very well be refused her,’ ” Bessie read aloud over her shoulder. “Oh, Anita, how do the newspapermen know all of this?”

  “She was there,” said Anita. “Did I fail to mention that before? I’m so overwhelmed I don’t remember what’s been said and what hasn’t. Lottie was present for the meeting. It was myself, President Taylor, the lady principal, my Latin instructor, Miss Franklin, and Lottie. President Taylor stated during our meeting that the board had met before he spoke with the four of us. Lottie must have remembered and shared that detail with the Globe.”

  “What a hateful girl,” said Bessie. “If only you’d had another roommate. There are students there who would have protected you, I am sure of it.”

  “Yes, there are women of integrity there,” said Anita, remembering how lucky she had felt being the roommate of Lottie Taylor, a member of the sought-after Gatehouse group. She thought about how for so many months Lottie had been one of those women of integrity. With her fascination of Japanese culture and the way that she had told her cousin that skin color wasn’t worth fussing about, Lottie had seemed to her the most modern of women. But it had been only in speech, it turned out, not in action.

  Bessie, who had started reading the paper again, pointed to a section down the page. “ ‘Prexy’ Taylor, whose kindness of heart is a byword in the college, was appealed to, with the result that the girl was awarded her diploma. The girl took a prominent part in the exercises of Class Day, and no one who saw the class of ’97 leave the shades of Vassar suspected Negro blood in one woman voted the class beauty.” She look
ed up with a reassured expression. “See, Mrs. Hemmings, Anita will not lose her diploma. There is no talk of that at all.”

  Dora Hemmings shook her head disbelievingly. She looked toward the door, prompting Frederick to assure her that no one was going to burst through it demanding Anita’s diploma. “I am unable to listen to all this any longer,” she said, standing. “If you will all excuse me.” She walked back to the kitchen to continue kneading dough through her tears.

  Bessie sat in the chair that Mrs. Hemmings had vacated and kept reading, focusing on Lottie, who was not named in the paper, referred to only as “the roommate.” “ ‘This girl began to suspect the dark beauty, whose statements, freely made, as to the wealth and position of her family soon passed the bounds of credence.’ ”

  Frederick turned and looked at Anita. “If you could have just spent time with different students, if Lottie Taylor—”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to him. “I should have listened to you, I should have—”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, and Anita was thankful he was able to hold his tongue about Porter. “They are doing something wrong. They’re wrong. All of them.”

  “Yes,” said Bessie firmly. “No one could expect you to go four years without making friends. You had to grow close to people. Living without a community would have done real damage to you. You did what any of us would have done. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “But I do!” Anita cried out. “Now I do. What will become of me? Of my life? I won’t be accepted into any graduate programs now, certainly not Yale. They will know my true race. It is hard enough to be admitted as a woman to their graduate programs, and impossible as a Negro woman.”

  “What about one of the universities for Negroes?” Bessie suggested softly.