The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  “Yes, like Miss Hemmings, I have passed before,” said Andrew quickly, guessing the circumstances and wanting to break the tension before it could mount. “But only for brief periods of time, and only out of necessity.”

  “What sort of necessity?” William asked, moving his eyes from his wife to his guest. “When is it ever a necessity?”

  “To practice medicine,” Andrew replied matter-of-factly.

  “Am I incorrect in thinking that you ran a practice for Negroes in Tennessee?” said William, who had clearly been relayed Andrew’s entire life story by his wife.

  “You are not wrong,” said Andrew, looking briefly at Anita, who was sitting rigid and uncomfortable. “But for a time I learned my profession beside an extremely gifted white doctor. He was far older than I and compared to my dedicated instructors at Central Tennessee, his schooling and training were far superior. I firmly believed that learning from such a man would enable me to save more lives in the future. Negro lives.” Andrew cleared his throat and folded his napkin in his lap. “Working with him,” he explained, “I only treated white patients, so my need to disguise my race was essential. You can imagine what the reaction would have been if they knew they had colored hands on them.”

  “They would have died right there on the table, from your touch, not from disease,” said William, causing everyone to laugh and relax slightly.

  “The poison some think exists in Negro hands,” said Bessie, shaking her head.

  “In Negro everything,” said William. “They think the foundations of religion, of country, will all start to crack if the Negro is looked at as even fifty percent worthy of the white man.”

  “Some believe that,” Anita said, coming out of her shell and correcting him.

  “Yes,” said William, agreeing. “Not all. But many.”

  “In my life, I’ve had to ignore most of that hateful talk,” said Andrew. “If I hadn’t carried forward with shatterproof optimism, I would never have come out as I did.”

  Bessie looked across the table at Anita apologetically, but Anita smiled at her. It was clear that Andrew could handle himself very well with William, and did feel great pride in his work.

  “You and I,” said William, pausing to collect his thoughts, “we come from very similar circumstances. Bessie moved up north from Virginia when she was very young, and Anita, though her parents are Virginians, was born in Boston, but we spent our childhoods in the South, didn’t we.”

  “Yes, indeed. I’ve spent my whole life in the South,” Andrew said respectfully.

  “I was in Virginia until I was twenty years old,” William explained. “Started out my college education at Virginia Normal, aged fifteen. But I had a helping hand moving me up north. The president of the school gave me the idea of Amherst and helped make it a reality. Once there, I had to pay my way working as a waiter and a stable boy, but I had help, I’ll admit that. Negroes helped me. White men helped me. But you didn’t have such a step up, did you, Mr. Love?”

  “Call me Andrew, please,” he said, looking squarely at his host. “I’m afraid that in the South there’s the South and then there’s Mississippi. And I believe that like mine, your parents were born slaves, but your father became a literate, highly esteemed minister. Or that is what I have read about you.”

  “That’s correct,” said William between bites of the cherry pie that his wife had served for dessert.

  “I don’t doubt that it was just as difficult for you to move on to college as it was for me,” said Andrew carefully, “but I, as you say, did not have a step up. My father works as a farm laborer; most of my family is still illiterate. But he gave me drive, maybe more than any other parent in the South did. He wanted me out of Mississippi and out of the fields.”

  “And you made it,” said William.

  “Eventually. I wasn’t fifteen in college, I was thirty years old when I graduated from medical school.”

  “But you’re here now, and we are all very glad to have you,” said William, finally looking approvingly at Anita.

  When dinner was over and the women were clearing the table, Bessie pulled her friend over to the corner of the kitchen, looking like an excited schoolgirl.

  “He’s extremely handsome, Anita. And coming from absolutely nothing, becoming a physician with not a soul to help him. Even William had mentors. You and I had Northfield. He had no one. I have great admiration for him already. Please tell him he’s welcome back anytime. No, better yet, I will deliver the message.”

  “He is elegant, isn’t he,” said Anita, unable to repress her smile. “And his ambition is so honorable.”

  “He,” said Bessie quietly, taking her friend’s hand, “reminds me quite a bit of you.”

  The following evening Andrew Love called again, and the next week, Anita and he made the short journey to Boston so that he might meet her parents. The reporters had finally given up on the family, and Andrew and Anita were free to move between Sussex Street and Bessie’s home in Cambridge without scrutiny.

  “My darling girl,” said Mrs. Hemmings, after Andrew had gone. He had just dined with the Hemmings family for the third evening in a row. Dora clutched her daughter’s hand and said, “A horrible thing happened to you, and from it sprang something good. That is a handsome, remarkable man. Imagine, a Negro becoming a doctor with his sights set on Harvard. God is great.”

  “He does seem both those things,” said Anita, her pulse steadying for the first time in weeks thanks to her mother’s healing presence.

  “And he doesn’t seem to be coming to dine here just because he enjoys my cooking. I think he far prefers my daughter’s company.”

  “It is all happening very quickly,” said Anita, resting her head on her mother’s soft shoulder.

  “Is there a timeline to love?” asked Dora, stroking her daughter’s piled-up hair.

  “No, there is not,” she replied, thinking back on Porter and how after their first kiss she had known that love would swiftly follow.

  With her weight still leaning on her mother, she let her thoughts of Porter multiply. She was no longer in love with him, she was sure of that, but her fondness for him remained unshakable. He would always be part of that one magical year of school, when Anita didn’t feel hindered or limited by her race or her sex. When everything, even a life with a man like Porter Hamilton, seemed like a possibility.

  But that year was long over and the stone walls of Vassar College would never safeguard her again. But perhaps Andrew could.

  In the weeks that followed, Andrew’s courtship continued, and Anita, three months after their initial meeting, confided in Bessie that she knew she could grow to love Andrew, perhaps even more than she did Porter, because together they could live a genuine life together, full of confidences and shared goals. He, just as Bessie said, was very much like her. And with him, she thought, she could be the best version of her true self. Not Anita Hemmings passing; Anita Hemmings living.

  Soon after that declaration, Andrew must have sensed the change in Anita’s heart, for he felt confident enough to utter the word marriage. When he did, he confessed it had been on his mind since he first caught sight of her in the library.

  “But you want to move back to Tennessee,” said Anita. “After Harvard.” She thought about that distance and how awful it would be to leave her family, even with a man like Andrew by her side.

  “I do,” said Andrew. “Chattanooga feels like home and I have an established practice there. My patients are expecting me to return.”

  “Do you think I would be content there? In Tennessee?” Anita asked, her voice laced with doubt.

  “I hope so, but I can’t be certain,” said Andrew. “It’s a very different world. Perhaps you wouldn’t take to the South. As you are aware, things can happen to the Negro there, awful things.” He turned to look at her and kissed her hand. “But Anita, if you were not happy in Chattanooga, we would leave. We could start a new life together somewhere else if you did not take to the lifest
yle there.”

  “My parents said they would never return to Virginia,” said Anita. “To have their daughter go even further south, I don’t know how they would feel. And I’ve disappointed them enough this year.” She looked at his downcast face, and added, “But I would be willing to try. For you, I would try anything.”

  “Would you?” said Andrew hopefully. “And what if we left Tennessee and had to establish ourselves somewhere else one day? Anita, if that were the case, and we had to pass as white, is that something you think you could do again?”

  “Even if I was open to it, I don’t think I could, with my notoriety,” she replied nervously, her eyes darting around the tree-lined Cambridge street. “My story was printed everywhere from New York to Hawaii and back again. I even, recently, received a letter from the colored writer Paul Laurence Dunbar,” she disclosed. It was something she hadn’t been sure she would share with Andrew, but with the subject of passing back in the conversation, she felt that she had to. “He intends to include me in his new musical work,” she said, her voice unstable. “I’m going to be the subject of a song entitled ‘The Colored Girl from Vassar.’ He sent me a verse, and the lyrics are just awful. I’m called a poor dusky maid in the presence of millionaires. I’m so disturbed by it that I don’t dare write him back. I—” She wiped a tear from her face and looked up at Andrew, feeling the same brokenness to her heart as she did when the newspapers first came out.

  “But think,” said Andrew, putting his hand on her worried face. “If we were to marry, your name would change. You would no longer be the Anita Hemmings of the newspapers or of a play like Mr. Dunbar’s. You would be Mrs. Andrew Love. Anita Love. Now, I think we both look at passing as a very last resort, something we would be forced to do, not something we would choose to do again, but we have to discuss it before marriage. For Anita, I never want anything to come between us. We share such similar views and values—I think that’s what brought us together initially—and I always want it to be such.”

  “I do too,” said Anita, her eyes drying. “And of course, Andrew, it is something I would consider, with you. If we had to, we would.”

  “Perhaps if Tennessee did not prove a safe place, we could go to New York?” Andrew offered. “That is where you said you hoped to live, is it not? If you did not like the South, or if we were forced to leave, we could settle there.”

  New York. Anita thought about gliding through Central Park in the Taylor family carriage, taking in the opera with Lottie by her side, glimpsing Marchmont Rhinelander across the gilded room for the first time. No, her New York would never be like that again, but it would still be New York. And perhaps it could be just as good.

  “I know you’ve decided not to apply to the graduate program at Yale because of your notoriety,” said Andrew, interrupting Anita’s colorful memories. “But I can promise you a life of the mind, Anita. I can. I want to be married to a woman more intelligent than I am, better than I am, kinder than I am, and that person, without a doubt, is you.”

  “Is it me?” Anita asked, reaching for the comfort of his hand. “I want to be all those things, Andrew, but sometimes I’m not. At times, I think I am built of horrible things like fear, apprehension. That confidence I had built up at Vassar still feels stripped from me. You are helping to bring it back, but I don’t know that I can ever be like I was again. Or even like you.”

  “Of course you can be,” said Andrew, gripping her small hand tightly. “Intelligent as you are, beautiful as you are, and now strengthened from what you’ve endured—of course you can be.”

  “But passing again, the idea terrifies me,” said Anita, her voice shaking. “What would become of our families? Would we ever see them again?”

  “Anita, you are speaking as if we are going to start passing as white tomorrow. I hope we never have to. I pray the world changes and that no one has to. It’s just something we need to be realistic about, aware of. And as for your family, if we did have to live as white, we would never lose sight of them. It might have to be different, especially when our children are born, but we would still see them. I will make that promise to you.”

  Anita nodded, relieved. She did not fully understand the realities of Negro life in the South, but she did know that Andrew’s career in medicine would be far more lucrative if he passed as white. But could she really do it again? If necessary, did she have the strength to wipe away her history, lose her identity through the practice of stepping out of one’s skin and into another’s yet again?

  Anita leaned against Andrew’s strong shoulder and thought about her sister, Elizabeth. Lillybug. She had the darkest skin of them all. How cruel it was, Anita thought, that they had to have this conversation at all, when speaking of something as joyful as marriage.

  When they had walked back into the Lewis home, and straight through to sit on the ornate iron bench in the small backyard, Anita sat close to Andrew, their legs just brushing each other. She pictured her ailing father, her mother who had sacrificed so much, her brother who had looked after her during her Vassar years and thought about how happy they would be if she said yes to a marriage with Andrew. But she considered herself, too. She had thought Porter Hamilton could never be surpassed, but she was slowly coming to realize that with Andrew, she could have a deep, generous love—an honest love—and it was what she wanted. She would say yes to him not for her family or her community, but for herself.

  “I want to marry you,” she said as the sun had finished setting and a chill was spinning its way into the early spring air. “I would like very much to be your wife.”

  “You would?” said Andrew, taking Anita in his arms. “You’ll never know how happy that makes me,” he said, his voice full of joy. “I couldn’t go on without you now. We need each other, Anita. We will have a wonderful life, I promise you. I will do everything I can to make sure you are the Anita Hemmings, the Anita Love, you want to be.”

  “I’ll hold you to that promise,” she replied, falling into him, letting him kiss her, thinking how nice forever sounded.

  Just two days later, as Anita was organizing her room at Bessie’s, thinking of how memorable a year 1898 had already become, her friend knocked on her door, holding the day’s mail. She handed her two letters, which had been dropped off earlier in the day. Anita was bursting to tell her friend the news of her engagement, but she had to wait. It was the respectful thing to tell her parents first and she had not yet had time to travel to Boston.

  She took the letters in her hand and blinked back her surprise. “But these are addressed to me at my Boston address,” said Anita.

  “A neighbor brought them by this afternoon,” said Bessie. “A man who works with your father and had customers to drop off in Cambridge. Frederick asked him to do so. He told him they were important.” Bessie left Anita alone to read her letters and retired to the kitchen to begin making supper.

  Anita looked at them both. One, she was sure, was from Porter Hamilton. She recognized his large script, and it had a Chicago postmark in the right corner. She held that one in her hand, turning it over a few times, before she decided to open the other.

  She looked down at the signature before she read it. It was from Sarah Douglas. It read simply, “Anita, though I am sure you would think otherwise, you have a friend in me,” followed by her name.

  Anita had heard many times from Belle and Caroline since they first wrote, but she had never expected to hear from Sarah. She refolded the short note and put it in the envelope. So she had a friend in Sarah Douglas, former Vassar College Southern Club president. Perhaps, with so many other girls, and now Sarah, as allies, she would be able to return to campus one day after all. Maybe even in the company of Andrew Love.

  Heartened by Sarah’s words, she opened the letter from Porter, and the sight of his slanted handwriting, scratched onto the paper in thick black ink, brought a rush of memories: their meeting at Harvard, their first walk on campus, the maids bringing her letter after letter postmarked from Camb
ridge, the kiss. That wonderful kiss. Holding the pages, her feelings surged back in full force, but she pushed them down quickly. With steady hands, she put the unfolded letter on the table and read it.

  Anita,

  To the world, and to me, you are a Negro. I understand now why you put an end to our engagement so suddenly: You knew you would have to marry a colored man. From that moment forward, you were acting in my interest, and I thank you for that. You put me before yourself, when you could have carried on your charade much longer.

  Will the world ever change? I wonder. My mother, who was raised in a family of abolitionists, thinks it will. But that is not the reality now. The world does not want the races to join together. If you hadn’t told me, and your race had been made public while you were my wife, we would have been ostracized. We are not people who could thrive in such a pitiful state, so you saved both of us from great humiliation.

  I do not agree with what Lottie did. She should have kept your secret for you. She owed you that, certainly, as it is you who made her a true, whole person. Without you in her life, Anita, she would have remained a girl with not very much to offer but money and imagination. You can’t live a life based on those two things alone, even if you are a Taylor.

  Marrying Lottie will certainly keep me on my toes. And I do love her. Don’t doubt that. But you, Anita, I will never forget.

  Fondly,

  Porter Hamilton

  Though she didn’t have to, though she could have kept it and looked at those words for years to come, she walked into the kitchen where Bessie was bustling about and dropped the letter, folded in its envelope, into the fire. Porter Hamilton would stay part of her vanished college life, of the Anita Hemmings she had been when she existed safely under a mansard roof, hidden away from the rest of the world.

  “It wasn’t important after all?” asked Bessie.

  “It was once,” said Anita, watching the pen marks fade into black ash, the edges of the letter curling like a child in repose. “But it no longer is.”