The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  “Me, too,” said Ellen. “Though my mother admitted she had to meet with President Taylor her senior year and said it wasn’t all bad.”

  “What was it about? Academic probation?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Ellen, looking out the window at the snow falling on Taylor Gate. In 1913, the original gate to the school had been torn down and replaced by a Gothic Revival building and handsome stone entrance. It was one of Ellen’s favorite buildings on campus, though her mother said the old gatehouse was superior. “She graduated a cum laude, so it couldn’t have been that. Whatever it was, she survived.”

  Ellen said goodbye to her friend and ran down to the first floor and out the door, across the quad again, greeting the freshmen she had not said hello to since returning from winter break. Ellen had loved growing up in New York City, and had spent a good deal of time in high school sneaking out to music clubs and theaters. But as she walked past Strong and toward her own residence hall, she was glad that her mother had pushed her to Vassar. She remembered how when she was barely fourteen and had just started thinking about college, her mother had said to her, “Vassar. There’s no other school to consider.”

  Ellen was beginning to think she was right.

  • • •

  The sight of Ellen Love walking past the president’s door startled Dean Thompson, since she was waiting to speak to President Taylor about that very student. When Ellen had dawdled by, the dean stood up and positioned herself in the door frame, watching the dark-haired freshman as she laughed with her friend. Ellen Love appeared to be very happy at Vassar.

  “I’ve just hung up, Miss Thompson!” President MacCracken boomed from his office. “Come in, come in.”

  “This weather!” said Dean Thompson, making her way into the president’s capacious office. On the walls hung pictures of presidents past, and Miss Thompson paused and looked at the stern face of President Taylor, his thick white mustache combed and trimmed with precision. She then pulled an envelope from the brown folder she was holding. She glanced at the return address, which also indicated the sender’s class year, and placed it on the president’s desk.

  “This came for you yesterday, but my assistant, Hilda, is opening all the mail addressed to you from alumnae, as you know.”

  “Saving me much time,” said the president briskly. “And this letter is from an alumna?”

  “Class of 1897,” said the dean, waiting for him to remove the letter from the envelope. “It’s from a Mrs. Louise Hamilton. She was Louise Taylor when she was a student here. Hilda said that not only did she send this letter, but she has been telephoning nonstop since the last alumnae reunion at the end of fall term. I’m afraid she’s desperate to contact you.”

  “Class of 1897. Louise Taylor,” the president repeated. “I know the Taylor name, her father Clarence especially, but I don’t think they’ve given a penny to the school.”

  “They haven’t.”

  The president looked up at the dean and raised his eyebrows before diving into the letter.

  My Dear Dr. MacCracken,

  After serious discussions at the last class reunion and many unreturned phone calls to your office since, I have decided to ask you by letter if it is the policy of Vassar College to accept Negro students, and if so, is it the policy of the college to accept them as white?

  Already the South is asking questions concerning the colored girl in the freshman class.

  I am particularly interested in the matter because of my own painful experience with a roommate who was supposed to be a white girl but who proved to be a Negress. After rooming with Anita Hemmings during my senior year, I suddenly discovered that she was colored. Terribly upset, I wrote to my father at once, and he, while quoting the Golden Rule to me, quietly had a man in Boston investigate. The report came that the family was colored and it was considered impossible for a girl from such a section and family to be at Vassar. But at Vassar she was.

  In my own case, I learned after Miss Hemmings had been a guest in my home, that she resorted to falsehood to cover the distressing truth. I should not like any young girl to repeat my harrowing experience for it is Anita’s daughter, Ellen Love, who is now at Vassar.

  Parents of girls in both preparatory schools and college are giving this matter careful consideration for the question, we feel, is moral as well as social. I await your response and am optimistic that it will contain the news that Miss Love has been removed from school. The class of 1927 does not need the same stain that the class of 1897 will always carry.

  Very sincerely,

  Louise Taylor Hamilton

  “Not a reserved woman, is she?” said the president, putting the letter down. “Is what she is saying true, Miss Thompson? Is this student in the class of 1927 colored?”

  “She could be considered that way,” said the dean. “I don’t know how familiar you are with her mother’s story, but it caused a sizable scandal in ’97.”

  “I’m somewhat familiar with it,” said the president. “I am aware that we graduated her knowing that she had strains of Negro blood.”

  “We did. And while I’m sure for the faculty it felt like negative press at the time, it’s not something that stayed in the hearts and minds of the alumnae. I’m confident most of our women—apart from those who were with her in ’97—are not aware that such a person graduated. Just think of all our current professors, our wardens who were employed while her mother was a student. And the Granddaughters club. Many of those women have mothers who overlapped with Mrs. Love, but it’s second semester and it seems no one has informed Ellen. The scandal, I believe, dissipated long ago.”

  The dean glanced into her file and closed it again, changing her train of thought. “I looked for the minutes from the special session of the board meeting at which it was decided that Anita Hemmings should graduate, but no minutes exist.”

  “Do you believe they were purposefully destroyed or is that an unfortunate coincidence?” asked the president. He was known around the college for keeping every paper that was ever in his possession, and boxes of his letters were already piling up in storage—everything from personal correspondence to receipts for coffee and a note saying he had left his razor on the train and could he have a new one sent up? No minutes from his tenure would ever go missing.

  “I can’t be sure,” said Miss Thompson. “I hope it’s just an unfortunate coincidence.”

  The president looked down at the letter and read it again. “We certainly don’t want a repetition of 1897,” he said after a moment. “But we also have to proceed carefully, as this Hamilton woman sounds unbalanced.”

  The dean watched the president as he studied each line of the letter carefully, then she sat down in the chair opposite him and said, “To be quite frank, if I may, I don’t think Ellen Love even knows she’s black.”

  “Is that so?” said the president with interest.

  “From what Ellen wrote about her family on her application, I think her mother is living as a white woman now. You can see her file here,” she said, removing it from her folder and placing it on his desk, “that her father is a medical doctor who attended Harvard. Surely he is Caucasian.”

  “I think that makes our decision even easier,” said the president. “If this girl does not know that she’s colored, why should anyone else?”

  “I’m in complete agreement,” said the dean. “And she is in a single room in Josselyn Hall.”

  “How did that come to be?” asked President MacCracken, who had no say in where the students were housed.

  “Many freshmen are in singles now,” said the dean, “so it might be a coincidence. Or maybe someone in the housing office paid more attention than we did. But please be at ease as the wardens have assured me that she will remain in a single all four years.”

  “The thing to do is to turn a blind eye,” said the president, taking out his official stationery and uncapping a pen. “If they let her mother graduate twenty-seven years ago, I am certainly not goin
g to hold her daughter back now. We are not a college that goes back in time. We only move forward.”

  He put his pen to paper and wrote in bold script to his petitioner.

  My dear Mrs. Hamilton,

  I thank you for your letter dated the 5th of January and have taken your concern as an alumna under careful consideration.

  You use the word Negress in referring to her mother, but you probably know that both mother and daughter are more white than black. I may go so far as to say it is my understanding that Ellen Love herself is entirely ignorant of the fact that she has any Negro blood in her veins and that the communication of this fact to her would be a very great shock.

  I understand from the wardens that Mrs. Love’s daughter rooms alone, and that there is no intention on the part of the department to have her room with anyone during her time here.

  My own particular point of view is perhaps not pertinent but I may say that Negro students were my classmates at New York University and Harvard, and that I have taught students with Negro blood in Syria at the American University, and later at Yale. I was never aware that the universities lost caste through the admission of students with Negro blood.

  We have no intention of removing Ellen Love from college and thank you for keeping this matter a confidential one.

  I am,

  Very sincerely yours,

  President Henry MacCracken

  Though it was nearly dark outside, Ellen and Virginia decided to put off working on their first Greek translation of the year and instead walked up to see the brindled cows on the farm, the smell of livestock mixing with the sweet aroma emitted from the cider mill up the path. The snow had stopped and the sky was glowing purple, in the fleeting state where the stars were visible through the last trace of sunlight.

  “Look, the stream is completely frozen,” said Ellen, putting her foot on it and letting it slide. “Helen and I walked through it barefoot this fall. It’s shallow, though there are quite a lot of pebbles at the bottom.”

  “I love this part of campus,” said Virginia, who had also spent her childhood in a city, “especially in the snow. I bet fifty years ago it all looked exactly the same.”

  “I think when our mothers were here, most of it was like this,” Ellen replied, looking down at the distant yellow lights of the road.

  Ellen had sensed as soon as she walked through Taylor Gate for the first time that she was part of something bigger than herself. She felt it when she sat in the wooden seats of the handsome classrooms; when she lay in the parlors smoking cigarettes, her bangs in her eyes, listening to girls play “Tin Roof Blues” with amateur hands. When she heard the first few notes echoing in the halls of Main, she recognized the melody instantly and felt a mix of excitement and longing. Her brother had played it on their phonograph countless times. She looked toward the four quad dorms, the trees and bushes covered in snow. She felt uplifted as she walked, her posture straight, her head held high. There was something magical about this place, this hour, as snow refracted light from the lampposts and the campus buildings. She felt a glow being there, just as she knew her mother had.

  “Tell me we’ll never have to leave,” said Virginia, tilting her head back as far as she could. “That somehow life can stay just like it is today.”

  “It will,” said Ellen, looking down at the campus as Virginia lifted her arms toward the stars. “Part of us will always be here.”

  AFTERWORD

  Archives & Special Collections, Vassar College Library

  The story of Anita Hemmings began for me in 2013, when I came across a dusty stack of Vassar College alumni magazines I kept from my student years. A cover from 2001, with a picture of a beautiful woman wearing a style of dress popular in the Gilded Age, caught my attention and I immediately began to read the article inside. “Passing as White: Anita Hemmings 1897,” written by Olivia Mancini, a Vassar alumna, quoted Anita’s great-granddaughter Jillian Atkin Sim extensively. The article went on to explain that Anita Hemmings was Vassar’s first African-American graduate, but that she passed as white until her roommate revealed her secret at the end of their senior year. What it did not mention was who her roommate was or how she came to know that Anita wasn’t just of French and English ancestry as she claimed. I, a loyal Vassar grad, was surprised that I had never heard Anita’s story before, but I was immediately taken with it and started down a path of research and writing that would happily consume me for years.

  Following the Vassar article, I read an in-depth piece by Anita’s great-granddaughter, published in American Heritage magazine in 1999, in which Jillian disclosed that it was the death of her grandmother, Ellen Love, in 1994, which led her to discover the truth about her family’s race, eventually finding out that Anita was Vassar’s first African-American graduate and her daughter, Ellen, the school’s second. Jillian stated that after Anita and Andrew Love were married, they chose to pass as white once they moved to New York City. The consequence of that decision was that their children, including Ellen, were cut off from their black relatives. By Jillian’s account, Dora Hemmings, Anita’s mother, came to the Love residence in New York only once and was made to enter via the service entrance. Yet, according to Jillian, their daughter Ellen was aware of her race during her time at Vassar, as she was able to find her grandmother on Martha’s Vineyard in 1923.

  Jillian’s more recent research extended to the familiar Hemmings name and the fact that Anita’s family hailed from Virginia. Could she be related to the famous Hemings clan, the one forever tied to President Thomas Jefferson through his relationship with Sally Hemings, despite their different spellings? Jillian believes, but has yet to confirm, that her branch of the Hemmings family is descended from Peter Hemings, the brother of Sally Hemings and the son of Elizabeth Hemings and an English sea captain. Peter worked as a cook and brewer at Monticello before being granted his freedom in 1827.

  While I found Anita’s family history and Jillian’s premise fascinating, what interested me most as I continued to research was how Anita made her way to Vassar and lived her life as a white woman there, and how her roommate almost derailed her at the eleventh hour. In none of the articles I read regarding Anita Hemmings was her roommate’s name ever mentioned, nor was it readily available in the Vassar archives. I did not want the woman who was so happy to stay anonymous in the newspapers of the era to remain so more than a century later, and thankfully, after several research trips, her files were found.

  Anita’s roommate was Louise Taylor, a girl known by the nickname “Lulu” (rather than “Lottie,” as I call her in the book). She was born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey, and lived comfortably, but nothing like the millionaire’s Gilded Age life that I gave her in the novel. Her father was not a turn-of-the-century tycoon, but a surveyor, engineer, and postmaster of South Orange. After Vassar, Louise went on to earn her master’s degree in English literature at New York University and then taught history and mythology at schools in South Orange until the 1930s. She never married and had no children, which gave her ample time to keep tabs on Anita and her family.

  Louise and Anita roomed together for two years, not one, as I write in the book. And though newspapers at the time say that Anita did boast about family and connections, which led to her roommate’s suspicion, it was the article about Bessie Baker’s wedding to William Henry Lewis in Cambridge that was Anita’s ultimate undoing. This article ran in the Boston Daily Globe on September 24, 1896, at the start of Anita’s senior year, not in January as I have it, though Louise may not have acted on her suspicions until the end of their senior year, as reported by many papers at the time. (All the newspaper articles that I quote in the book ran in 1896 or 1897. The dates are off on a few to make them work in the context of the story, but they are accurately cited.)

  I imagine Louise Taylor was none too happy that Vassar allowed Anita to graduate in 1897, and she was still incensed about it when she discovered that Anita’s daughter was a student there in the 1920s. She wrote
several letters to Vassar president Henry Noble MacCracken explaining what she had to endure and hoping the school would not allow other girls to feel similar pain. MacCracken fought back, explaining they considered Ellen Love’s admission as a daughter of an alumna. He told Louise that Anita lodged the statement that her daughter did not know she had “negro blood in her veins” and the school took that as fact. Though it is a shameful point in Vassar’s history that they did not admit African-American students until the 1940s, MacCracken and Louise Taylor’s correspondence made it apparent that the school chose to admit Ellen despite knowing who her mother was, and that they kept her there in the face of Louise’s complaints.

  Sadly, as is the case in regard to most women living in the 1800s, very few traces of Anita’s life exist, which is why her story was such a good candidate for historical fiction. As beautiful and intelligent as Anita was, I wanted to give her a romantic adventure in the book, but there was no way for me to know the details of Anita’s quotidian life at Vassar. The newspapers from the time did carry on about all the Ivy League men who were taken by her beauty, and, inspired by those reports, I created her romance with Porter Hamilton, an entirely fictional character. While I doubt that Anita was ever serious with any man while she was at school, she would certainly have danced and socialized with the many male college students who attended Vassar’s functions. As for Louise’s love life, she wasn’t lucky in love at school or after. And I don’t believe she ever met Anita’s handsome brother, Frederick, though he reportedly did come visit his sister at Vassar despite his darker skin—darker than I describe in the book—which could have raised suspicions.

  Though much of Anita’s life at Vassar had to be fictionalized, the way she ended up at Vassar has been documented. According to her prep school, Northfield Seminary (now Northfield Mount Hermon), she started passing as white when she applied and she and Bessie had already selected their first-choice colleges before they entered the school.