But finally, from the deck of a boat or through the dirty glass of a train window, she spied New York, a polyglot city of crowded streets and densely packed blocks of multistory tenements where people moved about amid the anonymity of strangers, a place that could scarcely be more different from the rural cotton-farming country of Troup or Harris County, Georgia. Alexander Walters, a Kentucky-born bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who first visited the city in 1884, recalled the wondrous sight of an elevated railroad that transported half a million people a day and explained that in New York he felt “amazed at its inhabitants, astonished at the enterprise and aggressiveness of its business men and delighted at its beautiful and immense park.”71 But to the Tennessee-born Henry Hugh Proctor, who first saw New York in the late 1880s, the city seemed almost overwhelming. “What high buildings, what throngs on Broadway, what a crush at Brooklyn Bridge, where everybody seemed to get up and rush for the entrance at the same time!” Almost immediately, he learned a painful lesson from a porter and cabdriver who cheated him as he disembarked at the dock. 72
“To the provincial coming to New York for the first time,” the African American novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in 1902, “ignorant and unknown, the city presents a notable mingling of the qualities of cheeriness and gloom. If he have any eye at all for the beautiful, he cannot help experiencing a thrill as he crosses the ferry over the river filled with plying craft and catches the first sight of the spires and buildings of New York.” The new immigrant might feel bewildered and lonely. But “after he has passed through the first pangs of strangeness and homesickness, yes, even after he has got beyond the stranger’s enthusiasm for the metropolis, the real fever of love for the place will begin to take hold upon him. The subtle, insidious wine of New York will begin to intoxicate him.”73 So much would seem new to a rural southerner like Ada: the sheer number of horses and trolleys and pedestrians that clogged the streets, the tall buildings and elevated train lines, the possibility of walking through town anonymous and unknown. Along with fear and loneliness, she likely experienced a sense of wonder and astonishment, a rush of joyousness at being so far from the crushing racial order of the South.
No records document Ada’s early months, or even years, in New York. But many years later, she revealed that she had at least one connection there. Her widowed aunt, Anne, or “Annie,” Purnell, was in the city as early as 1882, living first downtown on Minetta Lane, in a largely African American neighborhood, and then, beginning in 1883 or 1884, in a tenement at 149 West Twenty-fourth Street.74 During the 1870s and ’80s, many of the city’s blacks had migrated uptown to this so-called Tenderloin district that extended from the west twenties to the west fifties, leaving to newly arriving Italian immigrants the packed downtown neighborhood in Greenwich Village where Clarence King had once strolled at night. In Annie Purnell’s crowded apartment building lived waiters and hotel porters, widowed washerwomen and homemakers, all—according to a zealously attentive census taker in 1880—not exactly “Black,” but with the “perceptible trace of African blood” that marked them as “Mulatto.”75
Purnell worked out of her own home, laundering other people’s clothes. 76 In January 1886 she or one of her neighbors placed a short ad in the New York Times: “Washing.—By respectable colored laundress; will do washing and ironing from 75 cents per dozen; good city references. Call at 149 West 24th St., third floor, back.”77
Perhaps Purnell wrote or sent word to Ada back in Georgia, encouraging her to come try city life, or maybe she simply offered refuge when unknown events drove Ada from her childhood home. In any case, no matter how small and cramped her own quarters might be, Annie Purnell perhaps took her niece in until she could find a job, showed her how to navigate the city, lent her money until she could stand on her own two feet. If so, that familial connection would make Ada more fortunate than many of her contemporaries. Relatively few of the Georgia-born blacks living in Manhattan in 1880 lived with members of their immediate family, a consequence of a migration dominated by young, single southerners.78 “Chain migrations,” with one relative paving the way for another, would become more common several decades later, with the “Great Migration” of southern blacks to northern cities that began during World War I. Young African American migrants like Ada often found themselves alone in mid-1880s Manhattan.79
In addition to providing Ada with lodging, Purnell might have instructed her in how to find a job. On March 1, 1886, less than two months after the washerwoman’s ad appeared, another ad appeared in the “Situations Wanted” section of the New York Times: “NURSE—BY A COMPETENT YOUNG WOMAN as a nurse to growing children; good city reference. Address A. C. Box 260 Time Up-town Office, 1,269 Broadway.”80 The timing is right, even if it remains impossible to prove whether “A. C.” might be Ada Copeland, who we know became a nursemaid. The language of the ad remains coyly quiet on the issue of the job seeker’s race or ethnicity. Other ads placed by would-be nursemaids referred to the applicants as “Scotch Protestant,” “Canadian,” “Protestant,” or “Scotchwoman”—all discreet ways of suggesting the job seekers were white. One referred to a “respectable young colored girl.” But many provided no clue as to the applicant’s race or ethnicity. “A. C.” implied she had held one other job in New York, offering one “good city reference” rather than multiple testimonies to her reliability or skill. And unlike many, though not all, of her fellow job seekers, she did not give her own home address as the place where a prospective employer might find her. There could be many reasons for this. Perhaps she did not want a current employer to know she sought a new job, or maybe she shared tight and crowded living quarters that she feared would not convey a good impression to a new employer. A rented mailbox at the newspaper office offered a more private venue for employer and employee to contact one another. The uptown office of the New York Times, on Broadway at West Thirty-second Street, was less than three-quarters of a mile from the Purnell apartment on West Twenty-fourth Street.
Whether Ada Copeland was the anonymous “A. C.” of the ad, or whether she sought work through friends or one of the city’s domestic employment agencies, she eventually found a job as a nursemaid with a family in lower Manhattan.81 Her precise whereabouts in the city during the mid-1880s remain unknown. Federal census takers did take note of servants, carefully recording the names of domestic workers who boarded with their employers, lived with their own families, or maintained rooms in lodging houses. But they compiled their snapshots of the city’s population just once a decade. In the intervening years, domestic workers like Ada remained largely unseen, going about their work unobserved by the officials who noted the heads of households for commercial city directories or kept track of property owners for the municipal tax records. Annie Purnell, Ada’s aunt, appeared in the city directories only because she was a widowed head of household; had she lived with her husband she, too, would have remained unnoted. King’s biographer Thurman Wilkins later surmised that Ada worked for a friend of King’s, but none of King’s close associates mention in their personal papers a young household servant recently arrived from Georgia.82 Anonymity might have been hard to find in a small Georgia farming community, but in New York Ada slipped into the city’s silent army of invisible domestics, and anonymity became a defining feature of her life. No one would know where she came from, who her people were, what her life had been like before she landed in Manhattan and became a working girl.
HOWEVER SMITTEN A DA COPEL AND might have felt at her first sight of the city, however eager to leave behind her memories of the violence and poverty of rural life, her race and sex circumscribed her world. And although her new job might seem singularly new and strange to her, it in fact made her a typical worker. Roughly 90 percent of young African American women in late-nineteenth-century New York held a job in “domestic and personal service.” Some toiled in hotels or restaurants, but most worked in private homes, where they often received room and board.83 Bending the curves of their lives
to fit the needs of someone else’s household, they set their own rhythms of sleep and work to match the tempos set by others. Jessie Fauset, a leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance and an assistant editor of the NAACP’s journal The Crisis, never did domestic service herself, but she knew many women who did. In her 1929 novel Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral, she described a young woman who “had known what it meant to rise at five o’clock, start the laundry work for a patronizingly indifferent family of people who spoke of her in her hearing as ‘the girl’ or remarked of her in a slightly lower but still audible tone as being rather better than the usual run of niggers. . . . For this family she had prepared breakfast, gone back to her washing, served lunch, had taken down the clothes, sprinkled and folded them, had gone upstairs and made three beds, not including her own and then had returned to the kitchen to make dinner.” At night Fauset’s fictional character would be too tired to undress before collapsing into her own unmade bed. No wonder she longed for marriage and a new life in which she could “enjoy the satisfaction of having a home in which she had full sway instead of being at the beck and call of others.”84 Ada, too, must have dreamed of such freedom.
A study of African American domestic workers in Philadelphia in the late 1890s found that nearly two-thirds of unmarried women boarded with their employers. Since there was a negligible difference in pay for those living in and those going home in the evenings, it made good economic sense.85 A nursemaid’s salary of $3 to $3.50 a week might seem grand in comparison to the $3 a month a young woman like Ada could make as a house servant in Georgia or the $40 to $50 a year she might make as a Georgia field hand, but it would not go very far in an urban center, especially if she sent money home to her family.86 In New York City, even the rudest room in a dark tenement rented for a minimum of $6 to $10 a month.87 So forgoing privacy, flexibility, or any real home life of her own, Ada most likely lived with the family that employed her, free like most nursemaids to go out into the city to test the boundaries of her new life just one afternoon a week, with an additional afternoon or evening every other Sunday.88 Marriage might seem a possible escape. But it would be difficult to meet men with so little free time of her own; doubly difficult because black women in New York so outnumbered black men. In 1890 there were roughly five black females in the city for every four black men.89
Nursemaids like Ada would devote long hours of work to the “washing, dressing and feeding of children” as well as the “general care of [their] health and well-being,” acquiring the skills and experience they would later put to good use with their own families. Almost 70 percent of nursemaids worked ten- to twelve-hour days, and nearly a quarter worked even longer hours, more time than was demanded from any other sort of domestic servant. But child care carried little social status. The women with “skilled” domestic positions as cooks, seamstresses, and laundresses earned more and worked less.90
Confinement and inflexibility likely ordered Copeland’s working life. Unable to entertain friends at home, control her own working hours, or hope to advance to a better-paying position, she possibly never felt free of the overbearing sense of being a menial and dependent employee in her own house. Whether she had her own room or shared it with one or more other young women, she likely had a dark and poorly ventilated living space. It might be shut off by walls from the more spacious rooms occupied by her employer’s family, but even a room of her own would not necessarily assure privacy. Her employers might enter her room at any time to ask for help or demand assistance. Domestic workers complained frequently about the monotony of their work and the brutally low pay. But “probably the chief objection of colored city domestics against service,” wrote the social worker Isabel Eaton in 1899, “is the social stigma which rightly or wrongly attaches to it. It savors to them of the degradation of their slavery days.” Those who leave domestic employment, she continued, leave “to escape social degradation first, from the desire for greater personal freedom next, and finally from the hope of higher remuneration.”91
Even the unmarried African American workingwomen who did not live with their employers faced the social stigma of domestic service. And their privacy would come not just at the expense of their pocketbook, but with a loss of comfort or even safety, in the crowded tenement boardinghouses where they could find rooms. Their domestic work began early, the sociologist Mary White Ovington wrote in 1911, “seven at the latest and lasts until the dinner is cleared away, at half-past eight or nine. Released then from further tasks, the young girl goes to her tiny inner tenement room, dons a fresh dress, and then, as chance or her training determines, walks the street, goes to the theatre, or attends the class meeting at her church.”92
The church played a critical role in the life of young African American women like Ada, providing not just a place of worship but a social gathering spot where they could relax with others who also felt displaced from the familiar rituals of their southern homes.93 The African American church provided northern blacks with a kind of family structure, the sociologist W. E. B. DuBois wrote in 1899. “Its family functions are shown by the fact that the church is a centre of social life and intercourse; acts as newspaper and intelligence bureau, is the centre of amusements.”94 As James Weldon Johnson would later write, “a Negro Church is for its members much more besides a place of worship. It is a social centre, it is a club, it is an arena for the exercise of one’s capabilities and powers, a world in which one may achieve self-realization and preferment.” A church might mean something similar to other people, he conceded, “but with the Negro all these attributes are magnified because of the fact that they are so curtailed for him in the world at large.”95
Ada Copeland turned for her own social and spiritual support to the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church, a small but lively congregation in Manhattan. This “invisible” sect of African American Methodism, based in Wilmington, Delaware, was minuscule in comparison to the much better known African Methodist Episcopal Church.96 It began in 1865 as a splinter group of the Union Church of Africans, itself formed in 1813 in protest against the racial policies of the nation’s mainstream Methodist Episcopal churches.97 By the late 1880s, the sect had only about 2,200 members, some 170 affiliated with Ada’s church, the Reverend James H. Cook ’s congregation in New York.98
The church offered worship services, classes, musical evenings, and summer excursions on chartered boats to a park outside the city that offered working congregants a rare respite from their daily labor. For 50 cents, a young woman like Ada could enjoy the boat ride, try her hand at fishing along the shore, and watch the young men of the church play baseball or cricket (a suggestion that some of the church members came from the West Indies).99
Ada almost certainly discovered the Union American Methodist Episcopal Church after she arrived in Manhattan; it had scant presence in the South. Growing up near West Point, Ada perhaps attended local prayer meetings, such as those that Easter Jackson, a former slave from Troup County, later recalled: “de prayer meetin’s, once a week, first on one plantation den a nother; when all the niggers would meet and worshup singin praises unto the Lord.”100 As a small child Ada likely attended the segregated black worship services held in the white Baptist or Methodist churches around West Point, and later, as a young woman, she might have gone to one of the new black churches sprouting up in Reconstruction Georgia.101
The Union American Methodist Episcopal Church in New York began in a building downtown, on West Fifteenth Street, not far, perhaps, from Ada’s place of employment. Maybe her aunt or some friends led her there. Or perhaps she stepped in on her own and soon found herself embraced by the community. “Each church forms its own social circle,” W. E. B. DuBois wrote of the black churches in Philadelphia in the late nineteenth century, “and not many stray beyond its bounds. Introductions into that circle come through the church, and thus the stranger becomes known.”102 The confidence and dynamism of the church leader, the Reverend James Cook—a man the New York Times later eulogi
zed as “one of the most prominent negro ministers in this part of the United States”—likely felt comforting to a young woman alone in the city.103 His church might not be large or prosperous, but with a liberal doctrine that emphasized lay involvement, admitted women to the ministry, and decried racism, it would feel welcoming.104
IN FEBRUARY 1888 THE African American journalist and activist Ida B. Wells penned an essay on the model woman for New York’s black newspaper, the New York Freeman (later the New York Age). In it she wrote, “The typical girl’s only wealth, in most cases, is her character, and her first consideration is to preserve that character in spotless purity. . . . She regards all honest toil as noble, because it is ordained of God that man should earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. She does not think a girl has anything of which to be proud in not knowing how to work, and esteems it among her best accomplishments that she can cook, wash, iron, sew and ‘keep house’ thoroughly and well.” A Negro girl like this, Wells wrote, might be rare, but she provided the pattern others should copy.105 In hard work, a black woman should find nothing but pride.
We know little about Ada Copeland’s day-to-day life in the years before she met Clarence King, nor can we know with any certainty what moral values she learned as a child. Later family stories depict Ada as a “queen,” a woman with regal good manners, a penchant for proper dress, and a deep sense of propriety that included Sunday morning church and formal Sunday dinners.106 We can only speculate as to whether Ada read New York’s black press. But like Wells’s exemplar of true womanhood, she worked hard, went to church, and aspired to a better life. Born to slavery, she could, in New York, dare to imagine her way into an independent working-class world, perhaps even a middle-class life, even if she could not yet see how to get there. On the eve of her first encounter with King, Ada had weathered the transition from slavery to freedom, from girlhood to adulthood, from rural southern life to life in the nation’s largest metropolis. She had made the shift from farmwork to domestic work, from an extended-family world to a more solitary and independent life, from the rhythms of the agricultural world to the rattle of the urban elevated trains. Behind her lay the restraints of the Jim Crow South, which limited where she could eat, how she could travel, what sort of work she could do, and even what kind of identity she could embrace. In place of these restrictions, she lived within those of the world of a live-in domestic, with limited free time or social independence. In all likelihood, she worked for white people. But even in New York, through her aunt and through her church, she remained tied to a black community. Her widowed aunt’s independence likely suggested to Ada that with hard work she, too, could make it in the city. And through her church, she surely knew African Americans who likewise had made a successful place for themselves in this bustling urban world. Still, even in New York, Ada’s race continued to shape how she could earn her keep, where she could live, and—in all probability—how she imagined she would spend the rest of her life.107
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