The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  Whatever the pretense, Edna did a terribly cruel thing. She took Lena away from the only home she had ever known and took her South, where she had never been, to leave her with sometimes brutal strangers in places like Miami and Atlanta—so near and yet so far from her second cousins, whom Edna refused to see because they were Cora’s relations. Lena should have been adored and doted on, the family pet. Instead, she was pulled here and there, North and South, mostly for spite, in the private war between Edna and Cora. In all things, Edna and Cora were sworn enemies. Life with Edna, the original drama queen, was all emotion. Life with Cora was all reason, discipline, and logic. Despite the fact that Cora was austere and lacking in affection, Lena loved her grandmother. She felt safe with Cora, who was there every night for bedtime prayers. Cora did not believe that children should be free to find God on their own. She thought they should be given God—and then be free to reject the whole concept. Cora, patient and steady as a rock, never raised her voice to Lena. But Edna was unconditionally loved, despite “kidnapping” hysteria, abandonment, and sadistic beatings, because Lena had dreamed about her and longed to see her for such a long time. Edna had never been a person to Lena; she was the small picture that Lena kissed every night. Edna appeared to love her daughter extravagantly—unless she needed to strike out at her and punish her for being born. What does an actress do with a child? Two of Edna’s cousins were currently acting and passing as white. Edna knew it would be impossible to pass with little Lena. Teddy and Lena, both copper-colored, were the darkest members of the Horne family.

  So Lena was periodically returned to Brooklyn whenever she interfered with Edna’s itinerant passing. Otherwise, she boarded with strangers whose kindness and hospitality usually rose in inverse ratio to their bank accounts. Young as she was, Lena understood that Chauncey Street was her only home. That wandering with Edna was not home. Despite that sense of home, however, Lena did not believe that the Chauncey Street household was ever a real family unit. How could it be when Cora refused to speak to Edwin? Lena was raised with no other children except whomever she ran into in nursery school and kindergarten. In the 1920s Burke, the only brother still at home when Lena’s parents ran off, was more like a big brother than an uncle to Lena. Lena did not have a real family, but at least she had a home. The house on Chauncey Street was a beacon for Lena for the first quarter of her life. She was naturally a stranger in the white world—but also a stranger in the world that most Negroes inhabited. She never stayed long enough in either world to put down roots. The house on Chauncey Street represented roots. It told her who she was—Lena Horne of Chauncey Street.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  South/1920s

  TERROR

  THE NEW decade opened with the masks of comedy and tragedy. The birth of Catherine Graves Nash, future family historian of the black Calhouns, on May 12, 1920, was a delight to her family. Tragedy came three months later, on August 13, when Catherine’s “big” sister, Marie, aged one year and eight months, was pronounced dead of what was called “Cholera infantum.” The medical report stated that she was “last attended by doctor 8/10/20” and “last seen alive on 8/13.” Adored and adorable baby Marie, the image of her pretty, big-eyed, dimpled mother, was doted on by all—especially her father. Homer Nash had written to his mother that he adored the baby sight unseen. Baby Marie was possibly the victim of contaminated drinking water in Atlanta in August. What her namesake mother might have been feeling! All the guilt, horror, and despair, plus a needy three-month-old. Homer, her doctor husband, could not give his wife a sedative because she was nursing. But she knew if she gave in to grief she might never get out of it. It was not Catherine’s fault that she came along after everybody’s little angel. As is typical with a firstborn, there were many pictures of baby Marie: with her mother and grandmother, at baby birthday parties, sitting in her father’s shiny new automobile. There seem to be far fewer pictures of Catherine than Marie.

  The decade began with joy and heartbreak—and life went on. Middle-class black Atlanta was optimistic about the future. There was no Harlem Renaissance in Atlanta, but there was a flourishing middle-class culture of self-improvement. Middle-class self-improvement in the South was very different from the Northern variety. One has only to compare the scope and political heft of Cora Horne’s “club” life (granted, an extreme case) with that of Katie Webb Graves and her daughter Marie Graves Nash. If Cora had lived in Atlanta and pursued her normal interests, she might have been lynched. Atlanta self-improvement was decidedly safe and sane.

  “Self-improvement” was, of course, part of the Talented Tenth credo—but it was also a big 1920s fad. “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better,” said Émile Coué, an early pop psychology guru. Katie and Marie were part of an Atlanta Chautauqua Circle in 1926 and 1927. A history of Chautauqua reads:

  The Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC) was started in 1878 to provide those who could not afford the time or money to attend college the opportunity of acquiring the skills and essential knowledge of a College education. The four-year correspondence course was one of the first attempts at distance learning … the CLSC program was intended to show people how best to use their leisure time and avoid the growing availability of idle pastimes, such as drinking, gambling, dancing and theater-going, that posed a threat both to good morals and to good health.

  The Chautauqua founders were Methodists.

  In A Handbook of Information for Negroes someone, possibly Katie or Marie, had written in pencil, “Our Doubts are traitors.” The motto of their Chautauqua Circle, which met once a month from four to six P.M. at the home of a member, was “Keep moving: A standing pool becomes stagnant.” The Circle colors were green and white, and the Circle flower was the carnation. Every meeting opened with the Lord’s Prayer.

  On “February 17,” no year given, the topic for discussion was “Birds,” followed by a vocal solo “Hark, Hark the Lark” and a “Schubert Discussion, led by Mrs. Graves.” Similarly, the month before, the subject had been “Nature” and the vocal solo was Beethoven’s “The Glory of God in Nature.” In June (again no year) Katie Webb Graves was hostess and the subject was “Books.” In October, the vocal solo was “‘The Negro National Anthem,’ sung by Mrs. Cater” and the subject was “Travel”—Mrs. Johnson discussed “My Trip to Europe.” In a change of pace, in November “Mesdames Thomas, Green, Lawless and Nash” gave a “Tacky and Paper Bag Party for Our Husbands.” In December, of course, the meeting subject was “Christmas,” and “Marie gave a reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s ‘Christmas in the Heart.’” And so on. The directory of Circle members listed fifteen regular members and six “Honorary”—including Mrs. Antoine Graves at 522 Auburn Avenue and her daughter Mrs. Homer E. Nash at 982 Simpson Street NW. Women of Atlanta’s black middle class handled the indignities of Jim Crow with as much personal dignity as possible. Otherwise, they lived in their own secure world in which there were no white people and where other, poorer black people worked for them.

  For most blacks, of course, the South was still a fearsome place. During a thirty-year period, between 1890 and 1920, more than two million Negroes migrated north. In 1920 there were sixty-one lynchings—reason enough for emigration. In 1920, 85 percent of all Negro pupils in the South were enrolled only through fourth grade, and 26.3 percent of Southern Negroes were illiterate—compared with 5 percent of Southern whites and 8 percent of Northern Negroes. That year Georgia was the scene of a secret meeting between black back-to-Africa proponent Marcus Garvey and the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey, who hated middle-class blacks, considered the NAACP to be his archenemy. The NAACP countered that Garvey, despite his vaunted concern with the African diaspora, did not care about Haiti, for example, while the NAACP did. Du Bois won the 1920 Spingarn Medal for founding and calling together the first Pan-African Congress.

  In September 1922 Antoine Graves Jr. was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Dental Officers’ Reserve Corps of the U
.S. Army. Judge was now practicing dentistry in Atlanta—in suite 207 of the Odd Fellows Auditorium, the primary black office building. That Christmas, his card, featuring snow and evergreens and a wintry village, read, “May good cheer be with you this Christmas Day and happiness attend you through the New Year. Dr. Antoine Graves.” His wife’s name was not on the card. Judge and Pinkie Chaires (considered the most beautiful girl in Atlanta) had been married in 1917. They had no children. The marriage ended in 1921 or 1922 and Judge left Atlanta for New York in 1923. (Without any corroboration whatsoever, I am convinced that Judge was gay and could not deal with that in his hometown.) Shortly after he moved to New York, he sent a sad Father’s Day greeting to Antoine Sr.: “I thank you for the good example you have always set before your children and wish that I had proved more worthy of it. Judge.”

  Six months later, he wired holiday greetings to his parents: “Merry Christmas couldn’t make it love to Browns and Nashes. Judge.” The wires to his parents and messages to his sisters Marie Nash and Nellie Brown (his musical accompanist) are so sad. In family photographs of handsome Judge he never smiles. Poor Judge, with so much talent, felt so unworthy, insecure, and full of self-hatred. It is no wonder that he had to get out of Atlanta. Getting away from the prying eyes of Atlanta was a good idea in one way and a bad idea in another. In Atlanta, someone might have been able to stop him from drinking himself to death.

  Meanwhile, the Graves-Nash clan continued to seize every opportunity for education and self-improvement. In May 1926 Catherine Graves Nash received her kindergarten teaching certificate. Two years later Catherine’s aunt Kate Graves earned her certificate from the Atlanta University School of Social Work with “very satisfactory” marks in human behavior, social evaluation, social psychology, community organization, home hygiene, social casework, and social hygiene. In 1928 young Catherine and her aunt Kate Graves visited their second and third cousins Frank Horne and his niece, Lena Horne, in Fort Valley—halfway between Atlanta and Macon. They traveled by Jim Crow train, sitting in the blacks-only car—this was safer than going by automobile.

  When Lena and her mother went South together for the first time, they went by train, and Edna was sick and mostly asleep the entire trip. Thanks to Woodrow Wilson’s resegregation of Washington some dozen years earlier, the South began in the nation’s capital, when suddenly all the white people in the car disappeared and were replaced with black people. But something quite wonderful happened. If her uncle Frank and W. E. B. Du Bois had “learned” about being black because of Southern white horror, Lena learned about being black from her introduction to Jim Crow—and the kindness of black people. The new passengers, uniformly dark, immediately started caring for Edna and treating Lena as one of their own, sharing their food and letting her play with their children.

  This was seven-year-old Lena’s first train trip. When they arrived at their destination, Miami, where Edna was scheduled to appear in Negro-only tent shows of popular dramas, Lena received the first beating of her life—the first of the many she would receive in the South. Edna was still so sick that she needed nursing care. The nurse took it upon herself to beat Lena for making noise. Lena and Edna lived in a three-room frame house, and Lena went to a one-room five-grade schoolhouse, where she was immediately put ahead a grade. Her schoolmates hated her. Fortunately, they were in Miami only a few months when Edna deposited Lena with a nice family in Jacksonville. Birthplace of James Weldon Johnson, Jacksonville had a stable black middle-class community that had existed since before the Civil War. The local blacks had, in fact, invented the famous cakewalk dance. There, Lena and her hosts were on their way to see another tent show when they nearly collided with a lynching. A black man stopped them on the road. “There’s going to be a lynching,” he shouted. “Turn around!” Lena did not know what a “lynching” was, but she never forgot the atmosphere in the suddenly speeding automobile. Her nightmares began that night, and Lena believed she would have them forever.

  After Jacksonville came a short period in Birmingham, as Edna followed the tent show circuit and Lena got scraps of education. It was an awful childhood—a time of terrible loneliness and self-protectiveness, broken occasionally by the hope that somehow she might be allowed to settle down in one place permanently.

  There was the doctor’s house in southern Ohio, where Lena had her own room for the first time since Brooklyn. She read late into the night to stave off nightmares. The family’s maiden aunt had the room next to Lena’s and comforted her when she cried in the night. Lena next lived with two old ladies in Macon, a mother in her nineties and a daughter in her seventies, whom Lena actually loved. The daughter worked in what she called the “white folks’ kitchen” and brought home treats. The mother, who was thin and spry, dipped snuff, told Bible stories, and made Christmas fruitcakes to sell. Lena was allowed to help. When Lena got rickets, the mother’s home remedies eased the terrible pain and her Bible stories helped her sleep. Despite the rickets, Lena loved Macon and loved her school—bigger and better than the black school in Miami. She became the teacher’s pet and, once more, was hated by the other children. Every few months or so Edna and Lena would move to another base on the circuit where, when her mother was not around, Lena often went to bed hungry. The tent show circuit was all black—Edna did not pass as white, but her complexion guaranteed leading roles. Since blacks could not attend the theater in Southern towns, tent shows were the only theatrical entertainment that they had. The shows were usually adaptations of older standard Broadway favorites.

  In Atlanta, only a few blocks from the cousins Lena had no idea existed, Edna left her with a crazy woman whom she had hired to take care of her house and daughter. The woman made ten-year-old Lena do all the housework, then beat her, claiming she had a “demon” in her when she failed to pass “inspection.” When Edna returned, neighbors told her about Lena’s screams. Drama queen Edna made it all about herself—half guilt, half shame. “Why do I have to learn about this from other people?!” she said to Lena. Edna’s beatings were worse than any others because they were always followed by tears, remorse, and kisses. But now Lena was sent back to Brooklyn for an extended visit. Edna was beginning to understand that Teddy meant what he said about money. Unless Lena spent a specified number of days in the year with Cora and Edwin, Edna would get no money. Even Teddy knew that his child would be better off with his parents than with her mother—so his financial support of Edna and Lena depended on Lena spending more time with Cora than with Edna.

  Fortunately, Lena’s blighted and almost Dickensian Southern childhood had been broken at intervals by trips back to Chauncey Street, where she dropped into and out of proper schools and had friends who were always happy to see her, and where Cora tried to exorcize her Southernisms. Lena no longer minded Cora’s nagging; she lived at home now with her own room upstairs, with people she knew who never raised their voices to shout at her or their hands to beat her.

  In 1927 Lena returned to Miami. Edna was sharing a house with her friend Lucille, an actress who passed as white. Lena was under strict orders to stay in the room and read, and not make a peep, when her mother and “Aunt Lucille” had “cocktail parties.” Lena now devoured all the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett. The only decent thing Edna did for Lena, other than producing her, was to provide her with the best late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century children’s books. When Edna was in a good mood, she was charming and wonderful—otherwise, be careful. Despite her earlier leading roles at the Lafayette, Edna now found that traveling in summer tent shows in the South was the only work she could get.

  In 1927 Edna was obsessed with staying out of the sun even though she was secretly planning to go farther south than Miami. She had met a white Cuban military officer and, unbeknownst to Lena, was on her way to glamorous Havana. Once again, Lena’s world was turned upside down. Her mother disappeared from her life as suddenly as she had eight years earlier—but not before depositing her with the nice old ladies from Macon. (I wonder
if she chose the old ladies in Macon because she knew they would be kind to her daughter, or because they were cheap.)

  Edna had a good reason to go to Havana. It turned out that she and the woman whom Lena was instructed to call “Aunt Lucille” were not simply entertaining touring actors at their “cocktail parties”—but were illegally “entertaining” strange men. Somehow, Lena had an accidental guardian angel who was aware of the situation. Her angel, the father of her lifelong Brooklyn friend Llewellyn Johnston, was the second-generation owner of a family field glass company with concessions at all eastern stadiums and racetracks, including Miami. Now Johnston called both Cora and Ted to say, “Get that child out of there!” Teddy then called Edna and ordered her to deliver Lena to his brother. Edna, busy packing for Cuba, had already taken Lena to stay with the Macon ladies—which was where Frank Horne found her. Lena had looked up from playing in the Macon yard to see a man who was vaguely familiar, but who she thought was white. “Hello, Lena,” the man said. “I’m your uncle Frank—I’ve come to take you to Fort Valley with me.”

  While not in the league of James Weldon Johnson, Frank Horne, practicing optometrist, poet, essayist, and educator, could also be called a black middle-class Renaissance man. He had suffered the slings and arrows of racism only collectively—as part of an excluded black group. Frank by himself could have spent his life passing as white. Even when he was a scoutmaster, some of his black Scouts thought he was white. In many ways, Frank was a typical middle-class second-generation New Yorker, but instead of coming from a foreign country, his parents were immigrants from the American South. He was also the typical product of a completely integrated education—from parochial school to Brooklyn’s excellent Boys High School to City College. The only time he purposely and publicly passed as white was to go to the Illinois optometry college where his uncle and namesake had passed as “Cuban.” Privately, rather like his father, he might do whatever was convenient at the moment. In 1926 Frank went south for the first time to find himself in a school that he would later recognize in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Fort Valley High and Industrial School was an excuse for free labor for canning peaches. Traditionally, until Frank arrived, the president had been white. I suppose the administration thought that Frank’s wavy brown hair, intelligent gray eyes, and quiet confidence stemming from having been a leader since boyhood made him white enough. Because he walked with a limp and used a sturdy cane, people assumed he had a war wound. Clearly, he could no longer run; but he found that he was expected to coach both the boys’ and the girls’ track teams—as well as be dean of the college and acting president at a salary far below that of a white in the same position. Frank and Lena had similar Southern experiences, all bad and all new. Lena, a skinny ten-year-old kid with bad legs from a case of rickets that she got in Macon, had experienced personal cruelty. And Frank, aged twenty-eight, had discovered and experienced the casual cruelty of Southern racism. He wrote: “I am initiated into the Negro race … From now on I am the Enterer of Side Doors, and Back Doors, and sometimes No Door At All.”