The parallel to Bill and Lorraina couldn’t have been more obvious, but it didn’t occur to me then. It was perfectly fine for them to clean and work for us as long as they knew their place and did not interact with us as equals. Like the black wrestler, their presence among us was limited.
While Culver had some wonderful teachers who made history and literature come alive, and occasionally one who invited a few of us over to his home to discuss the “big questions,” I don’t remember any conversations about race, segregation, the waiters, or that wrestling match, and there was definitely never any discussion of the kinds of social theory that would try to justify or explain how Culver’s form of apartheid fitted with the concepts of freedom and democracy we were being taught to defend.
* * *
At Harvard prejudice was subterranean, as was common in the North, where bias had adapted to changing social mores and gone into a sort of stealth mode. Admission quotas for Jews were gone. Of course there were still intimations of the old prejudices if you knew what to look for. When I was a freshman, my two assigned roommates were Jews. It was no more accidental than Sheridan Meyers and me in the same room at Culver. We belonged together was the message. Society tells you that, acts on it, and it becomes normal.
I can’t say that I minded that my roommates were also Jewish. That provided familiarity while we learned the lay of the land. Having long since discovered that there could be some reaction to my being Jewish, there was something comforting about not having to get into issues about religion, or not having to wonder whether I would be viewed as somehow different.
Low-level anti-Semitism was a reality at Harvard, though it wasn’t obvious. You heard it existed at certain social clubs. Then there was the famous Father Feeney, who was an endless fount of anti-Semitic bile. Feeney believed that Harvard’s horned-beast men who killed Jesus were an “enemy far more dangerous than McCarthy.”
Unlike at Culver, Jews at Harvard more often than not hung out with and dated other Jews. Maybe it was out of familiarity or comfort or culture. Maybe it had to do with religious beliefs, though not in my case. It was a bit of everything. At Culver my closest friends had been Protestants, but at Harvard I slowly migrated into a more Jewish world.
With regard to racial prejudice, the situation was quite different from Culver. In my junior year the senior class elected a black student, Clifford Alexander, who later went on to be the U.S. secretary of the army, as its first class marshal. Also there was a history of at least a few blacks attending Harvard, dating back to Richard Theodore Greener, who graduated four and a half years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. That said, black students when I was there were few and far between.
“Only at Harvard,” my friends and I said about Alexander becoming class marshal.
That history and Alexander’s popularity notwithstanding, you would have been hard put to find many Harvard students, myself included, who had read a single book written by a black writer. Perhaps there was a mention of George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington in something we were assigned, but I doubt if I learned a thing about Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, or Sojourner Truth, much less contemporary black leaders like Thurgood Marshall.
One of the famously great courses that American history majors like myself took was Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, Intellectual History of the United States. Schlesinger probed the age of Andrew Jackson, the “Bull Moose” (or Progressive) Party, the closing of the frontier, and the New Deal. We studied President Wilson’s international policies, but his racist attitudes and how he reversed the small progress blacks had made in the federal bureaucracies were somehow overlooked. I’m also pretty sure we weren’t assigned Gunnar Myrdal’s classic 1944 study of racism, An American Dilemma. Instead I remember focusing on the isms of the day—McCarthyism, communism, capitalism. Out of class, the issue of race was part of an unspoken “gentleman’s code” forged in the Boston Brahmin furnace. Silence was golden. The blacks at Harvard defied everything that white society believed about them. They were exceptions to perceived stereotypes. In my experience the thing to do was to pretend that there was no chasm, no differences in our worlds.
Whatever lessons I had learned about being Jewish at Culver were put aside at Harvard. There I soon realized that I was one of many. At the daily student newspaper, the Crimson, where I spent much of my time, religion and race took a backseat to top-notch journalism. But while I had friends who were not Jewish, my contacts with black students never evolved into friendships. For example, I worked with Adele Logan, a Radcliffe student from a prominent black family, when I directed Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul for the Harvard Opera Guild, which I founded with a couple of other students. Many of us who worked on the production became friends, but Adele, whose choreography on some very difficult scenes was wonderful, vanished the instant the final curtain came down. Never once had we talked about anything personal. We literally did not discuss anything that did not have to do with the opera. Considering that The Consul was about resistance to post–World War II totalitarianism, a discussion about race could well have come up. But it didn’t, as neither of us tried to navigate the racial waters that separated us.
Only on the fringes of campus life was a transformation detectable. A handful of students were strumming guitars and talking about things I didn’t study at Harvard. One conversation in particular that I recall was about the legendary singer Bessie Smith, who died after a horrible car accident; it was said she was turned away from a white hospital in the South.
“At a hospital?” I asked. “Did that really happen?”
“They let her die outside the door,” I was assured. “The same thing could happen today.”
I didn’t know whether the story was accurate. But it made me think. Stories were coming out of the South about lynchings and how segregated everything was. I remember lying in bed replaying what I’d been told about Bessie Smith. The Hippocratic oath was ignored. Those doctors let her die, and for no other reason than the color of her skin. It boggled my mind. I wondered if the Southerners I had known at Culver would have let that happen. On and on these thoughts rippled out, troubling me. The doctors had to know it was wrong. But I don’t remember connecting it to myself, or thinking about how my family treated Bill and Lorraina. Back then, their smiling faces and healthy looks covered up what I would later see as a connection.
The story of Bessie Smith, ironically, was where any similarities between being a Jew and being black in America ended for me. I was sure those same doctors would never leave me to die on the steps of a hospital, just as I was fairly certain that I could look at more or less anyone I pleased without being lynched. This was America, not Nazi Germany.
After college, anti-Semitism was rarely an issue for me, although I did have a passing incident where racism touched me. After graduating, I was stationed at Fort Sam Houston in Texas as an army officer for six months. Then, I worked in the theater before law school, and I lived in New York City. These were all places and, with regard to the military, a station in life, where anti-Semitism was not overt—or at least not to me. Race, however, was different. When I was stationed at Fort Sam, I attended an integrated dance somewhere off base at the edge of San Antonio and quickly learned a sharp lesson about the South. There was a local law, I was told later, that said you couldn’t drink past midnight on the day of a local election, and there we were drinking past midnight. I was outside the dance hall when the cop cars came roaring into the parking lot. Standing by my car smoking a cigarette, I remarked to an approaching cop, “That’s the biggest flashlight I’ve ever seen.” He punched me in the face, and I spent the night in jail. The cops must have known that blacks and whites were dancing together, I thought. But being white and an officer as well, I was released the following morning.
* * *
Back in New York City, it seemed that many Jews thought another Holocaust could strike us at any time, even in America. But I rarely gave that a thought
. Every now and then I would read in the newspapers about Jewish graves and temples being desecrated in Brooklyn. For me, however, such events seemed to occur in a different world.
Slowly, however, thoughts about race prejudice were penetrating my thinking. Southern school-integration struggles and lynchings would be on the news, and I would tell friends the story of being slugged in Texas. But day to day I lived in an all-white world and didn’t seem to notice the absence of black people wherever I went. Of course there were still Bill and Lorraina, but they seemed like an appendage to our extended family, rather than two hardworking individuals surviving in an uncaring environment, always there, always welcoming. At the outer edges of my thinking, perhaps things were beginning to pile up, however: the waiters at Culver, Bessie Smith, the segregation when I visited my grandparents in Miami Beach, that incident in Texas, and awakening thoughts about Bill and Lorraina. But my focus was on getting a job in the theater. Seeds had been planted, but they were still far from being ready to sprout.
4
Bill Rutherford
It was more than the usual kindness of the family butler. I used to think it had to do with my brother so clearly being the favored child. John was good at sports and a solid student. He didn’t need any special treatment. I missed a lot of school because of various illnesses, and I was continually falling behind in school. We were a study in contrasts.
As a child I didn’t try to parse the relationship. I loved that Bill Rutherford called me Skippy. He paid attention to me. Whether I was Skippy the kid who got skipped or it was just the name that came into Bill’s head, I was thrilled to have a nickname.
* * *
I don’t know why Bill and Lorraina stopped working for my parents. I was at Culver when they went to work for Grandma Bessie and Major. Maybe they really had been there to be like a second set of parents, and after I was sent to Culver they were no longer needed. Maybe my mother and father wanted to simplify. Bill and Lorraina had always been there to make our lives—school and sports and shows and concerts, social events, and all the rest—a little easier. They were there to keep the apartment spotless and to cook whatever my mother ordered by phone from Gristede’s. There was a laundress who appeared once a week, too. I took it all for granted and really didn’t think about how other families did things.
My mother definitely liked that buzzer in our dining room that called Bill to bring this or that. There was small talk—how we were doing in school, what was going on with the sports we played or followed. Dinner was the time we were supposed to be together.
Occasionally my father and mother talked about matters pertaining to the household economy or the economy of the allied households that fell under Grandma Bessie’s protectorship. And while that sort of thing happens in all kinds of homes, the focus was on Bessie, from whom all good things apparently came. Although I had little understanding of the mechanics of our family’s life, Bessie was the center of my parents’ attention. As I later understood, we stood to benefit from a society that stayed more or less the same, preserving our position on top. To say that money and privilege were the reasons my parents were not social activists would be too simple. However, few people question the order of things when it is to their benefit that nothing changes. There was no upside for my parents to agonize over the treatment of black people in the South, or of the help, or anything else.
Oceans of social and emotional change and growth long since covered, I’m not sure, however, that the whys and wherefores matter much. The specific social dynamic in our home was what mattered to me. We had domestic help. That help was black. At some point they got sent somewhere else within the family to do more of the same, and a relationship that mattered a lot to me changed in ways I didn’t understand.
Talking about maintaining the status quo, that probably applied to Bill and Lorraina too. They had escaped the South. As far as I knew they didn’t participate in the civil rights movement. They had jobs that kept them busy from morning till night as butler, chauffeur, bootblack, heavy lifter, cook, and lady’s maid. They served three meals a day except Thursdays and Sundays, when they served only one or two. It was their job to put the kitchen back together after those meals. It didn’t matter if the air conditioner was on; there would be sweat on their brows when they were working. But they seemed content. Or maybe that’s how I needed to see them. Smiles are easy to forge. It never occurred to me until much later in life to wonder about things like that. To me they were just Bill and Lorraina, always there, always smiling, ready to give me a hug.
I write about them not only because they meant a lot to me, but also because they mean something in the big picture. Racism flourishes in the blind spots that even the most conscientious people have. Although history was my favorite subject in school, I lost sight of what little I knew about the South when it came to Bill and Lorraina, two people who, despite their employment status and placement in the American caste system, were dear to me. As I grew older and was able to understand better, I blocked thoughts about what their lives had been like before they came to my family, let alone about their lives up North. It was not intentional. It was hard to accommodate both the reality and my feelings about that reality, even though I had enough of the facts. They were raised in the South when Jim Crow was still the law of the land and black men were regularly lynched for crimes ranging from garden-variety forms of disrespect to a lingering gaze in the direction of a white woman. Doing quick math on my fingers, I think they were within the age range to have family members who had been slaves. I wondered about that. Bill was light-skinned, and I would have to guess that there were white people in his genealogy—a grandmother who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time or some other equally troubling explanation. The possibilities were nothing I wanted to ask about. No matter how close I thought we were, a question so pointedly focused on the main insult to our intimacy—the black-white divide—was unthinkable.
Up North the whip and the lynch mob were considered the barbaric manifestations of unenlightened bigots nostalgic for a time that thankfully had gone the way of slavery and the seven-day workweek. But still Bill and Lorraina were tied to their more-or-less seven-day-a-week jobs. In the Hampshire House the entire staff (except for certain household servants) was white, as far as I knew, which included the doormen, the front-desk personnel, the restaurant waiters, even the back-elevator servicemen. It was a closed shop to people of color. And while Bill and Lorraina might have been able to find jobs working for some other wealthy white people, it would not have been easy. They weren’t slaves, but they weren’t exactly free to leave either. A black servant needed references from his or her present and/or previous employer, which was tricky. In Bill and Lorraina’s case there would have to be a job for a married couple—as well as an explanation as to why they no longer worked for the Warner family, why they left my parents, and a lot of thinking and wondering on the part of their prospective employers—which meant that for Bill and Lorraina, changing jobs was not something they thought too much about. They were free to leave, but if they wanted to live together and earn a salary, they were nowhere near free in the way that people think of freedom. They occupied a place in society that predictably assured their past would also be their future.
As the civil rights movement picked up steam, I assumed Bill and Lorraina were not involved in it. They benefited in the ways any person of color did at the time, but it seemed as if they did so quietly. Maybe they sent a few dollars to the NAACP every now and then, but if they did, I didn’t know about it.
In conversations with Bill, the sort of things liberal students discussed just never came up, whether it was Bull Connor unleashing dogs that attacked civil rights protesters, the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham that killed those four girls, burning buses, or mass arrests. Bill seemed far removed from that struggle.
Of course most white people I knew, especially those of my parents’ generation, were far removed from the struggle for equalit
y too. Many thought back then that Jim Crow segregation of black and white in the South could be undone without affecting the upper echelons of society. As a teenager I reflected my parents’ attitudes and understanding of the situation. As I learned much later, I was wrong. Without Jim Crow laws, there was up North almost as much segregation and just enough tolerance to keep racial intolerance, prejudice, and bigotry from boiling over—that is, until a black family tried to move into a white neighborhood almost anywhere in the North, and whites burned crosses or attacked their homes and threatened their lives. Then, in the 1960s, when racial unrest and the black power movement shattered their complacency, whites were shocked and angered when blacks reacted violently to the deprivations they suffered. As I grew older, however, I began to see that Bill and Lorraina were expected to have no needs or wants themselves, and in some ways treated like the servers were treated at Culver. As I became more aware, I asked careful questions that were gently half answered or ignored. Still, it was not hard to go about my life as a passive agent of the status quo.
When Bill and Lorraina left to work for my grandparents, it didn’t hit the heights of drama or even register much in the way of change. As far as I was concerned they were elsewhere working for the family. I didn’t mind too much, because I knew I would see them. The big smile and hug were the way we greeted one another after the longer and longer absences from the comforts so stitched into the experience of growing up with them, but the little betrayals of our racial and social caste differences proliferated. They were still “there,” even though I was growing and changing, because that was their job. I saw them at the weekend house in Westchester County during the summer and down in Miami Beach over the Christmas holidays. I still found my way to their room and flopped down on the bed and talked to them, as I had in my childhood days, but I was no longer the same person and our relationship had changed. I no longer needed them. I was becoming, without my knowing it, another white man they worked for. I came and went as I pleased, taking for granted their always being there.
The Butler's Child Page 6