The other, Atlanta Life, was founded by Alonzo F. Herndon, who, like John Merrick, was also born in slavery in 1858, and—by coincidence—was also a barber. As a young freed man, he acquired several barbershops and, in 1882, Herndon moved to Atlanta, where he quickly became known as the best barber in town. In 1904, he opened a fancy establishment on Peachtree Street which was described at the time as “the most popular and most successful business of its kind in the country.” Herndon got into the insurance business almost by accident. In 1905, the Georgia legislature passed a law requiring mutual aid societies to deposit $5,000 with state officials. Many—particularly those run by black churches—could not meet this requirement, and so Alonzo Herndon came to the rescue. He purchased several church associations, including two that he bought for $160. Atlanta Life was started in a one-room office in the Rucker Building on Auburn Avenue. Ten years later, capital stock of $25,000 was subscribed and sold—with Herndon buying most of the stock himself—and in 1922 the capital stock of the company was increased to $100,000, with Herndon again buying nearly all of it. By the time he died in 1927, Atlanta Life was a major institution in the black community, as it remains today.
While the fraternal orders were helping black businessmen—or at least some black businessmen—get ahead in a money sense, the sororities and social clubs were helping women advance socially. Out of Alpha Kappa Alpha and Delta Sigma Theta have sprung such women’s organizations as The Girl Friends, started in New York in 1927 by sixteen friends—girl friends, one supposes. The Girl Friends has expanded, and has several dozen chapters in as many cities. Though it is primarily a social club, The Girl Friends are active in community service. Then there is the small and exclusive Gay North-easterners, known for its beautiful balls, and composed for the most part of New York and Connecticut ladies. In Memphis, the Memphis Dinner Club is so selective that it has only eight members. The Smart Set Club of Houston, founded in 1944 by the smartest of Houston’s smart set, was originally composed of the five wives of the city’s five leading doctors and dentists. Houston’s black society reverberated with the news several years ago that The Smart Set was expanding its membership to twelve. In Philadelphia, there is the Cotillion Society, which, despite its name, has nothing to do with debutantes. It supports an opera company, and offers a showcase for young black singers, musicians, and other artists. To be “in” in Roanoke, Virginia, one would want to join the Altruist Club and, in Washington, there are a number of quaintly named clubs, including the What Good Are We, the Sappy Sues, and the Regular Buddies—all modeled more or less on The Girl Friends. One of the larger national women’s clubs for the upper crust is known as The Moles (husbands of Moles are called The Mules), which has chapters in 24 Eastern cities, from as far south as Georgia and as far west as Illinois. In addition to purely social doings—teas, luncheons, and card parties—The Moles support a black scholarship program.
There are also elite clubs for both men and women, such as Jack and Jill of America. Jack and Jill members must be parents, and the organization runs a club for children called the Jack and Jill Juniors. One of the purposes of Jack and Jill is to see to it that proper young girls meet proper young boys. And the women’s clubs are backed up by purely social men’s clubs, where men gather at each others’ homes or hotel suites just for camaraderie and good times—such as the Royal Coterie of Snakes in Chicago, the Me-Do-So Club in Baltimore, the Original Illinois Club in New Orleans, the Comus Club of New York and Brooklyn, the Bachelor-Benedicts in Washington, the Strikers in Mobile, and the Cotillion Club in Detroit. These clubs were originally founded by small groups of men from particular professions—doctors, dentists, pharmacists, lawyers. Sons and close friends of members are eligible for membership. They must be proposed, seconded, and passed by the entire group before they are taken in. Gerri Major, the former society editor of Ebony, has said, “Maneuvering to insure inclusion of a relative on one of these lists rivals the intrigue of foreign diplomats seeking American financial aid. Guest lists, too, are limited. An invitation is a royal command, thankfully acknowledged.” In many cities, the men’s social clubs sponsor the black debutante balls.
Then there are summer clubs, at resorts where affluent blacks vacation and have summer homes—at Highland Beach, Arundel-on-the-Bay, Columbia Beach, or Eagle Harbor, all on Chesapeake Bay, or on Martha’s Vineyard at the black summer colony of Oak Bluffs. A number of upper-crust New York families maintain second summer homes in the old whaling village of Sag Harbor, on the eastern end of Long Island. The black joke is: “That’s why they call it Sag Harbor. Everything is sagging.”
But, in fact, though the black summer colony at Sag Harbor may have sagged a bit when it started two to three generations ago, it is very much propped up today. Homes in the enclave are large, attractive, and well maintained. A number have swimming pools, and several have tennis courts. Areas of Sag Harbor that were once known as Nineveh and Mount Misery have been stylishly renamed Azurest and Sag Harbor Heights. (Though the terrain of Suffolk County is notoriously flat, there are hilly spots in Sag Harbor that would qualify as “heights.”) Sag Harbor’s summer set is famously close-knit, clannish, and exclusive. Its leaders are members of New York’s Pickens family (real estate), who have been summering here for many years, and New York State Supreme Court justice Edward R. Dudley and his wife, who own one of the houses with its own private pool. Newcomers with social ambitions find the going tough. “Money alone just won’t do it here,” says one summer resident. “There’s one woman who’s built a big new place, but no one’s impressed with her sauna and her gymnasium and her bidets. To us, she’s simply nouveau.” In Sag Harbor Heights, the wooded lanes are unpaved to discourage rubberneckers or other unwanted visitors. There is a private beach, with a three-dollar parking fee for “outsiders.” There is very little commingling with Sag Harbor’s white summer colony, nor with any of the Hamptons beyond. Needless to say, there is no social intercourse at all with the large—and very poor—black population of nearby Bridgehampton.
At the oldest and most snobbish of the black summer resorts, Highland Beach—founded in the 1880s by Frederick Douglass’s son—there was for years a rule, laid down by the light-skinned Establishment, that dark-skinned blacks could not join the club, or buy property there; this rule has since been eased, but only somewhat. At Oak Bluffs, where upper-crust blacks have also been going for years (Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke has a large house there), life is also very staid and seemly. “Oak Bluffs is more formal,” says Mrs. Paul Hough, whose family have had a summer home there for two generations. “We have bridge parties in the afternoon, small formal dinners in the evening. People bring their cars, and are driven to parties by their chauffeurs. We have a private beach, and a private tennis club. It amuses me to notice how, all at once, tennis has become such a big thing with white people. Why, my mother was having private tennis lessons at Oak Bluffs when she was a little girl!” No small amount of social rivalry exists, meanwhile, between Sag Harbor and Oak Bluffs. A Sag Harbor resident says, “Oak Bluffs has become terribly Middle West. You know, those pushy Chicago people.” A longtime Oak Bluffs resident sniffs and counters, “I hear that Sag Harbor these days has become completely overrun.”
In 1946, two Philadelphia ladies, Sarah S. Scott and the late Margaret R. Hawkins, founded Links, Incorporated, which, though it is not as venerable as The Girl Friends, has become the most prestigious—and exclusive—black women’s organization in America. Originally, the Links was simply a social group, centered about weekly bridge parties (members of Links were quite conscious of the black woman’s traditional love of poker, but poker has long been relegated to the lower class; the upper-class black woman plays bridge). But as Links expanded, it took on philanthropic projects and it has become the black equivalent of the Junior League.
The name Links refers to links of friendship. Husbands of Links are called Connecting Links, and children are called Heir-o-Links. Membership in Links in any city is limited
to thirty women (some cities have far fewer members) and most Links are so fair-skinned that some blacks wonder why Links call themselves a black group at all. The number thirty was selected as a ceiling for membership because “That was the maximum number that anyone could put up at one’s house,” according to Mrs. Hough, a former national president of Links. (In segregation days, when wealthy blacks traveled in the South, they could not stay in the best hotels; southern Links members were expected to hostess their visiting sisters.) Today, there are 130 Links chapters across the country, and their fund-raising projects involve education, medicine, and the arts. A popular Links fund-raising event is sponsorship of the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling fashion show that annually visits a number of cities across the country. Most Links husbands are members of Boulé. Nearly all Links members are AKA’s, with a small sprinkling of Deltas.
For their choosiness and their grand ways, the Links are ridiculed and even despised by lower-class blacks. “They’re nothing but snobs,” says the outspoken Lina Fleming of Cincinnati. “Or let’s just say they try to be snobs.” Mrs. Fleming insists that she would not join Links if asked, and adds, “My sister was asked to be a Link. She turned them down. Being a Link means nothing.” But it does mean something—if you are a Link.
At the same time, the Links and the other women’s groups are—like the men’s fraternal lodges—torn by inner strife, feuding, and clambering for one-upmanship. Each Link, and each Link chapter, seems to spend much of its time trying to outdo the others, and to talk the others down. (“Those Washington Links think they’re so grand!” sniffs one of the Detroit Links.) As for the Moles, they publish an annual magazine called Molerama and, in the 1974 edition, the publicity chairman for the Washington chapter was one Thersa Archer. In her annual report of her chapter’s doings, which she wrote herself, Mrs. Archer described herself as “hard working, careful,” and went on with a lengthy paragraph—one of the longest paragraphs in the article—describing her fourteen-day cruise to Nassau, Curaçao, Barbados, Martinique, and St. Thomas, a Fourth of July holiday spent in Norwalk, Connecticut, Thanksgiving with friends in Pittsburgh, and announced her and her husband’s fortieth wedding anniversary. Thersa Archer, however, had obviously been having some sort of dispute with one of her publicity committee members, Beatrice Smith. She gave Beatrice Smith only a short, perfunctory paragraph, in which she described Mrs. Smith as “fickle, easily led.” There must have been quite a row over this, because the words “fickle, easily led” were blacked out by the printer as the magazine went to press, though they are still legible through the ink.
Though many blacks tend to lay the blame for their woes at the feet of an amorphous white “Establishment,” the infighting between and among their own many elite groups may have helped prevent them from having a true Establishment of their own. In any human society there has always been a pecking order, with an elite group gathered at the top. In New York, Mrs. Astor had her “Four Hundred.” The uptown Jews had their “One Hundred.” In Washington, the Links have their “Thirty,” and Houston’s Smart Set has its “Twelve.” And of course the blacks have had a special need for their many tiny, closed social sets, clubs, secret fraternal and sororal orders, each with its secret rite and ritual, grip and password, each containing secrets within secrets. They have needed to bond together as a defensive shield against what they see as an inimical or, at best, indifferent white world. But in so doing the little clubs and orders have managed to erect tall barricades against each other as well. Perhaps this is at least one reason why promising black businessmen have had difficulty succeeding with what should have been promising black businesses. They don’t quite like each other.
Though each of the little clubs and societies likes to think of itself as the Top, they are really a series of small tops cut off from any base. They are even ambivalent about the color of their skin. Most light-skinned blacks say that they are “not proud” of having white ancestors. Yet they are very proud of the light skin their white ancestors have given them, and often it is the main requirement to join the club. The view from the clubhouse is comfortable and cozy, but it does not take in what Barbara Proctor calls “those bottomless blacks” who, if they are aware of the elite groups, view them with scorn and consider their social pretensions ridiculous. A wry and bitter little ditty has emerged from the bottom of the black world which reveals rather clearly how this world regards the higher-ups. It goes:
Twinkle, twinkle, little nigger,
All you do is sit and figger.
Don’t you know that if you get bigger
All you’ll be is a bigger nigger?
Sometimes attempts are made to bridge the abysmal social gap. One Links member tells of a young black man who worked in her office. Though his origins were the ghetto, he was college-educated, well-spoken, and “seemed nice.” She considered inviting him for dinner, but says, “I wasn’t sure how my friends would react, and how he’d react to them. Still, I asked him. He came, and—I was really surprised—he handled himself very well!” That, however, was as far as it went. Another Link recalls shopping with her mother at Rich’s department store in Atlanta, and seeing, on an escalator, an old black woman in split-out shoes, sagging stockings, a tattered shawl and a turban. She whispered to her mother, “Look at that dirty old colored lady!” Her mother reprimanded her. “You mustn’t say things like that,” she said. “She may be just as nice as you and me.” It was probably just what Charlotte Hawkins Brown would have said, and that was as far as that went.
And so the fragmented elite of the black world, with their clubs and societies each secretly at war with all the others, has not yet achieved what might be termed true clout in either the white world or the black. Among blacks, the elite have achieved importance without real position. They have become dignitaries, but without power, leading ladies and gentlemen without much influence, figureheads, but not leaders—shining examples, but not guides. As Lina Fleming puts it bluntly about the Links, “They’re all chiefs but no Indians.”
9
“Let Us Pray.…”
A certain amount of divisiveness was, of course, encouraged by the white slave-owners of the antebellum South. It was easier to control a divided people than a united one, and plantation owners taught their house servants to believe that they were “better” than their fellow slaves in the fields. To be sent to the fields was a form of punishment and, if he did his job well, the house slave was rewarded with better food, better clothing, and a generally easier life. It amused slave-owners to let their house slaves have periodic parties, dances, teas, and other “socials,” for which the slaves dressed up in their best clothes—invariably hand-me-downs from the master and his wife—and which were otherwise imitations of Southern white social activities.
An ex-slave named Austin Steward, who wrote and published his autobiography in 1857, gave a vivid description of the status layers that existed on the plantation:
It was about ten o’clock when the aristocratic slaves began to assemble, dressed in the cast-off finery of their master and mistress, swelling out and putting on airs in imitation of those they were forced to obey from day to day.
House servants were, of course, “the stars” of the party; all eyes were turned to them to see how they conducted, for they, among slaves, are what a military man would call “fugle-men.” The field hands, and such of them as have generally been excluded from the dwelling of their owners, look to the house servants as a pattern of politeness and gentility. And, indeed, it is often the only method of obtaining any knowledge of the manners of what is called “genteel society;” hence, they are ever regarded as a privileged class; and are sometimes greatly envied, while others are bitterly hated.
But it would be an oversimplification to say that the house slaves and field slaves on all Southern plantations “hated” each other because of the caste system. In households where the slavemaster or his wife was particularly despotic or demanding, there were often slaves who would have glad
ly changed places with the field workers and who misbehaved in an attempt to do so. And, in the end, it was always Slave Row—where every slave returned at day’s end—and not “the big house” that was the heart and nerve center of the slave community.
Here the house slaves, quietly and steadily, brought whatever food and clothing could be pilfered from the house, and distributed it among the others. Since the slaves saw their own people as stolen property, they saw nothing wrong with stealing from their masters. Naturally, it is seldom pleasant to be on the receiving end of this sort of charity, and there was doubtless some resentment among the field hands against their benefactors. House servants were also able to provide a certain amount of after-hours entertainment to the other inhabitants of Slave Row—many of whom had never set foot inside the big house, or spoken to “Massah” or his “missus”—regaling them with tales and gossip of the doings of the household, mimicking and parodying their masters’ speech, gestures, and mannerisms, often to the point of high hilarity. Most important, the house servants brought news of what Massah might be planning, picked up by eavesdropping at parlor doors and in back stairways. If, say, the serving maid at dinner learned that the master was planning to sell a block of slaves, that news was quickly reported to Slave Row. The house slaves earned respect as the plantation’s spies.
It is quite clear that most slave-owners distrusted their house servants, as indicated by accounts of “spelling-out stories”—where the master and his family spelled out words and sentences that they did not want the slaves to understand. A woman who could covertly learn to spell was a valued agent to the community of Slave Row. Secrecy became a mode of life on the plantation, and most slaves made it a rule never to let the white man know what they were thinking. Slave-owners, meanwhile, tried to use their house servants as sources of information as to what the field hands were saying or contemplating. And naturally there were servants who, in return for bribes or special favors, became traitors to their fellow blacks, just as there were Jewish traitors in the concentration camps of World War II. When traitors were discovered, they were harshly dealt with, even killed. Once, at a kangaroo court that was set up on a Mississippi plantation, a black waitress was accused of telling her master about a planned slave revolt. In her testimony, she stood up dramatically among her fellow slaves and said, “I told the Massah, ‘I’m going to tell you the truth, so help me God’—and then I told him nothin’!”
Certain People Page 9