by Tiya Miles
Why Ruth chose Philadelphia as her new place of residence (or why Arthur chose it, if they were together before the South Carolina exodus and if he made the decision) is not readily apparent. Neither Ruth nor Arthur seems to have had relatives already established in that city. But Philadelphia was certainly a destination for thousands of African Americans looking to shed southern economic and political injustice. In the nineteenth century, the city housed the largest free Black population in the country. Although Pennsylvania had only gradually abolished slavery in the late 1700s and early 1800s (a transition that took fifty years), Philadelphia proved a place where African Americans could hone and market skills, such that a healthy Black entrepreneurial class emerged. A critical mass of talented Black businessmen (mostly in the food-service sector), clergymen, educators, writers, and abolitionists made Philadelphia “arguably the most important community of free blacks” prior to the Civil War.30 There even seemed to be an invisible road leading out of Charleston straight to Philadelphia in the antebellum period, as nearly eight hundred free Blacks facing harsher restrictions and frequent arrests in South Carolina’s coastal metropolis fled to Philadelphia in the 1850s.31 This trend continued in the last decades of the century, when Philadelphia still claimed the largest Black population in the North. By 1900, the number of Black residents there had reached sixty-three thousand.32
Ruth joined this substantial, vibrant, struggling mass, at first with her new husband and then with their child. We can only imagine how disorienting it must have been for her, starting this next chapter of life in a teeming, strange city. Along with other Black newcomers in the 1910s, Ruth faced limited employment options. Here, as was the case in every other American city, most African American women were employed as domestic servants in private homes or institutions. Nearly 90 percent of Black women did some form of domestic labor in 1890; that number had decreased only to 84 percent by 1910. And although northern wages were higher than in the South, they were still low, keeping most Black Philadelphia families in the working or lower middle class even as an educated and financially stable Black community with local roots persisted.33 Opportunities for economic advancement were limited enough that the upper classes of Black society in Philadelphia, whom W.E.B. Du Bois called the “aristocracy,” consisted of merchants, caterers, teachers, and clerks with far less financial security and capital than their white upper-class counterparts.34 In a context in which schoolteachers measured among the elite, domestic servants with steady employment could be counted in the Black middle class.35 Those with steady employment and strong moorings in organized community life enjoyed a kind of stability that contrasted greatly with the hand-to-mouth lifestyles of many unemployed and poverty-stricken Black Philadelphians.
Back in Columbia, South Carolina, Ruth had been the child of domestic workers who served in a university community when she was young. Perhaps her youthful experience in this cultured Euro-American context equipped her with skills and modes of comportment that impressed potential employers. Soon after her arrival, Ruth managed to find regular work as a domestic in elegant homes. She also possessed the marketable skill of sewing, an ability she probably learned in the South and developed in the North. Sewing work opened new opportunities for Black women in the early twentieth century, but only the most highly skilled could make careers as seamstresses and dressmakers.36 Although Ruth did not labor with her needle full-time, it is possible that she took in piecework to supplement her income and thereby improved her skill. Ruth’s first position in Philadelphia may have been as a live-in servant in the home of a chemical engineer and an organist, Edward and Mabel Linch.37 Ruth and her husband seem to have lived apart for many of these years, which would not have been unusual for families with women employed as domestics. In 1930, nearly a decade after she had moved north and sewed the text on the sack, Ruth was still working as a “servant,” then in the home of Samuel and Cordelia Castner, a prominent family of politicians and photographers who occupied a mansion just outside of Philadelphia near Bryn Mawr College. Ruth’s professional designation had broadened within the decade, as she now claimed “waitress” as well as a “servant.” The addition of waitressing to her responsibilities, and her identification of such specific work, represented professional progress or an advance in professional identity. She still resided on the premises of her employers, though, a condition that often contributed to feelings of social isolation and sexual vulnerability for Black women in domestic service.38
Although Ruth created a record of her foremothers’ lives, she left no memoir that has yet been found of her own. Nevertheless, the steps she took to move north, reside in a city, start a family, work as a domestic, and take up sewing were shared by many Black women, some of whom left more traces behind. The biography of Boston activist Melnea Cass, a woman whose life unfolded similarly to Ruth’s in the same time period, provides perspective on Ruth’s decisions and experiences. Melnea Cass shared the story of her life in a detailed oral history collected in the 1970s. The trajectory of Melnea Cass’s life—her northern migration, frequent changes of residence, marriage and young motherhood, and maturation into a respected figure in her Black urban community—illuminates Ruth’s. Like Ruth, Melnea was born in the post-Reconstruction urban South, a time and place of intense racism and limited opportunities. Born to a struggling family in Richmond, Virginia, in 1896, Melnea relocated with her parents and sister to Boston as a child. Melnea’s parents moved north because “they weren’t getting any place…weren’t making any progress there” and “didn’t like the environment.” In Boston, the family settled first in a large boardinghouse, where they resided with thirty to forty other migrants. After Melnea’s mother died, she and her two sisters moved more than once, living with an aunt and then their aunt’s friend. Melnea was sent back down south to a high school for underprivileged girls, where she learned domestic skills, before returning to Boston and working as a domestic in a Cape Cod hotel and in private homes. Melnea married young during World War I, as did Ruth. Describing herself as a “war bride,” Melnea Cass shared with her interviewer that many Black women made this choice: “Quite a lot of us got married, you know; we were afraid this boy wouldn’t come back…so we got married.”39 The wartime context, as well as her pregnancy, likely also pushed Ruth toward early marriage.
Just as Ruth’s husband hailed from her own home state, Melnea’s husband, Marshall Cass, had been born in Richmond, Virginia, and had migrated north with his family, first living in Philadelphia and then in Boston. Melnea gave birth to their first child, a daughter, in 1919 while Marshall was away in the military, as was the case with Ruth. Notably, Melnea took up residence with her mother-in-law, a domestic worker and active community member, and received the support of family members even as she helped keep house. Melnea’s interdependence with her in-laws points toward the same possibility in Ruth’s situation. A 1919 transport record from Arthur Middleton’s military file lists his mother, Pink (or Pinkie) Middleton, as an emergency contact residing at North Broad Street in Philadelphia. Arthur’s mother may have lived in Philadelphia only briefly, as census records place her in Kershaw, South Carolina, with her husband, Flander, in both 1910 and 1920. Perhaps she moved north to assist her son and his young family. While no census lists Ruth at this address, it is very possible, even likely, that Ruth received her mother-in-law’s help or lived with her temporarily while Arthur was away in training and in Europe.40
After Melnea Cass’s husband returned from the war, the couple moved into a house of their own. Melnea ceased working outside of the home because her husband, a skilled tradesman, did not want the children to be placed in someone else’s care. “So I always took care of my family,” Melnea said, “and cooked and sewed, and did all kinds of things in the house. I would do everything. Made all their clothes, and everything.” She spent her children’s young years as a homemaker and community builder. With her own mother-in-law as a role model, Melnea turned to civ
ic engagement while raising a family in Boston. She read the local Black press, joined the NAACP, voted at her mother-in-law’s urging, and concerned herself with the status of Blacks in the South. She co-founded and joined what she described as “community clubs” and “social clubs” run by African American women. The Friendship Club, which supported the kindergarten program in her Roxbury neighborhood; the Pansy Embroidery Club; and the Harriet Tubman Mothers’ Club were among her chief preoccupations between World War I and World War II. In addition to long-term membership in the Pansy Embroidery Club, where she often performed secretarial duties, Melnea plied her needle to make her three children’s garments. By the 1940s, Melnea Cass was a Boston Black community maven and an officeholder in numerous clubs dedicated to African American advancement. She had left the South a poor girl, moved frequently to and from various residences, raised a family in a home she took pride in, and had come into her own as a leader and role model known as the “First Lady of Roxbury.”41
Ruth Middleton’s circumstances and contributions had also transformed in the interwar period. She and her husband were by all evidences living life apart while she continued to carry the name “Mrs. Middleton.” By 1940, Ruth and her daughter, now a young woman of twenty-one, were living as boarders in the house of a sixty-four-year-old associate named Martha Horsey. Ruth, at age thirty-eight, worked as a waitress in a tearoom, and Dorothy (affectionately known as Dot) labored as a domestic in private homes.42 Although mother and daughter still did the same general kind of work their enslaved ancestor Rose once had—that is, household and service labor—they had achieved a life beyond the baseline of freedom in the City of Brotherly Love. In the North, they had established a household by choice and formed a wide web of enriching social connections. Their social lives and domestic arrangements were significant and interrelated. In the South as well as the North, Black women longed for private domestic space away from the scrutiny and sexual overtures of white employers. Ruth and Dorothy may not have had a home of their own by mid-century, but their mother-daughter bond was intact, and they lived independently as “lodgers” in the home of a chosen companion.43 Beyond the parameters of their work worlds, Ruth and Dorothy Middleton led vibrant social lives that interconnected with their personal domestic sphere. If their foremothers Rose and Ashley had suffered acute separation and isolation, this mother-and-daughter pair celebrated intense sociality, especially with other Black women.
Ruth and Dorothy fully embraced a Black middle-class social life in Philadelphia that extolled women’s roles as homemakers and hostesses. They entered a cozy circle of women with connections fanning out across the Northeast and westward to Chicago, likely with the help of a few key initial contacts. Martha Horsey, who rented rooms to Ruth and Dorothy in the 1940s, had entered their lives by 1929, and likely earlier, when Dorothy was not yet ten years old. Martha operated an employment agency and may have helped Ruth find work in the 1930s; perhaps this is how the two women met and formed a bond.44 Sometimes in the company of Martha, Ruth soon joined the ranks of a rich social network made up mostly of middle-class Black migrants from the South. With these friends, Ruth adopted a mobile and enmeshed social life punctuated by parties and vacations. The social pages of The Philadelphia Tribune, a Black newspaper, covered Ruth’s trip to Atlantic City with friends in 1932, where she sported “baby blue organdic [organdie]” beachwear. Community media coverage extended to her attendance at various dinner parties in Philadelphia as well as in New York City. In the 1930s, Ruth intensified her social activities, attending and hosting a flurry of bridge parties, tea parties, and cocktail parties with members of a Black professional elite, including doctors and financiers, that stretched across multiple states. Among her recurring destinations was the Brooklyn, New York, home of Helen Stebo, her sister-in-law, an indication that although Ruth lived apart from Arthur, she kept in close contact with his family. Strikingly, Ruth seems to have named her only known daughter, Dorothy Helen, after this paternal aunt.45
Mildred Eubanks (also spelled Eubank), niece to Martha Horsey and friend of Ruth Middleton, is pictured here in her yearbook. Eubanks’s style of hair, dress, and accessorizing was likely shared by Ruth Middleton, a noted fashion trendsetter in her set. West Chester University Serpentine, 1931. Special Collections, University Libraries, West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania.
At home in Philadelphia, Ruth Middleton joined, and possibly helped organize, a series of Black women’s social clubs in an era when clubs were central to community life. She was actively involved with the Rotators Bridge Club, the Philedona Club, and the Conochie Club; in 1935 the Conochie Club met in the “spacious home” of a Black associate to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day amid green decor.46 Ruth became a regular figure in the Black society pages, where her colorful style and witty personality emerge. She donned a “modish” aesthetic and was fond of fashionable dress. Her “blue taffeta pajamas topped by a shimmering silver lamé jacket” made a splash at a dinner party in April 1938, while her “gray wool three piece suit with a finger tip jacket and black accessories” set a “charming example” three weeks later. Ruth professed herself to be a progressive and devoted hostess. When asked by a peer in 1939 what she would like to receive as a Christmas gift, Ruth responded with a remark that inspired this line in the Black society pages: “any new gadget with which to delight her guests when she entertains, would warm the cockles of this lovely hostesses heart.” When quoted about her pet peeves in 1938, Ruth exclaimed that she was “irritated by people who chewed gum incessantly.”47
By 1940, when she and her daughter were ensconced in the home of Martha Horsey, Ruth Middleton had secured her place among the Black upper crust. Described as an “Attractive South Philadelphia Matron” in January of that year, Ruth took one more crucial step in her social ascent.48 She joined a large Black congregation where she had surely been attending as a visitor for years. Black churches towered as central institutions for longtime residents as well as new arrivals in Philadelphia and other Great Migration destination cities. The Episcopal congregation Ruth chose, St. Simon the Cyrenian Church, had been assembling since 1894. In 1897, its founding members had purchased land on Twenty-second and Reed streets in South Philadelphia. Ruth’s formal admission to the church in February was followed by a laying on of hands ceremony in March. Dorothy had formally joined the church as a teen, several years before her mother, a further indication that Ruth had long been attending there.49 Dorothy, like her mother, began to appear in the social pages as a vivacious club and church member. In the spring of 1940, Dorothy authored installments of the youth section of the society pages, noting “all sorts of parties and dances” in celebration of Easter and a “whirlwind of formals.”50 But all of this buzzing social activity had yet to unfold when Ruth arrived in Philadelphia around the year 1918, possibly pregnant, probably afraid of the multiple risks surrounding her, and certainly carrying her formerly enslaved grandmother’s sack.
“54 Receive ‘Laying On Of Hands.’ ” This grainy newspaper photograph records Ruth Middleton’s confirmation at St. Simon the Cyrenian Church, Philadelphia, in February 1940. Ruth J. Middleton is listed in the article as a member of this group; however, specific individuals are not identified by face. The newspaper print preceding the list that contains her name reads: “The following persons were confirmed at the same time for the Mission of the Holy Spirit.” The Philadelphia Tribune, March 7, 1940.
What made Ruth record her family story during those first few years in the city? Had the disruption of relocation brought to mind a longing for home? Did isolation in a new place lead her to dwell on separation from family? Had the birth of a child inspired reflection about her own role as a mother and the plight of the foremothers who had preceded her? Did she wish to shape her family story into a concrete anchor of identity—as a Black woman, a southerner, a survivor—for herself and for her daughter? Had she become keenly aware, in the di
sorienting North, of the need for a tangible heritage to hold fast to and pass down? Perhaps if Ruth had never experienced the trial of having to make life anew that was the chief test of the Great Migration generations, she would not have sewn on the sack, and we would not be contemplating this rare artifact of multigenerational Black women’s experience.
And why did Ruth, a few years into her Philadelphia sojourn, choose embroidery as the method for preserving her family’s story? How did that choice relate to the woman she would become by the 1940s—a respected hostess, fashion exemplar, and church member? By the time Ruth occupied living quarters in the posh homes of Philadelphia elites while working as a domestic servant, embroidery had long been associated with the feminine sphere. In eighteenth-century Europe and the United States, writers, artists, and cultural connoisseurs had come to define the pastime exclusively as a women’s craft that soon stood “entirely as the expression of femininity.”51 Women who diligently and skillfully embroidered text and images onto fabric properly fulfilled the gender ideology of their society and time, performing a task that met the growing cultural expectations of women as the submissive, quiet, pious, and domestic sex. As we saw in a previous chapter, white women of the antebellum upper-class South sewed as a matter of duty and embroidered as a feature of gender decorum. In the Victorian era, the idealization of embroidery work as evidence of femininity, domesticity, and gentility skyrocketed. Girls and women of the elite classes embroidered alphabet samplers, Bible verses, floral still-life arrangements, forest animals, and bucolic scenes of peopled landscapes and calming interiors, and women of the aspiring middle and working classes did the same, straining toward the higher status associated with feminine drawing room culture and, increasingly, middle-class style.52 Because women produced embroidery in domestic spaces for the purpose of bringing comfort to the home, which had taken on greater importance for the Victorian-era middle class, embroidery came to “evoke the home” and to signal the space of the family, “specifically mothers and daughters,” explains the author of a classic book on embroidery, The Subversive Stitch.53