Certain People (34 page)

Still, growing up in Boston was pleasant. The McCrees lived in a comfortable house in an integrated neighborhood—Leonard Bernstein was one of Wade McCree's boyhood neighbors—and Mrs. McCree conducted what amounted to a salon. Young black students and educators who came to Boston made the McCree house their headquarters in the days when blacks could not stay in hotels. Roland Hayes, the tenor, was a frequent visitor, as were Wade McCree's favorite aunt and uncle, Aunt Laura and Uncle Julius. Aunt Laura ran a beauty parlor in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she dressed the hair of all the Smith College girls, and she was definitely an intellectual. Uncle Julius, an erudite man, had a vast library. Wade McCree grew up in an atmosphere of music, scholarship, and literature. Good conversation was encouraged, and reading. As a boy, Wade McCree fed himself avidly on a diet of Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Hawthorne, and Thackeray. He read the old
Compton Encyclopedia
in its entirety, and devoured Redpath's
Universal History
.

He loved to listen to the stories Grandpa Harper, his mother's father, told. Grandpa Harper
talked
history. He talked of all the heroes—black and white—of the past, of Booker T. Washington and Abraham Lincoln, of Frederick Douglass and General Stonewall Jackson. Heroes were his theme. Though Grandpa Harper did not have a heroic occupation—he was a janitor at the Boston State House on Beacon Hill—he was always sure to make his grandchildren aware of visiting heroes when they came to Boston. When Charles Lindbergh came to Boston on his tour after his heroic flight, Grandpa Harper saw to it that his grandchildren got a spot front and center on the State House steps, where he could lift them up and give them a good view of Lindbergh's face.

When Grandpa Harper had had a drink or two, he would tell the children about how Stonewall Jackson had been killed by his own troops. Grandpa Harper's father, Great-Grandpa Harper, had been a sexton at the church where Stonewall Jackson worshipped, and when the Confederate general was killed in 1863, it had been Great-Grandpa Harper's job to dig Stonewall Jackson's grave. When the grave was finished, Great-Grandpa Harper lifted his young son into the grave and said, “Now you can tell your grandchildren that you were in Stonewall Jackson's grave before he was.” It is a story that has been told in the McCree family for over a hundred years, and
through six generations. Wade McCree now tells
his
grandchildren, “Your Great-Great-Grandpa Harper was in Stonewall Jackson's grave before he was.”

Booker T. Washington was the hero and inspiration for Mary McLeod Bethune and her Daytona Institute, which later became Bethune-Cookman College. When she was a young woman, Booker T. Washington appeared to Mary Bethune in a dream. In the dream, she was sitting forlornly at the bank of a broad river when a man on horseback came riding up to her. He was wearing a uniform and perspiring from a hard ride and, as he drew near her, he dropped his horse's reins and the horse stood still in front of her.

“Who are you?” the man asked.

“I am Mary McLeod Bethune.”

“Why are you sitting there, and why do you look so sad?”

“I am trying to think how I am going to build my school,” she replied.

The man on the horse said, “I am Booker T. Washington,” and he pulled from his pocket a handkerchief as though to wipe his brow. But as he opened the handkerchief Mary Bethune saw that within it was wrapped a large and glittering diamond. “This is for you with which to build your school,” he said, and handed her the stone. Then he rode away. When Mary Bethune awoke, the vivid dream and the vision of the shining stone stayed with her.

Mary Bethune did not actually meet Booker T. Washington until several years later. By then, her school—helped not by diamonds but by philanthropies of such people as James M. Gamble (of Procter & Gamble, who supplied her not only with money but also with cases of Crisco and Ivory Soap), John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Madame C. J. Walker, and the Carnegie Foundation—had already opened.

Like Booker T. Washington, Mary Bethune believed that Negroes should learn useful skills, and her Daytona women students were taught home economics, cooking, and housekeeping. Her greatest appeal was therefore to the blacker group, and to women who were less well off. These, as she used to say, were “my black girls”—not the fair-skinned daughters of doctors and lawyers and clergymen who went to Palmer. It was easy for the fair-skinned group to laugh at Mary Bethune. She took herself, and what she saw as her great mission in life, with such terrible seriousness. Though intimates called her “Mama Bethune,” and those less intimate referred to her, almost
worshipfully, as “Mother Bethune,” she loved the thunder-roll sound of her full name, “Mary McLeod Bethune” and to hear herself presented at the speaker's dais with, “Ladies and gentlemen, I present—
Mary McLeod Bethune!
”

She was the first of seventeen children of a slave family to be born to freedom, and for this fact alone she considered herself “different” and special, even Heaven-sent. She liked to tell of how, when she was born, her mother held her up to show to her father and said, “She is a child of prayer, Samuel! I asked the master to send us a child who would show us the way out!” And how, at the time, her old grandmother, sitting in her rocking chair and puffing her corncob pipe, cried out “Thank you, Master, for another grandchild! This is a different one. Thank you, Lord!”

Mary Bethune was a heavy woman, but she carried her weight with dignity, even majesty, and with what some people thought a bit of pomposity. But to watch Mary Bethune come into a room was like watching the entrance of a reigning monarch. Mary Bethune's critics also say that she made too much of her “close friendship” with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Mary Bethune met when she became president of the National Association of Colored Women, that she used her White House connections for publicity purposes, and that she “tried to ride on Mrs. Roosevelt's coattails.”

Mary Bethune thought of herself as the most important Negro woman of the twentieth century, if not of all time, and probably as the most important Negro
person
. Surely this was one reason for the break-up of her marriage to Albertus Bethune after barely ten years. He went home to North Carolina, where he died of tuberculosis in 1919, while she went on to greater and greater things. Her sense of her own importance was, to some people, ludicrous. Grace Hamilton of Atlanta recalls telephoning Mrs. Bethune at one point to ask her support on some program Mrs. Hamilton was then involved in, and Mrs. Bethune's reply: “My dear, you have nothing to worry about.
I
am at the helm!” Mrs. Hamilton says drolly, “It turned out that the program had already gone down the drain.”

Mary Bethune was a brilliant fund-raiser, unexcelled at ringing the doorbells of wealthy men she barely knew and coming away with bequests of hundreds of thousands of dollars for her school. She had tremendous presence, and an enormous sense of theatre. She would sweep regally, head held high, to the speaker's platform, face her
audience for a moment, and then say, “Ladies and gentlemen …” and there would follow a long, pregnant, dramatic pause. Then she would say, “I stand before you in all humility.…” The audience would gasp.

She also, no doubt, had an enormous ego. She once told a friend how she handled speaking engagements at racially mixed gatherings in the South. She always came up to the speakers' table last, so as not to create any embarrassment about where she should be seated. She would then deliver her address. “Then,” she said, “I leave the auditorium during the standing ovation.”

Mary McLeod Bethune was deeply conscious of her own blue-black color—almost obsessive about it. Though she insisted that she thought her color was “beautiful,” she repeated this theme so often that some suspected that, deep down, she had secret doubts. Still, she used her color as a symbol of the purity of her race and, by transference, to the purity of her purpose. She did not have a great sense of humor on the subject of color, or on any other subject, but she did have an ability to deliver pithy comments—some of them, surprisingly, almost antiblack. “Negroes,” she once said, “are not very smart. But they're very
wise
.”

She could also express herself in a way that was quite poetic. Charles Turner is a young Atlanta white who directs the United Board for College Development, a facility that develops a variety of programs to aid traditionally black colleges. As a young boy, Turner met the legendary Mrs. Bethune, who died in 1955, and she apparently was taken with him, as he was with her, and he was particularly struck with something she said to him. It was a remark intended for him, as a white, but it might also be taken to heart by blacks—Old Guard and new-rich, fair-skinned and dark—as they struggle for achievement, status, recognition, for parity with whites and for some sort of racial unity in America in the late 1970s. It might even have been an item included in Charlotte Hawkins Brown's little etiquette book.

Mary Bethune had just come back from a trip to Switzerland, where she had been struck by the beauty of the rose gardens that bloomed along the south-facing shore of Lake Leman. “There were roses of all colors,” she told young Turner. “There were white roses, pink roses, yellow roses, and red roses. There was one variety of rose that was of so deep a shade that it was almost black. And I realized
that all roses bloom if you give each variety an equal amount of sunlight.” Looking at him with her arrestingly deep brown eyes, she said, “You're a young man. You've got a long life to live, and a lot of sunlight to shed. Make sure that your sunlight shines on all the roses.”

23

Peeking Ahead

“One thing that can be said for the black upper class,” says one black woman with more than a touch of pride, “is that we're always nice to our servants.” This comment, with its curious echo of the classic statement of the gentlewoman of the Old South (“We were always good to our slaves”) is an indication of the growing emphasis placed, by middle- and upper-class blacks, on
niceness
. In addition to a nice house in a nice neighborhood, with nice things to go in it, with nice schools for the children, and nice places to go on holidays, today's black elite wants nice manners, nice speech, and to be regarded as nice people.

Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, which created federal educational programs, extended loans to small businesses, initiated such notions as Head Start, thousands of poor blacks were helped out of ghettos, into colleges and graduate schools, and into the mainstream of the American middle class. In the Nixon years and following, these programs have gradually begun to go out the window, but their accomplishments remain and what they did cannot be destroyed. In the decade between 1960 and 1970, the number of blacks employed in technical and professional occupations increased by 131 percent, and the number of black clerical workers increased by 121 percent. There have been qualitative as well as quantitative changes. There is decidedly a new maturity among the black middle class, and a new sophistication. They have left militancy behind them, have relaxed their guardedness, dropped at least many of the chips from their shoulders in favor of becoming nice, middle-class
Americans. Nowhere was the new quality of black life exemplified better than at a recent staff meeting of a large Midwestern hospital, when someone casually mentioned having bought a pair of Gucci loafers. None of the white doctors or social workers in the group had ever heard of Gucci. But a pretty young black nurse had. “Gucci makes a wonderful shoe,” she said.

To be sure, many white professionals—notably doctors and lawyers—complain that the federally funded programs put many blacks through colleges, universities, and graduate schools who were not qualified, and that blacks, in too many cases, were given passing grades and, eventually, degrees that they did not deserve simply because it was the easy way to avoid a racial hassle. This may be true, but it is not the point. The point is that
they got their degrees
. Now a sifting-out process will take place, and the truly talented will separate themselves from the less talented, the cream rising to the top. From this cream will certainly emerge the black upper class of tomorrow.

As part of the increased maturity and sophistication of this emerging class, other changes are taking place. Black speech is changing, for one thing. As recently as fifteen years ago, for example, it was almost always possible to tell whether the person one was speaking to on the other end of the telephone line was white or black simply by tone of voice or inflection of speech. Today, differentiating between white and black voices is much less easy. The colleges have done this. The new college-educated blacks are also more interested in integrationist conversation than in the African nationalist “rap” of a few years back. Though the mothers and grandmothers of this generation may have preoccupied themselves with such matters as whether one had “good hair” or “bad hair,” today's educated blacks talk freely and easily about the advantages and drawbacks of black hair texture, even with their white friends and acquaintances. The colleges have also undoubtedly eased the young blacks' suspicions about whites and whites' motives and have also caused whites to be less distrustful of blacks. The intangible “differences” between the races, at least on the educated level, have begun to seem much less apparent Already, in most parts of the country, there is much more social integration and intermingling between the races, and this will doubtless increase even further. As this happens, interracial marriages will probably also increase—slowly, but perceptibly.

The black Old Guard—particularly the older people among the Old Guard—may continue to prefer their quiet, conservative lives, their
old neighborhoods, and to content themselves with their small circle of “visiting friends.” But the new middle class of educated blacks is already beginning to eclipse this smaller group in economic importance, and to push forward toward business and political success in an important way rather than to view success in terms of the security, honesty, and probity exemplified by the Pullman porter or the government clerk. As the new middle class moves into the new upper class, improving, as it goes, its style, speech, tastes, and niceness, it will not so much expand as solidify, taking on more and more values and attitudes that will seem almost indistinguishable from those of middle- or upper-class whites. This is beginning to happen already, as blacks moving upward are eschewing Cadillacs in favor of compacts and station wagons. In the future, no doubt, there will be a proliferation of black country clubs.