The Gilded Years (40 page)

“Yes,” she whispered. “That’s something that has always terrified me. At Vassar I was able to have both. It ultimately worked against me, but for four years, I could pass and I could be with them, my family, during the holidays. I’m afraid that now, outside of a college existence, that would not be the case. It would be the choice of one or the other. Or at best, I would have to visit with them in a very different, limited capacity.”

Anita had heard stories of it before, Negro women who went on to live otherwise and had to pass off their mothers
and fathers as servants, forcing them to use the maid’s entrance, the back door. When she was with Porter Hamilton, she had considered being one of them.

“I hope I never have to fully make that choice,” said Andrew. “But as it stands now, my family understands what a person has to give up to pursue a career in medicine. A Negro person, that is. Which is time and money, and occasionally, dignity.”

“My family understands, too,” said Anita. “To a point.”

“I think only someone who has lived as we have can truly understand our positions,” said Andrew. “And that’s why I wanted to meet you, Miss Hemmings. I never attended school as a white person like you did, but I have lived as one. I am familiar with floating between both worlds, to be treated as white. I know what it’s like to leave behind your identity as a Negro and be confused about whether you are doing so willingly or unwillingly. And I understand the guilt that can come with securing a better life by passing. The shame. You may think, am I doing this because I am not brave enough to live as a Negro? Or am I living this way because it is the only way to pursue a career I deserve? Perhaps it is an act of bravery? Tricking them into treating you like one of their own. Have you had thoughts like these, Miss Hemmings?” Andrew paused and looked at Anita with an intensity that should have made her uncomfortable, but his words, his presence didn’t disquiet her at all. “Still,” he said, moving his body farther away from her, “I acted indiscreetly, and I apologize, but I hope you can understand. I had to meet the Negro woman who had graduated from Vassar. This brave woman.”

Anita let the smallest of smiles form on her face and then backed away from him, too, when she spotted another cataloguer looking at them with interest.

“My apologies,”
he said, seeing Anita’s colleague. “I’m making you uncomfortable. I will go. I do hope you will allow me to call on you in the coming days. I’m afraid all of Boston knows your address after the papers published it so many times, but I do not want to come unless you would like to see me again.”

“I am not staying at home for that very reason,” said Anita, standing up. “But I would like to speak to you again.”

No one had ever put into words so plainly the emotions she had felt for four years at Vassar. A decade ago, Mame Marshall had tried to prepare her, but Anita was still many years from understanding fully. Andrew Love was the first man she had ever met who passed for the sake of his career, for his intellectual betterment. He hadn’t passed to shed his Negro identity. She couldn’t help but feel a jolt of energy as she thought of the way he had articulated the things she had never spoken—not to Frederick, nor Bessie, not even to herself.

Anita walked to the front desk and came back with Bessie and William’s address written on a slip of paper.

“If you would like, you can call on me here,” she said, making sure her hand did not brush his as she gave him the note.

“I will call on you tomorrow,” he said, placing his hat back on his head and leaving Anita as quietly as he came in.

A
ndrew did as he said and rang the bell at the Lewises’ house the following evening.

Bessie, who had heard only briefly about Anita’s encounter with a light-skinned man at the library, opened the door and was shocked to see someone who looked even whiter than Anita standing there, holding flowers for both her and Anita.

“Mrs. Lewis, please excuse me, I do believe I’m ringing your bell near dinnertime. Miss Hemmings, whom I had the pleasure of meeting yesterday, told me you and Mr. Lewis would be so kind as to allow me to call on her today.”

“Of course, of course,” said Bessie, trying to mask her surprise at his skin color as she let him in the door. “And this is a perfectly good time. If you do not have plans, you could join us for supper.”

“Oh no, I could not impose,” said Andrew, walking into the large, comfortable house. “I would be glad to another evening, when it’s not an inconvenience.”

“Nonsense,” said Bessie, showing him to a chair in the sitting room. “I will just fetch Anita upstairs.” She turned to her right and called for her husband, who was around the bend in the dining room, introducing the two men before she went upstairs so that her visitor was not alone.

“
I heard him come in,” said Anita as Bessie walked into her bedroom door where Anita was penning a letter to her mother. “Andrew Love.”

“Yes!” Bessie said excitedly. “Anita, you said he was light, but this man looks positively white.”

“But he’s not,” said Anita defensively.

“No, of course not,” said Bessie, not having meant to offend. “What I should have said is that he is very handsome and exceedingly polite.”

“Isn’t he?” said Anita, her excitement matching to rise Bessie’s. Since meeting Andrew the day before, she hadn’t been able to think of anything except the man who in so many ways seemed like a carbon copy of herself. Throughout her time at Vassar, no one in her Boston community had fully understood her challenges. Andrew Love did. It was as if she hadn’t realized just how alone she was until she met him.

“Come, Anita,” said Bessie, interrupting her thoughts. “Re-pin your hair and let’s go downstairs. I’ve already invited him to stay for supper, but if it turns out that you don’t want him to, then we shall send him away at once.”

“I don’t think it will come to that,” said Anita, smiling.

“No, me neither,” said Bessie, crossing the room to leave. “I think we will all fall a little bit in love with Mr. Love after this evening.”

She didn’t turn around to see Anita blush, instead leading the way downstairs, where the women greeted the two men who were speaking animatedly.

Anita and Andrew greeted each other politely and familiarly, as if somehow their private, personal words exchanged the day before had helped them cross the boundaries into emotional intimacy very quickly.

“Thank you for allowing me to call on you,” said Andrew,
standing a respectable distance from Anita and not offering his hand to her. “I very much wanted to see you again.”

“Of course,” Anita replied politely before William and Andrew took up their conversation on the Negro community in Boston.

The Lewises spoke animatedly about the people they knew in the area who were leading the charge in social change, and Andrew nodded at the familiar names.

When they sat down to dinner a few moments later, the conversation switched to the ways of Northeastern colleges and what Andrew might expect as a Negro at Harvard, but William swung it swiftly back to social change after the main course was served.

“We do hope Anita joins Bessie as a voice for the educated Negro woman,” William explained to Andrew after Bessie had finished describing her work with Josephine Ruffin and the Boston chapter of the National Association of Colored Women.

“I have no doubt that she will,” said Andrew before he complimented Bessie on the meal.

“Yes, of course that is something that interests me,” said Anita, though she had not attended a meeting with Bessie yet. She intended to, but she was still too afraid of the possible judgment on her character by such smart, proud Negro women. Not everyone thought the way Mame Marshall did. She worried they might sneer at her choice to attend Vassar as white, not look upon her with pride as they did Bessie.

“I am sure Miss Hemmings’s commitment to the Negro community is just as strong as mine,” said Andrew. “We were able to speak at some length yesterday and I found that we have very similar values.”

“That’s all excellent to hear,” said William, pushing
aside his empty plate. “I believe there was also some talk of passing?” he said, looking at his wife.

Shocked, Anita also looked at Bessie, whom she had confided in the night before. Clearly, Bessie had turned around and told her husband the details of their intimate conversation.

“Yes, like Miss Hemmings, I have passed before,” said Andrew quickly, guessing the circumstances and wanting to break the tension before it could mount. “But only for brief periods of time, and only out of necessity.”

“What sort of necessity?” William asked, moving his eyes from his wife to his guest. “When is it ever a necessity?”

“To practice medicine,” Andrew replied matter-of-factly.

“Am I incorrect in thinking that you ran a practice for Negroes in Tennessee?” said William, who had clearly been relayed Andrew’s entire life story by his wife.

“You are not wrong,” said Andrew, looking briefly at Anita, who was sitting rigid and uncomfortable. “But for a time I learned my profession beside an extremely gifted white doctor. He was far older than I and compared to my dedicated instructors at Central Tennessee, his schooling and training were far superior. I firmly believed that learning from such a man would enable me to save more lives in the future. Negro lives.” Andrew cleared his throat and folded his napkin in his lap. “Working with him,” he explained, “I only treated white patients, so my need to disguise my race was essential. You can imagine what the reaction would have been if they knew they had colored hands on them.”

“They would have died right there on the table, from your touch, not from disease,” said William, causing everyone to laugh and relax slightly.

“The poison some think exists in Negro hands,” said Bessie, shaking her head.

“
In Negro everything,” said William. “They think the foundations of religion, of country, will all start to crack if the Negro is looked at as even fifty percent worthy of the white man.”

“Some believe that,” Anita said, coming out of her shell and correcting him.

“Yes,” said William, agreeing. “Not all. But many.”

“In my life, I’ve had to ignore most of that hateful talk,” said Andrew. “If I hadn’t carried forward with shatterproof optimism, I would never have come out as I did.”

Bessie looked across the table at Anita apologetically, but Anita smiled at her. It was clear that Andrew could handle himself very well with William, and did feel great pride in his work.

“You and I,” said William, pausing to collect his thoughts, “we come from very similar circumstances. Bessie moved up north from Virginia when she was very young, and Anita, though her parents are Virginians, was born in Boston, but we spent our childhoods in the South, didn’t we.”

“Yes, indeed. I’ve spent my whole life in the South,” Andrew said respectfully.

“I was in Virginia until I was twenty years old,” William explained. “Started out my college education at Virginia Normal, aged fifteen. But I had a helping hand moving me up north. The president of the school gave me the idea of Amherst and helped make it a reality. Once there, I had to pay my way working as a waiter and a stable boy, but I had help, I’ll admit that. Negroes helped me. White men helped me. But you didn’t have such a step up, did you, Mr. Love?”

“Call me Andrew, please,” he said, looking squarely at his host. “I’m afraid that in the South there’s the South and then there’s Mississippi. And I believe that like mine, your parents were born slaves, but your father became a literate,
highly esteemed minister. Or that is what I have read about you.”

“That’s correct,” said William between bites of the cherry pie that his wife had served for dessert.

“I don’t doubt that it was just as difficult for you to move on to college as it was for me,” said Andrew carefully, “but I, as you say, did not have a step up. My father works as a farm laborer; most of my family is still illiterate. But he gave me drive, maybe more than any other parent in the South did. He wanted me out of Mississippi and out of the fields.”

“And you made it,” said William.

“Eventually. I wasn’t fifteen in college, I was thirty years old when I graduated from medical school.”

“But you’re here now, and we are all very glad to have you,” said William, finally looking approvingly at Anita.

When dinner was over and the women were clearing the table, Bessie pulled her friend over to the corner of the kitchen, looking like an excited schoolgirl.

“He’s extremely handsome, Anita. And coming from absolutely nothing, becoming a physician with not a soul to help him. Even William had mentors. You and I had Northfield. He had no one. I have great admiration for him already. Please tell him he’s welcome back anytime. No, better yet, I will deliver the message.”

“He is elegant, isn’t he,” said Anita, unable to repress her smile. “And his ambition is so honorable.”

“He,” said Bessie quietly, taking her friend’s hand, “reminds me quite a bit of you.”

The following evening Andrew Love called again, and the next week, Anita and he made the short journey to Boston so that he might meet her parents. The reporters had finally given up on the family, and Andrew and Anita were
free to move between Sussex Street and Bessie’s home in Cambridge without scrutiny.

“My darling girl,” said Mrs. Hemmings, after Andrew had gone. He had just dined with the Hemmings family for the third evening in a row. Dora clutched her daughter’s hand and said, “A horrible thing happened to you, and from it sprang something good. That is a handsome, remarkable man. Imagine, a Negro becoming a doctor with his sights set on Harvard. God is great.”

“He does seem both those things,” said Anita, her pulse steadying for the first time in weeks thanks to her mother’s healing presence.

“And he doesn’t seem to be coming to dine here just because he enjoys my cooking. I think he far prefers my daughter’s company.”

“It is all happening very quickly,” said Anita, resting her head on her mother’s soft shoulder.

“Is there a timeline to love?” asked Dora, stroking her daughter’s piled-up hair.