The Gilded Years (43 page)

“You lived in Tennessee?” said Helen, surprised.

“Briefly. For my father’s medical practice. But they weren’t happy there. My mother does not like the South but she adores New York. She loves the opera and the museums and lately, with me, the Broadway revues, though she pretends not to. She spends a great deal of time being supportive of my father’s office since he works independently, but she was always very good at making the city come alive for me, for all of us.”

“After graduation,” said Helen, “it will be your turn. You can make it come alive for me.”

“I promise,” said Ellen, thinking that while she knew she wanted to go back to New York eventually, she hoped her four years at Vassar would go by very slowly.

When the meeting had ended, the girls left the parlor together, ready to part ways for their late afternoon classes.

“I have zoology,” said Helen, the leather soles on her new boots tapping their way through Main Building.

“
Come to my room after class. I have the greatest record to listen to, ‘Riverboat Shuffle.’ My brother gave it to me over winter break. You’ll go crazy over it,” said Ellen.

“I don’t think I can like anything better than ‘King Porter Stomp,’ ” said Helen, whistling the song.

“If you keep whistling that tune, I swear I will tape you to your desk chair and never set you free,” said Ellen, putting her hands over her ears and holding her breath.

“Good, then I won’t have to go to zoology,” said Helen, twirling into a wall.

Giddy from the start of the new semester, the two girls made their way to the second floor, where many of the classrooms and administrative offices were located, and passed President MacCracken’s office on their way to the back stairs. Both looked inside as they walked by and paused when they saw the dean of the college, C. Mildred Thompson, sitting at the desk in the president’s reception room.

“I live in fear of being called in by Prexy or Thompson,” said Helen, after they had smiled and walked by the dean. She was a much-admired woman who had marched in the second suffrage parade in 1911 and was now actively involved in Democratic politics, helped by her close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Despite that, the students hoped never to have to meet her alone.

“Me, too,” said Ellen. “Though my mother admitted she had to meet with President Taylor her senior year and said it wasn’t all bad.”

“What was it about? Academic probation?”

“I’m not sure,” said Ellen, looking out the window at the snow falling on Taylor Gate. In 1913, the original gate to the school had been torn down and replaced by a Gothic Revival building and handsome stone entrance. It was one of Ellen’s favorite buildings on campus, though her mother said the
old gatehouse was superior. “She graduated a cum laude, so it couldn’t have been that. Whatever it was, she survived.”

Ellen said goodbye to her friend and ran down to the first floor and out the door, across the quad again, greeting the freshmen she had not said hello to since returning from winter break. Ellen had loved growing up in New York City, and had spent a good deal of time in high school sneaking out to music clubs and theaters. But as she walked past Strong and toward her own residence hall, she was glad that her mother had pushed her to Vassar. She remembered how when she was barely fourteen and had just started thinking about college, her mother had said to her, “Vassar. There’s no other school to consider.”

Ellen was beginning to think she was right.

•  •  •

The sight of Ellen Love walking past the president’s door startled Dean Thompson, since she was waiting to speak to President Taylor about that very student. When Ellen had dawdled by, the dean stood up and positioned herself in the door frame, watching the dark-haired freshman as she laughed with her friend. Ellen Love appeared to be very happy at Vassar.

“I’ve just hung up, Miss Thompson!” President MacCracken boomed from his office. “Come in, come in.”

“This weather!” said Dean Thompson, making her way into the president’s capacious office. On the walls hung pictures of presidents past, and Miss Thompson paused and looked at the stern face of President Taylor, his thick white mustache combed and trimmed with precision. She then pulled an envelope from the brown folder she was holding. She glanced at the return address, which also indicated the sender’s class year, and placed it on the president’s desk.

“This came for you yesterday, but my assistant, Hilda, is opening all the mail addressed to you from alumnae, as you know.”

“Saving me much time,” said the president briskly. “And this letter is from an alumna?”

“Class of 1897,” said the dean, waiting for him to remove the letter from the envelope. “It’s from a Mrs. Louise Hamilton. She was Louise Taylor when she was a student here. Hilda said that not only did she send this letter, but she has been telephoning nonstop since the last alumnae reunion at the end of fall term. I’m afraid she’s desperate to contact you.”

“Class of 1897. Louise Taylor,” the president repeated. “I know the Taylor name, her father Clarence especially, but I don’t think they’ve given a penny to the school.”

“They haven’t.”

The president looked up at the dean and raised his eyebrows before diving into the letter.

My Dear Dr. MacCracken,

After serious discussions at the last class reunion and many unreturned phone calls to your office since, I have decided to ask you by letter if it is the policy of Vassar College to accept Negro students, and if so, is it the policy of the college to accept them as white?

Already the South is asking questions concerning the colored girl in the freshman class.

I am particularly interested in the matter because of my own painful experience with a roommate who was supposed to be a white girl but who proved to be a Negress. After rooming with Anita Hemmings during my senior year, I suddenly discovered that she was colored. Terribly upset, I wrote to my father at once, and he, while quoting
the Golden Rule to me, quietly had a man in Boston investigate. The report came that the family was colored and it was considered impossible for a girl from such a section and family to be at Vassar. But at Vassar she was.

In my own case, I learned after Miss Hemmings had been a guest in my home, that she resorted to falsehood to cover the distressing truth. I should not like any young girl to repeat my harrowing experience for it is Anita’s daughter, Ellen Love, who is now at Vassar.

Parents of girls in both preparatory schools and college are giving this matter careful consideration for the question, we feel, is moral as well as social. I await your response and am optimistic that it will contain the news that Miss Love has been removed from school. The class of 1927 does not need the same stain that the class of 1897 will always carry.

Very sincerely,

Louise Taylor Hamilton

“Not a reserved woman, is she?” said the president, putting the letter down. “Is what she is saying true, Miss Thompson? Is this student in the class of 1927 colored?”

“She could be considered that way,” said the dean. “I don’t know how familiar you are with her mother’s story, but it caused a sizable scandal in ’97.”

“I’m somewhat familiar with it,” said the president. “I am aware that we graduated her knowing that she had strains of Negro blood.”

“We did. And while I’m sure for the faculty it felt like negative press at the time, it’s not something that stayed in the hearts and minds of the alumnae. I’m confident most of our women—apart from those who were with her in ’97—are not aware that such a person graduated. Just think of
all our current professors, our wardens who were employed while her mother was a student. And the Granddaughters club. Many of those women have mothers who overlapped with Mrs. Love, but it’s second semester and it seems no one has informed Ellen. The scandal, I believe, dissipated long ago.”

The dean glanced into her file and closed it again, changing her train of thought. “I looked for the minutes from the special session of the board meeting at which it was decided that Anita Hemmings should graduate, but no minutes exist.”

“Do you believe they were purposefully destroyed or is that an unfortunate coincidence?” asked the president. He was known around the college for keeping every paper that was ever in his possession, and boxes of his letters were already piling up in storage—everything from personal correspondence to receipts for coffee and a note saying he had left his razor on the train and could he have a new one sent up? No minutes from his tenure would ever go missing.

“I can’t be sure,” said Miss Thompson. “I hope it’s just an unfortunate coincidence.”

The president looked down at the letter and read it again. “We certainly don’t want a repetition of 1897,” he said after a moment. “But we also have to proceed carefully, as this Hamilton woman sounds unbalanced.”

The dean watched the president as he studied each line of the letter carefully, then she sat down in the chair opposite him and said, “To be quite frank, if I may, I don’t think Ellen Love even knows she’s black.”

“Is that so?” said the president with interest.

“From what Ellen wrote about her family on her application, I think her mother is living as a white woman now.
You can see her file here,” she said, removing it from her folder and placing it on his desk, “that her father is a medical doctor who attended Harvard. Surely he is Caucasian.”

“I think that makes our decision even easier,” said the president. “If this girl does not know that she’s colored, why should anyone else?”

“I’m in complete agreement,” said the dean. “And she is in a single room in Josselyn Hall.”

“How did that come to be?” asked President MacCracken, who had no say in where the students were housed.

“Many freshmen are in singles now,” said the dean, “so it might be a coincidence. Or maybe someone in the housing office paid more attention than we did. But please be at ease as the wardens have assured me that she will remain in a single all four years.”

“The thing to do is to turn a blind eye,” said the president, taking out his official stationery and uncapping a pen. “If they let her mother graduate twenty-seven years ago, I am certainly not going to hold her daughter back now. We are not a college that goes back in time. We only move forward.”

He put his pen to paper and wrote in bold script to his petitioner.

My dear Mrs. Hamilton,

I thank you for your letter dated the 5th of January and have taken your concern as an alumna under careful consideration.

You use the word Negress in referring to her mother, but you probably know that both mother and daughter are more white than black. I may go so far as to say it is my understanding that Ellen Love herself is entirely ignorant of the fact that she has any Negro blood in her veins and
that the communication of this fact to her would be a very great shock.

I understand from the wardens that Mrs. Love’s daughter rooms alone, and that there is no intention on the part of the department to have her room with anyone during her time here.

My own particular point of view is perhaps not pertinent but I may say that Negro students were my classmates at New York University and Harvard, and that I have taught students with Negro blood in Syria at the American University, and later at Yale. I was never aware that the universities lost caste through the admission of students with Negro blood.

We have no intention of removing Ellen Love from college and thank you for keeping this matter a confidential one.

I am,

Very sincerely yours,

President Henry MacCracken

Though it was nearly dark outside, Ellen and Virginia decided to put off working on their first Greek translation of the year and instead walked up to see the brindled cows on the farm, the smell of livestock mixing with the sweet aroma emitted from the cider mill up the path. The snow had stopped and the sky was glowing purple, in the fleeting state where the stars were visible through the last trace of sunlight.

“Look, the stream is completely frozen,” said Ellen, putting her foot on it and letting it slide. “Helen and I walked through it barefoot this fall. It’s shallow, though there are quite a lot of pebbles at the bottom.”

“I love this part of campus,” said Virginia, who had also
spent her childhood in a city, “especially in the snow. I bet fifty years ago it all looked exactly the same.”

“I think when our mothers were here, most of it was like this,” Ellen replied, looking down at the distant yellow lights of the road.

Ellen had sensed as soon as she walked through Taylor Gate for the first time that she was part of something bigger than herself. She felt it when she sat in the wooden seats of the handsome classrooms; when she lay in the parlors smoking cigarettes, her bangs in her eyes, listening to girls play “Tin Roof Blues” with amateur hands. When she heard the first few notes echoing in the halls of Main, she recognized the melody instantly and felt a mix of excitement and longing. Her brother had played it on their phonograph countless times. She looked toward the four quad dorms, the trees and bushes covered in snow. She felt uplifted as she walked, her posture straight, her head held high. There was something magical about this place, this hour, as snow refracted light from the lampposts and the campus buildings. She felt a glow being there, just as she knew her mother had.

“Tell me we’ll never have to leave,” said Virginia, tilting her head back as far as she could. “That somehow life can stay just like it is today.”

“It will,” said Ellen, looking down at the campus as Virginia lifted her arms toward the stars.
“Part of us will always be here.”

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