The Invisible Line (42 page)

At the end of each day Wall collected his four dollars in pay, walked out the arched doorway of the Government Printing Office, boarded the streetcar, and retreated to his new house. It was fancier than his father's had been: a three-story colonial with a tile bath and a hot-water heater in the basement, “one of the best homes” in the neighborhood. Its grandeur was muted by its pebbled stucco siding, which helped the house blend a bit into its surroundings. It was a fortress and a blind.
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After years of working to stay colored, years of experiencing what W.E.B. DuBois had called “this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” Stephen had finally decided to shed the burden of race. His family was taking to their new community. Neighbors regarded his wife, Lillie, as a “woman of culture.” In April 1909 his seven year-old daughter Isabel was invited to attend Sunday school at Brookland Baptist Church. That fall she would enter the first grade at the graceful brick elementary school two blocks away. The people and places of his past fell away. Stephen Wall saw more and more that being somebody depended on being nobody.
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AFTER ISABEL HAD BEEN going to Sunday school for a month, there was a knock on the Walls' door. It was a neighbor, David Oertly. In many ways Oertly was like Stephen Wall. He also commuted into town and worked for the government in a skilled position—he was a draftsman at the Navy Department. In his spare time he played second base on the Brookland Brotherhood's baseball team and grew irises and dahlias. His yellow roses were prizewinners. His oldest son was the same age as Isabel and went to Sunday school with her.
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Oertly was calling on church business. Lillie Wall was home with the three children. In the time Isabel had been attending Brookland Baptist, he said, a number of parents had withdrawn their children from the Sunday school. If Lillie showed any confusion about his point, Oertly told her that the “congregation had determined that Mr. Wall was a negro.” He left the Walls with a blunt request: “either identify themselves as white or discontinue their attendance upon the Church and school.” Oertly may have been apologetic, but he was firm: “although they regretted having to ask the parents to withdraw their children,” a newspaper later explained, “it was necessary. ”
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If Isabel was too young to know what was happening, her parents understood. Brookland did not feel like Washington, but it was still a swamp. As a new neighborhood being built from the ground up, it could be even more segregated than the rest of the city. For years leading up to the time the Walls moved there, the neighborhood citizens' association had doggedly protested plans to build a colored school nearby—Negroes simply were not moving there, they argued, and besides, the school would lower their property values. When Congressman Heflin proposed segregating streetcars in the District, the association sent a letter of support. Neighbors such as David Oertly may have looked and acted like the Walls, but their worlds were profoundly different. Oertly's wife was a proud member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy; his father-in-law had been a private in the Virginia cavalry and attended every Confederate reunion he could for decades after the war. Being white did not mean freedom from race. If blackness for Stephen Wall forced a continual consciousness of who he was, being white required a constant display of who one was not.
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The Walls faced a dilemma. They were no longer anonymous. Neighbors knew
who
they were, and now they were voicing suspicions about
what
they were. They could leave Brookland and return to Stephen's old neighborhood and old identity. Or they could follow his brother and sisters' example: move somewhere else, and thoroughly cover their tracks.

Instead, Stephen and Lillie sought a third option. Without any protest they stopped sending Isabel to Sunday school and waited out the summer. On a warm, cloudy September morning, mother and daughter made the short walk to the Brookland School, entered the brick archway, and found the principal's office. With fair skin, blue eyes, and hair in long blond curls, Isabel was nothing but a “pretty little miss about to make her bow to the world by entering first grade.” After making “the usual inquiries,” the principal admitted the girl. Her mother spelled her name for the paperwork: Isabel “W-h-a-l.”
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Ten days later Isabel was sent home from school with a note from the principal. “My dear Mrs. Whal,” wrote Mary Little, “in consequence of information subsequently obtained, I will have to withdraw the ticket of admission to Brookland School issued ... to your daughter Isabel Irene.” It was signed “Respectfully.” Following up on what the principal meant by “information subsequently obtained,” Lillie learned that in response to complaints from parents and possibly the Brookland Citizens' Association, the principal had determined that Isabel was a “colored child” who was legally forbidden to attend the District's white schools. Her teachers were stunned. “None of them even suspected that she had colored blood,” one said, “and it is difficult to make them believe it now.”
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Stephen Wall echoed their disbelief. “My child is as white as any in the Brookland School,” he said. “If it had not been for some talkative busybody who set the story going, no one would ever have dreamed of raising the question.” He had tried to become white by keeping his mouth shut, only to find himself and his family targeted for their race more than ever before. He faced the bitter prospect of explaining the situation to Isabel. The girl did not know she had been kicked out of school. At the moment, she was sick in bed. Perhaps by the time she got better, the issue could be resolved. Unlike the situation with the Baptist church, Stephen would not go quietly. He resolved to appeal the expulsion.
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It was uncertain what such a challenge would accomplish. The Walls' secret was out, and the harder Stephen fought, the more people would know. Even if Stephen and Lillie succeeded in getting Isabel reinstated to the first grade, a ruling by school officials in her favor was unlikely to change the community consensus that the Walls were not white. Isabel would have to face classmates and parents who did not want her at school. The Walls would have to live among people who did not want them as neighbors.
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Stephen Wall's refusal to give in was not merely an expression of rage or pride. He could not let go because he was convinced that the principal had violated the law. As he understood it, the District's Civil War-era statutes established separate schools for blacks without prohibiting them from attending white schools. Even if the law did mandate segregation, he could not imagine that one elementary principal had the authority to classify his children as colored. While Lillie wrote a letter to schools superintendent A. T. Stuart asking him to reconsider the principal's decision, Stephen contacted the press. On Sunday, October 10, next to pieces on President Taft getting sunburned at Yosemite and Ty Cobb stealing home against the Pittsburgh Pirates,
The Washington Herald
ran a front-page story under the headline “May Bar Young Girl from School: Controversy as to Whether She Is a Negro.” Three more boldface subheads followed, announcing, among other things, that the “Claim of Negro Extraction Affects Stephen Wall, Employe[e] of G.P.O.”
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Having embraced the anonymous life, Stephen Wall cast it aside in his bid to get Isabel admitted to a white school. In addition to mentioning where he worked, the story pinpointed the intersection in Brookland where the family lived. In his comments to the reporter, Wall all but placed a spotlight of racial scrutiny on his head. “They say she shall not go to this school because they think her father has negro blood,” he said. But he refused to “confirm or deny the report on his extraction.”
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Wall “hinted significantly about damage suits if his rights were not given him,” the
Herald
reported. But what did he mean by “his rights”? Wall was not arguing that he was white or, for that matter, that his daughter was white. Nor was he arguing that segregation was wrong. Rather, he was asserting a right not to admit his race and not to be classified as black without evidence provided by the government. “The burden of proof is on them,” he declared. “If they believe I have negro blood, very good. Let them prove it. For my part, I only know the law compels me to send my child to a public school, and that I have obeyed the law.”
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The point Wall was making was fundamentally about process. In the absence of an official reason backed by evidence, the school had no authority to expel Isabel. “I am certainly going to send my child back to school as soon as she is well,” Wall said. “As I understand it, the case is not yet settled. I do not know why my little girl has been barred from school. She has not attended this week because she is sick.” It was a technical argument about Isabel's entitlement to attend the school two blocks from home—an argument, perhaps, that only a lawyer could love. Even as Stephen turned his back on the colored world, he remained O.S.B. Wall's son.
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THAT WEDNESDAY THE SCHOOLS superintendent wrote Stephen that he had “the honor to inform you that I sustain the action of the principal.”
The Washington Post
and
Washington Times
picked up the story. The next day Stephen Wall was laid off from work.
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Reaction to the controversy rippled through colored Washington. People in Wall's former social circle were indignant on his behalf. Wall may have been trying to escape the race, but he was still suffering like a black man. “I am in sympathy with Wall,” wrote Charles Purvis, the physician who had treated O.S.B. Wall in his final illness. “It is damnable to have such a question raised. What a country!! Where is our boasted religion? Liars every one of them.”
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If Wall's plight appealed to members of the black elite, so did his technical view of his legal rights. Alongside their outrage at America's “race hatred,” members of the black elite firmly believed that “the law is with Wall.” Purvis's letters were both cris de coeur and legal briefs, citing slave laws mandating that “a child shall follow the condition of the mother,” an 1856 Ohio court decision establishing a one-half rule as “what constitutes a white man,” and an 1868 case in the District holding that the mixed-race child of a prominent abolitionist was white. “If 25 percent can make a fellow black,” Purvis declared, “75 should surely make him white.”
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Although newspapers did not report Wall's firing, the story circulated by word of mouth. Purvis, in retirement in Brookline, Massachusetts, received clippings and letters about the case from Whitefield McKinlay, a Washington real estate broker with ties to Booker T. Washington and the Roosevelt and Taft administrations. “Wall is passing ‘thru' a serious experience; he is being punished for asserting his rights,” Purvis wrote. “Taft should order his reinstatement. Of course the Public Printer will deny that he was influenced by public opinion, but the action speaks for itself. I hope Wall will fight it out. I hope he will call upon the President.”
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It was not out of the question for Stephen Wall or someone acting for him to meet with President Taft. Wall knew members of the “black cabinet,” the handful of federal appointees who had the president's ear on matters relating to the race. Years before, his father had called on President Garfield. But mobilizing his elite support would require him to acknowledge that he was black. As an anonymous white man, Wall had decidedly lower connections. Whether or not someone intervened, he was reinstated at the Government Printing Office for a third time two months later.
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On October 29 the Walls wrote the board of education appealing the superintendent's decision and requesting a hearing. They received no reply. By mid-December Stephen retained John Ridout, the lawyer who had represented him in the lawsuits untangling his mother's estate. Ridout threatened to seek mandamus to force an “official action of the Board expressed and recorded at a Board meeting.” A month later, on January 28, 1910, the board formally affirmed Isabel's expulsion by an 8-1 vote. Two in the majority were black; the sole dissenting vote was from Mary Church Terrell, a civil rights leader and fixture of the colored elite who was long acquainted with the Walls. Her reasoning echoed Purvis's balance of protest and legal principle. She sought to spare Isabel “many of the hardships, humiliations and injustices of which she would be the helpless victim if she were forced to cast her lot among colored children.” And she argued that “during slavery it was customary in some southern states for the child to follow the condition of the mother, and, since the mother was white, the child should be allowed to attend the white schools.”
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Although Wall was committed to the notion that the board of education affirmatively had to prove his race, that position was bound to intensify the scrutiny on him and his family and, ultimately, affirm his black ancestry. His father, after all, had been prominent in broad legal and political circles in the District of Columbia. On March 17 Stephen Wall filed suit in the District's trial court to force the “immediate re-admittance” of Isabel to the Brookland School. His petition conceded that Isabel's “great grandparents were a white man and a very light mulatto woman; her grandparents were a son of said great grandparents and a white woman, and the parents of petitioner are a son of the said grandparents and a white woman.” The board of education responded that this admission was enough to justify the expulsion, and its lawyer started investigating Wall's background.
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