Common Ground (13 page)

By the turn of the century, whites as well as blacks were retreating from the race question. In the South, the end of Reconstruction was followed by the imposition of rigid segregation, underscored by Klan raids and lynchings. In Boston, the changes were slower and subtler, but even there the passing of the abolitionist leadership and weariness with the “old issue” took their toll. Once Boston’s cultural institutions and public accommodations had been open to all. Now segregation became the order of the day: the nursing school of the Massachusetts General Hospital denied a black woman’s application; the black editor Frederick Douglass was forcibly ejected from a first-class railroad car and compelled to take a seat in the “Jim Crow car.”

As blacks were deserted by their old Yankee allies, they found little sympathy among the Irish, who had long resented the abolitionists’ alliance with the Negro. Blacks and Irish competed for jobs, with the Irish gradually displacing Negroes in many traditional occupations. Some intermarriage took place—particularly between Irish maids and black servants—but the children of such unions found themselves spurned by both groups. For a time after the turn of the century, Mayor James Michael Curley hinted at an alliance of Irish and black workers against the Yankee “codfish aristocracy,” but even Curley proved a fickle ally. When Trotter spearheaded a protest against the showing of D. W. Griffith’s
Birth of a Nation
, Curley overrode objections to the film’s racial message and authorized its run. “Where is the valiant Jim Curley of old,” Trotter asked bitterly, “the friend of the people, lovable Jim Curley, whom we coloured people supported for the mayoralty against the advice of our white friends? If this were an attack on the Irish race he would find a way pretty quick to stop it.” The alliance died aborning.

White Bostonians—Irish and Yankees alike—were responding, in part, to the Southern ex-slaves who had flooded North in the decades since the Civil War, expanding Boston’s black community from barely 2,280 in 1860 to nearly 14,000 in 1910. These late arrivals were likely to be dark-skinned field hands from rural Georgia or Alabama. Even W. E. B. Du Bois conceded in 1901: “As a whole, it is true that the average of culture and wealth and social efficiency is far lower among immigrants than natives.” It was one thing for white Bostonians to attend the Symphony with the Lewises or visit the Authors
Club with William Stanley Braithwaite, quite another to brush shoulders with a former Georgia sharecropper. Whites recoiled and gradually that recoil hardened into permanent withdrawal.

To Boston-born blacks, the lesson was clear: the newcomers—soon dubbed “Homies,” from “down home”—were dragging them under, destroying their “special relationship” with whites. In 1912, a white social worker was strolling through a black neighborhood with Butler Wilson, a prominent “Black Brahmin” and leader of the NAACP. Arguing about the establishment of a settlement house for black youth, they passed a group of young Negroes playing craps. “What’s to become of them?” the social worker asked. “Let them rot!” snapped Wilson.

As the Homies swarmed into black neighborhoods, Boston’s blacks began to disperse, hoping to put some distance between themselves and the interlopers. Even before the turn of the century, older Negro families began moving out of their traditional quarter on the back side of Beacon Hill, establishing themselves in the South End, Dorchester, or the more remote suburbs.

Soon the South End became the principal landing place of the Southern migrants, for jobs were readily available there in the Boston & Albany Railroad yards and the hotels of Copley Square. Many railroad porters and waiters settled in a narrow strip between the tracks and Columbus Avenue, within easy walking distance of Back Bay Station. One boardinghouse in the neighborhood catered exclusively to Southern-born waiters; Ebenezer Baptist Church, established to serve Southern fundamentalists, soon became known as “the Jay Bird Tabernacle” because of the loud shouts of “Glory to God!” which punctuated its services; and the Southern Diner on Columbus Avenue appealed to Homie tastes with hush puppies and sweet potato pie.

After World War I, another ingredient was added to the stewpot of black Boston: West Indians, particularly from Barbados and Jamaica. Highly motivated and hardworking, they came to Boston intending to make some quick money and then to go home. Many stayed on, but they continued to regard themselves as “His Majesty’s Subjects,” and formed their own set of institutions: St. Cyprian’s Episcopal Church, the Eureka Cooperative Bank, the Crispus Attucks Drum and Bugle Corps. West Indians were known in Boston as “Black Jews” and “monkey chasers,” but most often as “Turks.” By the 1920s, Boston’s black community formed a triangle, with Brahmins, Homies, and Turks all protecting their prerogatives and regarding each other with ill-disguised suspicion.

This chronic fragmentation enfeebled the community, but there were other sources of weakness. The vaunted “special relationship” between the races—though short-lived and much exaggerated—seduced Negroes from the development of strong black institutions which might have created a substantial middle class (for years, Boston’s largest black business was Chisolm’s Funeral Home). Then there was the community’s size: throughout the nineteenth century blacks never exceeded 2 percent of the city, and even by 1970 they had reached only 16.3 percent, compared with Washington’s 71 percent or Detroit’s
43 percent. Boston blacks lacked the critical mass necessary for effective political or social action. This became particularly important in 1949, when the City Charter was amended to replace ward-based elections with an at-large system. With the black community unable to muster enough votes citywide, only one Negro—Tom Atkins—was elected to the City Council over the next quarter century. Finally, the community had no historic center to provide a sense of continuity and cohesion. Boston Negroes have always lived in segregated space, but that space has shifted steadily from north to south. There has never been a place where Boston’s blacks could say with certainty, “This is what we are, this is where we make our stand.”

By the mid-twentieth century, black Boston had three separate centers: Intown, Crosstown, and the Hill.

The Hill was the latest refuge of the Brahmins and their imitators. It had been a Jewish neighborhood until the 1930s, when upwardly mobile Negroes seeking better housing leapfrogged over a resistant Irish community and settled on the slopes leading to the green of Franklin Park. By the forties, they were firmly established in the big Victorian houses on the tree-shaded side streets off Humboldt Avenue. It was there in the summer of 1940 that Malcolm Little—later Malcolm X—moved in with his sister Ella; he found it a “snooty black neighborhood” whose residents “prided themselves on being incomparably more ‘cultivated,’ ‘dignified,’ and better off than their black brethren down in the ghetto.”

Crosstown, back in the South End, was “the Great Black Way,” “Black Broadway,” or, to its denizens, simply “the Avenue.” Its red-hot center was the intersection of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues, where jazz and blues blared from the open doorways of the Hi-Hat, the Wig-Warn, Kelly’s, Wally’s Paradise, and the Big M. And there were seedier establishments, gin mills like Hardy’s or the 411 Lounge, where the three biggest pimps in town hung out with their stables. The high rollers parked their long cars at the curb, searching the sidewalk for the litany of Crosstown Pleasures—dope, booze, the numbers, the horses, and high-yellow women.

Intown was where the Walkers—and the Jenkinses before them—lived, a largely working-class neighborhood embracing Lower Roxbury and the outer South End. The narrow side streets—Kendall, Hammond, Davenport, Ball, Flagg—were predominantly black, though still with a liberal admixture of Irish, Italians, and Jews. On the major thoroughfares were the offices of the black doctors and lawyers, the undertakers, barbershops, and hairdressers, and the best restaurants—Slade’s Barbecue, where chickens roasted tantalizingly in the front window, and Estelle’s, where a customer could munch ribs and ogle the black celebrities.

Shortly after Helen Jenkins and Quinnie Walker were married in 1931, they moved into a little row house on Davenport Street in the heart of Lower Roxbury—a shabby house on a shabby street. Quinnie worked steadily—first at the P. H. Graham Wastepaper Company, hauling cardboard boxes from the
downtown department stores; then, during the Depression, on several WPA construction projects. But there was never enough money to go around, particularly after the Walkers started having children, eight in all, beginning with Rachel in 1934.

They were poor, at times desperately poor, but somehow they managed. From his sharecropping days, Quinnie knew how to draw food from the earth. In their backyard he planted a vegetable garden where he grew collard greens, wax beans, cucumbers, and tomatoes. When the produce was ripe, he wrapped it first in waxed paper, then in brown paper, twisting it in a special way to keep out the air; then, after the first frost hit, he stored the packages in barrels sunk deep in the frozen earth, so the family had greens all winter long. In those first years, the marriage seemed to work, but gradually the gulf between the Bostonian and the Georgia Homie grew wider.

Between 1940 and 1960, Boston’s black population mushroomed from 23,675 to 63,165, nearly tripling in twenty years what it had taken three centuries to build. Most of the newcomers were Cotton Belt Southerners, some arriving during the war to work in military facilities or industry, others surging North in the postwar boom. For many Boston blacks this latest wave of Southern immigration was devastating, the final liquidation of their special relationship. In the narrow alleys of Intown, a remnant of old Bostonians struggled to retain some shred of that distinctiveness. Sometimes they were driven to extreme measures. One woman who grew up in Lower Roxbury recalls how outraged her mother was when an Alabama family moved next door and began hanging its laundry on the front porch. Her mother went over and explained, “That’s not the way we do things here. We put our laundry in the backyard.” When the Alabama woman told her to mind her own business, the Bostonian instructed her children to spatter the laundry with mud. They had to do it three times before the newcomer got the message and moved her wash to the rear.

This battle of region and class was fought out
within
the Walker household. Helen felt that she’d married beneath her. Quinnie, who had quit school in the fifth grade, could neither read nor write. He was not without talents. A natural mechanic, he could fix your lawn mower or water pump, and people said he could hear a car go by two blocks away and tell what was wrong with it. But such skills carried little weight with Bostonians like his wife, who regarded him as a Georgia farm boy.

Quinnie thought Helen was “uppity.” He sensed that she felt superior to him because her folks had been “house niggers” while his had been “field niggers,” and he couldn’t stand her “house nigger” ways. He didn’t understand why she had to set the table every day with forks, knives, and spoons—down where he came from, people weren’t afraid to pick up good food in their hands. He ridiculed her because she didn’t know how to clean a fish or pluck a chicken, simple jobs for any eight-year-old Burke County girl.

Much of the conflict focused on the Fourth Methodist Church, just down Shawmut Avenue. Although its pastors and membership were black, it was part of the overwhelmingly white Methodist Episcopal Church and thus gained
some of the traditional prestige Boston blacks attached to such churches. A devout member, Helen served on several of the church’s committees, while sending her children to its Sunday school. Quinnie, though nominally a Baptist, had little use for religion. For a few years he reluctantly joined Helen at Fourth Methodist, yet soon he stopped going and did whatever he could to prevent her from attending “that fancy, white folks church.”

As the atmosphere at home deteriorated, Quinnie spent most of his time playing whist at the Independent Social Club or lounging on orange crates with the other neighborhood men outside Dolly Bolt’s Tropical Variety Store. Injured in an accident on a WPA project, he received some insurance money and promptly spent it on a secondhand Cadillac, in which he loved to tool up and down the avenue. A spiffy dresser, he wore dazzling white shoes which he polished every day. Quinnie also savored his whiskey: old Grand-dad gulped straight from a big juice jar. And he relished his women. The family knew he was running around, often spotting him with some new girlfriend coming out of a Crosstown bar.

A “massive dude”—his six-foot frame carried 250 pounds—Quinnie could be a tyrant at home. When he thought it was time for guests to leave, he would go downstairs and pull all the fuses out of the box. He refused to buy Helen clothes, so she couldn’t go out. When he went to work in the morning, he often turned the furnace off and locked the basement door, leaving Helen and the children to shiver in a frigid house.

Not surprisingly, the Walker kids were caught between their mother’s Brahmin reserve and their father’s street savvy. On most issues Rachel took her mother’s side, but the ferocity with which she defended it owed not a little to her father’s style. Once when she saw one of Quinnie’s women loading up her father’s Cadillac outside Fulsom’s Market, she grabbed the groceries and flung them all over the parking lot. And one particularly cold day, Rachel unscrewed the hasp on the basement door and—while her terrified mother begged her not to—went down and turned on the furnace. This set off a terrible row, during which Quinnie warned his rebellious daughter not to mess with the furnace again, and Rachel said she’d mess with it anytime she liked and the only way Quinnie could stop her was to carry the damn thing around on his back.

During World War II, Quinnie got a job at the Charlestown Navy Yard. Remembering what had happened to their cousin Moses Baker, the family was apprehensive, but every day Quinnie and two black co-workers rode the El to City Square and walked along the wharves to the Yard. Townie heads would turn, but nobody ever bothered them.

After the war, he went to work for the Begsford Construction Company, where he made good money. But Helen and the children didn’t see much of it. When the kids wanted a dime for ice cream or candy, he’d say, “I can’t afford to make the Jew rich” (most Roxbury stores were Jewish owned). Eventually, Helen went to work as a stitcher at the Goddess Bra factory to help pay the bills, but even that wasn’t enough. In 1960, she got a court order requiring
him to pay her fifty dollars a week, which he did only sporadically. In October 1962, Helen left him and moved in with her second daughter, Alva.