The Butler: A Witness to History (3 page)

On weekends in Washington, the butler sometimes played golf on the Langston Golf Course. That led to chats with President Ford, a golfer himself. Eugene Allen and Ford also shared the same birthdays. “It’s Gene’s birthday, too!” First Lady Betty Ford would call out when they’d bring the cake out to surprise her husband. Soon as Eugene put his key in the door, and she had presented him with his birthday gifts, Helene just had to know what Mrs. Ford had given the president for his birthday.

In 1980, while serving in the Reagan administration, Eugene Allen was promoted to maître d’, a position of power among the butlers and maids at the White House. (He had outlasted so many other butlers, doubling the number of presidents for whom Alonzo Fields—the man who hired him—had worked.) Allen couldn’t help but feel the tension in the Reagan White House over the issue of apartheid in South Africa. Many American blacks from the civil rights movement joined with liberal whites—there were a good number of Republican politicians as well—in
assailing the Reagan administration for supporting the apartheid regime. But White House butlers did not dare enter the political fray. They worked to improve the lot of their families by showing up to work every day. In all his years—thirty-four years and eight presidents—Eugene Allen never missed a day of work. Even during the 1960s riots, when it was hard to drive through the streets of Washington, he made it to work, and on foot if he had to.

One afternoon, inside the Reagan White House, Eugene Allen saw Nancy Reagan coming in his direction. There was an upcoming state dinner for West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. He imagined she wanted him to attend to some last-minute details. Instead, Nancy Reagan told Eugene Allen he would not be needed at the state dinner. He was suddenly dumbfounded. Before he could say anything, she told him that he and his wife, Helene, would be attending the state dinner—as guests of the president, in honor of his decades-long service to the White House and the presidents he had served. He was deeply touched, could barely move. He could imagine the look on his wife’s face when she heard they were going to a state dinner together. He was one of the first butlers in the history of the White House to be invited to a state dinner as a guest—a guest just like the ambassadors and business magnates who received invitations to such affairs.

Helene recalled how nervous she was about the pending state dinner, about what clothes and jewelry to wear. She had expressed worry
to friends and fretted to her son, Charles, about what in the world she would talk about. She’d never gone to college, after all. Despite her insecurities, on the night of the dinner, she and Eugene looked resplendent leaving the house. Helene’s jewelry gleamed. Neighbors stared at them wide-eyed.

That night, Eugene Allen walked in the front door of the White House—not through the back entrance where service workers entered. Amid the glamour and splendor, they were in awe. “Had champagne that night,” the butler’s wife would remember all these years later. As she said it, Eugene, rocking in his chair, just grinned: for so many years he had stocked the champagne at the White House.

As if out of respect for that very special night, Eugene and Helene Allen had only one picture on the wall in their home that spoke of his White House years. It was the picture of them walking through the receiving line at the White House during the state dinner. The plantation of his boyhood years must have seemed a lifetime ago.

Frankly, from the moment I entered the Allens’ home, I was surprised there were not more visual highlights of his White House career. In Washington, people hang and frame all manner of photographs and documents.

After hours had passed during my first visit, and we’d exhausted ourselves with talk and their memories, Helene said to her husband, “You can show him now,” while nodding in my direction.

Eugene Allen slowly stood up. He asked me to follow him from the living room to the kitchen, stopping in front of a door—the basement door. His long and bony right arm reached onto his belt loop, where a string of keys jangled. He unlocked the door. I wondered why anyone had to keep their basement door locked. Then I quickly mused it was a gritty neighborhood; they were elderly and lived alone. “Follow me,” he said. “And hold on to my arm. The light switch is in the middle of the basement.”

We descended creaky stairs and walked into pitch blackness at the bottom of the stairwell. He inched his way to the hanging overhead string and pulled it. “Well, here it is,” he said, as I began scanning the now bright room, stunned as my gaze moved from wall to wall at what I was seeing: there were rich, gorgeous pictures on the wall of Eugene Allen with President Kennedy, with President Eisenhower, with President Nixon. He pointed to a picture of him with Sammy Davis Jr. Another with him and Duke Ellington and some other butlers. He pulled me to another corner of the basement. “Ike painted this picture for me,” he said. There were framed letters from the presidents to him on his birthday. It was like being dropped into a museum. There were hundreds and hundreds of pieces of memorabilia.

We heard shuffling feet walking across the kitchen floor. It was Helene.

“Show him the picture of us with Ella Fitzgerald!” she hollered down at us.

“Give me time. I am. Give me time,” the butler called up to her. His eyes were lit; he was smiling as if he suddenly appreciated the gallantry and perseverance of his own life. He shifted things so I could get better views. There were marbled busts of the presidents he had worked for; there were pictures of state dinners with Eugene Allen hovering in the background. On a shelf there were several four-inch photo albums. Inside them were some of the most gorgeous pictures of White House dining I had ever seen. The lit candles in the photos nearly flickered off the pages. There were framed and signed letters from the presidents to him and his wife. There were also several boxes of old
Look
and
Life
magazines. Helene, who helped curate the collection, had made especially sure to keep anything with Jackie Kennedy on the cover. It was a visual feast. Of course this basement needed to be locked. These were treasures, likely bound for a museum somewhere, someday. A life lived in the hard shadow of power. A life lived inside the White House during the Korean War, the Cold War, Little Rock, Rosa Parks on the move, the Cuban missile crisis, the moon landing, the integration of Ole Miss, Vietnam, the murders of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the taken-from-us Kennedy brothers. Also, Watergate. (How the teacups must have rattled inside the White House then.) And the rise of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, two men linked to political movements that terrified blacks.

He stepped closer to another picture hanging on the wall and squinted: it was a sepia-toned and nearly faded photograph of him and Ike at
Gettysburg—after Ike had left the White House. These had been lasting relationships. It is hard to imagine that some of these presidents didn’t admire the life of Eugene Allen, how he had survived, stayed off the unemployment rolls, navigated the politics of each administration. The children of several presidents still had him on their Christmas card list. He kept turning in the basement, as if on an easel, a world of power and glitter that had spun all around him, with him taking a place inside it.

In time, he pulled the light switch, returning the basement to darkness. Helene was awaiting us at the top of the stairs, leaning on her cane. I told her that what I had seen in the basement—his life, their life—had simply stunned me. “Hmm-mmm,” she said, nodding in agreement.

Back in the living room there were more photographs to look at. More memories that tumbled out: that time the White House had sent a Lincoln Town Car right to their home in the predawn darkness to ferry the butler to Andrews Air Force Base to hop aboard
Air Force One
; tales about the dexterity it took to serve a first-class meal on a plane zooming through the skies with the leader of the free world on board: Balance the tray with the wineglasses just so! Don’t let the gravy roll from the plate! And Lord have mercy, don’t trip and fall in the aisle of the plane. They both chuckled inside their warm house.

Helene, who had her own special memories, had kept hold of all those pretty dresses and lovely hats she had worn to White House events. They just could never imagine giving the clothing away. Sometimes Helene would implore Eugene to creep down into the basement
and retrieve one of those magazines with Jackie on the cover. And she’d get to flipping through it in the lamplight and they’d both share some memories about being eyewitnesses to Camelot.

My visit was coming to an end. The election was looming just days away. It was so easy to feel how eager the Allens, who lived an unassuming life on this ordinary street in Washington, DC, were to vote. Elderly people, from the South, they had once been denied the right to vote. And now all their hopes and memories—of being colored, then Negro, then black, then that epithet hurled from certain corners, now African American—were rolling toward one candidate, Barack Obama. It was as if they were rocking Barack Obama into their very bosoms.

I left and felt, walking away from this modest dwelling, that I certainly had quite a unique story to tell. Actually, I wanted to run back once I reached the corner and plead with them to keep that basement locked, to keep those treasures safe.

Over the weekend, a nation kept wondering, kept asking: Would America elect a black man its president? My own family members back in Ohio weighed in: no, Obama would not win this time; America was not yet ready, maybe two election cycles away.

On Sunday night—thirty-six hours before Election Day—Charles Allen came over to visit his parents. He thought they’d bombard him with questions about the new, flat-screen television he had recently bought them. What did this button do? And what about that one? Instead, Helene couldn’t wait to tell her son that a writer had come to visit
two days earlier. “She was so happy,” Charles would tell me. “She felt somebody was finally going to tell Eugene’s story. She said to me, before going to bed, ‘I feel so at peace.’ ” Charles would later tell a reporter in Ohio that it seemed “preordained” for me to come by.

The next morning, Monday, I phoned them. Just to say hello and inquire about the photographer sent to take their picture for my story. “She’s gone,” Eugene said, referring to Helene. His voice sounded strange, hollow even. I asked where she had gone. “I woke up and my wife didn’t,” he explained. I was still confused. Gone to the hospital? No, he said, Helene had passed in the night. I was speechless and suddenly felt woozy. I asked if there was anyone with him. Some church ladies were just then coming through the door.

Amid the sadness, as the hours passed, some visitors—among them current and former White House butlers and maids and dishwashers—began to share stories about the beautiful Helene Allen: how she loved to dance; how she just loved champagne; the way she looked in her dresses when heading off for some grand function at the White House. Meanwhile, amid this sudden pain, they’d have to constantly shove Eugene out of the kitchen; he kept wanting to serve everyone. After half a century of butlerlike duties, he could not step back and leave the work to others.

· · ·

Twenty-four hours later Eugene Allen, retired White House butler, rose in the darkness, got dressed in a semi-blur of confusion—his wife of sixty-five years gone, her
Jet, Ebony,
and
Newsweek
magazines with
covers picturing presidential candidate Barack Obama still on the living room coffee table—to go vote. It must have taken an iron will, yet he knew, as the world knew, that history was in the balance.

Following his vote he returned home. He’d grimace as he walked without complaining about the pain. Church ladies and relatives kept him company during the rest of the day as sadness gripped his heart and pain racked his body, so much so that sometimes he walked around his house as loose as a straw puppet held upright by strings.

When the drama of election night began to crest, and tears had gushed—and a nation, seemingly against the odds of history, had miraculously leapt over a piece of the mountaintop and elected the first black man president of the United States—Eugene Allen was sitting in his favorite chair, inches from where Helene used to sit. He had a lovely little smile upon his cinnamon-colored face.

My story, about the history of blacks in the White House, from the kitchen to the West Wing, and about Eugene and Helene Allen, and about the civil rights movement and all those prayers for Barack Obama, was titled “A Butler Well Served by This Election.” It appeared on the front page of the
Washington Post
on November 7, 2008, three days after the election—and on the very day that Helene Allen was buried.

The election had, indeed, well served all those who had endured brutal segregation and were still alive: those who had been beaten during the sit-ins in North Carolina, who had marched over the Edmund
Pettus Bridge in Alabama, who had started off on civil rights marches and been thrown inside the notorious Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi. All those alive who remembered the signs
WHITE, COLORED.
Even in a world of speed, of gadgetry gone amok, of impersonal machinery, this was epic. This was history that welcomed every other historic milestone into this moment. People everywhere reached for comparisons, but because this was America, once a land rife with Klansmen and lynchings and second-class citizenship emblazoned in the laws, there really were no comparisons. And yet, an old man who had fulfilled his civic responsibilities that morning sat alone in an easy chair in Northwest Washington, and the leap in his life felt epic as well. From plantation to ballot slip and a vote for Barack Obama.

After publication of the story, the letters written to me and Eugene Allen came from all corners of America as well as from around the world. The story had been picked up and reprinted in a great many newspapers. We both were surprised and touched. Some evenings, after work, I’d tote a bagful of the letters through the winter darkness over to his home. Here he is at the door, a little stooped, the arms at a perpetual crooked angle, offering a little smile. Not long after my arrival this evening, and after our unfolding chitchat—about the extreme cold outside, about the letter that had arrived from outgoing president George W. Bush and Laura Bush about the loss of Helene—he puts on his bifocals as I hand him some of the letters I’ve pulled from my shoulder bag. He delicately opens and starts reading one after the other.