The Butler: A Witness to History (4 page)

From Diana Glenn:

What a touching story. Although I don’t have contacts, I am sure you do. I certainly hope that Eugene Allen is invited to dinner in the White House with President Obama. Your story was picked up by the
Bend Bulletin
in Bend, Oregon.

From Jason Whitely:

My best to Mr. Allen and his family who struggle with great loss at such a proud and fascinating turning point in history.

From Kimberly Randolph:

Haven’t I cried every day this week, and here I am wiping my eyes again . . . Who’s going to take care of Gene now that Helene’s gone? Gene definitely should be there at the White House on Jan. 20, 2009.

From Phyllis C. McLaughlin:

How sad that his wife died before she could vote in this historic election . . . What a wonderful couple. My heart really goes out to him.

From Martin Cain:

Thank you for your story about Mr. Allen and his amazing career . . . I am a 58 [year old] white male . . . My vote was going to be cast for McCain. On my drive to the polling place, I started thinking about America’s history and the moment that was quite possibly at hand for the American people—not just black Americans, but all Americans. I walked in and voted for Obama. I think that on an intellectual level I can understand the excitement over the significance of the Obama election. I know that I can never understand it on an emotional level . . . I cried when I realized that Helene had died before the election. Please extend my sincere condolences to Mr. Allen and his family.

There were more letters—from Australia, from Japan—and far too many to read in one sitting. “My goodness,” the butler said, letting out a little whoop of laughter. “They’re awfully nice.”

“Would you like some tea? Some coffee?” Maybe he’d never get over the urge to serve. But I said no because I couldn’t bear to see him rise, grimacing, and amble off into the kitchen. Sometimes we’d just sit, in silence,
The Price Is Right
droning on the television, the episodes playing back to back yet again. I know he missed Helene. I wondered, that night, and even on other nights, if I were somewhat to blame for Helene’s leaving
this earth, if my questions during the interview had exhausted her, stressed her, had caused a slowing of her heart until it just stopped. Then I’d remind myself that her son had told me how she had expressed to him how happy she was feeling before she ascended the stairs for what would be her last night of life on earth—happy that the story of Eugene Allen would finally be written.

Standing outside, on the porch, in the winter darkness, I’d wait until I heard the deadbolt lock click from inside. Then the butler would pull back the curtain and wave good-bye.

My man Godfrey.

My man Eugene.

Allen once spoke of Nixon pacing the corridors of the White House, deliberating inner office turmoil and his distrust of the press. In a public setting, an American president always appears confident, bold, and assured. The public sees them surrounded by the trappings of power. Didn’t Kennedy himself look vibrant at Cape Canaveral, in those cool sunglasses and surrounded by his space dreams? There was the ageless Ronald Reagan seen chopping wood with an axe in that rustic California setting, an image that seemed to speak of virility and power. If a man’s home, however, is his castle, what is the White House in which he dwells? The front door hardly keeps nightmares or bad tidings away. Is it also, at times, a bewildering chamber where the imagination can drift and wander? It is quite easy to imagine Eugene
Allen bidding me farewell, turning from the door, and descending into his basement, where it is all gathered, where his world remains frozen in time, like a newsreel stopped two floors beneath his Helene-less bedroom. The pictures of him and Ike, of him and boxing champs inside the White House, of him and Mamie Eisenhower, of him snapping that picture of Daddy King, daddy to the civil rights leader. Ruminating, like some of the presidents he served, walking in the quiet dreamscape of a late night to fortify himself for the days ahead, to remember some of the glory of what had gone on before. At home, the president of his own life.

· · ·

Some weeks later I returned to share news: the transition team of President-elect Obama would be sending a VIP invitation for Eugene Allen to attend the inauguration. There was more news: Hollywood movie producers had begun calling. There was talk of a desire to do a movie about his life. “Well, I’ll be doggone,” he said. He smiled through pain. All his life he had worked on his feet. Now the ailments seemed to be everywhere inside his body—shoulders, hips, calves. A VIP invitation and Hollywood calling: I wondered how much any of it really meant to him. There was no one in the house to remind him to take his pills. There was no one—on those evenings he was in the mood—for whom to set out the fine china and light a candle. The way he used to do in the White House. The way he used to do for Helene. I could have
shared the news over the phone, but I had grown fond of him by then. As I walked away from the home of Eugene Allen on that evening, I was reminded of my own neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. The neighborhoods shared similarities: tidy streets, solidly built homes, yards with fences and rows of hedges. Working-class neighborhoods. When I finished college, I had returned to reside with my grandparents and not my mother. Old people charm me. Maybe the distance from this street in Washington to my own neighborhood in Columbus was not that great at all.

D
URING THE HISTORIC
campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, stories of America’s racial history were constantly unspooling in daily and weekly publications: Michelle Obama’s enslaved forebears had been traced to a plantation in South Carolina. The White House—the residence to which Barack Obama was trying to gain entrance—had actually been physically built with the labor of slaves. How black was Obama? Many denizens of the urban hair salons would point to his father’s being from Africa itself—the motherland. His story was so mesmerizing, so bewilderingly fascinating, that it was beyond irony. But the world of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had always been pulled into the nation’s racial agonies.

Throughout history blacks have looked to the White House for help and leadership in the march toward equality.

In 1863 President Lincoln, utilizing his ferocious political acumen, had ingeniously forced Congress into adopting the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery. Chains fell from both ankles and wrists. But he paid with his life. (The momentous legislative victory to abolish slavery was the subject of
Lincoln,
a 2012 Steven Spielberg film. Spielberg, incidentally, had been one of the directors initially interested in telling the Eugene Allen story.) Reconstruction, in the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination, sought to expand black aspirations. In 1866 Frederick Douglass—onetime slave and among the most famous abolitionists of his time—made it to the White House to plead with President Andrew Johnson about black voting rights. Johnson allowed that he had no political capital to gain from fighting for blacks to have the right to vote. Douglass secured another White House invitation in 1877. On this occasion there wasn’t even the pretense of politics: President Rutherford B. Hayes had engaged Douglass to serve as master of ceremonies for a festive evening of entertainment.

On October 16, 1901, a Negro butler at the White House was told that President Theodore Roosevelt would be having an evening guest. Just before the appointed time, the butler dutifully set the table. The guest, alone, arrived under the cover of darkness—and in secret. It was Booker T. Washington, the famed educator, also born into slavery. A
Negro had never before dined at the White House. His mere presence made the butler both curious and nervous. Lynchings were still common in the Maryland countryside, a scant distance from the White House itself. According to later accounts, Washington and Roosevelt primarily talked about southern politics and strife in that region. The next morning a smallish item about the dinner appeared on newswires. In short order, all hell, indeed, broke loose. Southerners excoriated Roosevelt for having invited Washington to dine at the White House. The
Memphis Scimitar
was among the first to unleash its invective: “The most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States was committed yesterday by the President, when he invited a nigger to dine with him at the White House.” It went on: “It is only recently that President Roosevelt boasted that his mother was a Southern woman, and that he is half Southern by reason of that fact. By inviting a nigger to his table he pays his mother small duty . . .”

There were, to be sure, shards of light amid the darkness that sometimes flowed from the White House when it came to black Americans. In 1939—the year a natty-dressing Eugene Allen was plotting to get out of rural Virginia for better job opportunities—the Daughters of the American Revolution, who controlled bookings to Constitution Hall, refused to allow opera singer Marian Anderson to sing on that stage because of their segregation policy. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a member of the DAR,
abruptly quit. Her stance gained wide and appreciative coverage in the Negro press. More significant, she arranged for Anderson to perform on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday 1939.

By contrast, First Lady Bess Truman, who hailed from the border state of Missouri, was a devoted member of the DAR. When the DAR refused to allow Hazel Scott—a noted pianist and wife of Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—an engagement in 1945 at Constitution Hall, another war of words erupted. Powell pleaded with President Truman to do something. Truman said he could not, offering that the DAR was a private organization and he intended to stay out of its business. Bess Truman steadfastly refused to quit the DAR. Powell—who could be dangerously quick with a quip—referred to First Lady Bess Truman as “the last lady of the land.” President Truman, inside the White House, erupted over Powell’s disparaging remark and referred to Powell as “that damn nigger preacher.” The public weighed in; letters poured into the White House. One missive addressed to Bess Truman spotlighted the plight of blacks in battle: “In light of their sacrifice it is a shocking fact to realize that you refused yesterday to give up a cup of tea and a box of cookies to support the thesis for which they died.” There were those who thought Powell had embarrassed the White House. “On the other hand, Powell has certainly seized a dramatic way to strike at prejudice,” a Missouri newspaper noted, “and like Cato (who had
warned of the cracking of the Roman empire) is serving the nation by calling attention to danger.”

Among the first tasks Eugene Allen was given inside the White House kitchen when he was hired as a pantry man was washing the cups and saucers from which President Truman and Bess Truman drank their daily tea.

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE
butlers who happened to be Negro operated in a private world inside the White House. It must have been a great responsibility—perhaps somewhat of a burden—for them to carry all those secrets with them through the years. Wives and relatives constantly needled them about what went on inside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: Were there secret escape tunnels in the White House? Was Jackie Kennedy nice—or snobbish? Did LBJ use the word “niggers” ? (By all accounts, the greatest president on civil rights since Lincoln did use that word.)

Once outside the White House, there was another private world that awaited these butlers. That world was the one populated by ambassadors, famous actors, publishing tycoons, and the moneyed gentry who lived up and down the East Coast. They were families in Washington, New York City, in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Newport, Rhode Island; they were
the swells who summered out on Long Island. They held soirees and lavish parties for their friends flying in from the West Coast, and they often turned to White House butlers to work those parties.

These Negro butlers—and a good many of them had been trained by Eugene Allen himself—were in such demand during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s that they formed the Private Butler Membership Club. They were known for their punctiliousness and their professionalism, which made them prized recruits for these social affairs. “Those men were jazz and bebop cats who had their own swagger and suited up at night to serve world leaders as the invisible ones,” recalls Daphne Muse, whose father, Fletcher Muse Sr., and uncle, George Allen Muse, were members of the Private Butler Membership Club. Both men had been hired as contract butlers at the White House, where they first met Eugene Allen. “It was a tight circle of men,” adds Muse. When they ventured to out-of-town assignments, the butlers would often arrive back home laden with bags of delicacies. “A twenty-five-pound bag of blue crab meat would be considered leftovers,” says Muse. But it was their discretion that some prized above all else. Muse chuckles at one particular memory of a certain butler who told her, late in his life, what went on at an out-of-town private function: sex, and plenty of it. The affair turned out to be an orgy, and the butler was forced to tiptoe—tray in hand—around the gyrating bodies.

I
N LOOKING BACK
over my own writing life, it seems now that Eugene Allen was a kind of capstone to all those fascinating figures I had interviewed in years past who had a link to turmoil inside the White House.

Scenes from this writer’s life:

It’s 1986 and I’m sitting in a motel room on the edge of Little Rock, Arkansas, with a frail man launching a campaign for Arkansas governor. He is not just any man; he is Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas during the 1957 Little Rock school crisis. He’s another old pol who can’t let go. He has been talking about redemption of late, but the blacks in the state—and many whites, it must be stated—just rolled their eyes at him. He’s the very governor who had forced the Eisenhower administration to call out federal troops to ensure the safety of the nine Negro students back in 1957. He seems so courteous, and he does not wish to really talk about the past, though he does offer that, in 1957, he was only trying to uphold states’ rights.