The Butler: A Witness to History (5 page)

It’s 1991 and I’m in a Harlem apartment with E. Frederick Morrow. He was the first black hired—in 1955—in an executive position at the White House. He is seated on a sofa, a proud man, a Bowdoin College graduate. He operated in a society before there was any modern civil rights legislation. The epithets he heard! There were even blacks who made fun of him for working in a Republican administration.

It’s 1992 and I’m sitting in the home of Louis Martin, the Democratic
operative whose work on behalf of black hopes and ambitions stretches back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. It was Martin who had been the principal organizer of the one-hundredth-anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1963 at the White House during the Kennedy administration. The more he talks about those times—fighting for civil rights, getting Negroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph into the White House for visits—the more he dabs at his tears with the white handkerchief in his hand. The memories of the battles still overwhelm him.

I’m sitting—it’s 1993—with an old wheezing man, George Wallace, who’s in a wheelchair in his office in Montgomery, Alabama. At one point in American history Alabama’s Governor Wallace represented the reason blacks had fled the South: he was the governor who stood in the door at the University of Alabama and said blacks would never be admitted to the school. His choice of words—“segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”—would become a rallying cry for segregationists and Klansmen. In 1972 a deranged man shot George Wallace while he was on the campaign trail. That day in Montgomery he tells me stories of all the black friends he now has, of all those who have forgiven him.

Another day—it’s 2002—the sun is starting to set, and I’m leaning on a car outside a broken-down auto body shop in Jackson, Mississippi. James Meredith, who integrated Ole Miss in 1962, is talking about poverty, and
black folk and white folk, and Mississippi, and being fearless, and history. He’s forty years removed from that day that riveted a nation and sparked riots on the campus. He tells me how much he loves the state of Mississippi, where mobs once thought him the embodiment of every black person trying to strive ahead.

I’d come to spend time with all these men as a writer, a journalist and biographer chasing stories throughout America’s main roads and back roads. At certain moments in history, all of them caused some kind of emotion, or tumult, to engulf the White House over the issue of blacks and equal rights. And during all those moments, through years and years—bullets and fires and assassinations upon the land—an unknown butler by the name of Eugene Allen was inside the White House. He saw and heard the now historic names, all the images. He certainly would have heard some of the phone calls, eyed some of the men arriving at the White House to see the president to talk about Little Rock, or Oxford, Mississippi. Or Birmingham. He had to take it in, decipher it, process it emotionally. He was, yes, the man with the tray, the medicine, the tea, the bowl of soup; he was the butler who fetched the president’s straw hat, the president’s wingtips. But he was also a black man. And he saw the ground shifting from up close.

Some nights, when he arrived home from the White House, alighting from his car on Otis Place, after yet another cataclysmic event revolving around black Americans and their epochal struggle for freedom
that had overtaken the television screens, Eugene Allen’s neighbors would want to rush from their porches and plead with him for information. Anything, dammit, just any tidbit, any morsel of information. But Helene had trained these neighbors well over the years—a perceptible nod, a few pointed words in the grocery store aisle: Eugene couldn’t talk; he had to be discreet; he was no one’s gossip. Of course that didn’t necessarily stop Helene herself from asking questions. Little Charles would hear them whispering at the kitchen table. He’d be playing with his toys in the living room. He’d hear low-pitched talk about his father’s workday at the White House. Then, soon as he’d amble into the kitchen, such talk ceased. And the conversation turned to ho-hum things rather than the doings at the White House, where the leader of the free world lived.

How does a man, a butler, a Negro butler in the era of segregation, keep it all inside? Keep gliding about the premises when so much happening around him affects his own life and that of his family? Discretion plays an important role for sure, as does a love of country.

I’m reminded of the line uttered in
The Butler
by Martin Luther King Jr. himself: “Young brother, the black domestic plays an important role in our history.” He seems to be talking about pride, and honor of job, and their contribution to the slow march forward.

I
T WAS BITTERLY
cold—temperatures would hover throughout the day between ten and twenty degrees—on the morning of January 20, 2009, in Washington. At 6:30 a.m. I stood inside the home of Eugene Allen. We would be going together to the inauguration of the nation’s first black president. Watching the onetime butler descend the stairs—those tiny grimaces creasing his face again—I wondered if we had made a mistake. I now wasn’t so sure he could make it; I thought the long day ahead would be too much. During my recent visits, Eugene Allen had started wrapping his arm around me, giving a tight hug. It touched me. He did so upon reaching the bottom of the stairs, even as I could hear the air coming up through his lungs. When I expressed concern about how he felt, he told me not to worry. “I’ll be okay,” he said, standing near the framed picture of President and Nancy Reagan and Helene that hung in the living room. I helped him into his long gray wool overcoat. He donned a Sinatra fedora. His son, Charles, was outside revving up the engine, letting the heat ooze throughout the insides of the Cadillac. We rode the car to a subway station and boarded the train. We knew there’d be a lengthy walk once we reached the final train stop. The train was packed but amazingly orderly. No one wished—not on this day—to cause any kind of disruption or disturbance. Charles held one arm of his father, I held the other.

When we emerged from the train station, it was a scene reminiscent of
The Day of the Locust,
with people far as the eye could see. The
crowd would surge to more than two million people. Almost immediately, Eugene Allen needed to sit down. He was exhausted. We found a cement barrier and he caught his breath. His son rewrapped the scarf, tighter, around his father’s neck. We started making our way to our seating area, up streets crowded with police officers on horseback and thousands upon thousands of pedestrians. A third of a mile into the walk, I strongly suggested we turn back and find a taxi. We needed to get Eugene Allen home; he was breathing heavily. And I felt like a fool for having him out in this brutally cold weather. But then Eugene Allen turned to me and said, “Just get me out of the cold for a spell. I need to get someplace warm. Then we’ll keep going.” We found a police substation. I was freezing. Charles was freezing. And the butler was freezing. We all sat sipping hot chocolate. After twenty minutes, with Eugene Allen again saying he had no intention of turning back, we continued on our way.

We finally reached the VIP section. A Marine guard greeted Eugene Allen and escorted us to our cold, metallic seats, a cold wind whipping all around us. We could see the area in the distance where the president would take the oath of office. We could see Aretha Franklin’s huge and colorful hat atop her head. Eugene Allen sat looking around, taking it all in. He said he knew how much Helene would have loved being here. A parade of figures started strolling and taking their seats in an area above us on the Capitol rotunda steps. Many were figures the butler
had served over the years. “There’s Jimmy Carter,” he said. “He’s looking good, too. Took me with him over to Camp David once. When he came into the dining room there—they had given me the day off when I went with them there—he pointed to an empty seat and said to me, ‘Who sitting here, Gene?’ And I said, ‘No one, Mr. President.’ And he said, ‘Good, I’ll sit right here by Gene.’ ”

President-elect Barack Obama strolled into view. Clearly overjoyed, the butler said, “I’m telling you, it’s something to see. Seeing him standing there—well, it’s been worth it all.”

W
ORTH IT ALL?
Maybe he was talking about the long trek from a Virginia plantation, the verbal abuse he was subjected to while working in a country club; maybe he was talking about all the dishes he had washed in his life, all the moonless nights he had alighted from the White House on his trek home, bone weary. Maybe he was talking about the 1960s, when the kids with the afros in his neighborhood, the ones wearing those “Black Power” buttons, wondered why in the world he was still working over at the White House—as a butler.

At ceremony’s end—with history washing over everyone in attendance—Eugene Allen rose, he tightened his gloves, and we all headed back home. More than a few people recognized him from the
story that had been written about him just after the election. They shook his hand.

That afternoon, back home, sitting in his easy chair, Eugene Allen fell asleep. The television had been playing
The Price Is Right.

In the second week of March 2010 I hopped aboard a city bus in Washington, DC, and rode over to Providence Hospital. Charles had phoned and told me his father had been admitted two days earlier with some respiratory and hip problems. He was lying in bed, though wide awake, when I arrived. “The nurses take good care of me,” he said. “They think I’m famous.” One of the nurses had remembered the articles written about him; soon word got around the hospital, and doctors and nurses dropped by to meet him. They’d mention how amazing it was he had worked all those years at the White House. When Allen fell asleep that day, Charles and I strolled the hallways, worried. The old man appeared to be weakening. Still, he rallied in the days ahead and was released. The return home didn’t last long. He told Charles one day he was feeling terrible. He was admitted to Washington Adventist Hospital, where, on March 31, 2010, Eugene Allen, butler to eight presidents, took his last labored breath.

It had been a mere sixteen months earlier that I had first met Eugene Allen and his wife, Helene, that he had first escorted me down into a darkened basement that held such treasures from a life inside the White House. A day after he died, his obituary appeared in newspapers
all around America. He received lovely tributes on the national news telecasts. “Eugene Allen has died,” Brian Williams said on
NBC Nightly News,
as pictures of Allen revolved on a screen. “Few Americans will ever get to see as much history as he did, and only a handful have ever been this close to power.” There was swelling music. Williams continued, “He served the most powerful and most famous people in the world. And after hours a lot of presidents treated him as their friend.” His death was noted around the world as well. The
Independent
of London described Eugene Allen as “a discreet stage hand who for three decades helped keep the show running in the most important political theatre of all.” The obituaries all made mention that he had voted for Barack Obama amid the sadness of losing his wife on Election Eve.

S
EVERAL HUNDRED PEOPLE
strolled into the Greater First Baptist Church in Washington on April 8, 2010, to bid Eugene Allen farewell. The long line of men along the back row of the church were Secret Service agents. A few had gotten to know Allen during gatherings at the White House after he retired. Most had just come out of respect. There were rows of flowers near his casket. There were aging butlers and maids seated in the pews. Delores Moaney, who had worked at the White House during the Eisenhower years, recalled: “He was such a
charming man. I had worked as a maid with the Eisenhower family in New York. When I got to the White House, I met Gene. You’d notice his smile right away.” The first female usher at the White House was Nancy Mitchell. She got the position in 1980. Some days inside the White House she was just a jangle of nerves, worrying she might do something wrong. “Gene—he told me to call him Gene, but I never could—calmed me down. He’d come and get me and say, ‘Nancy, let’s go get some lunch.’ And he had already set up a lovely place setting for me and him. He may have been the best man I ever met.”

President Obama sent over a letter. It was read by the chief White House usher, Rear Admiral Stephen W. Rochon: “His life represents an important part of the American story,” the president’s letter said of Eugene Allen. It went on to cite the butler for his decades of service to the country and his “abiding patriotism.”

The Reverend Winston C. Ridley talked about Allen and the sweep of history—the world wars away from our shores, the wars over equality inside our own borders. “Now, it’s true that some tried to stigmatize his job, that of butler. But Eugene Allen raised it to a level of excellence.”

There were several musical numbers by the choir, among them “Jesus on the Main Line” and “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep.”

I caught a glimpse of the suit the butler lay in before they closed his casket. It was a formal, gray evening suit. He had on white gloves, just like the elegant ones he sometimes wore at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
when he was serving the high and mighty. Flowers adorned the casket. One card pinned to a bouquet of red roses read “President Obama and Michelle Obama.” The aging butlers and maids who had known Allen through the years began making their way slowly out of the church. Outside it was crisp and bright.

It was, as President Obama said, quite an American story: a young man who had fled a southern plantation, who had made his way to the nation’s capital, who had witnessed the tumult and glory of change from a unique position, who had crossed from one century to the next while working for eight presidents. And who had also seen the once unimaginable: the swearing in of a black president.

There was even a bit more. In late 2012 a local organization put Eugene’s home on a historic walking tour map of Washington. It was now known as “The Eugene Allen Residence.” A movie had also been completed about his life, and among its stars were Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey (playing characters inspired by Eugene and Helene), Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Robin Williams, David Oyelowo, and Cuba Gooding Jr. The movie told the story of the whole modern civil rights movement, from the vantage point of a White House butler.