The Invisible Line (41 page)

But at century's turn the “devilish stricture of race prejudice” was inescapable. In every state of the former Confederacy, blacks had been violently kept away from the polls and then stripped of the vote. After George White of North Carolina finished his term in 1901, Negroes in Congress—a bastion of protection for black federal workers—were merely a memory of Reconstruction. “Whites only” signs confidently announced a new segregated order, repeatedly validated by the Supreme Court. Best-selling novels and scientific studies alike described blacks as innately stupid, lascivious, violent, and diseased. With sickening regularity, often approvingly, newspapers reported lynchings.
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Washington, in the words of Wall's onetime neighbor Anna Julia Cooper, was overrun with “hysterical negrophobics” and “Angry Saxons.” Blacks were shut out of most jobs—even advertisements for maids and butlers were increasingly requesting whites—and were routinely excluded from hotels, theaters, and restaurants. “I may walk from the Capitol to the White House,” wrote one woman in 1907, “ravenously hungry and abundantly supplied with money ..., without finding a single restaurant in which I would be permitted to take a morsel of food.” In the winter of 1908, Alabama congressman Thomas Heflin, whose district included Tuskegee, proposed segregating public transportation in Washington. A month later, on his way to deliver a temperance lecture at a Methodist church, Heflin shot a black man in the neck on the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar.
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At the Government Printing Office, white printers, bookbinders, and other tradesmen denied black workers union membership and regularly complained about their competence. As one of the last Negro compositors, Wall wanted to call as little attention to himself as possible. Nevertheless he tried to muster the courage to ask for a promotion. Since his reinstatement in 1899, Wall had made the same salary: four dollars a day. In the meantime he had married and had three children. Now in his fifties, he knew he was running out of years to support his family. After his daughter Isabel was born, he succeeded in getting a three-cent raise as an imposer, adding footnotes and putting pages into final form for the presses. He lasted a few months before being demoted to his old job.
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Around the time Roscoe was born in 1906, Wall twice applied for jobs supervising other compositors. He phrased the requests almost as apologies. “Mr. Stillings,” he wrote the public printer, “do not think that I mean to take advantage of the kind treatment accorded me by you.” Wall arranged to meet with Stillings to talk about his long-term prospects. “You made me feel that if an opportunity presented itself, and the person worthy, you would give them a favorable consideration,” he wrote afterward. “I can assure you that no one will be more diligent, faithful, or strive harder to give perfect service, nor would anyone appreciate more highly the confidence placed in me by you.” The public printer promised to give Wall's situation his “most careful consideration.” The promotion never came.
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STEPHEN WALL'S ESCAPE FROM blackness began after the death of his mother, Amanda Wall, in 1902. On a bitter mid-November day, Stephen stood beside her open grave in an isolated corner of Arlington National Cemetery, the sunlight broken by the bare branches of surrounding trees. His brother and three sisters hovered nearby. In front of him a granite obelisk announced his father's name in large capital letters. His mother's name would be etched inconspicuously on the side. Surrounding them were markers for men the Wall children had known growing up, officers in the war and fixtures of elite colored Washington, their carved and gabled stones clustered like a block of Victorian houses.
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When O.S.B. Wall died in 1891, a mass meeting had gathered to express their “profound sorrow” and pay tribute to the man's service to his people. The leaders of the race packed his funeral—former U.S. senator Blanche Bruce and congressman John R. Lynch, doctors and lawyers, professors and reverends and bishops.
The Washington Post
described the service as “very impressive.” It had been conducted by the distinguished pastor of the First Congregational Church, the elite institution that Wall had integrated shortly after the Civil War.
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By contrast, Amanda Wall's funeral in 1902 was a “short and simple” affair. Aside from a few close friends, the Wall children grieved alone. A white undertaker had prepared her body. Looking at Edward, Isabel, Sallie, and Gertrude, Stephen had reason to wonder if they would ever stand together again. Edward was married to a French woman in Montreal and working as a sleeping car conductor on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a position that would be off limits to blacks for another half century. At the time of their mother's death, Isabel was already Mrs. Gotthold Otto Elterich of Manhattan and Freeport, Long Island, the wife of a railroad capitalist. Sallie had become Helen Easton on New York's Upper West Side. They were new people now, scattered, anonymous. The youngest, Gertrude, had lived at home during their mother's final illness, but she would soon move to a decidedly paler section of northwest Washington and start going by her given first name, Laura. Despite their family's proud history, all of Stephen Wall's siblings found it necessary to disappear and had no problems doing so.
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While the Walls' neighbor Howard University professor Kelly Miller pondered “the self-degradation and humiliation of soul necessary to cross the great ‘social divide,' ” becoming white loomed as a temptingly simple option for Stephen Wall. His siblings were hardly the only people he knew who had crossed the line. At roughly the same time that Stephen's older brother moved to Canada, his cousin Ralph Langston, who grew up next door and apprenticed with Stephen at the Government Printing Office, was arrested in New York for seducing a young woman who claimed not to know that Langston was colored. The daughter of O.S.B. Wall's old friend Richard Greener was now J. P. Morgan's personal librarian—of exotic Portuguese origin—Belle da Costa Greene. Around 1902 another scion of the District's colored elite, Theophilus John Minton Syphax, was establishing himself as a white lawyer in New York by the name of T. John McKee.
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Stories of the blurred boundaries of color were cultural commonplaces in turn-of-the-century American life, fodder for popular novels, Broadway plays, and front-page news. Black Washingtonians sat through Sunday sermons on the perils of passing for white, then whispered about the people they knew who had gone to the other side.
The Washington Bee
, the venerable weekly edited by O.S.B.'s and Stephen Wall's old acquaintance Calvin Chase, described the colored elite as gripped by a “white fever craze.” Even as the paper opined that the fever “ought to be cured,” it advertised whitening cosmetics like Complexion Wonder Creme, which promised to “improve any colored countenance like magic.” People of Stephen Wall's class and complexion might have said the real struggle was to stay colored rather than cross over. They spent their days arguing with train conductors who insisted that they be seated in the white car, and parrying the hostile reactions from police and passersby when walking with darker friends, colleagues, and spouses. Being white could be as simple as keeping one's mouth shut.
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But Stephen did not cross the line, at least not in 1902. While most of his family disappeared, he held on to his old life. During his years laid off from the Government Printing Office in the 1880s and 1890s, he ran a pool hall, then a cigar shop, and finally a bicycle store, all in black neighborhoods and all serving black people. He remained in the neighborhood where he grew up, in the shadow of Howard University and the Freedmen's Hospital, near his mother and old friends. Just up the street were Hillside Cottage and his uncle John Mercer Langston and his aunt Carrie, who provided an immediate connection to family, community, and history. In the years before his death in 1897, Langston would hold court on the porch, regaling neighbors with stories about his garden, the graceful trees that lined Fourth Street (the sycamore, spruce, white birch, and sweetgum were personal gifts from Charles Sumner), and most of all, “important facts and stirring episodes in the history of the Negro race, of which he never tired of telling.” “He was,” according to Kelly Miller, “a talking encyclopedia upon the events of the Civil War and the tragic era of reconstruction. ”
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When Stephen sought his second reinstatement to the Government Printing Office in 1899, he stated his race outright in letters to the public printer. Moreover, he stressed that the earlier firings had been motivated by prejudice and politics, not by job performance. He returned to work in 1899 as a black man. He described himself as “Colored” in a questionnaire distributed at work and detailed his father's service in the United States Colored Troops.
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Although Wall was outspoken about his race at work, his ties to his community grew ever more tenuous. In 1900 he married a white woman. Contemporary writers imagined that passing for white often began as a lark, only to become irreversible because of love and marriage across the color line. But Lillie Slee knew that Stephen was colored. Raised by a Canadian mother in Massachusetts port towns, she simply may have ordered her world differently from the average Washingtonian. She prayed at the First Congregational Church, where she may have met Stephen. Or perhaps the immediate necessities of life caused her to regard racial integrity as less imperative than others did at the time. She had been married before. Stephen was already in his forties. Their relationship could have been the last chance for either of them to start a family. Stephen and Lillie understood that they were living beyond a boundary—they eloped and married alone in Philadelphia. Lillie knew Stephen's mother, but the couple did not live with her.
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Marrying Lillie eroded Stephen's connection to the black community, as he decided he could no longer be a “good fellow” and stopped socializing with old friends. As a devoted husband—and, by the end of 1901, father—he hardly left the house anymore except to go to work. He continued to view himself as part of the Wall family and continued to identify as black. He named his first child for his sister, Isabel Irene. His son would be Roscoe Orin, after Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall.
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Soon after his mother died, Stephen moved his family back into the rambling frame house his father had built—a move in the opposite direction from the one chosen by his siblings. Sparsely furnished, with tattered mats on the floor, the house was past its proudest days. Amanda Wall had spent the decade she outlived her husband close to poverty. At the same time she regularly made loans to friends, and she always had something for the steady stream of poor blacks whom she continued to receive. Being part of the colored elite was never simply a question of money.
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The house had kept Amanda afloat—she borrowed on it repeatedly. When creditors came knocking, Amanda deeded the house to Isabel and two apartment buildings to Helen and Edward. The maneuvers—disguised as sales—served a dual purpose. She was able to shield the house from foreclosure after a creditor sued her in 1896. And more important, the land transfers tethered her children to her even as they made their way in the white world. As long as they held the family property, they remained part of the family.
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If the web of property initially tied the Walls together, it would soon push them apart. Separated by physical distance, financial need, and identity, the five children were incapable of untangling their mother's estate on their own. They turned to the equity courts of the District of Columbia, which promised an efficient but painful way to resolve the mess. Their father, O.S.B. Wall, had spent many hours arguing equity cases as an attorney in private practice. His children hired white lawyers for the job. Only two weeks after Amanda died, Gertrude sued her siblings for a share of what their mother had signed over to them. In the meantime Stephen, Helen, and Isabel fought over who would be their mother's executor. But with three children out of town and a fourth—Gertrude—living under an assumed name, nothing was resolved. Subpoenas went unserved. Gertrude dropped her case almost immediately after filing it, only to bring—and again drop—an identical suit three months later.
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It took until the end of 1907 for everyone except Gertrude to reach an agreement. Edward sued his siblings to force them to sell the house, claiming they owed him money. The plaintiff and defendants were colluding, using the suit to engineer a particular result: a forced sale to which Gertrude could not object. Edward's lawyer had represented Stephen in earlier cases involving their mother's estate. Stephen, Helen, and Isabel conceded the case. But Gertrude was nowhere to be found. In early 1908 a judge ordered the sale. The District of Columbia bought the house and promptly knocked it down. In its place the city built a colored school.
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IN JULY 1908 STEPHEN used his share of the sale money to start building his house in Brookland. That same month he received an official reprimand for making three mistakes on a single galley—an “exceptionally bad proof.” Shortly afterward he and a few dozen others were removed from the Monotype composing machine and demoted to checking proofs for errors, which required standing all day by roaring presses and molten lead casting machines. His foreman told him it was part of a large-scale reorganization of his division. But most of the others were soon “sent back to the machine,” Stephen would complain. Less qualified people were operating the Monotype keyboards. Stephen was reminded of this fact every day because it was his job to correct their “horrible composition, which takes three times as long to get in proper shape.” “An injustice has been done me,” he seethed .
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