The Invisible Line (43 page)

Two months later the presiding justice, Daniel Thew Wright, heard from ten witnesses. Three policemen testified that the “reputation of the Wall family was that it was colored”—that they had lived in a colored neighborhood, that O.S.B. Wall was “regarded as a colored man,” that “the mother was yellow in appearance,” and that Stephen had conducted “a colored pool-room” in a “colored neighborhood.” The undertaker who prepared Amanda Wall's body for burial “supposed the deceased to be colored” because “when he handles a colored body, it has an odor which to him is very offensive, and he perceived that odor on this body.”
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Stephen Wall admitted that his father “was known as a colored man” but asserted that his mother “was, and was recognized as, a white woman.” Lillie testified that she had known her mother-in-law, “who was a white woman.” Asked about her first marriage, Lillie said that she “had been married to a Japanese.” From there Justice Wright, who was four years away from impeachment hearings on an array of personal and professional misdeeds, took over the questioning. The judge elicited that Lillie had married Stephen on the spur of the moment, as they “were on a trip to Atlantic City.” The judge then asked about her own racial background, implying that her conduct was somehow less than white. When Lillie said that she had “no African blood in her ancestry,” Justice Wright followed up with a question about a “mark of color just below her jaw.” Lillie explained it was “a birth mark or from the liver.” The testimony was uncomfortable, invasive, and humiliating. It was also the last time that O.S.B. and Amanda Wall would be publicly remembered.
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At Justice Wright's urging, the board of education convened its own hearing the next week and read the court transcript into the record. A delegation of the Brookland Citizens' Association showed up “with an avowed determination to contend ‘to the last ditch' for the little girl's exclusion from the public schools for white children,” but John Ridout convinced the board not to allow them “to come here making speeches.” The only person put in the witness chair would be Isabel Wall.
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Ridout called her to the stand and announced, “I will rest my case upon the personal appearance of the child.” By all accounts, Isabel was a vision of Victorian girlhood, “decidedly pretty” and charmingly unaffected by everything happening around her. According to
The New York Times
, she “laughed and talked with her mother ... and showed no fear of Capt. Oyster,” the school board president. “Isabel,” reported the
Times
, “is a great deal more concerned over the way her dolly's complexion is wearing off than the manner in which her own cheeks are scrutinized by every one she meets.”
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Although the District's laws established separate “white” and “colored” schools, there was no definition of “colored” on the books. Relying on Isabel's skin, eyes, and hair, Ridout argued that “ ‘colored child' means a child so colored as to be recognized as such.” After briefly noting that in the past the board of education had allowed light-skinned children to attend white schools, Ridout returned to Isabel's appearance. “No human being could look at that beautiful little child and not admit instinctively that so far as personal appearances is concerned she is a white child,” the lawyer said. “God almighty has designed this child and the fact that the school law should be construed so she will be declared a colored child will never make her so . . . I am sure you will pardon me for the personal feeling I have in the matter because I confess that this little child appeals to me. ”
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Ridout's pitch for the “instinctive” belief that Isabel was white may have struck him as a plea for common sense, but it was a tone-deaf argument at a time when whites reflexively believed that any African ancestry made a person black. The one-drop rule had motivated the citizens of Brookland to demand Isabel Wall's expulsion in the first place, and the school board relied on something like it in arguing that Isabel's “very light mulatto” great-grandmother settled the question of the girl's race. “The people generally hold, of course, that one drop of negro blood makes a negro,” reported the
Post
in 1907, “and their steadfastness of purpose and the strict social lines that are drawn are considered the only real safeguards of the white race in the South.” It was such a commonplace belief that Booker T. Washington could invoke the rule casually and without comment: “It takes 100 percent of white blood to make a white man, but only one drop of negro blood to make a negro.” A popular play at the time concerned a Southern governor who learns that he has an imperceptible trace of black ancestry—it was called “The Nigger.”
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While the white public constantly stressed the importance of racial purity, the statutes in effect across the South were considerably less strict. Most states, including Maryland, drew the color line with a one-eighth rule—one black great-grandparent made a person legally black. Virginia had a one-fourth rule. Only Oklahoma defined
colored
as “all persons of African descent.” Ridout could have hewed close to the formalism of laws defining race and argued that the common legal definition of
colored
at the time the District of Columbia enacted its schools law was a one-eighth rule. Lawyers litigating similar cases in Louisiana, North Carolina, Virginia, and elsewhere were winning on the basis of strict, technical readings of blood quantum requirements. Such arguments succeeded not because they enabled people of color to become white but because strict readings of the statutes prevented people who had long lived as whites from being reclassified as black. In the absence of a statutory definition in the District of Columbia, the strongest argument in Isabel Wall's favor had little to do with “instinct.”
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With little besides Isabel's appearance to go on, the board voted 8-1 that the girl, “for the purposes of school classification, is a colored child.” The two black board members in the majority issued a separate statement suggesting that they disapproved of Stephen Wall's move toward whiteness, a view repeated soon afterward in the black press. “We cannot stultify ourselves to the point of admitting that our own children are stamped as inferior because of attendance on the schools provided by the Board of Education for colored children,” they said, “nor are we disposed to grant that there are any superior privileges attaching to attendance on a white as compared with a colored school.” “I am very sorry to have to disagree,” said Mary Church Terrell, the lone dissent, “but my conscience will not permit me to adopt the attitude of the Board.” “I have seen Isabel Wall,” she said. “I know Isabel Wall's grandmother, and I have seen Isabel Wall's mother and, as I understand that the rule is that all children follow the condition of the mother, I am of the opinion that Isabel Wall is a white child.”
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Ten days later Justice Wright issued his opinion. Like the school board, he was unimpressed with the argument based on Isabel's appearance. Although she had “no physical characteristic which afforded ocular evidence suggestive of aught but the Caucasian,” the judge observed that “her father presents to the eye racial characteristics which identify him of Negro blood” and that her mother was “formerly wife to a Mongolian.” In the absence of a statutory definition, Justice Wright defined
colored
in the “common parlance of the people.” As he saw it, “persons of whatever complexion, who bear negro blood in whatever degree and who abide in the racial status of the Negro, are ‘colored' in the common estimation of the people.” Wright's definition stopped short of a one-drop rule—people who had established themselves as white could argue that they did not “abide in the racial status of the Negro.” But ultimately, the definition shut out Stephen Wall, whom Justice Wright specifically identified as someone whose status had “been always that of the negro.”
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Wall appealed to the District of Columbia's high court. His brief cataloged Southern statutes that defined who was black and who was white yet conceded that “the term ‘colored' when not defined by statute is to be given its common significance.” After positing a weak argument that the common definition of
colored
hinged on appearance, the brief argued—contrary to a century of case law—that Isabel's racial status had nothing to do with her father's “negro associations.” While successful lawyers in other cases had argued that hypertechnical racial definitions were necessary to prevent whites from being reclassified as black, Wall's counsel never imagined the possibility that many whites could have African ancestry.
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Six months later the District of Columbia Court of Appeals affirmed Justice Wright, quoting his opinion at length. The court regarded physical appearance as a “delusive test of race” and after consulting the dictionary definition of
colored
concluded that it meant “persons wholly or in part of negro blood, or having any appreciable admixture thereof.” It was as close as a court had gotten to adopting the one-drop rule. The year 1910 ended with the Wall family identified and exposed in legal precedent and in newspaper articles that ran coast-to-coast.
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SOON AFTER THE COURT'S decision, Stephen Wall sold the house in Brookland. For the next ten years the family moved repeatedly from neighborhood to neighborhood and from white to black to white again. The courts could not keep them from becoming white, but affected only how they did so. From 1916 to 1920 the Walls rented a home just a couple of blocks down Fourth Street from where Stephen had grown up. Their landlady was Mary Church Terrell, the one school board member who had voted in Isabel's favor. But by 1920 the Walls had moved again, settling in Georgetown. They changed their first and last names. Now they were the Gates family: Steven, Elizabeth, Lillian, Ethel, and Russell. In many ways their new community was like Brookland. The neighbors were lower-level federal employees, all white. The major landmark was another Catholic university. Here Isabel, Ethel, and Roscoe had no problem attending the white schools down the street. Stephen was back on the Monotype machines at the Government Printing Office. By this point he preferred working the night shift.
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B
UCHANAN COUNTY, VIRGINIA, WAS an island far from the sea, one of the most isolated parts of Appalachia. It had barely any level ground, just mountains on mountains pushing into Kentucky and West Virginia, each ridge like an ocean to cross. The hills were so steep that they had names like Big A. Most of the county was ancient towering forest—chestnuts on the ridgelines, white oak down the slopes, and yellow poplar and black walnut in the coves and bottoms, at the heads of ravines, and along narrow twisting creeks. During winter only four or five hours of light reached the deep hollows between the hills; the sun rose over one mountain and set behind another.
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Buchanan's county seat, Grundy, was barely a town, just a collection of buildings perched between the mountains and the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River. When Grundy wasn't flooding, it was burning, and when it burned, it burned to the ground. There was no fire department, nor was there running water. Telegraph lines had not found a way into the county. Election results reached the state capital days after every other county in Virginia had reported them. A few long-distance telephone lines had been strung, but mostly by moonshiners seeking advance warning of raids by state revenue agents. When convicts escaped from the penitentiary, they made for the area as if it were Mexico.
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Nine miles northwest of Grundy, four miles shy of the Kentucky line, Home Creek curled off the Levisa Fork. The creek twisted several miles east through the hills, branching off into ever-smaller hollows. Journalists, ethnologists, and geographers who wandered the area and regularly recounted their travels for Northern readers described places like Home Creek as ones that “the current of time has swept by and left . . . in an eddy,” inhabited by people “rich in the local colour of an age long past.” The locals spoke seventeenth-century English, spun the cloth on their backs, shoed their own horses, and hunted small game “with the old English short bow” and “arrows hefted in the ancient manner.” They led lives almost entirely confined to the few miles surrounding their windowless cabins.
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Most of the people living along Home Creek descended from the men and women who had originally moved into the area from more civilized parts of Kentucky. Some 150 years later they were still pioneers, scratching gardens and cornfields out of hillsides that washed down to bare rock after a season or two. They tethered shacks to large trees to anchor them for the inevitable floods. Aside from church, they could gather at a mill for grinding corn and a small country store where they could pay for bolts of calico and children's shoes with chickens and eggs. Home Creek's mill and store were owned by the same short, stout, and foulmouthed man. If anyone had a secure place in this jagged hollow, it was George Looney. He was about thirty-five years old, with eyes the same color as his gray hair, the father of two sons and five daughters. Where most people owned a few dozen acres, he claimed several hundred. His ancestors were among the county's very first settlers. Less than a mile to the south, over one ridge of hills, was Looney's Creek.
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Although outlanders assumed Buchanan County was a place that time forgot, George Looney knew better. Every day his world was changing. Although most of the county was wooded, very little forest was untouched by 1910. Over the previous decades most of the yellow poplar and other ancient hardwoods had been chopped down, “ball hooted” down the hillsides, and floated out the creeks. The nearest train station was forty miles away, but a large outside logging concern had already extended narrowgauge rail from the Norfolk & Western line in West Virginia to Hurley, just northeast of Home Creek. At Hurley the W. M. Ritter Company had built an enormous lumber mill that employed six hundred men. It was surrounded by a boomtown and, beyond that, thousands of acres of bare hills studded with tree stumps. In addition to employing mill hands and lumberjacks, the company had crews hard at work expanding the rail line, one hollow at a time, to new tracts of virgin timber. It was close enough that Looney could probably hear the Shay locomotive's shrill whistle.
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