One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (3 page)

At the outbreak of the Civil War, at the age of thirty-two, Thomas stood witness to the end of a world. Young whites went off to fight distant battles and New Bern fell to Union troops. Thomas saw whites flee before the assault, and he saw blacks flock to New Bern to escape marauding Confederates. Where the town had counted fewer than three thousand blacks before the war, he saw the number approach fifteen thousand at the conflict’s end. And he saw death and fear as yellow fever took at least nine hundred lives.
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Still, New Bern stayed largely on the war’s periphery, allowing Thomas to persevere as a tradesman and minister. In the only words of his that are known to be extant, he described for John Wesley Cromwell, author of
The Negro in American History
, an episode from his ministry that involved an eight-year-old boy who would grow up to be the Reverend Joseph C. Price, founder of Livingstone College and prominent advocate of black self-help. Thomas recalled:

Around the war’s end, Thomas took a third wife who was more girl than woman. Fifteen-year-old Anne Vashti Delamar was the daughter of a slave mother and a white master. Anne’s eyes were blue and her skin was the color of ivory. Lustrous black hair fell below her shoulders and completed the impression that she was as white as any of the women who traveled New Bern’s dirt streets in horse-drawn jitneys.

With the passing of the war, Thomas and Anne shared the jubilation and disorientation of freedom. He supported the family and gained respect among whites and blacks alike; she tended to their home. Across the racial divide, whites restarted life in the grand houses and reasserted their belief in natural superiority. By 1870, blacks comprised fully two-thirds of New Bern’s population. No matter. They were put in their place, if need be at the end of a whip.

As one New Bernian told Whitelaw Reid, a Civil War correspondent who later became editor of the
New York Tribune
, “The poor, shiftless creatures will never be able to support themselves in freedom.” Reid was left to conclude: “Nothing could overcome this rooted idea, that the Negro was worthless, except under the lash.”
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And the lash was officially enforced.

The state legislature passed the Black Code of 1866, a statute that restricted freedom of movement and barred blacks from carrying unlicensed guns. Worse still, the white power structure responded to enactment in 1868 of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal rights to all, and ratification in 1870 of the Fifteenth Amendment, ensuring the right to vote, as if the expressions of the national will were the decrees of a hostile power.

But Thomas and Anne also witnessed the rise of black churches and social affairs, saw the federal Freedmen’s Bureau open schools for blacks, and eventually experienced the start of the black franchise. They weathered the good and the evil of the world, while at home they built a family that was a monument to parental strength, built on a belief in the goodness of the Lord and reverence for the American ideal.

AS BATTLE TURNED
fifteen, Thomas and Anne asked one of his half-brothers to help rear their obstreperous son. James lived sixty miles away in Goldsboro. He had been a teacher and was working as a railway mail clerk, an elevated position for a Southern black. He took Battle in, promising to guide him through high school and instilling the even higher aspirations of going to college and law school. It wasn’t to be. After James contracted pneumonia and died, Battle returned to New Bern, brokenhearted at this first death of a loved one and harboring the fantastic notions that not only could he get as fine an education as a white man but he could also become an attorney. He had seen black men of such prominence. They “came repeatedly to our home as if to a shrine” to seek his father’s counsel. Many had secured advanced degrees. Never could Battle achieve that in New Bern or in North Carolina or in the South, and a flickering ambition to attain the standing of an educated man now merged with New York’s pull.

The attraction was all the stronger because a tide of oppression swept the South as the twentieth century drew near. The US Supreme Court opened the floodgates in 1896 by upholding in
Plessy v. Ferguson
the constitutionality of providing separate and purportedly equal accommodations to blacks. In North Carolina, severe economic dislocations intensified the ruling’s corrosive impacts. As plunging cotton prices drove white farmers toward poverty, Democrats flew the banner of white supremacy against a biracial Fusion movement of Republicans and Populists.

In 1898, Battle’s hometown newspaper, the
New Bern Journal
, called for renouncing “negro supremacy, indecency, menace to property, destruction of social law and order.”
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An armed white paramilitary rode the countryside to make its Democratic and supremacist preferences plain. Dressed in crimson, they became known as the Red Shirts. After an election, word came from the state capital, Wilmington—like New Bern, a majority black city—that a white mob had deposed the municipal government, driven from town a black newspaper editor who had decried lynching, and killed as many as thirty blacks.

That same year, Battle witnessed the appearance in New Bern of men unlike any he had ever seen: young black men wearing the uniform of US soldiers and preparing for duty in the Spanish-American War. The army had deployed standing regiments, including the all-black Buffalo Soldiers, who had served on the western frontier and who would save Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders at the battle of Las Guásimas. When President William McKinley called for volunteers, a soon-to-be ousted North Carolina governor enabled African Americans to enlist in regiments attached to white militia units. On leave, many traveled for recreation to New Bern. To whites, they were arrogant armed men who personified a refusal to accept the lot assigned to blacks; to Battle, they embodied adventure. He dashed to the tracks to watch the soldiers go off by train into places that lived in his dreams.
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But he understood that he was not yet ready to follow them. To acquire some of the polish he admired in the Delamars, Battle went to work for Major Graham Davies, whose family lived on grounds large enough for a mansion and a second house. He tended the lawns, gardens, and shrubbery; pumped drinking water from a well; and brought soft water for the laundry from a rain cistern. Indoors, he emptied chamber pots and fanned away flies by pulling a cord that waved paper strips over the dining table.

The household staff included a cook, housemaid, and two coachmen, plus a Miss Dissoway, their demanding leader. Battle wrote letters for them, “as well as the letters for a neighboring white man’s concubine who often visited.” Eventually, Miss Dissoway allowed Battle to serve as one of the family’s mealtime waiters.

“There I learned the proper way of laying a linen cloth and placing silver. As have so many other Negroes, from ‘backing chairs’ I learned how people of real culture and refinement behave, converse and live,” Battle told Hughes, adding, “My period of work with this family of the Old South was a happy one and it was with some regret that I left them. At the age of sixteen, however, feeling myself a man, I decided to pull up stakes and head north to make my way in the world on my own.”

There would be no stopping him, nor were Thomas and Anne inclined to thwart their son’s ambitions. He had grown past six feet and was on his way to within a ham’s weight of 240 pounds, a size that made him several inches taller and more than 50 pounds heavier than the average American male in 1900. He was fit for labor and, thanks to Thomas’s tutelage, he had a tradesman’s skilled hands. In matters of the mind, he was perfectly literate and had no problem with arithmetical computation. It stood to reason that someone could put Battle to use.

A sister, Nancy, had already headed north to Hartford, Connecticut. The family developed a plan. Battle and Anne would travel together to Brooklyn, where Anne would visit the Delamars. Battle would go on from there to link up with Nancy and make his start in Connecticut. When all was ready, Thomas spoke to his son in typically bracing fashion. Battle told Hughes: “The night before I left home my father, who had always prayed with us and for us, had a long special prayer with me alone. He said, ‘Dear Lord, I am now laying my youngest son upon Thy altar.’ He prayed that I would learn to curb my temper, quit fighting, and be a good Christian. Then from his knees he arose to give me his blessings and encouragement.”

Then the morning of leave-taking arrived, as it would soon come for virtually every black Southern family through the mid-twentieth century, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters atomizing to overcome what they could of the dictates of skin color. In moments that turned out to be the last in which he saw his father alive, Battle left behind the cool rivers and the open fields, the black washerwomen with baskets on their heads and the whites in high carriages, the hiss of hot dirt streets under the spray of a water wagon, and the sweetness of the drink Caleb Bradham had invented in his drugstore, Pepsi-Cola.
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Anne and Battle traveled by boat, a ticket on an Old Dominion steamship being less expensive than going by train. The Old Dominion’s service to New York from Richmond and Norfolk, Virginia, was then becoming a primary transportation for early black migrants on the Eastern Seaboard. In 1898, the year before Battle and his mother made the voyage, one New York man commented, “Negroes are coming on every boat from southern waters.” Another said, “Nobody knows how it happened but on every Old Dominion Steamship that docked there (were) from two to three hundred Negroes landed in New York.”
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The route took Anne and Battle across Albemarle Sound to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on a steamer and then by rail to Norfolk. They were a pair who would have drawn glances. Battle towered over his mother, his broad shoulders showing the results of fieldwork, masonry, and the sport of boxing, which had become a favorite. Skin tone distinguished the two as well. Battle’s face and eyes were deep brown. By surface appearance, he seemed little related to a woman who had inherited fair skin and blue eyes from her father. In the strange calculus of race, his blood was at least one-quarter white, while hers was at least half Caucasian. Yet for legal, social, and economic purposes, they were equally and totally black—and equally covered by the Jim Crow strictures that greeted them on crossing into Virginia.

The harshness of Jim Crow was a revelation to Battle, because North Carolina was still a year away from introducing fully systematic repression. Battle told Hughes: “In Virginia I saw my first separate waiting rooms, marked WHITE and COLORED. We also experienced segregation on the Old Dominion Line’s Norfolk-to-New-York boat. My mother was assigned to a filthy hole with a large number of other colored people.”

He would not allow Anne to be so degraded: “It was a long overnight trip, almost twenty-four hours, as I took a part of my money to secure a stateroom for her. Once that was arranged, I spent the night there, too, and nobody bothered me.”

FIRST HE SAW
the Statue of Liberty—that inspiring monument to promises kept, towering rebuke for promises broken, at the mouth of New York Harbor—and then the full sweep of America’s largest city appeared before Battle as the steamer rounded Manhattan’s tip. Everything was bigger than Battle had ever seen. More than three hundred buildings stood nine or more stories tall as the invention of the elevator and development of steel skeletal construction allowed for the creation of real estate in the air.
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A golden dome sat atop the tower Joseph Pulitzer had built for his newspaper, the
New York World
. At a height of 309 feet, the gilded tip was meant to attract the eye, and it surely drew the look of a small-town Southern teenager with scant possessions. Surrounding Pulitzer’s pride were the chest thumpings of America’s nineteenth-century capitalist titans: John D. Rockefeller, oil; J. P. Morgan, finance; Andrew Carnegie, steel; James Buchanan Duke, tobacco; Henry Havemeyer, sugar; Jay Gould, railroads. These men had made Lower Manhattan into a landscape of seemingly limitless wealth. They competed and conspired, profited and profiteered, and then they went home to decorous townhouses or fabulous mansions. As recounted by the authors of
Gotham
, an encyclopedic history of New York up to the brink of the twentieth century: “But with outspending one’s rivals the only definitive route to preeminence, a steady inflation in extravagance ensued as members of opposing cliques scrambled to convert Wall Street revenue into Fifth Avenue social standing. Dinner parties corkscrewed upward in lavishness—black pearls in oysters, cigars rolled in hundred-dollar bills, lackeys in knee breeches and powdered wigs.”
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