One Righteous Man : Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York (9780807012611) (8 page)

Six years after Battle left home with dreams of succeeding like the Delamars, he stepped into adulthood under Florence’s grounding influence. A butler’s income paid for free-form bachelorhood, a bed in a small room, and sums wired home to Anne, but it would hardly support a wife and family. Casting about for new possibilities, Battle heard that blacks his age were pulling down good money as luggage porters at the Grand Central Depot, but the jobs were hard to get. He would have to see the headman, the fearsome Chief James Williams.

In the spring of 1905, Battle headed to the landmark built by Cornelius Vanderbilt for the railroad empire by which he became the world’s richest man. Designed to resemble the Louvre, the depot extended along Forty-Second Street for 370 feet and then turned north in an L shape for almost 700 feet. Outside, Battle wove among horse-drawn coaches and streams of arriving and departing passengers. Through the doors, crystal panes atop one-hundred-foot tall trusses overspread a train shed with seventeen tracks. “New York opened its eyes and gasped,” the
New York Times
had said of the depot’s opening in 1871.

With more than a little trepidation, Battle made his way to the Chief’s cubby of an office. He found a broad-shouldered presence with deeply set eyes and a bearing that conveyed command and maturity. In fact, James H. Williams was just four years older than Battle.
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Born in 1879, he had grown up in a household haunted by the ghosts of slavery. His grandmother Sarah Powell had been taken in girlhood from West Africa and had been sold into bondage in Virginia. She remembered the white men who had kidnapped her, the hard ship’s voyage, and servitude on the state’s Eastern Shore. She would tell of a plantation owner’s son who had taken her as a mistress, who had fathered a baby with her, and who had taught their son, light-skinned John Wesley Williams, to read and write while hiding in the woods.
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John Wesley escaped, reunited with his mother after the Civil War, started his own family with a woman who also had escaped slavery, and brought James H. into the world bearing the gene of his grandfather’s fair complexion. Like Battle, James H. had been born into the South’s first postslavery generation of African Americans. Like Battle, he had an adventurous spirit. Like Battle, he had left home for the North as a teenager. By 1897, at the age of eighteen, he was living in the Tenderloin, was married to sixteen-year-old Lucy Metresh of Connecticut, and had found work as a hotel bellman. Lucy gave birth to a son that year. James H. and Lucy named the boy Wesley Augustus. He was the first of their six children, and he would grow up to be the most consequential of the brood by far.

Around the turn of the century, James H. took a position with as unlikely a source of equal opportunity as could be: Charles Thorley’s House of Flowers on Fifth Avenue. To call the House of Flowers a florist shop would be akin to describing Tiffany’s as a corner jeweler. Thorley’s elaborate floral arrangements were a must-have nicety among upscale New Yorkers.

Thorley had started in the business at the age of sixteen in 1874. Enjoying success, he then found even greater wealth as an investor in the city’s booming real estate market. Big money made Thorley a player in New York. He was a member of a committee dedicated to making Fifth Avenue the city’s grandest boulevard, and he belonged to the Tammany Hall war council. At the same time, he quietly helped the disadvantaged. When Thorley died in 1923, two hundred “down and outers” gathered at a mission on the Bowery to honor the generosity he had shown them.
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And many were the black men to whom this rich and powerful white man gave work.

Williams delivered flowers to well-to-do customers and served as the shop’s doorman. Thorley’s standards were exacting. Meeting his demands steeped Williams in the importance of first-rate customer service, and Thorley was pleased to recommend his protégé for a higher-paying porter’s slot at Grand Central. The station had too much work for its twenty-five luggage carriers, only two of whom were black. Williams got the job. Then, recognizing that he could tap a limitless supply of young African Americans for service labor, he presented the railroad with job candidates who met his insistence on reliability, industriousness, and honesty.

One by one, Williams’s men proved themselves, and the stationmaster gave him responsibility for hiring porters. In time, the force grew to more than four hundred men, and Williams eventually became Chief Williams to the young black men he helped propel into life, as well as in the minds of the traveling public. Both would revere the Chief for elevating luggage portage into a dignified occupation. Most memorably, Williams outfitted his team with uniforms that included hats topped with red flannel. Thus was born the term by which luggage carriers became widely known—“redcaps.”

Brightly visible, they scurried from curbside to trackside, collected a modest paycheck and bigger tips, and served as concierges to the city. Abram Hill, who interviewed Williams as part of the WPA Writers’ Project, wrote that the redcaps covered up to ten miles a day as “walking booths of information,” each one prepared to answer questions ranging from “the time of departure of the Trans-Atlantic steamers to the time the baseball game begins, and how far is the nearest eating place.”
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Wearing a red carnation in his lapel over the course of forty-five years, the Chief became well known to Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, Coolidge, and Wilson. He counted as friends New York governor Al Smith, senators Robert Wagner and Herbert Lehman, as well as Archbishop Patrick Cardinal Hayes, spiritual leader of New York’s Roman Catholics. Students at Yale and Harvard made sure to send him a ticket to the schools’ annual football match.

All of that was still to come for Williams on the day Battle applied for work. As was his practice with every job seeker, he questioned Battle closely about everything he had done over the previous five years.

Battle’s brawn was apparent. He would have no trouble hauling luggage. He was also well spoken and schooled in relating to whites. Finally, Williams may well have detected that Battle had the brains to help with the paperwork of managing an expanding work force. He offered Battle a red cap, and Battle eagerly accepted, neither man having any reason to suspect that they and young Wesley Augustus, grown straight and tall at eight years old, were on their way toward grueling fights against racial barriers.

BATTLE BROUGHT FLORENCE
the good news. He expected to make the healthy sum of several hundred dollars a month, ten dollars in salary, the remainder in tips. Happily, he left behind a butler’s duties, noting with pride, “When I left the service of Mr. Forbes, I never worked in a private home again.”

Plunging into twelve-hour shifts, Battle set his mind to building a savings account. To economize, he moved into a hot-bed bunk room, where he was reunited with a brother who had joined the family’s dispersal. He remembered:

Battle further trimmed spending by joining the redcaps for meals at McBride’s Saloon, the establishment where, they all knew, the police riot of 1900 had begun with the mistaken-identity stabbing of white cop Robert Thorpe by black Arthur Harris on a sweltering August night.

“Thanks to McBride’s Saloon, no one in our dormitory basement ever went hungry,” Battle recalled. “For a dime, a man could get a foaming pail of beer. With the beer, the purchaser was entitled to access to McBride’s free lunch corner. I did not drink, but I would put my pennies tighter with those of the other boys and someone would be sent for the beer. While the beer was being drawn he would pick up enough free lunch for all of us.”

Then nature disrupted Battle’s plans. Florence’s frequent queasiness pointed toward pregnancy. Battle brought Florence to the West Fifty-Third Street office of Dr. E. P. Roberts, one of the city’s few black physicians.

Born in Louisburg, North Carolina, in 1868, Roberts was raised in a log cabin whose porous roof revealed the stars overhead as he lay in bed. The family had virtually no money. He would laugh to remember that playmates called him “Pillsbury” because his mother had made his underwear out of flour sacks.

By dint of brains and determination, Roberts graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where William D. was enrolled (and where Langston Hughes would study), and took medical training at New York’s now shuttered Flower and Fifth Avenue Hospital. He was the lone black student and one of just two class members to have completed college.

Roberts’s credentials as a physician were overmatched by the color of his skin. Looking back in 1951, still practicing at the age of eighty-three, he remembered being spurned as prospective patients discovered that they had enlisted the services of a doctor who turned out to be black. Whites simply rejected him, while many blacks, conditioned by racial boundaries, refused to trust that a black man was a doctor, let alone a doctor who was as capable as a white doctor.
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Roberts’s confirmation of the pregnancy propelled Battle and Florence into marriage. Looking back, Battle confessed that Florence fulfilled his hope of marrying a woman “as near like my loving mother as I possibly could.” He wrote as he gathered his memories for Hughes: “In this I have been most fortunate in the selection of my mate.”

The wedding took place on June 28, 1905, under the auspices of Florence’s Baptist pastor, the Reverend George Sims, at Sims’s home. A former farmhand and railroad worker, Sims had founded Union Baptist Church in a storefront on West Fifty-Ninth Street. He devoted his ministry to the “very recent residents of this new, disturbing city,” was becoming well known for the vigor of his services, and was embarked on building Union Baptist into a major house of worship. Like Battle, Sims had the physique of a heavyweight fighter. “When he talked of Christ from his pulpit, Jesus became alive, a workman, a carpenter who took off his apron and went out to answer the call to preach,” wrote Mary White Ovington.
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The wedding certificate records that Florence reported her age to be eighteen, rather than sixteen.
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Never mentioning that Florence was two months pregnant, Battle recalled the day: “My wife was two hours late for her own wedding. We had an appointment with the minister for eight o’clock. I left my work at Grand Central at seven in the evening and was dressed and waiting anxiously at her sister’s apartment before eight—but Florence was still out shopping. We were not married until ten at night.”

For a short time, Samuel and Florence roomed with her sister in a tenement on the far west end of Sixty-Eighth Street. Then they moved to a place of their own, another tenement, this one “four rooms with a distinguishing brass bed” at 341 West Fifty-Ninth Street. The neighborhood teemed with unemployed and underemployed men, women who went to work as domestics if they were lucky, and poorly clothed children, many of whom were also ill attended.

More than six thousand people were counted as living on a single block just north of the Battles’ apartment. Ovington described the tenements there as “human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings.” “Bedrooms open into air shafts that admit no fresh breezes, only foul air carrying too often the germs of disease,” she wrote, adding that, generally, the “people on the hill are known for their rough behavior, their readiness to fight, their coarse talk.” She said that vice is “open and cheap,” that “boys play at craps,” and that “Negro loafers hang about the street corners and largely support the Tenth Avenue saloons.”
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At the age of twenty-three, Battle had come a long way from Anne, from river-chilled watermelons, from the countryside—from the South, with all its studied courtesy and overt cruelty—only to live among people who had little more space than was allotted to their ancestors on slave ships.

Still worse, the danger of white-on-black violence overshadowed the neighborhood—and the New York Police Department was the most feared threat. Officers operated out of a stationhouse on West Sixty-Eighth Street. They were well known for wielding nightsticks with impunity. Never did they do so more vehemently than during the Siege of San Juan Hill. On a Friday evening in July, about a month after Battle’s wedding, a white gang taunted an elderly white peddler on the gang’s corner. When a young black man attempted to help the peddler, a police roundsman ordered a black minister, who ran a coal business, to go into his shop. The minister refused.

“You black———, get in there or I will knock your brains out,” the roundsman ordered, according to the detailed retelling in Timothy Thomas Fortune’s
New York Age
. Inside the store, the roundsman hit the minister. The minister grabbed a gun from a drawer. Police beat the minister senseless. Black residents swarmed the cops when they carried the minister outside.

Across Battle’s neighborhood, tensions ran high the next day. The
Age
reported:

On Monday night, a police officer ordered men who were standing in front of a saloon three blocks from Battle’s apartment to get off the sidewalk and go inside. A brick thrown from a roof struck the officer’s head.