Passing Strange (14 page)

 

 

ADA LIKELY LEFT GEORGIA in the mid-1880s. But she left behind no stories about her flight north, by foot or horse, train or boat, in the company of friends or relatives or on her own. Like many rural southern migrants in the late nineteenth century she perhaps moved first to a southern city, testing the possibilities of urban life, before moving north. Her age made her a typical migrant. The southern blacks who migrated to New York in the 1880s were overwhelmingly single and young, most moving between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight.
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Born free or raised in freedom, they felt less rooted than their parents, less willing to endure the daily humiliations that blacks faced in the harsh racial climate of the post-Reconstruction South. The older generation’s deep memories of slavery might inure them to the social and economic discrimination that flourished in a later era of greater political and personal freedoms. But younger people, without their own memories of chattel slavery as a reference point, would see the South of the 1880s differently, less as a place of expanded opportunities than one of harshly limited possibilities, especially when measured against the failed promise of Reconstruction. For all that had changed in local race relations, much remained the same. “Well, it is just like as it was in time of slavery,” a black carpenter from Columbus said in 1883. His fellow freedmen were afraid to speak up; “they want to say things, but are afraid of the white people.”
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Ada, no doubt, had grown up with similar fears. Her move north powerfully suggested, however, that she wanted more in her young life.

If Ada’s age made her a typical migrant, she remained in other ways unusual. Relatively few blacks emigrated north before 1900 from Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, despite the harsh Jim Crow laws that governed life across the Deep South. Most African Americans moving north during the late nineteenth century came from the upper South and border states, and those heading to New York City came largely from areas near the Atlantic seaboard, where they could catch a steamboat headed up the coast.
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In the 1880 census, for example, 5,350 black and mulatto residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn listed their birthplace as Virginia; only 460 claimed to be from Georgia .
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In the years following the war, the local Democratic newspapers of west Georgia did their best to persuade African Americans (or at least those who could read) to sign labor contracts and stay put as a labor force by pointing out that work conditions elsewhere might be worse. In 1869 Troup County’s largest paper, the
La Grange Reporter,
claimed that “the poor, over-worked needle-women of the North, who are struggling in the cold sweat of life and death, not knowing whether they will have bread to eat to-morrow, would consider the condition of the negro woman of the South far better than their own.”
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But the winds of discontent inevitably swept across the cotton fields, where even the poorest black sharecroppers now understood their lives differently than they had before. And these winds of change swept young Ada north.

From the lower Mississippi Valley in the late 1870s and early 1880s, many thousands of rural blacks moved north and west into Kansas in search of farmland and the political and economic freedoms that, with the collapse of Reconstruction, seemed so hard to secure in the Deep South. Fewer migrants from the southeastern states joined the great movement of the “Exodusters,” but in the summer of 1879 crowds of freedpeople gathered in eastern Alabama and western Georgia to listen to speakers extol the economic virtues of Kansas, and recruitment agents spread out across the farms of western Troup County. “The emigration idea prevails more largely in this section of Georgia than many suppose,” the
La Grange Reporter
noted in August. “There are many negroes who would quickly leave for Kansas if they could see their way clear. They have an idea that they would have more privileges, social, political and commercial, in the West and North than they have here.”
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Possibly, Ada and her family heard talk of the opportunity to be found far from the rolling red clay hills that marked the boundaries of their known world. Eventually, however, Ada’s interests focused not on the farmlands of Kansas but on New York City, where her life would be governed by something other than the cyclical rhythms of the growing seasons. No records document when she left home. Her son believed she arrived in New York around 1884. It seems at best an approximate date, confirming that Ada came north not as a small child but as a young woman—not as the result of someone else’s decision but as a consequence of her own.
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Traveling north, Ada would have been reminded of the harsh racial logic of the South at every step of her journey. Writing about travel conditions in Georgia in the late 1880s, a local reporter remarked upon the strict segregation that governed train travel: “Dirty and half-clad white men and women may ride in these first-class coaches, but never mind how neatly dressed colored persons may be, they are not permitted to enter if it is known that they have a drop of colored blood in their veins.”
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Required to pay first-class prices, African Americans could not ride in the first-class cars.
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Throughout the South, segregation prevailed on all forms of public conveyance.
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However Ada traveled, she could not help but observe that her color, as well as her gender, determined where she could ride, or eat, or sleep, where she would be safe and where she would not.

But finally, from the deck of a boat or through the dirty glass of a train window, she spied New York, a polyglot city of crowded streets and densely packed blocks of multistory tenements where people moved about amid the anonymity of strangers, a place that could scarcely be more different from the rural cotton-farming country of Troup or Harris County, Georgia. Alexander Walters, a Kentucky-born bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who first visited the city in 1884, recalled the wondrous sight of an elevated railroad that transported half a million people a day and explained that in New York he felt “amazed at its inhabitants, astonished at the enterprise and aggressiveness of its business men and delighted at its beautiful and immense park.”
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But to the Tennessee-born Henry Hugh Proctor, who first saw New York in the late 1880s, the city seemed almost overwhelming. “What high buildings, what throngs on Broadway, what a crush at Brooklyn Bridge, where everybody seemed to get up and rush for the entrance at the same time!” Almost immediately, he learned a painful lesson from a porter and cabdriver who cheated him as he disembarked at the dock.
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“To the provincial coming to New York for the first time,” the African American novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote in 1902, “ignorant and unknown, the city presents a notable mingling of the qualities of cheeriness and gloom. If he have any eye at all for the beautiful, he cannot help experiencing a thrill as he crosses the ferry over the river filled with plying craft and catches the first sight of the spires and buildings of New York.” The new immigrant might feel bewildered and lonely. But “after he has passed through the first pangs of strangeness and homesickness, yes, even after he has got beyond the stranger’s enthusiasm for the metropolis, the real fever of love for the place will begin to take hold upon him. The subtle, insidious wine of New York will begin to intoxicate him.”
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So much would seem new to a rural southerner like Ada: the sheer number of horses and trolleys and pedestrians that clogged the streets, the tall buildings and elevated train lines, the possibility of walking through town anonymous and unknown. Along with fear and loneliness, she likely experienced a sense of wonder and astonishment, a rush of joyousness at being so far from the crushing racial order of the South.

No records document Ada’s early months, or even years, in New York. But many years later, she revealed that she had at least one connection there. Her widowed aunt, Anne, or “Annie,” Purnell, was in the city as early as 1882, living first downtown on Minetta Lane, in a largely African American neighborhood, and then, beginning in 1883 or 1884, in a tenement at 149 West Twenty-fourth Street.
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During the 1870s and ’80s, many of the city’s blacks had migrated uptown to this so-called Tenderloin district that extended from the west twenties to the west fifties, leaving to newly arriving Italian immigrants the packed downtown neighborhood in Greenwich Village where Clarence King had once strolled at night. In Annie Purnell’s crowded apartment building lived waiters and hotel porters, widowed washerwomen and homemakers, all—according to a zealously attentive census taker in 1880—not exactly “Black,” but with the “perceptible trace of African blood” that marked them as “Mulatto.”
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Purnell worked out of her own home, laundering other people’s clothes.
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In January 1886 she or one of her neighbors placed a short ad in the
New York Times:
“Washing.—By respectable colored laundress; will do washing and ironing from 75 cents per dozen; good city references. Call at 149 West 24th St., third floor, back.”
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Perhaps Purnell wrote or sent word to Ada back in Georgia, encouraging her to come try city life, or maybe she simply offered refuge when unknown events drove Ada from her childhood home. In any case, no matter how small and cramped her own quarters might be, Annie Purnell perhaps took her niece in until she could find a job, showed her how to navigate the city, lent her money until she could stand on her own two feet. If so, that familial connection would make Ada more fortunate than many of her contemporaries. Relatively few of the Georgia-born blacks living in Manhattan in 1880 lived with members of their immediate family, a consequence of a migration dominated by young, single southerners.
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“Chain migrations,” with one relative paving the way for another, would become more common several decades later, with the “Great Migration” of southern blacks to northern cities that began during World War I. Young African American migrants like Ada often found themselves alone in mid-1880s Manhattan.
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In addition to providing Ada with lodging, Purnell might have instructed her in how to find a job. On March 1, 1886, less than two months after the washerwoman’s ad appeared, another ad appeared in the “Situations Wanted” section of the
New York Times:
“NURSE—BY A COMPETENT YOUNG WOMAN as a nurse to growing children; good city reference. Address A. C. Box 260 Time Up-town Office, 1,269 Broadway.”
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The timing is right, even if it remains impossible to prove whether “A. C.” might be Ada Copeland, who we know became a nursemaid. The language of the ad remains coyly quiet on the issue of the job seeker’s race or ethnicity. Other ads placed by would-be nursemaids referred to the applicants as “Scotch Protestant,” “Canadian,” “Protestant,” or “Scotchwoman”—all discreet ways of suggesting the job seekers were white. One referred to a “respectable young colored girl.” But many provided no clue as to the applicant’s race or ethnicity. “A. C.” implied she had held one other job in New York, offering one “good city reference” rather than multiple testimonies to her reliability or skill. And unlike many, though not all, of her fellow job seekers, she did not give her own home address as the place where a prospective employer might find her. There could be many reasons for this. Perhaps she did not want a current employer to know she sought a new job, or maybe she shared tight and crowded living quarters that she feared would not convey a good impression to a new employer. A rented mailbox at the newspaper office offered a more private venue for employer and employee to contact one another. The uptown office of the
New York Times,
on Broadway at West Thirty-second Street, was less than three-quarters of a mile from the Purnell apartment on West Twenty-fourth Street.

Whether Ada Copeland was the anonymous “A. C.” of the ad, or whether she sought work through friends or one of the city’s domestic employment agencies, she eventually found a job as a nursemaid with a family in lower Manhattan.
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Her precise whereabouts in the city during the mid-1880s remain unknown. Federal census takers did take note of servants, carefully recording the names of domestic workers who boarded with their employers, lived with their own families, or maintained rooms in lodging houses. But they compiled their snapshots of the city’s population just once a decade. In the intervening years, domestic workers like Ada remained largely unseen, going about their work unobserved by the officials who noted the heads of households for commercial city directories or kept track of property owners for the municipal tax records. Annie Purnell, Ada’s aunt, appeared in the city directories only because she was a widowed head of household; had she lived with her husband she, too, would have remained unnoted. King’s biographer Thurman Wilkins later surmised that Ada worked for a friend of King’s, but none of King’s close associates mention in their personal papers a young household servant recently arrived from Georgia.
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Anonymity might have been hard to find in a small Georgia farming community, but in New York Ada slipped into the city’s silent army of invisible domestics, and anonymity became a defining feature of her life. No one would know where she came from, who her people were, what her life had been like before she landed in Manhattan and became a working girl.

 

 

HOWEVER SMITTEN A DA COPEL AND might have felt at her first sight of the city, however eager to leave behind her memories of the violence and poverty of rural life, her race and sex circumscribed her world. And although her new job might seem singularly new and strange to her, it in fact made her a typical worker. Roughly 90 percent of young African American women in late-nineteenth-century New York held a job in “domestic and personal service.” Some toiled in hotels or restaurants, but most worked in private homes, where they often received room and board.
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Bending the curves of their lives to fit the needs of someone else’s household, they set their own rhythms of sleep and work to match the tempos set by others. Jessie Fauset, a leading writer of the Harlem Renaissance and an assistant editor of the NAACP’s journal
The Crisis,
never did domestic service herself, but she knew many women who did. In her 1929 novel
Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral,
she described a young woman who “had known what it meant to rise at five o’clock, start the laundry work for a patronizingly indifferent family of people who spoke of her in her hearing as ‘the girl’ or remarked of her in a slightly lower but still audible tone as being rather better than the usual run of niggers. . . . For this family she had prepared breakfast, gone back to her washing, served lunch, had taken down the clothes, sprinkled and folded them, had gone upstairs and made three beds, not including her own and then had returned to the kitchen to make dinner.” At night Fauset’s fictional character would be too tired to undress before collapsing into her own unmade bed. No wonder she longed for marriage and a new life in which she could “enjoy the satisfaction of having a home in which she had full sway instead of being at the beck and call of others.”
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Ada, too, must have dreamed of such freedom.