The Butler: A Witness to History (2 page)

Just days after that night in Chapel Hill, I told Steve Reiss, my editor, that Barack Obama was going to win the presidency, and because he was going to win, I needed to find someone from the era of segregation, and find them right now, to write about what this upcoming and momentous event in American history would mean to them. And I wanted the person to have worked in the White House, I told him. My editor’s
eyebrows arched. “Hmm.” Reiss sighed. He didn’t believe Obama would win, but he did believe my intentions. He wanted me to finish a couple of other hanging assignments, then I could go in search of this ghostly person. He wondered: how far back would I look for this White House employee? “Are you talking the nineteen sixties?”

“Farther back,” I said.

I wanted to find a black man or woman who had worked and scrubbed inside the White House, who had washed dishes there, who had drunk from those
COLORED ONLY
water fountains in America during the Jim Crow years. I did not mind that people around me were constantly saying America would not elect a black man as president.

A black employee at the White House in the 1950s? The White House operator told me it was their policy not to give out names of former employees, and she knew of no White House office that would assist me in such an endeavor. There are always walls, roadblocks in a reporter’s work, and I told myself this was nothing to fret about. Besides, I had a source on Capitol Hill, in a congressman’s office, someone who would help. But after much back-and-forth, this source couldn’t gain any guidance from the White House either. Others were soon offering blank stares, or long pauses on the telephone, with no possible names or even leads. Then, with me wondering if such a person could be found, someone told me about a lady in Florida who used to work at the White House, who might know of just such a person.

The woman in Florida, a former White House employee, gave me a name. “If he’d
have passed away I would have heard about it,” she said. “The last time I saw Eugene Allen he was standing outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, getting into a taxicab. He was attending a reunion at the White House. He worked there many years as a butler.” She did not know exactly how many years.

If Eugene Allen were still alive, I had to find him. If he had been getting into a taxi when last seen by my Florida contact, that meant he likely lived in the Washington, DC–Maryland–Virginia region. The phone books were full of Eugene Allens. By the time I had made forty calls without tracking down this particular Eugene Allen, I began to wonder if this man still lived in the area. People age and become snowbirds. They move to California, Arizona, Florida. And, of course, they die. The unsuccessful calls kept mounting.

“Hello, I’m looking for Mr. Eugene Allen, who used to work as a butler at the White House.” It was about the fifty-sixth call.

“You’re speaking to him.”

· · ·

The subway train rumbled under the surface of DC. The butler had given directions to his home. It was a working-class neighborhood through and around which the 1960s riots had once swept. On my way to his street I walked past a fish fry joint, and storefront churches, and small clothing stores. In front of the butler’s home, the front gate had been left noticeably ajar: expecting company.

“Come right in,” Eugene Allen said. His back was slightly bent, and he stepped about with little grimaces. He introduced Helene, his wife, who was reclining in an easy chair with her cane lying across her lap. She was smiling warmly. They lived alone. After he was seated, both were quick to let me know that they’d talk with me, but only after they watched their beloved game show,
The Price Is Right.
They watched back-to-back episodes, watched them with an intensity that told me not to dare interrupt, so I didn’t.

Splayed on an end table were half a dozen magazines with then–Senator Barack Obama’s picture. It was easy to tell how proud they were of his candidacy. As game show images flickered on the wide-screen television (a gift from their only child, Charles, a Vietnam War vet who worked as an investigator with the State Department), I saw on a wall the only picture that hinted at employment at the White House: the Allens standing with President and Nancy Reagan at what seemed a very formal affair. I still was unsure of exactly how many presidents Eugene Allen had worked for.

“Eight presidents,” he told me.

Eight? He could tell I was surprised.

“That’s right. Eight. Started with Harry Truman and worked all the way up to President Reagan.”

He started telling me about his life. Born in 1919 in Scottsville, Virginia, on a plantation, he grew up working as a “house boy” for a
white family. They taught him kitchen skills, and he came of age washing dishes and setting tables for that family. There was nary a hint of bitterness in his voice about his upbringing. But like Huck Finn, he wanted to light out for the territory. He got as far as Hot Springs, Virginia, home to the renowned Homestead Resort. With his refined skills, he got a job there as a waiter.

In the 1930s, jobs for Negroes anywhere quickly spread on a grapevine that was stitched together by church members, Pullman porters, bellhops at Negro hotels—the vanguard of what would form the backbone of the black working and middle class. While in Hot Springs, someone told Eugene Allen about a job in Washington, DC, at a country club. He’d heard about the high steppers and good tips at country clubs. He threw his suits in a trunk and soon found himself in the nation’s capital.

The Depression lay like a hard stone across the land, but he had a job in Washington, and he liked it. He wore nice suits, hats with soft brims, and two-toned shoes. (In some photos that survive from the era, there he is, sitting on the hood of a car, in a natty suit and fedora, looking like a million bucks though flat broke.) At a party one night in 1942 he met Helene, also a transplant to DC. She had relatives in Washington who sent letters and magazines to the small town in North Carolina where she was born and raised. Desperate to get out of the Jim Crow South, she begged her father to let her go live in this mecca her relatives described. Though he initially said no, she kept asking until he finally
relented. Now in DC, she and Eugene were eyeballing one another across the music and bobbing heads at a nighttime soirée; she thought surely he’d ask for her phone number. It was a wartime city, and moments were precious. Life was so unpredictable. But he was too shy. “So I tracked his number down,” she says. They both chuckle. They married a year after meeting.

By 1947 they had saved enough to purchase their home on Otis Place in the city. Eugene was working at the country club. The job required a certain degree of smoothness, of discretion, and those were traits he possessed, traits that gained him favorable attention from the politicians and bankers who belonged to the country club. Five years later, in 1952, someone at the country club told him they were looking for “pantry workers” over at the White House, and that he should go over there and talk with Alonzo Fields. “I wasn’t even looking for a job,” he told me.

Fields, a black man, had risen from butler to maître d’ at the White House. An Indiana native, he had trained at the New England Conservatory of Music in hopes of teaching someday. When his benefactor died, his music dreams were thwarted, so he had made ends meet by working as a waiter. He joined the White House staff during the Hoover administration and would work there for twenty-one years under four presidents. He had no earthly idea that Eugene Allen, the man sitting before him, would far surpass him in number of presidents worked for and years served.

Fields talked to Allen about the prestige of working at the White
House, how discretion was to be valued and practiced. Fields must have picked up on Allen’s air of quiet dignity because he hired him to work in the pantry. The starting salary was twenty-four hundred dollars a year. In 1952, it was decent money. Helene, a vivacious sort, now owned bragging rights: her husband worked at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a fact she was quick to drop on neighbors and fellow churchgoers. It bestowed a certain importance on the Allen family.

Allen admits he was quite nervous when Fields came looking for him one day shortly after he began work at the White House. He told Allen it was time to meet President Harry Truman. “Just listen to this man,” Truman said to Allen, pointing his finger in the direction of Alonzo Fields, “and you’ll be okay.” The years began to roll by. Allen was promoted to full-fledged butler. To celebrate that and other occasions, he and Helene would throw little dinner parties down in their basement, which was fairly stark save for a noticeable black-and-white portrait of Jackie Robinson, which hung on a wall near the bar. They’d be joined by fellow butlers and their wives, neighbors, and acquaintances from their church. Mixed drinks would be served and folks would start, after a week of being buttoned-up, to relax. Guests would plead around the card table and makeshift bar for any information about what went on at the White House. Eugene was ever tight-lipped.

After having left the White House all these years later, Eugene Allen was more open. He admitted he could hardly have envisioned how
history would evolve during his years—thirty-four in all—spent at the White House. He reminisced about shaking the hand of every president he had worked for, and about spending nights in the White House when the weather forbade his getting home. He reminisced about flying on
Air Force One,
and about all the Easter egg hunts for the children. He talked about all the state dinners and White House luncheons.

“I was there, honey,” Helene pipes in. They both smile: old souls, old love.

During the tense Little Rock school desegregation crisis, he watched President Eisenhower argue with Arkansas governor Orval Faubus over the phone. It made him mighty proud when Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the black schoolchildren. He was there when President Kennedy had to protect James Meredith on the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1963 as the school, by court order, was forced to allow the first black student to enroll. The stories come more frequently now, but back then, when Helene would ask him about the social and racial strife engulfing the country and what it was doing to the president he was serving, Eugene Allen was mostly silent.

There were sweeter moments. He was there, at the White House, in 1963 when President Kennedy hosted an event to honor the one-hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Allen and the other butlers had never seen so many blacks at the White House at one time, upwards of eight hundred floating about, among them
Langston Hughes and Sammy Davis Jr. (One of the black guests cracked it was like being inside Uncle Tom’s cabin.) Sometimes, on getting back to the White House kitchen, where he’d pause for a break, he’d shake his head at the wonder of social progress: Allen himself had been born in the former Confederacy and only fifty-four years after the end of slavery.

We know, of course, the Kennedy years would come to a tragic end. When President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Allen and the other crestfallen butlers awaited the arrival back at the White House of those who had traveled with Kennedy. He remembers First Lady Jackie Kennedy being in a near-catatonic state, and there were the low-pitched voices of the Kennedy children that seemed particularly sad. When Allen went home on the night of the Kennedy assassination, he felt strongly that he should get back to the White House; he could not sleep. He prepared to return. Helene cautioned him about going out so late, with so little rest. But he was determined. As he was putting on his coat in the hallway, he collapsed into sobs. Charles, the son, would later tell me that was the first and only time he had seen his father cry. Indeed, Kennedy enjoyed an almost gospel-like devotion from blacks in America.

It pained Eugene Allen to see a White House engulfed in such deep and dark sadness. He saw it everywhere: in the butlers’ quarters, in the White House kitchen, in the West Wing. Kennedy was the president who had begun to take on the intransigent Southern Democrats in his own political party over the issue of civil rights. And he was the
president who had hosted gatherings at the White House that included more blacks than ever before. Now a gunman had taken him away.

One of Eugene Allen’s unique gifts as a White House butler—who seemed to gain more respect with each incoming administration—was his ability to improvise. In the days following the assassination, he wanted to bring a bit of cheer to the White House; he was especially worried about the Kennedy children, John and Caroline. It had been a long time since there had been such youth in the White House, and the nation had fawned over the children as they romped into the arms of their father. Eugene Allen told the White House chef to whip up some goodies: he was going to have a party for John and Caroline and some of their little friends. And there they were, all seated around a little table, enjoying themselves, smiling, the butler bending and serving. For a little while at least, there was the cacophony of little voices squealing with delight. Even the butler found reason to smile.

The butler thought President Johnson brave, if somewhat vulgar with his language. Yes, there were times, plenty of times, when Eugene Allen wanted to march right up to President Johnson and tell him about his boy, Charles, who had been sent to Vietnam, who was sweating in jungle darkness, who was trying to stay alive and get his ass back home. But Eugene Allen was caught in the middle, like a figurine bobbing on turbulent waves: he had to balance his concerns about being tossed out of the White House for insubordination on the one hand and his and Helene’s worries about their only son being half a world away, trying to
stay alive, on the other. The father, the butler, watching history turn, could not say a word. All he could do was stand there, frozen, as Johnson talked to his so-called brilliant war hawks—Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and Dean Rusk—and howled about sending more, more, more troops. Of President Richard Nixon, he’d only say he was shrewd, a little secretive, and a bit distant—the telltale traits, as it were, that would come to doom the Nixon presidency.