The Invisible Line (52 page)

What mattered most to Freda was not Jordan Spencer's race. Rather, it was how racial categories—the rules of race—pushed the man and his descendants, and how they pushed back. In researching her genealogy, she learned that “you don't have to be rich to pick up all of the Southern charm and ideas.” When she informed her mother about Jordan Spencer, the elderly woman got very upset. “She said, ‘Your daddy would roll over in his grave if he knew that you said something like that,' ” Freda remembered. “Allegedly, someone in the neighborhood must have called him ‘negro' or something like that, and I think he bloodied their nose for it.” As a boy, Freda's father intuitively understood that the Spencers would always be accepted as white as long as they regarded any suggestion otherwise as an insult. Freda Goble has begun to understand the color line as it has always functioned—in terms of racism, not race; hierarchy as opposed to heredity; barriers instead of blood.
¹²

Other descendants of the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls have shared Goble's insight, as revelations about African ancestry opened up a world that might have been. Isabel Wall Whittemore, Thomas Murphy's first cousin, was sixty-five when her daughter called nearly ten years ago with exciting news about a genealogy project and a man named O.S.B. Wall. “My kids all thought it was cool—they were ecstatic,” Whittemore recalled, but she found herself inexplicably dumbstruck. “The only ancestry I knew supposedly came from England and Ireland and Scotland,” she said. She did not tell her husband because, in her words, “I thought he would lose love for me.” But almost immediately she asked herself, “What's it to be ashamed about, Isabel?”
¹³

It is a question that Isabel continues to ponder. Knowing full well that she had no reason to feel ashamed, she wondered instead why such feelings came so reflexively. Now in her mid-seventies, slowed by illness and the pain of her husband's death, she has contemplated her life and family and everything her mother ever said about her childhood. “Most families have one skeleton in the closet. My family has more skeletons than they have living bodies,” Isabel said. “It's amazing . . . I don't know whether
enigma
is the correct [word], but there is mystery to it. There's mystery, there's lies, there's violence . . . It's a big, big, big, big thing to chew over and swallow and try to understand.”
¹⁴

Isabel grew up on Cape Cod and speaks with a gentle Massachusetts accent. Until 2009 she lived in central New Hampshire in a white clapboard house, with a front room converted into a shop where a daughter sold tea to summer tourists who strayed from Lake Winnipesaukee. Sitting at her kitchen table in August 2008 and gazing out on the yard—regularly crossed by moose until a neighbor built a fence—she expressed pride in the accomplishments of O.S.B. and Amanda Wall, fascination with their world, and anguish about its rupture. For the first time in her life, Isabel felt pity for her mother, who was the little girl kicked out of the first grade in Washington, D.C., in 1909.

Isabel Whittemore also has thought about the lingering effects of her grandfather Stephen Wall's decision to pass for white. Beyond the downward social mobility—his white descendants have lived with less money, education, and influence than their black ancestors did—Isabel focuses most on the loss of a large, close-knit family. In nineteenth-century Washington the Walls and the Langstons lived next door to each other, siblings and cousins growing up together in a community that they had built. By comparison, Isabel's life has been marked by an abiding solitude. “When you're an only child, you feel very much alone . . . When I was small, I played by myself. You get hurt a lot as you get older, because you want to have friends,” she said. “I've always wanted family. I always envied large families, and that's why . . . I want to know more and more and more. I want to know all there is to know. I want to know I have a family back there. Wherever.”
¹⁵

“Wherever” can feel very far away, and to Whittemore the past has at times seemed impossibly remote. If anything, though, her story reveals its proximity. Isabel Wall Whittemore's name is not her only link to her family's history. She has O.S.B. Wall's strong chin as well as the same striking blue eyes, flair for the dramatic, and wry sense of humor as her forebears. She grew up with people who directly experienced the ordeal of passing for white. Her own mother could have explained what it was like to be expelled from school for being black, or to play with a doll on the witness stand while the District of Columbia school board scrutinized her appearance. As a young girl visiting Long Island in 1946, Isabel met her great-aunt, O.S.B. Wall's daughter, a woman who had grown up in the heart of black Washington during and after Reconstruction, lived in a home where Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony called, and received words of wisdom and encouragement from her uncle John Mercer Langston. Ultimately what makes Whittemore's family history so fascinating to her is not how alien it is to her experience but rather how tantalizingly close it is.

Other descendants have also felt history's insistent reach. It speaks to them directly, through dozens upon dozens of letters by Randall Gibson, his parents, and siblings that have remained in family hands for generations, stuffed into manila folders and envelopes. It survives in memory. Freda Goble grew up listening to her grandfather talk about living as a young boy with Jordan and Malinda Spencer in their mountain cabin, and several other Spencer descendants and Johnson County residents still repeat stories from people who knew Old Jordan, a man who has been dead one hundred years. Though the past may appear to be long gone, it continues to echo and haunt, intruding into the present and subtly shaping how people see themselves, their families, and communities. But the Gibsons, Spencers, and Walls never entirely accepted what the past demanded for them. Their histories reveal constant questioning, acts of interpretation and reinterpretation, stubborn assertions of will, and outright escape. More than anything, this is their legacy. They help us understand the rules of the past while insisting that we make our own.

I started thinking about the issues at the heart of this book nearly twenty years ago, and expressing my gratitude to all of the friends, family, teachers, colleagues, mentors, and organizations that have contributed to this project during that time is almost like writing another work of history. This book began with the aid of several generous fellowships. In 2003, when I was about to embark on a life of legal practice, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a fellowship to work on this project fulltime as an independent scholar. I thank Jane Aikin at the NEH for her support and the scholars who evaluated my fellowship application for changing the course of my life. The project was nurtured at crucial moments by the inaugural Raoul Berger-Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellowship in Legal History at Harvard Law School and the Samuel I. Golieb Fellowship in Legal History at New York University School of Law. I also benefited enormously from fellowships from the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, and Yale Law School. I presented portions of this book and received invaluable feedback at Vanderbilt, Boston University, NYU, Stanford, the American Bar Foundation/Illinois Legal History Seminar, and the annual conference of the American Society for Legal History.

Patient librarians and archivists at a number of institutions enabled me to research this book thoughtfully and thoroughly. I am indebted to the staffs of the Southern Historical Collection; Louisiana State; Tulane and the Amistad Research Center; the University of Mississippi; Duke; Virginia State; the University of Kentucky; Bowdoin College; the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University; the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina; the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland; Harvard's Law Library, Widener Library, Houghton Library, and Peabody Museum Archives; Manuscripts and Archives at Yale; the Filson Club Historical Society; the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; Old Courthouse Museum in Vicksburg; the Library of Congress; the National Archives and Records Administration; the Maryland State Archives; the Mississippi Department of Archives & History; the North Carolina Office of Archives & History; the South Carolina Department of Archives & History; the Washingtoniana Collection at the D.C. Public Library; the Louisiana Division of the New Orleans Public Library; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York; the Buchanan County Public Library in Grundy, Virginia; the Johnson County Public Library in Paintsville, Kentucky; and the Terrebonne Parish Main Library in Houma, Louisiana.

As I traveled north and south, the people and places in this book came to life through conversations I had and friendships I made with a group of people whose thoughtfulness, generosity, candor, and trust I will never forget. Understanding O.S.B. Wall, Jordan Spencer, and Randall and Hart Gibson, among others, would not have been possible without Linda Alexander, Calvin Beale, Danny Blevins, Lisa Colby, Gordon Cotton, Robert Denton Jr., Robert Denton Sr., Freda Spencer Goble, Thelma Denton Hancock, Ed Hazelett, Paul Heinegg, Jan Horne, Ginger Hunley, William LaBach, Val McKenzie, Sarah B. Morrison, Sir Thomas L. Murphy, Joe Pearce, H. Foster Pettit, Walter Preston, Hewey Purvis, Tommy Ratliff, Lowell Ed Spencer, Manuel Spencer, Ed Talbott, Valentine Van Zee, and last but certainly not least, Isabel Wall Whittemore.

At Vanderbilt University Law School, my home since 2007, I have been blessed with brilliant colleagues and a warm, welcoming community. In addition to generous funding from the Law and Human Behavior Program, the Constitutional Law Program, and the Dean's Office, I have had a wealth of superb readers, mentors, and friends. Without their support, this book would not have been written. Special thanks go to Mark Brandon, Ed Rubin, Gary Gerstle, Sarah Igo, Chris Guthrie, Kevin Stack, Lisa Bressman, and John Goldberg, as well as Frank Bloch, Rebecca Brown, Jon Bruce, Chris Brummer, Jim Ely, Tracey George, Nancy King, Liz Lunbeck, Alistair Newbern, Erin O'Hara, Bob Rasmussen, Jeff Schoenblum, Mike Vandenbergh, and Ingrid Wuerth. Vanderbilt's librarians and library staff have spent nearly four years helping me track down hundreds of books, statutes, and hearing transcripts, as well as the weather in eastern Kentucky on May 4, 1912. My sincere thanks go to Jo Bilyeu, Peter Brush, Martin Cerjan, Michael Jackson, Stephen Jordan, Jim Kelly, Linda Tesar, Bill Walker, and especially Mary Miles Prince. For terrific research assistance, I thank Benjamin Berlin, Kathleen Gilchrist, William Hardin, Shaina Jones, Matthew Koreiwo, Lauren Lowe, Jacob Neu, and Steven Riley. For miraculous feats of administrative assistance, I thank Brandy Drinnon, and I am also grateful for the work of Christie Bishop, Marita Bush, and Sue Ann Scott. Grace Renshaw has been very helpful with publicity and communications. Stephen McElroy and Scott Nelson provided crucial technical support.

Before this project was a project, I had teachers who opened up new worlds to me. I thank Steve Biel, Larry Buell, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Karl Guthke, Jeff Melnick, Peggy Pfeiffer, Tom Siegel, and Werner Sollors. My first sustained encounter with the complexity of the color line occurred in 1993 in South Africa, where I volunteered on a voter education project before the country's first “nonracial” election. It was an intense introduction to apartheid-era classifications, and my conversations there—especially with Thabo Manyoni, Cinque Henderson, and Natosha Reid—put me on a path that led to this book. Howard French, Jesus Sanchez, Janette Williams, Larry Wilson, and Dave Zahniser are dear friends who helped shape how I see the world and write about it.

At Yale I had incomparable mentors and untiring advocates in Bob Gordon, Harold Koh, Carol Rose, and Peter Schuck. I also thank Emily Bazelon, Lincoln Caplan, Crystal Feimster, Glenda Gilmore, and Mark Templeton for their guidance and support. My conversations with Daniel Markovits, absurd and profound, have been a great joy these last thirteen years. As a lawyer, I had the privilege of working with extraordinary judges and attorneys, including Dorothy Nelson and Rya Zobel, Michael Strumwasser, Fred Woocher, Kevin Reed, and Johanna Shargel, all of whom deepened my understanding of law and the lives lived in its shadow. In Boston I became a legal historian with the help of Charlie Donahue, Mort Horwitz, Christine Desan, Mary Dudziak, Pnina Lahav, David Seipp, Jed Shugerman, Michael Stein, and especially Ken Mack, who has been a friend and a reader of my work without equal. I was also lucky enough to belong to a writing group with Steve Biel, Jona Hansen, Jane Kamensky, John Plotz, Jennifer Roberts, Seth Rockman, Conevery Valenčius, and Michael Willrich, whose comments and suggestions from the start of the project to its completion were unfailingly insightful. I am particularly grateful to Jane for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript. At NYU I learned from some of the best readers and writers of legal history, including Richard Bernstein, Harold Forsythe, Dan Hulsebosch, John Phillip Reid, and especially Bill Nelson, who has been a mentor of boundless generosity to more than a generation of scholars. George Barnum, Randall Burkett, Vernon Burton, Rachel Cohen, Jane Dailey, Doug DeMay and Nell Ma'luf, Adam Feibelman and Cindy Gardner, Crystal Feimster and Dani Botsman, George Flautau, Laura Freidenfelds, Matthew Gilmore, Andrew Kent, Morgan Kousser, Brian Kraft, Joe Mathews, Mary Gorton McBride, Seth Mnookin, Nick Parrillo, Matthew Pearl, Zach Schrag, and Diana Williams were all helpful with research and publishing questions at various stages of the project. Chris Capozzola, Kristin Collins, Dan Hamilton, Alison LaCroix, and Brad Snyder are friends and colleagues who read portions of the book and have long been sources of ideas and advice; Matthew Lindsay read the entire manuscript and had excellent suggestions. John Donahue, Jeremy Hockenstein, and Ira Stoll have been my friends for more than twenty years, and it was always a pleasure to talk with them after a day of research or writing.