Dad never told me that his maternal great-grandmother, Genevieve Coakley, worked as a seamstress in President Grant’s White House. For a man who lived to tell stories, outrageous stories, most of which revolved around the extraordinary achievements of generation upon generation of Hills, this was a rather curious omission. But there was a reason why the story of Genevieve Coakley was too outrageous for even Dad to talk about. It was too odious to bear repeating. After all, what dad in his right mind would tell his little boy that his great-grandmother, at sixteen, had been raped?
It gets worse. Apparently, Dad’s great-grandmother was raped by a white man who also worked in the White House. (The identity of the rapist is not known.) The rape resulted in Dad’s great-grandmother giving birth to a daughter, my dad’s grandmother Marie Coakley, in 1876. Marie was raised to believe that her grandparents were her parents, and that her sixteen-year-old mother was her older sister. She didn’t discover the truth until she was an adult.
“I am not a bastard child!” Marie was reported to have screamed, recoiling in shame, when one of her aunts finally confronted her with the truth.
How does a Black, teenaged girl born into slavery manage to get a job working in, of all places, the White House? Well, it certainly helped that Genevieve Coakley had an unusually enterprising father, Gabriel Coakley. He had petitioned for, and was granted permission to purchase, his entire family’s freedom in 1862 for $3,300, when Genevieve was a little girl. (Some of the more “lenient” slave masters allowed their slaves to work at paying jobs in the evenings and weekends, once their regular duties had been completed.) Barely two years into his new life as a free man, Gabriel Coakley, along with a small group of recently freed Blacks, somehow wrangled a meeting with President Lincoln. During the brief meeting, Coakley asked President Lincoln for permission to hold a fundraiser on the White House lawn to help fund the building of St. Augustine’s Church. President Lincoln granted this permission, allowing the event to take place on July 4. Both Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd, participated and made donations, inspiring everyone else to make generous donations as well. And so, beyond Gabriel Coakley successfully raising funds for what turned out to be Washington, D.C.’s first Black Catholic church, a significant connection was established between his family and the White House, which likely resulted in Gabriel Coakley’s daughter Genevieve working in the White House as a seamstress.
I don’t tell the story of how Dad’s grandmother Marie was conceived, or the cover-up that followed, to suggest that what happened in our family was, from a historical vantage point, particularly unusual. It’s hardly breaking news that the rape of Black females, whether slaves or several generations removed from slavery, was frequently committed by white males in power. (Despite former president Thomas Jefferson’s denials, DNA evidence confirms that Sally Hemings, a slave of Jefferson’s, bore six children fathered by someone in the Jefferson family. Recent research has all but proved that it was Jefferson himself.) I tell this story because the rape by a white male of a Black female, particularly, but not exclusively, when resulting in a pregnancy, can set off a ripple effect of shame that impacts generation after generation. This is certainly not to suggest that white-on-Black rape represents the only cause of racial self-loathing. Nor do I claim that the cover-ups, the secrets or the “passing” as white or, equally destructive, the unacknowledged, elevated social status of lighter-skinned Blacks at the expense of Blacks of darker complexions, can be traced solely to one heinous incident lurking, unacknowledged, in the past.
There is also another side to one’s contradictory feelings about being Black, whether light-skinned or dark-skinned or the thousands of shades in between. The best chance of surviving with any semblance of dignity, while protecting against future victimization, is to achieve. And to never stop achieving. Call it compensation, a way of establishing, as best one can, some distance from past humiliations, whether exacted the year before or generations past.
I am not so foolish as to suggest that this phenomenon is exclusive to my family, nor is it exclusive to any particular race. Nevertheless, this is my story, my family’s story, and race plays a huge role. With that in mind, I will skip a few generations, leaping from my great-grandmother Marie’s birth in 1876 to my father’s, a half-century later.
My dad was born in Independence, Missouri, in 1923. Officially christened Daniel Grafton Hill III, in order to avoid name confusion he was nicknamed Buddy by his maternal grandfather, Dr. Thomas W. Edwards. The nickname proved prescient; from infancy on he remained fiercely loyal to his sisters, appointing himself, frequently to their annoyance, their protector and comrade. His unflagging devotion to his family, combined with what his youngest sister, Doris, characterized as his “great, spontaneous sense of humour,” meant the nickname stuck with him for the rest of his life.
My dad’s paternal great-grandfather, Richard Hill, had been born a slave in Maryland, but in the late 1800s managed to buy freedom for himself, his wife, Demias Crew, and their family. Daniel Hill I, my dad’s grandfather, was born into freedom a few years later. The youngest of ten children, he was still a toddler when his mother died, leaving his overwhelmed father little choice but to send young Daniel to live with a white Quaker family. The practice of Black parents shipping one of their young children off to live with a “benevolent” white family was common at this time, as it afforded the Black child a valued opportunity to enjoy the advantages of a solid education, something that would have otherwise been unattainable. Daniel’s departure was unusual in the sense that white families preferred taking in girls rather than boys, for the reason that Negro girls were viewed by whites as more acceptable and less threatening than their brothers. Young Daniel, however, more than earned his keep while growing up with his adopted Quaker family, taking on the lion’s share of the household chores and earning top grades in high school and later at Storer College in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Upon graduating from Lincoln University he became a minister at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Baltimore.
My grandfather was the second Daniel Grafton Hill (Dan II, as I’ll call him), and, determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, he also became an AME minister, eventually getting his doctorate in sacred divinity and serving as the dean of the School of Religion at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
My grandmother, May Louise Edwards, came from a prominent Catholic family that included doctors and dentists. Belonging to the small class of Black professionals was of utmost importance to May’s parents, as it was a rare and prestigious position for Black Americans. All the more reason for May’s mother, Marie, to make sure that the shameful (and damaging) details of her parentage would never come to light. Anxious to ensure that her children not do anything to jeopardize their upper-class status, Marie made every effort possible to steer them clear of middle-class or lower-income Blacks, while encouraging them to interact with lighter-skinned, bourgeois-leaning Negroes. Marie’s obsessive class consciousness all but derailed my grandmother May’s marriage to the much darker skinned Dan II, who came from an “undesirable” (as in middle-class) family. In the long run, however, Marie’s dramatic interventions made my grandparents all the more inseparable. Even the story of how they were introduced is the stuff of old-fashioned, sepia-toned movies.
“When I met your grandfather he looked so handsome and dignified in his World War I officer’s uniform,” Grandma May always told us, implying that this was the way Granddad was dressed the first time the two of them met. But May had been introduced to my grandfather once before when he’d dropped by her house to meet up with one of her brothers. Since he wasn’t in military uniform that first time, he barely made an impression. When Dan appeared at May’s house the next time outfitted in full military regalia, she never suspected that this dashing display was for her benefit. This time May was smitten. That Dan II was an officer, a highly esteemed achievement for a young Negro at that time, undoubtedly added to his regal bearing.
As for Dan II, he always swore that “I fell in love with your grandmother the moment I saw her. And I’ve loved her ever since.” It came as little surprise that he said those same words during their sixtieth anniversary celebration; everyone knew that this was one of the few stories Granddad didn’t alter with each telling.
“Oh shush,” May would always whisper with a bashful smile in response to Granddad’s romantic outpouring. A glance at any of Granddad’s letters to May, written when he served in France as a second lieutenant during World War I, exemplifies both his love for his young bride and his droll humour. “Dearest Little Girl,” he wrote in August 1918:
I have been able to visit the post office daily only to find nothing from the States. I guess there is mail here somewhere for me but as usual there often happens to be a tie-up at one of the bases; then again a Deutsch submarine gets in a lucky shot occasionally and thereby sends a few loving letters to the bottom to be censored by “sea-weed” and “sharks”… I am just about as crazy as I can be to hear from you and the home folk … my opportunities [to write] will decrease in the future, but you must never weary or despair of hearing from your boy… Take good care my little girl, May, my wife.
Your boy, Dan
Whenever my dad told me stories about his parents, he tended to spare the mushy stuff and cut right to the heart of the action: “My poor mother! Right after she eloped with my father he was shipped off to fight the Germans in World War I. He killed a lot of enemy soldiers in close quarters, in dagger-to-dagger combat.”
“That’s enough, Dan,” Mom would interject, steering the subject to something more child-friendly. “Did you know, children, that when your grandfather was in the war your grandmother May graduated from Howard University with a degree in English literature? She had to keep her marriage a secret or Howard University wouldn’t have allowed her to continue her studies.”
Tales of Grandma’s university triumphs didn’t stand much of a chance next to Granddad’s fight-to-the-death battles in the trenches of France. Especially since the number of “German victims” who died at Granddad’s hand kept changing each time Dad told us these blood-and-guts stories. The closest Granddad himself came to disclosing what really happened in those trenches was in the last years of his life when he’d cry out each night in his dreams, reliving whatever unspeakable horrors he’d experienced.
Dad never explained that his parents eloped because May’s parents profoundly disapproved of Granddad, or rather what Granddad represented. Had they known of their daughter’s intention to marry a non-Catholic “cursed” with a complexion several shades darker than May’s, they would have done everything in their power to have prevented it. Dan II returned from fighting overseas only to find himself immersed in another, less noble battle: trying, against overwhelming odds, to win his in-laws’ blessing. Still weak from being gassed by the Germans during his service—he’d spent weeks in a Paris hospital recovering—this was hardly a welcome homecoming. Anxious to appease his in-laws, he promised never to become a Methodist minister like his father, a promise he promptly rescinded once his strength (and resolve) returned.
This broken promise was quickly and cannily exploited by May’s mother, who pressured May to leave her minister husband, going so far as to offer her gifts and large sums of money if she capitulated. May, frustrated by the constant moving (an occupational hazard for a rookie Methodist minister), gave in to her mother’s bribes a few times, taking the children and moving back to Jersey City to live with her parents. But these separations never lasted long. One day, tired of being caught in a tug-of-war between mother and husband, May stormed out her parents’ door for the last time, declaring, “I’m taking my children and moving back in with my ‘heathen husband.’” From then on, Dan II and May stayed together, and, from all I could gather (first-hand, as well as from Dad’s innumerable stories, cross-referenced with scores of family letters), they enjoyed an unusually affectionate and loving marriage.
My father grew up in a strict, protective and extremely close-knit household. Since their father was a minister, Dad and the other children rarely had to be reminded that they had a reputation to uphold. Dad had three sisters: Jean was the oldest, Margaret came second, and Dad next, followed three years later by Doris. The children grew up in the 1920s and 1930s, through America’s worst economic turmoil and depression. Fortunately, thanks to their parents’ higher education and tireless work ethic, they were largely shielded from the blatant racism and grinding poverty that faced so many Black Americans. The neighbourhoods the children grew up in were well integrated, with surprisingly little in the way of outright racial tension. “There wasn’t a lot of poverty in the communities we were raised in,” Doris explained. “You didn’t see street people. They had people who rode the rails … we used to call them tramps … but among those there were not many Blacks.” But relative economic stability did not always spare Blacks from what could be the most insidious racism of all: that from within their own community. When Dan II was transferred to minister in Portland, Oregon, the all-Black congregation was reluctant to accept him because he was so dark. Only when his far fairer-skinned wife joined him a few weeks later did the church eventually come to open their hearts to Dan II.
During America’s post–World War I period, opportunities for a Black person to obtain a higher education were extremely limited. Either you were forced to drop out of school at an early age to find work in order to support your family, or you were denied entry into college by racist admission policies. If you managed to make it through high school and be accepted into university (usually a Black college), chances were that the tuition fees would be unaffordable. Dan II and May were among the exceptions to this rule, part of what the Black sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois termed “the talented tenth.” Their good fortune made them all the more determined to remain low-key and down to earth. They considered getting decked out for Easter not only pagan but downright cruel, as it would serve to remind people from more modest backgrounds of their economic struggles. Materialism was frowned upon. “It was a simpler life back then,” Doris recalled wistfully. “We never wanted for anything, but possessions were not so important. We had what we needed and were content with that. Coming out of the Depression, we, and everyone we knew, lived frugally.”
Each child was assigned certain chores, done before they were allowed any “social time.” Saturday mornings were spent house cleaning, with the understanding that—if and when the mopping, sweeping and washing were up to snuff—they could attend the afternoon matinee, a favourite family activity. The many chores weren’t divided along gender lines, which left my dad to excel as the most gifted cook and gardener of the children. May and Dan, while sharing few of the sexist attitudes of this era, nevertheless had one hard and fast rule concerning Hill males and females: “The gentlemen always protect the women of the family.”
The high point of the day was dinnertime. After leading the family through prayer, Dan II would entertain everyone with lively stories about some of the characters in his church. “Today my temperamental church organist announced she wasn’t in the mood to perform for the Lord,” he’d begin. “I had to scramble from the pulpit to the pipe organ so I could accompany the choir, and then sprint back to the pulpit when the song was over to resume my service.” In between helpings of chicken and collard greens, the children got a sense of what was going on in the outside world: everything from politics to details of Dan II’s work, to May’s experiences as a social worker and board member for Planned Parenthood. (May’s work with Planned Parenthood caused more than a few people in the community to regard her as a woman who championed “casual relations.”) May, never one to shrink in the face of public opinion, insisted that the children embrace independent, progressive thinking, even if that invited the odd raised eyebrow.
Questions from the children were not only expected but demanded, with each child encouraged to express his or her own opinion on the various issues of the day, provided they could back it up with intelligent, cogent logic. Surprisingly, religion was a flexible topic, with the children encouraged to read about all kinds of faiths and, ultimately, form their own opinions about their spiritual direction.
Dan II’s strong presence in the community meant that there was always some member of the congregation looking out for his children. This proved to be something of a mixed blessing for my dad, as the people in the community—whom he referred to as “no-good, nosy busybodies”—never hesitated in reporting to his parents if there was the slightest cause for concern.
Punishment, when merited, came swiftly. My father, the most irrepressible and rambunctious of the children, received the bulk of the discipline. Dan II would take him into a room, close the door and commence with the spanking. Dad would start bawling before the first blow landed, not so much out of fear but to alert his sisters, knowing they’d quickly rally to his defence. The three of them would huddle against the door in the hallway, wailing at their father to stop. “Would you girls like some of the same?” Dan II would inquire as he walked out of the room, glaring down at his daughters, wiping his hands as if to cleanse them of the unseemly whomping he’d just laid on his son’s backside, the three girls scattering like frightened mice.
When Dan II moved his family to Denver, Colorado, his lungs, still compromised by the lingering affects of his wartime exposure to mustard gas, couldn’t adjust to the higher altitude. The decreased oxygen level at that elevation left him feeling as if he could barely breathe. His doctor told him his only chance of recovery was to leave the mountains for at least six weeks, or until his circulation improved. The Methodist bishop reassigned Dan II to a church in Kansas, where May’s uncle Jessie, who taught at the Black college there, agreed to take him in. But my dad refused to let his father leave without him. At three years of age his temper tantrums were already legendary; one of his most effective attention-getting tactics was to bang his head on the floor with such force that he’d frequently knock himself out. Unable to see his son so anguished, Dan II agreed to take his son to Kansas with him. Uncle Jessie provided much more than mere lodging for Dan II and his son.
“Uncle Jessie was able to talk to my father ‘man to man,’” Doris later disclosed, taking great pains to explain that Dan II, who’d been secretly suffering from postwar trauma (not a recognized disorder at this time), was able to confide in Uncle Jessie. It’s likely these “man to man” talks were the real cure Dan II needed. Six weeks later he returned home, never to suffer from the mountain air again.
Throughout the mid-twenties and early thirties, the Hill family moved frequently, as Dan II found himself constantly being reassigned to different churches in various small towns. “The one thing you can rely on in life is change,” Dan II would tell his children. Because the congregations in these towns couldn’t afford to contribute anything in the way of money to the church offering, Dan II would frequently supplement the family income by putting on concerts for the local community. Admission would be nominal: a nickel, or sometimes a loaf of bread, or a chicken.
Dan II, a splendid, self-taught musician who could play back on the church organ virtually any song he heard, usually performed alongside May, who was also an accomplished pianist and vocalist. Together they’d fill the church auditorium with uplifting Negro spirituals. Dan II would always add a little local spice by writing and performing humorous songs dealing with issues or gossip germane to his town and congregation, frequently improvising new lyrics. On many occasions, the resulting laughter would continue for so long that he’d be forced to kill time with a long harmonica solo. The people in these small towns, rarely exposed to concerts or shows of any kind, regarded the Hill concerts as major events.
As the Hill family continued to pick up and move, each new home became a meeting place, attracting people from every conceivable background. Dan II kept in contact with a wide variety of Howard University alumni, among them Black writers and entertainers who, being shut out of hotels and restaurants when travelling, would lodge with anyone who might have the room to take them in. This meant that on any given evening, Blacks travelling through the area might show up for dinner, lodge with the Hills for a day or two and then move on to the next stop. These visitors included Langston Hughes and the great lyric tenor Roland Hayes.
During the direst period of America’s Great Depression, parents with children also came knocking at the Hill door, begging for scraps of food. My young dad learned the art of making quickie peanut-butter sandwiches—handing them out to all takers under the protective eye of his mother.
Through the constant parade of people drifting in and out of Dad’s life as a boy came a powerful message: If you’re Black and educated you can rise above the barriers of racism and be anyone you choose to be. Conversely if you’re uneducated, you could well end up like one of those beggars, existing on handouts from strangers.
But generosity had its limits. When a thief started making off with the bottled milk that was delivered before sunrise to every front doorstep in the neighbourhood, Dan II decided to act. Early one morning, after staying up all night waiting in the darkened front hall, he spotted the culprit—a clinking, weighed-down potato sack slung over his shoulder—scooping the bottles of milk off the front porch. As Dan II flung open the front door, the thief scuttled across his lawn. After repeatedly warning the thief to stop or he’d shoot—whereupon the thief picked up the pace—Dan II squeezed the trigger of his World War I .45 pistol twice: Pop! Pop! Two shots, sounding like distant hand claps, were immediately followed by milk spilling out of the potato sack, and the thief sprawled on the front lawn traumatized but unharmed, howling out his surrender.
Emulating his father’s heroics, Dad decided to take up target practice in the basement with his own BB gun. One careless trigger pull resulted in all the basement windows being blown out, thanks to the wild ricocheting of the little bullets. Dan II chose to spare his son the usual beating and instead confiscated his BB gun.
But Dad’s predilection for mischief, the more devious the better, wasn’t easily discouraged. One night he decided his father’s pre-dinner prayer needed a little upstaging. After excusing himself to use the bathroom, Dad snuck into the living room and plopped a risqué recording entitled “A Preaching Blues” onto his parents’ Victrola. As the saucy double entendres tumbled out of the speakers, Dan II raced to the record player, snatched the “obscenity” off the turntable and smashed it to pieces.
Fortunately, Dad’s impossibly cheery, relentlessly funny nature saved him from staying in anyone’s bad books for very long. More than a few times, Dan II was seen winding up to give his son a stiff swat, only to pause in mid-strike in an effort to suppress a rising chortle. But while Dan II used his humour to defuse various community, church and household tensions, Dad’s humour was intended to produce precisely the opposite effect. Dad was looking to cause trouble: sprinkling a large dose of sneezing powder on his unsuspecting grade four classmates or stealthily dipping an unsuspecting girl’s pigtails into his inkwell. His teachers tended to overlook his pranks because, at Dan II’s insistence, Dad had been moved up two grades and was assumed not to have developed the maturity to match his intellect.
His parents knew that the most effective way to keep my dad out of trouble was to occupy him with chores. His favourite task was lighting the gas furnace in the church an hour before each service. One day when he was ten, he turned on the gas and waited too long to light the furnace. The furnace exploded, the blast hitting him square in the face and blowing him several feet in the air. Somehow, he was able to drag himself to his feet and stagger home, where his sister Jean took one look at him and fainted. Dad limped to the sink and dunked his entire face in cold water. This was not the accepted remedy back then, but it was a quick and effective treatment that saved his face from permanent disfigurement. Already, Dad was demonstrating quick thinking during a crisis far beyond his years.
Dad’s spunk never got in the way of his loyalty and affection for his sisters. He was especially fond and protective of the youngest, Doris, applying something of a double standard when it came to how he thought she should behave. After graduating from elementary school, Dad made a habit of dropping by to ask Doris’s teachers how she was getting along. The teachers, bemused that one of their most unruly students had recast himself as his little sister’s de facto parent, eventually told him to stop worrying, that Doris was making out just fine without his constant supervision.
Doris’s agreeable temperament held up surprisingly well under her big brother’s over-attentiveness. The upside was that he included her in everything: insisting to the disgruntled boys in the neighbourhood that she be allowed to participate in after-school touch football games and marbles competitions, and taking her by the hand to Saturday matinees. Indeed, Dad could go from tough to tender and back again within minutes. One weekend afternoon as the two of them were walking up the stairs of a movie theatre, a boy sneered at Doris, hissing, “Nigger.” Whoppp! Almost before the epithet had registered, the boy’s mouth was greeted by a hard and fast smack courtesy of Dad’s right hook. Bomp, bomp, bomp, the dazed boy tumbled down a few stairs, and Dad and Doris continued walking into the movie theatre as though nothing had happened.
Being ever watchful of Doris didn’t discourage Dad from inviting her to take part in some of his riskier excursions. By eleven years old, Dad had taken to sneaking out of the house to drive his father’s car in the middle of the night, at first limiting his travels to the backyard, where he could gradually get used to the feel of the clutch and the stick shift. Once he’d mastered this new skill, he patiently passed it on to eight-year-old Doris, sitting her on his knee so that her tiny arms could reach the steering wheel. In no time they were driving in tight little circles in the backyard. But as Dad’s confidence grew and he started taking the car for midnight spins around the block, Doris, game and impressionable though she was, refused to join him.
As the Hill children approached adolescence their individual characters became even more defined, their respective strengths subtly contributing to the collective personality of the family. Even though Dad may have never matched his eldest sister Jean’s academic excellence, Margaret’s impressive creative abilities or Doris’s musical gifts, he was the family spark plug: funny and fearless, dynamic and unpredictable.
While part of Dad’s spunk sprang from his genetic makeup, he was also finding his own way to rebel against the strict conformity of the intellectual, upwardly mobile Negro middle class. Some Black parents believed that in order to blend in and succeed in mainstream society, you had to out-white the whites: be more polite, more driven, more intelligent and educated, more punctiliously clean. There was always that nagging imposter syndrome tugging, lurking just beneath the skin. One crude act, misused word or lapse in manners, and you’d be seen for what you really were: a rag-clad, classless, dark-skinned interloper. At any moment, for any reason, you and your family could be hurled back to where you came from: some master’s plantation, or the White House working as a teenaged seamstress, at the mercy of powerful white men.
Certainly, the flawless behaviour demanded of the Hill children was not exclusive to upwardly mobile Blacks in the 1930s. But still, rules of etiquette in the Hill household were rigid to the extreme. There were to be no “boarding-house reaches”—stretching your arm across the table to grab the salt shaker; no “short stopping”—helping yourself to salt before passing it on; no singing or raised voices at the table or unseemly bodily noises of any kind; no “lazy man’s load”—carrying too many dishes from the dinner table to the kitchen sink to save subsequent trips; and absolutely no shows of gluttony. “My job is to nourish you, not to fill you up,” was May’s quick rejoinder should anyone dare to ask for a second helping. Evidently, too much of anything—food, clothes, material things or even attitude—revealed a weakness of character.
If Dad embraced his parents’ values and manner of thinking, he also felt the need, from time to time, to strike out against them. At first this was limited to shenanigans at home, but as Dad grew older, he began pushing the limits beyond the four walls of his house.
Dad’s best friend as a teenager was a boy nicknamed Mushmouth, due to his enormous lips. Mushmouth delighted in Dad’s daredevil impulses, constantly matching them and challenging Dad to up the ante. When the two of them turned sixteen, they frequently went out on double dates with various girls. If and when Dad’s behaviour and schoolwork met the family standard of excellence, his father would sometimes let him drive his car—a rare privilege for a Negro boy in his neighbourhood.
One Sunday morning, Dad dropped his father off at church with the understanding that he’d return to pick him up at the end of services. Unbeknownst to Dad’s parents, he and Mushmouth had a double date lined up and, armed with “daddy’s car,” they were determined to make the greatest possible impact on the two girls, whom they barely knew. After picking up their dates and cruising around town a few times, Dad, deciding the girls weren’t sufficiently impressed, ramped up the charm. After instructing Mushmouth to hand out a couple of cigarettes, Dad, with one hand on the wheel, turned his head to wink at the two startled girls in the back seat and gallantly offered to light both their cigarettes. When the girls’ looks of surprise turned to horror, Dad swung his head around just in time to see another car right in front of him. Ka-bang! He’d crashed his father’s car into another car stopped at a red light.
Mushmouth and the girls, unhurt and wanting no part of any messy consequences, scrambled out of the car and fled. The driver of the stopped car, incurring minimal damage and having no insurance, drove off. Dad’s father’s car, however, was destroyed, leaving Dad no choice but to abandon the vehicle at the side of the road and walk back to his father’s church. His father stood out front, waiting impatiently.
“Where did you park the car, son? Don’t dilly-dally,” his father asked, exhausted from a long day of leading services.
Dad’s punishment bore the markings of his father’s unassailable and, under the circumstances, remarkably even-handed logic. Not only were Dad’s driving privileges suspended indefinitely, he was not allowed to sit in the front seat of any car for an entire year.
Despite the Hill family’s relative middle-class comfort, there were always stinging reminders that as a Negro, you were a second-class citizen. An outdoor recreational pool was a stone’s throw away from where the family lived in Portland, providing welcome relief to all, seven days a week. All, that is, except Negroes, who were allowed to swim for only one hour a week in water that hadn’t been replaced for several days. Immediately afterwards the pool was drained and refilled so that the non-coloured could swim in water free of any “Negro contaminants.” At home, Dad’s capricious sense of fun at all costs, grating as it sometimes could be, provided his family with a welcome distraction from the shadowy unpleasantness, or worse, of the world beyond their four walls.
Inevitably, as Dad moved into his teenage years, his behaviour began to carry a whiff of rebellion, self-destruction and troubling indications of a rising temper. He was sucking up two packs of cigarettes a day and enjoying all-night drinking binges with his buddies. When he returned home in the early hours of the morning, his abstemious father would greet him at the front door and testy verbal exchanges would ensue. A few times they came close to blows, with May having to intervene and separate them.
One night Dad got so drunk that he passed out, and his friends, unable to revive him, deposited him like a sack of flour on his front porch, rang the doorbell and bolted. Dad’s father dragged him to his feet, slapped him awake and steered him into the foyer. Then he propped him up in front of the full-length mirror and forced him to take a look at himself.
“I want you to see just how pathetic you are. Anyone could take advantage of you in any way they see fit. You’re totally helpless, worse than a baby. You’re a disgrace.”
Dan II’s message rang out loud and clear. In the world that Dad would soon be venturing into, the worst thing that you could do was to leave yourself vulnerable, to be in any way out of control.
At seventeen, Dad left home to study at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he boarded with his father’s youngest brother, Joe, and his family. Lincoln, an all-Black school, had become a proud tradition for the Hill family, and the knowledge that both his father and grandfather had graduated from this highly regarded institution weighed heavily on my dad. To make things worse, his uncle Joe was a dean who taught English literature and was so caught up in his image as the erudite English professor that he was nicknamed, scornfully, “the Black Englishman.” Soon my dad would be stigmatized as “the professor’s boy.” Joe’s preening arrogance, combined with Dad’s parents’ expectation that he follow in the footsteps of other “Hill scholars,” proved all but intolerable for my father, as this, his first letter home from Lincoln in 1941, bears out.
I have come to the conclusion that I do not like the prevailing pressure. I would much rather be a student, just an average student whose uncle was not the dean of the university… I am even called by everybody the little Dean. I hope that I am not stepping out of line when I say this but when … [Uncle Joe] implies that I am stupid because I have not read Hamlet, I do not particularly like the remark … I am continually being reminded by everybody (and when I say everybody I mean everybody because there is not a single person on this campus that does not know me), that I am Dean Hill’s nephew and that I must get a straight A average … The main reason is because Uncle Joe is a very hard and heartless man. The other day [Uncle Joe] kicked a very good friend of mine out of the class and gave him an F for the day, simply because he did not have a necktie on. I must myself have a necktie on at all times, and I must walk on my toes or the balls of my feet in the house. He insists that I sleep too much, and that I should read some of Shakespeare’s plays instead of going to bed between 9–10–11 o’clock every night. He is trying desperately to make me a cultured, and refined man. I cannot whistle, sing crazy swing tunes, wear T-shirts, jeans, or lounge around. When I come home you will not know me.
If Dad had found the rigorous rules of the Negro bourgeois oppressive at home, what he encountered at Uncle Joe’s house was much worse. The usually winning aspects of his personality—endless enthusiasm, disarming (albeit irreverent) humour, unstoppable energy—were being met with scorn, and his intelligence questioned. No wonder he was awfully homesick for, as he wrote, his father’s “informality and joking manner, and the good old home atmosphere.”
Uncle Joe’s expectation that you were a loser if you didn’t excel academically wasn’t all that different from Dad’s parents’ views. But Dad’s parents constantly reassured him that he had the right stuff to succeed. Uncle Joe did the opposite, always suggesting to Dad that he was rather dim.
Despite doing well (if not breathtakingly so) in school, Dad’s intelligence was of a type that didn’t readily come alive in academic surroundings. It thrived in those many grey zones that resisted easy categorization. Dad’s smarts—alert to a fault and highly intuitive, imbuing him with a preternatural ability to read people while wisely pretending otherwise—weren’t readily measurable.
Uncle Joe’s strict manner and hostility towards Dad may have been a mask for Joe’s own personal problems. A secretly addicted gambler who had racked up enormous debts to the mob, Joe attempted to defraud the university in an effort to pay his debt. Shortly after my father returned home from Lincoln, Joe’s house was bombed and he and his family fled to Liberia—thanks to Dan II’s connections—until things settled down.
Had Dad been aware of Joe’s assorted transgressions he might have been less vulnerable to his uncle’s taunts. As it was, Uncle Joe managed to touch on Dad’s greatest fear, that maybe he wasn’t smart enough where it ultimately mattered the most: college and from there, the ever-competitive, ever-racist workplace.
The anguish that pours out of my father in the following letter to his dad speaks to an unsettledness that is universal to all teenagers.
I have not quite found myself as yet, if you know what I mean, I think I would like to [quit school and] work for a year in California [or] I could get a job working for the Matson Steamship Company as a cabin boy or a cook’s aide. The ships go to Samoa, the Fiji Islands, and the South Sea Islands. You know that I am going onto 18 and am fast becoming a man. You might think that all of this stuff I am writing is bunk, but before you do I urge you to think about me and see if you can’t remember what kind of boy I was. As you recall I was never a good student. I got along with people pretty well but I never was too serious about anything. I do not have a major at Lincoln because I am still confused about what I want to do, and what I want to become. At any rate, Dad, I do not want you to over estimate me and build yourself up and then get an awful letdown … If I do not make the grade it will not be because I did not try, but it seems to me that I put twice as much time on the subjects that the other boys seem to get with a snap.
Your son,
Buddy
Not only was Dad unsure of his place in the world, it was becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to gauge where the world, at large, was headed. While many Americans believed that they were safe from the conflicts and slaughter unfolding across the Atlantic (and Pacific), all that changed on December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
“The news knocked me off my feet, and took me completely unaware,” Dad began a letter to his father, written on the day of the attack.
Wait, I have just heard an open declaration of war by Japan against the U.S. and Britain. This mess is too darn close to our homes and loved ones. Listen Dad, I want to lay the facts down to you hard and cold … You cannot Tell What These Japanese might do. Right now our country is at war, and I am afraid that there might be a bombing of the pacific Coast. Prices will go sky High, and I do not want to be in the East when so much trouble is going on near my home … You can believe it or not, but this war is a very serious thing, and my business isn’t to be in school here, but to be at home with the rest of my family.
It’s a given that, as attached as he was to his family, Dad wouldn’t want to be away from them during the most catastrophic event of his life to date. But he was also looking for a way out of university. The Pearl Harbor bombings gave him the perfect excuse to drop out of school. Within weeks, he’d moved back home to live with his parents in Oakland, where he found work as a welder in the shipbuilding industry. The job was deemed vital to America’s war effort, and he could have easily avoided being drafted into the army so long as his foreman granted him the status of a “necessary worker.” But freed from the constraints of Uncle Joe’s rules and relieved to be out of the academic pressure cooker of Lincoln, Dad’s commitment to work was upstaged by his whirlwind social schedule. Dad’s new nickname was Party Boy, drawn from the new group he ran with, called the Red Wine Boys.
Dad repeatedly ignored warnings from his boss that he would lose his necessary worker status if he continued to miss work or show up late and badly hung over. As a result, he lost his special status and was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. He was eighteen years old.