Chapter Four


Chicago

Although I talk with my mother often by telephone, I don't get back to Chicago to visit as often as I would like. Part of the reason for this is that my mother is an inveterate globetrotter. Even at the age of eighty, Mom will hop on a plane in a heartbeat. She visits my brother David and me in Boston at least twice a year. When my brother Stephen was working as a stockbroker in Thailand, Mom flew over to check out his place in Bangkok. When my brother Timothy's job took him to live in Tokyo, my mother flew over there to visit him. Twice. I, on the other hand, rarely leave home without a compelling reason. The more I tried to unravel the mystery surrounding my grandfather's resignation from the Labor Department, however, the more it seemed that a trip to Chicago would be a good idea.

Sitting with Mom in the kitchen of the three-story townhouse where my brothers and I had grown up, I wondered why I hadn't made the trip sooner. My mother was clearly glad to see me. Although gas was nearly four dollars a gallon, she happily drove me all over the city to see the significant locations in my grandfather's life. She took me past the University of Chicago Law School, where J. Ernest received his law degree. Passing the Gothic buildings that made up the central campus, I imagined Lucile and J. Ernest strolling through the quadrangle on their way to class, or perhaps courting on one of the park benches along the Midway. Twenty years later their oldest son, J. Ernest Jr., would also spend five years at the University of Chicago, never receiving a grade lower than B in any class.1

Leaving the campus, Mom and I drove through Washington Park and headed north along Martin Luther King Boulevard past the majestic townhouses where black folks of means had lived in the 1940s. The neighborhood had deteriorated significantly since then, but the gray stone houses still maintained an air of elegance. Turning onto Fiftieth Street, we drove slowly, taking in the sights, before pulling to the curb at the corner of Fiftieth and Wabash. Topped by a small steeple, the building that had once been St. Mark Methodist Church sat on the corner, facing a vacant lot. St. Mark's congregation had long since moved away from the neighborhood, but the building was still being used as a church. Like the rest of the neighborhood it looked somewhat down on its luck, and much smaller than I had imagined.

In the early 1920s when J. Ernest and Lucile were courting, St. Mark had been the place to be. In my mind's eye I pictured what the church would have looked like on the day my grandparents got married. The pews would have been packed with church folk dressed to the nines. There would have been ushers wearing white gloves and black suits to show you to your seat. There would have been women decked out in their finest furs and most outrageous hats. But the thing that would have really set the congregation talking that day was the couple's intellectual brilliance. During a typical wedding ceremony, the minister reads the vows first and then says to the bride, then the groom, “Repeat after me.” But J. Ernest and Lucile dispensed with the usual prompting and recited their wedding vows entirely from memory. As they filed out of the church that day, Chicago's black bourgeoisie would have had no doubt that they had just witnessed the union of an extraordinary couple.2

My mother's father and Lucile's father had both served at St. Mark during their time as Methodist ministers. When Mom's father led the church for three years in the late 1930s, the family lived around the corner on Fiftieth Street. After gazing at the church for a while, Mom and I went to look for her childhood home. Like many of the other houses on the street, it had been torn down. Only an empty lot now overgrown with weeds and littered with trash marked the spot.

Next, Mom drove me past Provident Hospital, where I was born. When the distinguished black surgeon Daniel Hale Williams had helped to found Provident in 1890, blacks could not always receive service in white hospitals, nor could black doctors easily practice there. In 1952, when I was born, my grandfather was a member of Provident's board of trustees. Mom remembers that J. Ernest arranged for her to have the best possible treatment there, including her own private suite. Although many black hospitals in other cities have closed their doors since the coming of integration, Provident Hospital continues to remain open, a reminder of the clout, wealth, and voting power of Chicago's black community.

Turning south on Cottage Grove Avenue, we crossed under the tracks of the “L” train at Sixty-third Street and made a left on Sixty-seventh Street toward Evans Avenue. The modest three-story brick home where J. Ernest and his family lived for over thirty years sat in the middle of the block on a small lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Next to the house stood a single-car garage with a long driveway.

As my mother and I pulled up to the curb, I remembered that Daddy had driven my brothers and me past this house a few times when I was a little girl. He'd never really made too much of it. I suppose in his own way, he'd been taking a trip down memory lane, just as I was doing now. Dad had been dead for twenty-four years, but in that moment I missed him terribly. “Here I am, Daddy,” I said to myself. “I've come to find out about J. Ernest and about our family.”

Mom and I parked and got out of the car.

“Which one was Daddy's room?” I asked her. She pointed to the second floor of the house, where a small dormer window covered by a striped awning overlooked the street. “What's it like inside there?” I asked her. She shrugged.

“It was OK. Not the fanciest house but a nice house. There used to be a little yard with a tree in it around back. I'm going to take a look.”

As Mom headed off down the block to inspect the rear of the house, I stood looking up at the small dormer window, thinking about my father.

In the 1930s when my dad was growing up, Chicago's neighborhoods were as segregated as those of any city in the Deep South. At the time, the public schools on the city's predominately black South Side were in terrible shape. Even when compared with the inferior schools reserved for black children in other large northern cities, Chicago public schools fared poorly. My mother had been an “A” student at Farren Elementary School when she lived in Chicago. But when her family moved to New York in 1940, Mom instantly found herself two full grade levels behind the rest of her classmates.

J. Ernest and Lucile knew only too well that a poorly educated black child had little chance of success in life. They were determined not to allow the Chicago public school system to hamstring their children. Powered by the belief that only exceptional people could escape the second-class status meted out to most blacks, J. Ernest and Lucile drove their children relentlessly. My grandparents had been math majors in college. They played math games with their three children at home, even when they were babies, and tutored them in reading. When it was time for the boys to go to school, the Wilkins children bypassed the nearby McCosh School. Instead, they were sent to Willard Elementary, where Lucile worked as a math teacher.

Chicago's segregated public schools were not equipped to handle the intellectual prowess of the Wilkins children. Unable to challenge them intellectually in any meaningful way, teacher after teacher simply skipped the boys on to the next grade. J. Ernest Jr. was the oldest of the three and set the pace for his two younger brothers. Always his father's favorite, J. Ernest Jr. possessed a genius-level IQ, got his PhD at age nineteen, and went on to study with Albert Einstein. John and Julian would have to rise to unusual heights simply to keep up. My father, who graduated from elementary school when he was eleven, was considered the “slow” one in the family.

The three boys competed fiercely among themselves for the approval of their parents. In every contest, no matter how small, everyone's self esteem was on the line. Even as an adult, my father could be brutally competitive. He always played to win and would sulk if he lost at anything, even if it was only a bowling match with us kids.

Only sixteen months apart, my father and John each graduated from Wendell Phillips High School at age fourteen and were enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in Madison one year apart. Looking at the picture of his freshman class, I am struck by how lonely my dad and his brother must have been. The only black students in a sea of strapping white farm boys, Julian and John would have been out of place even if they had been eighteen. I can't even begin to imagine what it must have felt like to have your first collegiate experience at fourteen, at a virtually all-white campus, miles from home. In the picture Julian and John stand in separate rows, frail, somber, and unbelievably young. They may have felt alienated and overwhelmed, but the two Wilkins brothers had each other.

In the pressure-cooker environment of their home, as boys among the college men at Wisconsin, and then as roommates at Harvard Law School, the two brothers stood together against the world. To his dying day, I don't believe there was anyone my father loved more than his brother John. Years later, when a stroke disabled John in San Francisco, my father wrote him every day from Chicago. John's widow, Constance, tells the story that, as kids, John and Julian had a nightly ritual in the room they shared. After the lights went out, one of the boys would throw a shoe at the other. Then the other one would throw it back. Every night for fourteen years—two shoes, two brothers. This was probably the closest they could come to expressing the intense love they felt for each other.3

Love was definitely at a premium in the Wilkins household. J. Ernest did not become the phenomenal success he was by going easy on himself in any way. His path had been arduous, and he was well aware of the fine line society drew between success and failure for black men. It was important to be not merely adequate in life but impeccable. Both Aunt Constance and my mother described J. Ernest's criticism of his boys as “unrelenting,” “harsh,” and “extreme.” Even when they had grown to adulthood, J. Ernest rode his boys hard.

When John and Julian joined the family law practice after graduating from Harvard Law School, J. Ernest hectored them frequently. “You just don't think,” he would thunder, looking over a brief they had prepared. “What were you thinking!”⁴

Intensely concerned with maintaining the good name and the high regard in which he was held, J. Ernest policed himself and his family ruthlessly for any cracks in their perfect façade. Life was full of pitfalls. One could not be too careful.

“Yep. The yard's still there, but the tree looks awful.” Back from her stroll around the block, my mother's voice jolted me out of my reverie.

“What was it like for my dad growing up here?” I asked her.

Mom reflected for a moment. “Lucile and J. Ernest were hard on their children, Carolyn. Your father never felt he was bright enough or good enough to suit either one of them. J. Ernest was very critical. I can't really say much more than that.”

While we'd been driving around that afternoon, Mom had regaled me with story after story about her childhood on Fiftieth Street. The time some tough kids threatened to beat her up after school and her big brother Paul had to walk her home. The time she was scratched by a rabid cat from the house next-door and her arm swelled up “as big as a balloon.” The time Captain Dyett, who had taught Nat King Cole at DuSable High School, suggested that her brother John learn to play the French horn, starting him on a lifetime career in music.

However, when I asked Mom to tell me stories about my grandfather, she became strangely reticent. My mother is a woman of the “Old School.” She would never come straight out and criticize anyone. She had always taught us when we were growing up, “if you can't say anything good, it's best not to say anything at all.” I could see she was doing her best to stick to that philosophy.

Later that afternoon, however, as we relaxed over platters of fried chicken and waffles at a South Side eatery, I asked her again about J. Ernest. Maybe it was the homemade gravy, or the candied yams that came as a side dish? Whatever the reason, Mom was now willing to talk about the past.

In December 1950 when my parents got married, my mother had been halfway through her last year of graduate school at Smith College. The wedding had been on Christmas Eve, and the couple had only a few days to spend together before my mom returned to college in Massachusetts. Since J. Ernest and Lucile would be away on vacation for a few weeks, my parents decided to save money. Instead of going to a hotel for their honeymoon, they would stay at my grandparents' home on Evans Avenue. To mark the beginning of his married life, my father had purchased a brand-new bedroom set and installed it in his old bedroom.

My mom recalls that it had been a bitter winter. On the second or third day after the wedding, Chicago was hit by a major snowstorm. Mother was distinctly not pleased when J. Ernest and Lucile called late the following night to announce that they had returned to Chicago several days earlier than anticipated. Mom was even less pleased when J. Ernest and Lucile demanded that my father, honeymoon or no honeymoon, drive to the airport immediately and pick them up.

The exact words spoken between my mother and father upon receiving this summons have been lost to history. But my father was nothing if not a dutiful son. He got up from his honeymoon bed, put on his overcoat and galoshes, shoveled a foot of snow from the driveway, carefully eased the car out of the garage and onto the street, and drove off to Midway Airport to pick up his parents. But he was not quite careful enough. My mother recalls that Dad somehow broke one of the side mirrors on the car that night. And in a voice still shaking with indignation after nearly sixty years, she told me, “And do you know J. Ernest and Lucile made your father pay for the repairs. Can you imagine!”

My grandfather had had to pinch pennies his whole life, working his way through high school, college, and law school and doing whatever odd jobs came his way. Although he had successfully lifted himself into the ranks of the middle class by 1950, money remained important to J. Ernest. His life growing up poor in Farmington, Missouri, had taught him that people who could hold on to their money would have the ability to control their own destiny, while those who threw money away frivolously would have nothing left for a rainy day.

When the army drafted his eldest son and sent him to Tuskegee University to teach pre-flight math to the famous Tuskegee airmen, J. Ernest made sure that Junior sent home a detailed accounting of his daily expenses at the end of every week. Although his son was now a college professor and a grown man with his own paycheck, J. Ernest needed to be sure that Junior was not frittering his money away.5 J. Ernest believed that those without money were destined to be forever at the beck and call of others. Among his daughters-in-law, my grandfather's cheapness was legendary.

When J. Ernest went to work in Washington in 1954, he and Lucile sold their Evans Avenue home, though the couple continued to spend their vacations in Chicago. According to Mom, they did not want to spend the money it would cost to stay in a hotel. J. Ernest and Lucile expected my parents to put them up for the duration of every visit. Mom recalls one sweltering August in particular, when J. Ernest and Lucile descended on the house and stayed for several weeks. While they were in town, my grandparents' many friends and acquaintances would stop by, and my mother, pregnant with David and with three-year-old me in tow, was expected to entertain the lot.

“Just imagine, Carolyn. There was no air conditioning then. J. Ernest and Lucile would sit in the front room with the windows open getting a nice cool breeze while I was cooking and cleaning in the kitchen, pregnant, and with a three-year-old child!”

“Didn't they ever offer to help?” I asked.

“Not once,” Mom replied. “They were the Wilkinses, after all. All of Chicago fawned over them and they felt entitled.”

The situation eventually came to a head when J. Ernest, unbeknownst to Lucile, slipped Mom a hundred dollars (a lot of money in 1955) to buy herself a dress. Mom, surprised and pleased, mentioned the gift to Lucile who, my mother remembers, “hit the roof.” Whereupon Mom told Lucile that she regarded the couple's summer-long visit as a “serious imposition.” Whereupon Lucile reported Mom's remarks to J. Ernest and thus created a major full-blown family brouhaha.

My father, caught between his indignant wife and his domineering mother, refused to take sides. As he would often do when family situations became too emotionally difficult, Dad simply ignored the entire controversy.

“Wilkins men don't stick up for their women,” Mom told me, shaking her head. “That's why I had to stick up for myself. If I didn't say something, no one else was going to.”

My mother took another bite of fried chicken, her mind still turning over events more than fifty years in the past.

“Lucile was some kind of bigwig on the Methodist women's board, and she was always traveling to conferences and so on. Well, often before she was due to travel, she'd ‘get sick.’ She'd take to her bed, and I'd have to go out to their house and cook and clean for them. And then, soon as it was time for her to leave, she'd recover miraculously. She'd be out of the house and gone. That Lucile. She was some piece of work.”

I had known for some time that my mother had not been a big fan of my grandmother. But what I really wanted to know was whether she had ever heard any family discussions about J. Ernest's position at the Labor Department. If it was true that my grandfather had been forced out of his job, perhaps the blow had not come all at once? Perhaps there had been signs? Perhaps J. Ernest had talked things over with his sons, all of whom were adults with successful careers of their own in 1958? I asked Mom about it.

“Oh no,” she told me. “He never said a word. Your father and I didn't know a thing about it until J. Ernest was fired.”

“He was fired?” I asked her.

“Well, he left, however you want to put it. I found out about it by reading the papers like everyone else.”

Maybe Mom was holding out on me? Surely an event of this magnitude would have at least been mentioned around the family dinner table?

“Well, what about after he resigned?” I pressed her. “Didn't anyone in the family talk about it? It must have been a terribly stressful time for him.”

“No, Carolyn, I'm telling you. J. Ernest never said a word. And your father never said a word.”

“Well, do you think the stress of being forced to resign killed him? You know he died almost three months after his resignation.”

“Could be, Carolyn. He'd just come home from a trip the night he died. He was alone, you know. Lucile was away at some conference or other. The neighbors noticed that the lights in his house had been on all night, so they called the police. When the officers arrived, there was J. Ernest dead on the floor, surrounded by open suitcases. He'd had a hemorrhage, and there was blood everywhere. And it was your father who had to make the trip down to Washington in the dead of winter to identify the body.”

“And how did Daddy take it?” I asked.

“Well, Carolyn, Wilkins men do not talk about their feelings. He never cried or anything like that. Not at his father's funeral, and not at his mother's either.”

The inability to express or cope with emotion seemed to be a trait shared by all three of J. Ernest's sons. There was some kind of emotional disconnect that rendered them incapable of facing their own emotions or the emotions of others. When it came to expressing any kind of emotion, my father had been completely blocked. He had never been able to bear discussion of any personal issues. He was known to walk out in the middle of any conversation that threatened to get even a little emotional. All three of the Wilkins brothers were like that. I began to suspect that perhaps this emotional disconnect was a behavior they had learned from their own father. Although my grandfather was described by the press as “modest,” “self-effacing,” “unassuming,” and “soft spoken,” family members who knew him best used different words to describe his personality, words such as “pompous,” “punctilious,” “humorless,” even “cold.”

At least in the eyes of his daughters-in-law, J. Ernest had been a tightly self-contained man who was ruthlessly critical of himself and others. Of course, my mother and Aunt Connie were much younger than my grandfather when they knew him. His peers were now long gone, so there was no way to know if J. Ernest had unbent a bit more around people his own age. From what my mom told me, however, this didn't seem likely. Although Chicago's black bourgeoisie lionized J. Ernest he seemed to have had few, if any, confidants.

On my way back to Boston in the plane the following afternoon, I mulled over what I had learned about my grandfather during my Chicago trip. I was still in the dark on the subject of his resignation, but I had acquired some useful insights into his personality. Pulling down the tray table from the back of the seat in front of me, I opened up my diary and began a new list of research questions.

What exactly caused J. Ernest to resign his Labor Department position?

Why had he not told his sons about what he was going through during this crucial period in his life?

Why had he been so emotionally distant, even from the people he loved the most? This inability to address emotional issues was a trait he had passed on to all his sons. Had J. Ernest inherited this emotional disconnect from his own father?

As I wrote out these questions, I realized that in all the profiles, interviews, and bios I had seen so far, J. Ernest had never given his parents more than a cursory mention.

What had J. Ernest's relationship with his own father been like?

As the plane started its descent into Boston's Logan Airport, I remembered a story that Aunt Marjory had told me years ago.