The Chronicle kept copies of its old issues stacked in a basement room. An old woman named Ethel Cane zealously guarded this room. You didn’t dare go near it, much less enter it, without Ethel’s permission. Most people said she’d been here before the building was built—that it was actually built around her. That could’ve been true. Ethel might’ve well been one of the people whose homes were torn down in the name of progress. Not long after I joined the paper, she told me, “Honey, this is my spot and I ain’t gonna leave it.”
I took her some coffee. “How ya doin’ Mrs. Cane? I brought a little joe for you.”
She accepted the cup with a suspicious eye. “What d’you want? You don’t never come down here if it ain’t for something.”
“Course not. I wouldn’t waste your time—or mine.”
She chuckled and sipped. “Well, I got to say, you sure do know how to make this nasty brew taste like something. What kind of something, I ain’t gonna say.”
I ignored that. “So Mrs. Cane, I need to look up a party that happened back in ‘23.”
“Now, why would you want to do that?” She was nothing if not nosey. “You ‘bout to rock somebody’s boat, huh? ‘Bout to do a Lanie-Lanie on ‘em.”
She’d come up with that term and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what it meant.
“Just doing my job,” I said, “asking questions.”
“Honey, you got a twinkle in your eyes that’s brighter than Broadway, and it says you’re on to something. Whoever you’re after, they’d better start running.”
I repressed a smile.
She took another sip. “So tell me again, who can I help you do a Lanie-Lanie on today?”
Not twenty minutes later I had confirmation of what Beth said. Back in ‘23, the Chronicle didn’t do full coverage of black society or its parties, but it did run small pieces once or twice a week, especially when the story involved meetings between the socially or politically significant. Such was the case in September of ‘23. Katherine Goodfellowe and Eric Alan Powell had indeed thrown a party and one of their guests was a man named Sexton—Sexton A. Whitfield.
Whitfield was a prominent Republican, but not just any prominent Republican. He was the Collector of Internal Revenue for the Third District of New York County and that made him very prominent indeed.
The sixtyish Whitfield was also self-educated and self-made. He had an impressive history of appointments, from private secretary of New York State’s treasurer, to chief clerk in the State Treasury to supervisor of Accounts for the New York Racing Commission. He was on a first name basis with religious leaders, judges, the mayor’s staff and Mayor Jimmy Walker himself. He had “friends” everywhere.
Whitfield had certainly used his influence to achieve a lot of good. Thanks to his direct intervention, more colored had been appointed to better-paying city and federal positions than ever before. If you needed coal in the winter, medicine for a Harlem clinic or books for a classroom, Whitfield was the man to see.
But if you crossed him, or criticized one of his allies, you were dead meat. A master of Machiavellian maneuvers, Whitfield moved silently and struck swiftly. He deserved his reputation as being cool, calculating and occasionally vindictive.
People were still talking about the Hamilton incident, five years after the fact. Edward H. Hamilton was a militant socialist and leading Negro nationalist. Back in ‘21, he had a humble job as a clerk at the post office. He wrote a couple of letters to the New York Sun criticizing conservative civil rights leader Booker T. Washington. Whitfield owed his start to Booker T. and was fiercely loyal, so when he saw the letters he was furious. Whitfield picked up the phone and by the time he hung up, Hamilton was out of a job. Apparently, the postmaster general was one of Whitfield’s many “friends.”
He was a powerhouse, all right. Not good looking by any stretch of the imagination, but impressively clever, urbane and discerning.
I’d met him at one of Carl Van Vechten’s infamously smart dinner parties. Whitfield knew about international affairs, and could speak with eloquence and enlightenment on a wide range of matters. But his attitude toward women was primitive. Upon learning what I did for a living—and that no, I wasn’t interested in dating him—he lectured me on how women belong in the kitchen, that American women don’t know how to appreciate their men and that the so-called ‘modern woman’ is simply a woman who has lost her soul. A woman, he said, is meant to be taken care of, to be cosseted, coddled and protected—as long as she remembers her place. The moment she forgets it, he said, she must be reminded.
Could an accomplished man of his position really think that way? At the time, I couldn’t believe it, but now I had to wonder.
Whitfield wouldn’t have been interested in a woman who saw him for what he was, but what about someone like Esther? She was poor and struggling. By all accounts, she was trusting, often naive. He might’ve found her an easy target. What had he promised her? Help or rescue? Maybe even love? Had he promised her anything? Would he have even had to? Maybe she had simply hoped.
Dear, sweet Esther. The vicious scar that marred her face showed that she’d already once fallen prey to the charms of an abuser. If Whitfield had targeted her for seduction, where would she found the strength to resist him?
At some point, however, she must’ve realized that she’d stepped into a trap. She’d tried to walk away. Had he refused to let her? Could he, a man of his high station, have been involved in something so despicable as making her disappear?