CHAPTER 3

DRIFTWOOD

THE 1930S DID NOT GREET ETHEL PAYNE’S GRADUATING class with open arms. The fury of the Great Depression lashed Chicago’s South Side with devastating force. Merchants on State Street and Grand Avenue, at the center of Bronzeville, shuttered their storefronts, and the Binga Bank closed its doors. At the Royal Gardens Cabaret, where a jazz orchestra once wailed into the night, eight hundred men slept in long rows of army cots.

Like canaries in a coal mine, black workers were the first to feel the effects of the Great Depression. “It is well known that when an unemployment wave strikes the country,” warned the Chicago Defender in the early months of 1930, “race workers are the first and hardest affected, as many jobs which they hold ordinarily are taken from them and given to white workers.”

The Payne family was more fortunate than most. Ethel joined her brother doing clerical chores for an insurance company while her older sisters clung to their jobs in the schools and the youngest one toiled in a dress shop. Among African Americans in Chicago, nearly 60 percent of the men and almost 45 percent of the women were without work. But even holding jobs, the Payne family was destitute. By April 1931, the Chicago school system ran out of funds to pay its teachers. For the next two years, the two oldest Payne sisters received real paychecks only four months out of the year. The remainder of the time they were given scrip that they could redeem for eighty to ninety cents on the dollar, at least until the banks and stores lost faith in the IOUs and ceased accepting them.

But no matter how dire their circumstances, Bessie refused charity and remained determined to keep her family together and get her last child through school. She took on domestic work and turned their residence into a boardinghouse by stuffing the six children into two or three bedrooms. At every turn, she devised a way forward. Meeting as a council, the family decided to pool its resources so that the youngest child, Avis, could go to college. “So we would all save up,” Ethel said. “I would work or go work in people’s houses, clean, and I’d put aside a little money, maybe a dollar.” The funds, combined with a scholarship, sent Avis to West Virginia State University.

Bessie’s indomitable spirit remained an anchor for the children throughout the turmoil of the Great Depression. Even when bone-tired she never let up in providing structure and stability for her family. At night, when the children were at the dining room table finishing their homework, an exhausted Bessie would manage to call down instructions from upstairs.

“Bed the fire.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t forget to wind the clock”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t forget to empty the icebox pan.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As for herself, Bessie’s strong faith and her job as a Sunday-school teacher gave her strength to carry on. “My mother,” said Ethel, “was the most devout, religious person you’d ever want to meet. She just prayed, prayed, and prayed all the time.” The children found respite in the family’s abiding habit of reading. “This was our entertainment, as well as a broadening of education and culture,” said Thelma. “So if we were poor in purse, we had a wealth in books and an appreciation of the classics to an uncommonly high degree.”

At night the family took turns reading aloud from the Bible and treasures such as Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Alcott’s enduringly popular novel about four daughters growing up with a mother and a much-absent father mirrored Ethel’s own life. In the Payne family, Ethel was Jo March, a tomboy frustrated by social limitations, infatuated with reading, and driven ceaselessly to write. Marmee March, Jo’s mother, could well have been Ethel’s own mother, holding the family together through difficult times, providing unconditional love to her children, and dispensing sage counsel. Until the end of her life, Ethel said she could recite Little Women by heart, just as she never forgot her mother’s advice. “You may not have what you want or what you even need,” Payne said her mother used to tell her, “but always remember that using what you have to improve your mind is more important than material things.”

IN THE MIDST of the hard times, Ethel Payne pressed on with her education. She hoped to become a lawyer. “Just as I was fierce about protecting my brother, I had a strong, strong, deeply embedded hatred of bullies,” she said. “I just felt that if you’re strong, you had no right to pick on weak people.”

The odds, however, were stacked against her. Less than 3,500 of the nation’s lawyers were female. Few professional schools were open to African Americans. And she certainly did not have the kinds of grades a law school required. Undeterred, she entered Crane Junior College, which was near West Englewood. Open to African Americans, who made up 15 percent of its student body, Crane was a haven for low-income students who hoped to eventually enter the University of Chicago or Northwestern University. But Payne was soon bored. “I was just majoring in English and history, the routine things that most people did,” Payne said. “But I was always thinking of doing something else more creative.” That thing was writing.

When she began at Crane, Payne learned of a national essay contest for high school and junior college students sponsored by the American Interracial Peace Committee, a group of African Americans allied with the American Friends Service Committee and under the direction of Alice Dunbar Nelson, who had once been married to Payne’s favorite poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The essays, one to two thousand words in length, were to address subjects ranging from general ones such as “Youth Looks at World Peace” to rather specific topics like “Russia and China in Manchuria.”

Payne decided to enter the competition and submitted an essay about “Interracial Relationships as a Basis for International Peace.” It made the then rarely heard link between domestic racial justice and decolonization. The peace committee winnowed down the entries to nine finalists and sent them off to a group of judges that included, among others, W. E. B. Du Bois, the most famous African American intellectual and civil rights leader of the time, and Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, who had recently established Negro History Week, the forerunner of Black History Month. When the winners were announced in July, Payne was on the list. First place went to a Harvard University student. Payne tied for fourth and earned a $10 prize.

Despite this success, Payne’s writing ambition was neither in essay writing nor in nonfiction. She wanted to be a writer of stories and novels like Jo March in Little Women. And like March’s mother, Bessie Payne encouraged her daughter. “I happen to be one of the great mass of aspiring writers,” Ethel confessed in a letter at the time, “who hope to some day pen the ‘Great American Novel’ and earn a place in the sun.”

THE GREAT DEPRESSION HAD NOT put an end to cultural life in South Side. Rather, in some ways the hard times reinvigorated musical and literary enterprises, which were well used to surviving on the economic margins.

In the fall of 1930, newsstands in South Side and other centers of African American populations carried a new magazine. Publisher Robert S. Abbott, working off his phenomenal success with the Chicago Defender, had launched a new general-interest magazine bearing his name. “Abbott’s Monthly has just made its bow,” reported the New York Amsterdam News, “and its contents warrant the expectation that it will be the magazine the people have been waiting for.” Monthlies catering to black readers then were primarily the NAACP’s Crisis and the National Urban League’s Opportunity. Unlike the two civil rights–oriented publications, however, Abbott’s new entry was more akin to the New Yorker, which had been launched five years earlier. Magazines that served white readers were flourishing, and Abbott’s faith in his publication seemed to be confirmed by its initial reception. “There have been many literary ventures of this sort, and magazine upon magazine, but not of the caliber of Abbott’s Monthly,” reported the Detroit Independent. “It has outstripped the imagination of all and upon perusal proves to surpass any other endeavor.”

Abbott’s Monthly put out a call for work from writers and artists in Chicago, an acknowledgment that by 1930 the center of African American cultural life had shifted away from the East and Harlem. Payne immediately sent off a short story. To her delight, it was accepted for publication.

Well-crafted and clever, Payne’s tale was heavy in autobiographical overtones but with dark notes her mother could not have applauded. In the story, entitled “Driftwood,” eighteen-year-old Madge Barton, whose father died when she was twelve years old, moves to a great Midwestern city in hopes of becoming a novelist. “Eighteen had seen the dawning of her conviction,” Payne wrote. “She would forge ahead and strike out for herself.” In contrast to her roommate Vivian Lasham, “the embodiment of all the spirit of wild, revolting youth,” who haunts stage doors in hopes of becoming an actress, Madge devotes her time to writing.

Vivian’s failure to obtain work drives her into the arms of a sleazy white-suited gambler with black patent leather shoes brilliantly shined and a black-banded tan derby worn angularly and whose plump fingers at the end of oily hands sported ruby and gold rings, “Hello there, baby. C’mon. Come sit with papa,” he says upon spying Madge.

Her roommate’s descent into the gambler’s world solidifies Madge’s literary plans. “The idea had been playing in Madge’s mind for weeks that she would write a novel dealing with the sordidness of the dens of vice and evil and the evils of the city,” wrote Payne. “Why! She would make this her masterpiece; she would point out all the evils so as to bring about great reform.”

She works day and night, alone in her apartment now that Vivian has deserted her. But publishers promptly reject the first draft of her novel. A successful novelist consoles her. “Madge,” he says, “you haven’t had enough experience with hardships. You think your trouble is hard, but you must learn to face defeat bravely. Victory comes in getting up after you are down, and trying again.”

With renewed energy, Madge trims the sentimentality and weak portions of her manuscript. Convinced it is now bound for success, she goes out to consign it to the mail. On her way to the post office, she encounters a broken-down and haggard Vivian, abandoned by her gambler. Madge helps her into a nearby drugstore and over hot chocolate invites Vivian to live with her again. “Kid,” Vivian replies, “I know you mean it, but it’s too late to start again. I’m just driftwood, floating along, getting nowhere.”

Several days later Madge returns to her room. She is months in arrears on the rent. There she finds her manuscript at her door, once again rejected. She sinks into despair and rushes out into the night. From the shadows emerges a slender sinister-looking man ogling her.

“Hello, baby, going my way?” he asks.

Madge prepares, as she had before, to give him a stare intended on sending him away. But instead she throws her head back, issuing “a laugh of despair and abandonment that lingered on the night air in haunting echoes.” Taken aback, the man stares at Madge. “Sure,” she says, “anywhere you say, daddy.”

“They melted into the night and the great grimy shadows of the city swallowed them up.”