CHAPTER 4

AN ABUNDANCE OF NERVE

IN NOVEMBER 1931, TWENTY-YEAR-OLD ETHEL PAYNE SAT before her typewriter in the house on Throop Street, placed a piece of paper in the roller of her machine, and put her fingers to the keys. “My dear Dr. DuBois,” she began. “Fate and circumstances have a curious way of coinciding to achieve a common purpose. So it is with a good deal of presumption that I take it upon myself to write to you at this time.”

Presumption was the right word because her letter was directed to W. E. B. Du Bois. Sociologist, activist, and cofounder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was the most nationally prominent African American of the day. Payne was proposing to write his biography. “Of course, I realize that this is a tremendous undertaking that requires wide experience and a broad range of material to draw from, as well as nerve,” she wrote. “At the present time the only one of these three that I have in stock is nerve, and that is in abundance.” If Du Bois replied, the letter was lost to history.

Despite her determination and early good fortune with her fiction, Payne was learning—as Madge had—that a black woman had little hope of making a living by writing in the 1930s. A more practical career plan was in order.

Payne left Crane College, which was struggling to remain open, and entered the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions run by the Methodist Episcopal Church. The tuition-free college had a Bible-centered curriculum that offered basic medical and social work training likely to make one employable. Payne found its religiosity a bit overwhelming but she stuck it out, majoring in social services with minors in fine arts and religious education. She earned her highest grade, an A–, in a storytelling class. But overall her work, or lack of it, resulted in yet another lackluster academic performance.

In her spare time, she continued to write her stories for Abbott’s Monthly. Her choice of subjects and her style was like those of Émile Zola, the French writer known for his natural style in writing about violence, alcohol, and prostitution. One of her tales featured a minister who had an affair with a parishioner, and another described a black prostitute’s day in court. The magazine was evidently happy with her contributions and promoted her work in display advertisements in the Defender. “You remember the story ‘Retribution’ in the March issue by Ethel L. Payne, whose fiction and facts are so closely interwoven that one marvels at the unfolding of her story,” said the advertisement. “This month Miss Payne has written ‘Cabaret.’ In it the glamour of the night life is brought into the open day.”

Payne’s success with Abbott’s Monthly was no small achievement. Since its start, the magazine had grown in circulation to more than 100,000 and attracted some of the nation’s best black writers, such as Chester Himes, who would later write If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Richard Wright, who was struggling to launch himself as a writer, tearing into pieces most of what he wrote. But he was sufficiently pleased with one story called “Superstition” that he submitted it to Abbott’s Monthly. It became his first published work.

IN THE SPRING OF 1934, Payne neared the completion of her studies in social service at the Chicago Training School. In the Torch, the student annual publication to which she was a contributing editor, Payne published a lengthy semifictional account of washday in an alley behind her house. “ ‘The row’ is like an alien intruder or an ill-favored child,” wrote Payne in introducing the place. “Complacently it squats in its ugly, squalid surroundings while the rest of Englewood haughtily lifts its skirt and passes around it.”

On the evening of June 15, 1934, Payne graduated from the Chicago Training School. She was still not a scholar and finished eleventh out of her class of thirteen. For her yearbook, Payne selected words from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “All things come round to him who will but wait.” She still retained hope of a law career and asked the school to send her transcript to the University of Chicago. While the university had accepted black students as early as 1870 and by the 1920s had more than sixty African Americans in its student body, it would be another decade before a black woman would graduate from its law school. With her grades, Payne was not a feasible candidate.

Instead Payne used her newly minted degree to land a job at the State Training School for Girls in Geneva, Illinois, about forty miles west. The reformatory housed about 400 to 500 girls sent to it by juvenile courts from around the state, mostly on charges of immorality and incorrigibility. “Those girls,” Payne said, “some of them 15, 16, 17 years old, and they’d had experiences of people 40 years old or more—street hustling, prostitution, into drugs and things.”

When Payne arrived she found a campus-like setting situated on the sloping banks of the Fox River. The inmates were housed in about a dozen two-story-tall brick cottages, each with a dayroom, kitchen, dining room, and matrons’ quarters on the first floor and bedrooms with barred windows on the second. The day was given over to classes, vocational training, and religious services. In their free time, the juveniles engaged in sports such as croquet, basketball, and even roller-skating on the half mile of paved sidewalk.

Payne was hired as a matron. Each cottage housed about thirty-five girls with two women who were on duty all the time except when the relief matron took a turn for a day each week. Payne had to wake the girls and get them off to classes or to their jobs within the reformatory such as working in the laundry. “I was like a jail warden,” Payne said.

Payne’s wards were all black girls. About one hundred girls, or a quarter of the population, were African American, the high number a reflection of the eagerness of Cook County courts to lock up black youths compounded by the refusal of other state reform institutions to house black inmates. The black cottages, with such names as “Faith” and “Lincoln,” were overcrowded, and the residents received less-than-adequate treatment. In fact, the professional staff neglected them except when white girls were discovered having sex with the black inmates. The racial indiscretions horrified the staff more than the sexual transgressions.

The job was exhausting and the girls were a challenge. “They put me to a test, and they would do all kinds of things to see how strong I was,” Payne said. “They had lived hard lives crowded into their very young years.” After a while she reached an accommodation with many of the girls, and some, Payne felt, came to respect her. “I don’t know how many lives I actually affected, because it was too much of an experience for a young person who had been sort of sheltered.”

But after a year and a half, her mother finally told her, “Stop it. Stop it and come home.” Payne returned to Throop Street. The best job she could find was as a nursery school teacher in settlement houses and public schools at $80 a month. She kept the job for three years, earning enough to get by comfortably. But she was now in her late twenties, more educated than most in her neighborhood, and yet Chicago remained shuttered to her. It was as Chicagoan Bigger Thomas said in Richard Wright’s Native Son, “Half the time, I feel like I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knothole in the fence.”

IN JUNE 1939, Payne instructed the Chicago Training School to send her transcript to the Chicago Public Library Training School. Admitted and trained, she swapped tending children for working with books and became a junior library assistant, with a 40 percent hike in salary.

The aspiration to be a writer, however, remained alive in her. She signed up for a two-credit evening course in short story writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism; the class was taught by John T. Frederick. Lanky, thin, with wire-rimmed glasses resting on a Roman nose, he looked every part the professor. However, the farm-raised Frederick, who rode a pony to school, was actually an accomplished author, editor, and host of a CBS radio show about books. During the Great Depression, as regional director of the WPA Writers’ Project, he had worked with such Chicago writers as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, who would become one of the best-known American writers in the 1940s and 1950s.

Payne stayed with the class and signed up for Frederick’s advanced short story writing class in the second semester. She wrote weekly class assignments of all sorts ranging from recollections to short stories, from plays to dialogues. Her papers came back carefully marked up with encouraging remarks such as those Miss Dixon used to write at Lindblom Technical High School.

“You have a good feeling for words,” Frederick told Payne. “More than that, you have a rich and significant experience to share.”