Family Albums, Aborted Futures: A Disillusioned Wife Becomes an Artist, 1890 Seventh Avenue
There were few memories of her childhood she could recollect with any pleasure. It would not be wrong to say that she had never been a child, or at least, she had never been a happy child. Are precocious children ever happy? To learn about the world or to blossom too early was dangerous. It wasn’t clear if her father, the man who raped her twelve-year-old mother, was the son of the family that had owned her grandmother’s people; all she knew was that he was the sort of southern gentleman who had no scruples against making concubines of their servant girls. Although a term like concubine inadequately described the violence experienced by her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, three generations of women who, in her words, became very practiced at submission. Her great-grandmother had been a slave; her grandmother and mother were nominally free. The monstrous intimacy of chattel slavery, the violent coupling and compulsory reproduction, marked each generation of her family. The child follows the condition of the mother—partus sequitur ventrem—so that the daughters labor even now under the outcome. What happened to Edna’s mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother was neither unique nor exceptional. It was to be expected if you were a servant in the house. House service, wrote Du Bois, preserved “the last vestiges of slavery and medievalism.” The “personal degradation of the work” was so great that “any white man of decency would rather cut his daughter’s throat than let her grow up to such a destiny.” Throughout the world, there was “no greater source of prostitution than this grade of menial service.” Du Bois echoed Frederick Douglass, who a century earlier described the kitchen as brothel. The kitchen contained a “whole social history,” not only of racism and servility, but sexual use and violation.
Her grandmother joined “the wild rush from house service, on the part of all who could scramble or run,” and moved the family to Boston so that Edna might avoid this fate. The awful things they escaped were described only through euphemisms like loyal servants and concubines and fathers, but her grandmother was too honest to disguise the brutality part and parcel of intimate labor as love or consent. Dissemblance was the way they managed and lived with this violence. What Edna knew was: All the women in the family were beautiful and They probably often submitted to the white men. She also knew never to speak the name of her father or her mother’s father or her grandmother’s father. The secrets and lies and the perverse lines of descent encompassed slavery and its afterlife. Only when she was an adult did her mother share the graphic account of her rape. A white family had hired her mother as a nursemaid. Her family was so poor they permitted it. When she was in bed sleeping beside her three-year-old charge, her employer, a fine Virginia gentleman, entered the bed and raped her. At twelve, she didn’t even realize that she was pregnant, she was too young to know anything about sex or babies, and so believed the old people when they said there were snakes in her belly.
My sister, my mother. Until she was about six years old, Edna believed her grandmother was her mother. She and her mother lived with her grandmother and the Negro man she had married after giving birth to her second child by a white man. They were poor but lived on the outskirts of a very nice colored neighborhood and strived to assume their place among decent and respectable Negroes. Being nearly white endowed them with status; being nearly white also raised questions about the circumstances that afforded Edna’s ivory complexion, golden wavy hair, and blue eyes. The missing father exposed the lie of any presumed respectability. Once it became apparent that Edna had no father and was nameless, the other children on the block mocked her and called her terrible names, making cruel sport of the things their parents whispered behind closed doors. They adored and reviled her, envied her near-white beauty and held her in contempt as the child of a white man’s whore. Half-white bastard. Her fate was sealed. Even her aunt Nancy believed Edna would never amount to anything and would be a bad woman like her mother.
When in a fit of jealousy, her grandfather murdered the fiancé of his then-sixteen-year-old stepdaughter and was sentenced to life in prison, Edna was condemned as the granddaughter of a murderer too. All hopes of blending invisibly with the upper ranks were dashed. The scandal of the murder and the stepfather’s envy of his daughter’s lover cast an additional layer of shame on their house.
Her mother was too free. She did what she wanted. Her sexual relations were social. She was never kept by anyone. This excess—being reckless enough to have sex with a number of men, both colored and white, could not and would not be forgiven. Her mother was beautiful, loose, and unrepentant in her sexuality. She was attracted to men who were gentle and to men who abused her. Burdened by the weight of her mother’s history, Edna felt guilty and condemned. It wasn’t hers to carry, but the world punished her anyway. The knot of shame that blossomed inside her had as much to do with the names their neighbors called them as with what she now believed. It was hard to look at her mother and not judge her a bad woman.
As they lived in three small rooms, Edna found it impossible to avoid the sight of her mother in bed with colored and white men. White man’s whore, the neighbors spat. The words promiscuous or dissolute weren’t in the six-year-old Edna’s vocabulary. Lax in sexual matters, loose-living, abandoned, unrestrained in behavior, unruly, lavish, wistful. When she was old enough to understand the meaning of such words, she preferred to describe her mother as too free. A flood of tears accompanied the conviction that what the neighbors said about her mother was true. It was not the picture of her mother’s body entwined in the arms of a casual friend or stranger that made her sob inconsolably; rather, it was the vision of her mother applying rouge to her cheeks. The blood-red color was the same as that of the artificial rose she had soaked in water, loosening the pigment, and then painted onto her face. Her mother was beautiful, cut-rate, and deep scarlet. Only bad women did that.
Masked behind the quiet demeanor, the cultivated manners, the very fair and very pretty appearance, was a quiet turbulence. Edna was slow to realize it was not simply that her circumstances were unsettled; rather, there was something decidedly unsettled about her. A riot inside was palpable, but its source she couldn’t discern. Perhaps it was simply unhappiness, the brutal loneliness that characterized a failed and unhappy marriage. Perhaps it was the three generations of hurt transmitted along the maternal line. There was the creeping fear and the risk that her resolute passivity might yield to something dangerous and unexpected. Maybe it was the blind groping for something she could not name.
Lloyd Thomas did not try to seduce her as so many others had. The lovely twenty-nine-year-old Edna traveled in the best circles. As the social secretary of Madame C. J. Walker, the first black woman millionaire, she quickly gained entry to the worlds of the wealthy and the fashionable. The aspiring actress was courted by admirers, both white and black, and moved easily between the worlds of Greenwich Village and Harlem, taking pleasure in the opportunities and the glamour afforded by the city, at least for the beautiful and talented, and she was both. Edna was fascinated by Lloyd’s indifference. This dour, taciturn man, who managed aspiring singers and actors as well as several Harlem nightspots, did not appear to want or desire her, and that made her desire him fiercely. She initiated the courtship, and they married in a very short time. He was attractive, debonair, cosmopolitan; most importantly, he was a master of withholding. Even when surrounded by a roomful of beautiful chorus girls, his eyes never wandered. He remained aloof, cold, unreachable. This amazed and aroused her, encouraging her determination to make him want her fiercely. He loved her from a distance, if he loved her at all. He had never said that he did, and refused to utter those three words—I love you—despite her badgering, as if it were an outrageous or unreasonable thing to expect of a man. It surprised her although he had never expressed ardor or tenderness before they married, she wrongly assumed he would relent and soften. Certainly, he wasn’t a conventional man; he enjoyed the company of artists, writers, and entertainers whose desires were not fixed by the coordinates of identity, who outrageously defied expectations regarding who they were supposed to be and who they were required to love. (As with Edna, he might have enjoyed the experience of being wanted by those he did not want; more likely, he was attracted to the queer men regularly in his company, the poets, singers, and club owners who made Harlem beautiful; or maybe he wanted them with an intensity that Edna never could have guessed. Rumors circulated that it was a marriage of convenience.)
Despite his indifference, Lloyd proved to be a passionate lover; he satisfied her physically, and he was faithful insofar as he seemed completely unaffected by other women, yet his heart belonged to him alone. The very qualities that initially made him so attractive—his sexy reticence, Olympian reserve, and striking impassivity—caused a great deal of grief.
What was at stake in trying to transform indifference into love and adoration? Should she be satisfied with his cold constancy and a fidelity ensured by boredom with other women? Was the impossible effort to transform aloofness into devotion yet another attempt to break loose from her mother’s life? Or make up for what her mother failed to give? She had escaped her mother’s fate, and had been lucky when compared with the women in her family. No rapists, murderers, or mercurial violent men. No savage love and fierce carnality. At sixteen, she had rushed into marriage still a virgin, determined to escape poverty and scandal. All she and her mother noticed was the veneer of respectability and the gilded family name. Her husband, the son of a wealthy self-made man, enjoyed a secure place in “brown society.” What could be more attractive to a bastard child than social standing, than the protection of fathers and husbands? Only after she became a Mrs. did she discover that he was spoiled and irresponsible; he never worked; he drank and gambled away their money. It was a colossal mistake. She quietly planned and plotted a way out and vowed never to become a mother. The first abortion was difficult, but she was as resolute the second time.
With the first marriage, she miscalculated, confusing appearance with substance, seeking safety from the turbulence of her childhood in the priggish straight-laced milieu of the Negro upper classes, but she had been wrong to believe that by preferring constancy to passion, and a well-scripted life to uncertainty, she could avoid being damaged by the world. Only the wealth of her father-in-law had protected her and her husband from the streets. The second time, there was no one to whom she could turn. And to protect her from what? A tepid marriage, a lukewarm coital embrace, waning affection, boredom? All the secrets harbored inside a marriage: the remoteness of the husband, the abrading routine of daily life, the monotony of domesticity, the thousand missed opportunities for an act of tenderness or a small proof of love. The loneliness of the marital bed threatened to break her.
On stage, she had purpose. She was no longer a disappointed wife; she was alive, resplendent. It didn’t matter that this feeling was transient and ephemeral. The freedom of being less like Edna and more like others was exhilarating. To be lost to the world of marriage and duty and disappointment and tedium as she entered the space of the ensemble and the intensity of creating and inhabiting a world with others, a domain of collective bodies, kinesthetic experience and gestural language. All other roles had to be relinquished. The stage enabled her to escape her paltry individual life and slip into someone else’s existence—prostitute, queen, toiling laborer, flawed heroine—and to shed every petty concern. When she stepped into a character and lent her body to the gesture, she was nobody and everyone at the same time, no longer bound to her personal history and yet able to express deeply all the pain and failure and want, sharing it with the world but not shamed by it.
She disappeared into other lives; she became other selves. This was exquisite. It was the most sustained joy she had ever experienced. In the world of actors, directors, singers, playwrights and stagehands, she found a vehicle, an outlet for her tamped-down passion; she let go the impulse to seek safety within the confines of restraint and to settle for a dispassionate existence.
As her career soared, Lloyd became jealous and resentful. Her name appeared regularly in the theatre reviews, first in amateur productions, next as a member of the Lafayette Players, and then as a leading lady. Each success she enjoyed made him feel smaller and smaller, like there wasn’t enough air in the room for the two of them; like she was trying to become the dominant one, like they were in a competition, and he wouldn’t be anyone’s second. He had opposed adamantly her career as an actress and now she intended to go on tour. After six months on the road with Lulu Belle, she returned home to find him dating younger women, frequenting cabarets and theatre clubs without her, spending the night at other Harlem apartments. Things unraveled but it was all very civil: no cussing and fighting and cutting up clothes and throwing his belongings into the streets. They were moderns. They were bohemians. Again, she was alone and disillusioned in marriage; she had become practiced at being let down, accustomed to heartbreak.
Whether it was Evelyn Preer or Fredi Washington or Rose McClendon—she never confided. All she disclosed was that a romantic encounter with a colored leading lady turned her life around. One dance sent her hurtling down a radically different path. Embraced in the arms of this lovely lady, Edna felt something electric, and it made her feel alive; it let her know that she was someone other than who she imagined herself to be. It was her first experience with a woman. They danced together and something very terrific happened, a very exhilarating thing. It made her know. Rumors circulated. It was the theatre so no one was shocked. Then there was the gossip about her relation with A’lelia Walker. Edna was among the circle of beautiful women who surrounded the Harlem heiress. They were intimate friends. She left it at that.
She met Olivia at a party at A’lelia’s house. For six months Lady Olivia Wyndham pursued Edna relentlessly, claiming to be madly in love after their first meeting and not giving a damn about Lloyd. The English aristocrat was mannish, elegant, addicted to opium, and reckless. She had once cut herself on the head with a knife and thrown herself down a flight of stairs so that she might be hospitalized and attended by a nurse she loved. The intensity and force of her desire made Edna recoil. It frightened her. It was the opposite of everything she sought in a husband. For six months, Olivia, undeterred, regularly appeared at Edna and Lloyd’s Seventh Avenue apartment stylishly outfitted like a gentleman of wealth. Folks in Harlem accepted it as the English way after Radclyffe Hall, Sackville-West, and Nancy Cunard. She was after all a distant cousin of Oscar Wilde. Wyndham was the tempest threatening to destroy what remained of Edna’s staid and loveless marriage. After months of relentless pursuit, Olivia conceded defeat and decided to return to England. On the night she was scheduled to depart, she made a last visit to Edna, presumably to say goodbye, but not without hope. Edna had done everything possible to quash Olivia’s expectations, never reciprocating her affection or encouraging her desire. Yet, somehow after months in this sustained war of position, rejecting Olivia at every chance and determined not to feel anything at all for Lady Wyndham, she had succumbed to her charms. Had her resolve simply been worn away? Or was it more like rain after a long dry season? Unexpected, startling and necessary. If forced to do so, she would have no choice but to admit that she did harbor feelings for Olivia. Now that her departure was imminent, it was easier to admit. When Olivia arrived that evening, Edna invited her inside the apartment and then refused to let her go. They lived together for decades.
The romance of the English aristocrat and the Negro leading lady captivated the press. The articles stepped gingerly around the obvious—never mentioning the words lady lovers or homosexuals or lesbians—and cast no aspersions. People wrongly assumed ménage a trois; Edna and Olivia were the couple, but expansive enough to include Lloyd as a housemate. Lloyd didn’t seem to mind releasing her and enjoyed the attention they received in the press: Rich British Woman Forsook Own People to Reside in Harlem or She Renounced British Tradition for Her Negro Friends. He and Edna had drifted into the arms of other lovers, creating parallel lives, but the three of them lived together in their Seventh Avenue flat, hosted dinner parties for their mutual friends, and regularly appeared in the society columns as the Lloyd Thomases and friend, whether attending A’lelia Walker’s soirees, charity benefits, theatre openings, or the Hamilton Lodge Ball. Wallace Thurman, Dorothy West, and Jimmy Daniels rented a room in their place and Lloyd’s beautiful young lover, Harlem’s It girl Blanche Dunn, made a second home there until she jilted him for an English oil magnate. Olivia’s fortune allowed them to live comfortably. After his Harlem nightclub closed, Lloyd never worked again. Marriage provided the cloak that allowed them to live as they wanted and without public censure.
It was all so unexpected—late love and a successful career, a farmhouse in Connecticut and European holidays in English castles and French chateaus. For a poor girl who had been raised in a three-room apartment on the outskirts of respectability, it was astonishing and unbelievable—unless you were a leading lady or a brilliant entertainer or member of the beautiful set. She was one of the lucky ones: “the remnants of that ability and genius . . . whom the accidents of education and opportunity have raised on the tidal waves of chance,” a rare bird, a Negro artist.
The world kept Edna guessing about what she might do and who she might become. She had done all of the shocking things imaginable and the only reason she could summon was the urge for expression, an urge that no one experienced more fiercely than black women and that none paid as dearly when this need was unmet, when one remained an artist without an art form. Everywhere you looked you could find it. No modern intelligent person was content merely existing. Sometimes it was good to take a chance.