Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters

Prologue

PROLOGUE S Willis H. James had seen more than his share of conflict and grief in his twenty-eight years. After leaving his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, he survived guerrilla warfare, near starvation, and forced marches barefoot through the mountains of the Philippines as a soldier in the U.S. Army. Upon his return from Southeast Asia, he had taken jobs, often in hostile environments, as a waiter and a barber. None of his battles in or out of uniform, however, prepared him for the horror he encountered in a southern town in the fall of 1905. When he reached the limits of his endurance, he did as always, as everyone in the family did: he wrote to his older sister, Bertha James Lane. From the jail in Jesup, Georgia, Willis told Bertha, “I would not write you but I am in a terrible fix here I got into after leaveing Savannah, Ga.” He had shot a white man “for bothering him” and tried to escape by running into a swamp, but the vigilantes put bloodhounds on his trail and caught him. They put him in a cell “guarded with white men who have guns and try to get at me.” He begged Bertha “for dear Mother’s sake” to rush thirty-five dollars to bribe the sheriff so he wouldn’t be lynched en route to his trial the following Monday morning. That letter was one of some four hundred cards, notes, and letters written by James family members between 1891 and 1910 that Bertha saved. By accident or design, Bertha found the perfect storage space when she xxiii put the letters in an ice cream cone tin from our family’s drugstore. Though Bertha saved innumerable keepsakes of her brothers and sisters, few of them preserved any of her letters. Thirty remain in the collection, mostly relating neighborhood gossip and enclosing money for her youngest sister, Anna Louise. Bertha’s daughter and my mother, the author Ann Petry, acquired them when she emptied Bertha’s house in the late 1980s. The letters came to me after my mother’s death in 1997. My mother set the tin by the fireplace in the dining room of her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Not long after she brought it home, she told me, “Your Uncle Bill’s letters from the Philippines are in there. He wrote to your grandmother, and she had to pay for the postage.” Uncle Bill—Willis H. James—was one of the colorful uncles my mother mentioned when people asked her about the sources for her stories. She called these men her “foot-loose and fancy-free” uncles. Uncle Bill’s feet were particularly loose and his fancy especially free. He lived all over the country but came several times a year to visit Bertha and her family when my mother was a little girl. Each time he or any of the other uncles arrived, my mother knew she would hear stories about their adventures and the people they encountered. The tin with the letters inside soon became just another piece of furniture in my mother’s home. At two feet tall with a flat top, it was a perfect spot for one of the many piles of magazines, newspapers, books, and other tools of a writer’s trade that found their way onto every flat surface in the house. Most of the piles remained when my mother died— volumes of material that needed examination to separate drafts of stories and speeches from ancient shopping lists and even older notes to call her sister. The tin and its contents had been in Saybrook’s damp, salty air for about seventy years. Rust had eaten away at the edges of the container and covered the handle on top. It took considerable effort and a scraped knuckle to work the cover loose. After a final tug the lid flew off, and the aroma of sandalwood filled the room. One letter from Hawaii still contained bits of leaves and flowers. The perfume lingered a century later. xxiv Prologue Of course the tin contained far more than letters from the Philippines. It represented twenty years’ history of a family whose mother and father hadbeguntheirlivesinslaveryandcametosettleinHartford,Connecticut, just after the Civil War. The correspondents were Bertha, Willis, five other brothers and sisters, as well as their mother and father, and their mother’s brother Charles Hudson. As far as the...