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

Chapter 2: The Surrogate Mother

Chapter 2 THE SURROGATE MOTHER S Willis and Anna Houston James may not have been in a position to give their children riches, but they gave them a sense of selfworth and faith in their own abilities that lasted them throughout their lives. That confidence began with their oldest, Bertha Ernestine James. Anna cherished Bertha, molding her into a loving woman who nurtured her brothers and sisters and later her own children and their friends. Bertha, “Bert” to her brothers, loved children. Her daughter Ann’s childhood friends said, “I wish your mother were my mother, too.” Bertha devoted her undivided attention to each person she met and it made everyone feel as if “She’s been waiting all day just to see me!” She found genuine ways to praise nearly everyone she encountered. Her favorite expressions were: “If you can’t find something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything” and “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Where her sisters excelled at seeing the negative, Bertha searched for the good. Through the letters she received and the few of those she wrote that survived, a picture of Bertha emerges of a hard-working, creative woman with a whimsical sense of humor and strong opinions, especially in matters of style and deportment. A product of the Victorian era, Bertha adopted many of the values that she learned from the rich white people who hired her to style their hair and repair their corns and 22 The Surrogate Mother 23 bunions. She passed the values she learned along to her younger sisters and to her daughters. Bertha’s devotion to people, ladylike demeanor, and refined looks belied the survival skills she learned in childhood. Though she preferred to run her businesses, she could as easily operate a farm. Bertha impressed her children and their friends when she caught and killed chickens. She transformed fruits and vegetables as well. Jams, jellies and pickles poured from the kitchen, as she sold the results and kept the family supplied with food year-round. Bertha annually drove her family, weeping, from the house as she prepared cauldrons of homemade horseradish. Bertha and her sisters inherited plentiful fine strands of “good” hair from their mother. Helen told Bertha, “I should love to see the little Bertha. I know she is dear. Does her hair fly about as much this cold weather as it did in the summer?” Saybrook’s humid summers added curl and body, making the hair somewhat more manageable, but winter’s cold air straightened any hint of curl and separated each fine strand. As a beautician, Bertha knew how to care for her daughter’s hair and used her ingenuity to make it stay in place. Bertha, Helen, and Louise tamed their own locks by knotting them in tight buns that they wore on top of the head or at the nape of the neck. By the time she reached middle age, Bertha’s hair had turned a bright shade of silver that women envied, and she had added some weight to her slender figure. Days outside in the garden and the chicken yard had turned her skin a beautiful nut brown. She never believed it, but her friends and relatives considered her one of the most beautiful women ever to walk the planet. Early in life Bertha began collecting people by collecting autographs. The first signatures were from family members, but soon she had captured Hartford’s resident celebrities, beginning with the woman Lincoln said had started the Great War. She wrote, “‘Trust in the Lord and Do Good,’ written by your sincere Friend, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dec. 5, 1889.” Bertha and the rest of the James family met Mrs. Stowe through her neighbor and their benefactor Mary B. Lewis, who lived on Farmington Avenue around the corner from Mrs. Stowe’s home on Forest Street. Within the week, Bertha had secured the autographs of the entire Clemens family. Susan and Jean Clemens signed their names on December 12, the same day their father wrote, “Yours truly, Mark Twain.” Bertha met the Clemens family through their butler, George Griffin, whom scholars believe served as the model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Like the James family, Griffin attended North Methodist Episcopal Church. Bertha devoted nearly all her energy to work, from necessity and from a need to feel useful. When her mother wrote to Bertha in...