On Her Own Ground Read online

  By 1891 Alexander had sold or lost his shop, though he continued to be listed as a barber in the St. Louis city directory. In 1896 the St. Louis Republic reported, “The colored barber in St. Louis is about to become a thing of the past.” In less than a year, the paper predicted, “the darky barber . . . who shaves a white client will be an oddity.”

  Sarah surely was awed by the riverfront metropolis. Only a church spire and the courthouse jutted above Vicksburg’s roofline. Delta had few buildings taller than one story. But St. Louis’s granite-and-limestone insurance companies, department stores and commodities exchanges loomed above her. Instead of streets that muddied with every rain, boulevards were surfaced with macadam and paved with bricks. Where two railroad lines serviced Vicksburg, tracks for more than a dozen freight and passenger companies radiated from St. Louis’s massive Union Depot. Where Vicksburg could claim a respectably busy cotton trade, St. Louis was the nation’s largest inland cotton market. It was also home to Anheuser-Busch, the world’s largest brewery, and Liggett & Myers, the world’s largest manufacturer of plug tobacco.

  Even the air was different. Sarah was accustomed to the thick, wet humidity of the lower Mississippi. But in St. Louis the steaminess churned into a grimy roux of soot and smoke from the iron ore foundries and industrial furnaces along the river. Ashes and cinders from the cheap, soft, sulfur-rich coal glommed on to her skin and clung to her hair. So polluted was the air in 1906 that certain trees and shrubs had died off within the city limits. “We can no longer grow the evergreen conifers, with the exception of the Dwarf Junipers and the Austrian Pine,” complained the director of the Missouri Botanical Gardens. “While we grow a good many roses, it is only the hardiest that stand the present smoke.”

  To escape the pollution, St. Louis’s wealthiest residents pushed the city limits westward, fanning away from the river like a peacock spreading its feathers. At its far reaches were the mansions of Grand Avenue and gated enclaves like Vandeventer Place, heavily populated with prosperous German immigrants. With the advent of the nickel trolley into the far suburbs, the abandonment of downtown by those who could afford to leave escalated in 1890. Some members of the small black middle class settled on the nicer, near-in blocks that whites had relinquished. But the Italian, Jewish and black poor, like Sarah, were wedged into tenements between the business district and the eastern end of the more desirable residential areas.

  Sarah’s first place—probably more a room than an apartment—was at 1316 Wash Street, a street well known on the police blotter for its stabbings and murders. It also was not far from the dance halls of Twelfth Street and the saloons and brothels of the infamous Chestnut Valley near Union Station. To support herself and Lelia, she worked as a laundress, “washing for families in St. Louis,” she told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter years later.

  Jennie Lias and Ida Winchester met her shortly after she arrived, offering advice, friendship and leads about jobs. Like more than half the employed black women in St. Louis, they were washerwomen, filling slots that were shunned by immigrant and first-generation American working women who dominated the other domestic service jobs there. Sarah and her friends preferred laundry chores, at least in part because they could watch their children while they worked. On Mondays they were among the army of washerwomen who returned to their homes, customarily toting a week’s dirty laundry from two or three white families. Another laundress remembered carrying “ten to twelve sheets . . . twenty to thirty towels, twenty-four pillowcases, three and four tablecloths, and no end of shirts and other clothes and things” from each family.

  The work, all done by hand in wooden washtubs and iron pots of boiling water, was steamy, strenuous and laborious. Wet sheets and tablecloths doubled in weight. Lye soap irritated hands and arms. Heated flatirons were heavy, cumbersome and dangerous. Sarah, however, took pride in her work, often ironing late into the night to meet Saturday’s delivery deadline. She knew that a broken dress button or a scorched shirttail meant a cut in pay, a reduction of a washerwoman’s weekly $4 to $12 wages.

  By Sunday, her only day off, Sarah welcomed the release that church services always brought her, for she had long embraced the power of prayer. As a newcomer to a fast city and as a recent widow, she needed the solace it brought. Although she had attended the Pollard Church in Delta, she would later say that she had been “converted” at St. Paul AME, the church one block from her brothers’ barbershop and six blocks from her first St. Louis home. That conversion to a deeper religious faith may have taken several months, or it may have occurred shortly after she arrived.

  In September 1889, St. Paul’s new pastor, Reverend Ezekiel T. Cottman, began an aggressive outreach, bringing more than two hundred new parishioners into the church during Sarah’s first year in the city. Sarah herself was a likely prospect for membership, especially among the middleclass women of the church who made it their business to know the needy among them. The concern of this small educated elite, with their interlocking familial and friendship ties, would continue to help Sarah for years to come. Not long before she moved to town, the St. Louis Colored Orphans’ Home—located less than a block from her brother Alexander’s house—had been founded by Sarah Newton, a black Oberlin College graduate and former public school teacher. It would have been quite characteristic for Newton, herself a widow, to have personally reached out to Sarah, persuading her that the facility was interested in providing education, religious instruction and “a reverence and love for God’s word,” not just for orphans but for “half-orphans” like Lelia.

  As much as Sarah doted on Lelia, she apparently agreed to accept the help offered by the women of the orphans’ home, arranging for her daughter to live there at least part of every week. In March 1890, Maggie Rector, the home’s matron and one of the founders, escorted Lelia to Dessalines Elementary School with the other thirty or so young residents, and enrolled her in first grade. As she was tall for her age, perhaps like her father’s family, Lelia’s school registration listed her as six years old, though she was still three months shy of her fifth birthday. Already her big smile had begun to work its charm. Sarah would never forget the “kindnesses that were shown her daughter there” by Rector and the others.

  CHAPTER 4

  St. Louis Woman

  “I was at my washtubs one morning with a heavy wash before me,” Sarah later recalled. “As I bent over the washboard, and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself: ‘What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?’ This set me to thinking, but with all my thinking I couldn’t see how I, a poor washerwoman, was going to better my condition.”

  For most of the next decade, Sarah pivoted between the cauldron of the streets and the haven of the church, praying for answers. She was desperate to deliver herself from drudgery, determined to free Lelia from a similar fate. Daily she struggled to resist the undertow of the dismal life she knew in favor of the prosperous life she coveted. Straddling two worlds, it was as if she carried dual identities. To her neighbors she was “Sallie” McWilliams, a struggling laundress just like them. In her other vision, she was “Sarah,” a woman with dreams beyond anything they could imagine.

  Always at the mercy of others, she and Lelia moved frequently, often twice or more in one year. For months at a time, she lived with one of her brothers. At other times she and Lelia were scarcely steps ahead of homelessness, squeezed into whatever room they could beg or afford. Because nothing in Mississippi had prepared Sarah for the riptide of the city, she was sucked under again and again by family tragedies, an abusive marriage, a dangerous neighborhood. Finally the resilience she had first mustered after her parents’ deaths reemerged. As she set about to reinvent herself, she began to erase relationships and events too painful and shameful to acknowledge.

  St. Louis’s neighborhood churches battled for the hearts, minds and especially the souls of newcomers like Sarah. In the Deep South, their labor had been
essential. Here, the factories preferred to hire equally poor European immigrants over people with darker skins. Here, when life trampled them, they lashed out at each other. Here, corner honky-tonks and beer eased the sting of hopelessness.

  St. Paul AME, the Central Baptist Church and the other large black congregations in St. Louis positioned themselves as straitlaced alternatives to vice and immorality. Inside their sanctuaries, Jesus was the antidote to failure, and temperance saved all sinners. Their middle-class members considered themselves the “right kind of Negroes,” whose steadfast strategy for racial progress required thrift, self-help, charity and education. Their weekly services, Bible classes, recitals and revivals competed fervently with alley crap games and all-night dives.

  When St. Paul moved to a new building a mile west of the central business district in March 1891, Sarah’s neighborhood lost its most powerful spiritual anchor. But the women of the church, already linked to Sarah through Lelia’s stay at the orphans’ home, continued to reach out, encouraging her involvement. Founded in 1841, St. Paul was the second-oldest black Protestant church in St. Louis and the oldest African Methodist Episcopal congregation west of the Mississippi. Steeped in the AME Church’s long tradition of political militancy and self-reliance, its ministers had advocated abolition, conducted clandestine schools during slavery and harbored emigrants like Sarah’s brother Alexander.

  Inside St. Paul’s granite-and-stone edifice, Sarah tracked the mannerisms and conversations of local dignitaries and prominent members, especially its doctors, teachers, lawyers and clubwomen. Just as important, she was surrounded by the tangible evidence of their economic clout. Reverend Ezekiel Cottman was proud to remind his flock that they occupied the only church in St. Louis “constructed by and for Negroes.” The largest organ in the city, built by the renowned German designer Kilgen, soared above their altar. Their tithes and offerings had made it possible for them to savor Mozart anthems, soothing hymns and sedately rendered Negro spirituals each Sunday.

  It was no small joy on a frosty winter morning for Sarah to nestle into a pew and feel the warmth she could never generate in her unheated flat. If she occasionally longed for the rousing, toe-tapping music of Delta’s Pollard Church, she certainly did not miss the raucous noises and sour odors she had momentarily left behind on her block. As sunbeams warmed through the stained-glass windows and chandeliers twinkled above the carpeted aisles of the amphitheater sanctuary, Sarah and the 900-member congregation heard religious as well as political messages. In 1892 Reverend Cottman joined several prominent black Missourians to declare “Lamentation Day,” a gathering that drew 1,500 blacks to St. Louis to protest lynching through fasting and prayer. Visiting bishops and church officials often discussed global issues, from the church’s missionary work in Africa to the persecution of Russian Jews and Turkish Christians.

  Around the time St. Paul moved to Lawton and Leffingwell, a still predominantly white area, Sarah joined her younger brother Solomon at 1407 Linden Street, near the church’s former location. Having the rest of her family—James, Alexander and his wife, Mary, and Owen’s estranged wife, Samira—within walking distance was a welcome bonus for her and her daughter. Dumas Elementary, the school Lelia probably attended at the time, was a straight shot through their yard to the next block over on Lucas Street. Between 1891 and 1896 Sarah and Lelia remained in the same area, switching from rooming house to rooming house along Linden, an overcrowded alleyway where stoops served as parlors and windowsills as terraces.

  In April 1893, Sarah had to have been devastated when Alexander died from an intestinal ailment. With their eldest brother gone, the family in St. Louis now included two widows (Sarah and Mary), one abandoned wife (Samira) and brothers James and Solomon. Owen, the brother they probably had not seen since his 1883 move to New Mexico, now ran a saloon and “gaming table” in Albuquerque. With his new wife, Lucy Crockett Breedlove, he had started a new family, now numbering two daughters. In March 1892 he had been elected chairman pro tem of the Albuquerque Colored Republicans, no doubt aided by his brother-in-law, C. C. Crockett, an already established member of the town’s black community. Sarah’s sister Louvenia remained in Mississippi, with problems of her own: her son Willie Powell would soon be convicted of manslaughter in Natchez, Mississippi, and sent to Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Prison.

  With her family grieving and in disarray, Sarah drifted into a relationship with a man named John Davis, who had recently arrived from De Soto, Missouri, a town twenty-five miles south of St. Louis. Because he had no home of his own to offer, he moved in with Sarah and nine-year-old Lelia during the spring of 1894.

  A few months later, on Saturday, August 11, they married before a justice of the peace in a stuffy City Hall chamber. Outside, despite a light breeze, the city baked at a suffocating 100 degrees in the midst of a weeklong Midwestern heat wave. That night a brief shower roused the humidity along the dank brick sidewalks. The sweltering weather was a fitting launch to a troubled marriage. Almost from the start, Sarah regretted her decision. A decade later she would begin the process of jettisoning all mention of Davis from her scrupulously crafted life story. But at the time she must have believed it was the best that she could do.

  On her own for so long, Sarah no doubt welcomed the presence of a man, perhaps convincing herself that Lelia needed a stepfather. Surely she wanted companionship and the respectability that seemed to accompany marriage. But Davis was a poor choice, unable to deliver on any of her expectations. Something as simple as the signatures on their marriage license told part of the tale. His name was scrawled so haphazardly that “John” was barely decipherable, “Davis” only relatively more legible. “Miss Sallie McWilliams,” on the line below, lacked flourish, but was deliberate and clear.

  Sarah could not have had any illusions that marrying Davis would allow her to put away her washtubs. As with most unskilled, urban black men, his options were limited to low-paying, temporary and seasonal jobs. St. Louis’s German workers controlled the trade unions and had no qualms about reserving positions in carpentry, bricklaying and plumbing for themselves. Despite thousands of jobs in the city’s foundries and plants, blacks made up only 2 percent of factory workers. Those few who passed through industry’s gates were relegated to menial chores in the clay mines, brickyards and tobacco factories. Washerwomen like Sarah often were their families’ primary breadwinners, not because their husbands did not want to work, but because recent European immigrants were crowding them out of the market. In 1900, with decent-paying employment off-limits to large numbers of black men, 26 percent of all married black women in America worked—most as domestics or farmworkers—while only 3 percent of married white women were employed. An overwhelming 65 percent of the nation’s washerwomen at the turn of the century were black.

  Whatever legitimate difficulties Davis may have had finding work, Sarah soon learned that he was a shirker. “He was never a man to work and provide for his family as a man ought,” her friend Jennie Gully Lias said, remembering that he and Sarah “were constantly in quarrels because she failed to get a reasonable portion of his wages.” They also fought about his girlfriend and his drinking. “The general rumor of the community was that he was dividing his wages with a woman by the name of Susie,” said Lias. “He was addicted to the habit of drinking and would come home in a drunken condition and upon being questioned, would strike, beat and maltreat Sallie.”

  Sarah’s longtime friend Ida Winchester called him “fussy, mean and dangerous.” Another acquaintance said he had been “before the courts many times,” causing Sarah much humiliation and disappointment. But she remained locked in this volatile dance, trapped just as she had been in her brother-in-law’s house. To survive, she developed an iron exterior, but she also knew that she was subjecting her daughter to Davis’s belligerence. Just as a young Sarah had been able to run to her brothers from Jesse Powell, Lelia may have found safety a block away with her uncle James. Whatever misdeeds Davis inflicted upon L
elia, she and Sarah buried it in their pasts.

  As the black population began to shift westward into the areas that whites had abandoned, Sarah’s central city district deteriorated into the “toughest neighborhood in St. Louis,” so dangerous the police called it the Bad Lands. In 1894 and 1895, when local murders nearly doubled from twenty-five to forty-seven, the police chief pronounced Eleventh Street—four blocks from Sarah’s Linden Street apartment—“the most prolific murder center in the city.” Nearly every drinking establishment—the White Lion, William Curtis’s Elite Saloon, Dutch Diegel’s and Stark’s—along that corridor could be linked, if not to a murder, at least to a bloody brawl.

  Sarah had every reason to be concerned about what Lelia saw and heard when she passed the dives near Twelfth and Linden, where “female denizens, clad in diaphanous wrappers, constantly congregate on the street . . . filling the air with the plaint of barefaced solicitation and the revolting sounds of lewd profanity.” One block north of their apartment, dingy yellow awnings shaded busy Morgan Street’s secondhand clothing stores, cafes and barbershops. From morning until night, brothels and ten-cent bathhouses hosted a stream of unsavory patrons.

  A few of the bars along Morgan fancied themselves a cut above the gut-bucket hangouts—among them, the headquarters of the Four Hundred Social Club, which had given “entertainments that were the admiration of the colored race, the envy of all competitors and the terror of the police,” a reporter wrote at the time. On November 19, 1895, the group’s Grand Cake Walk Contest was the talk of the neighborhood. Staged a few blocks from Sarah’s home at Stolle’s Hall, a respectable gathering place, its judges included B. J. Owens, a family friend and partner in Alexander’s first barbershop. The promise of festivities spiked with ragtime’s syncopated rhythms guaranteed a crowd. A dance competition, regardless of the church’s admonition against such evils, delighted nearly everyone in a part of town where few affordable pleasures flourished.