On Her Own Ground Page 6

  Apparently the evening unfolded without incident. But later that night, the first of a spate of nasty murders that spilled over into the new year began near Sarah’s street. All it took was a bottle, a gun and a jealous boyfriend to leave another man dead on the floor of an apartment at 1245 Gay Street, the building where Sarah’s brother James had lived just a year earlier. Less than a week later, on the day after Thanksgiving, three blocks from Sarah in the 1200 block of Linden, a ruffian named Alexander Royal slashed his girlfriend, Jessie Sims, ten times with the butcher knife they had used to carve their holiday turkey. The couple was so well known in the neighborhood that the details of Sims’s cuts—including “two stab wounds in the chest, one penetrating the lung”—quickly spread from house to house. Two hours afterward another domestic dispute left a woman near death from multiple lacerations at 1207 Wash Street, close to Sarah’s first St. Louis rooming house. Not two weeks later, in a fight related to the Sims murder, one neighbor fatally shot another at 1902 Linden.

  On Christmas morning, two days after Sarah’s twenty-eighth birthday, Shelton Lee, better known as “Stack” Lee, fatally shot William Lyons at Curtis’s Elite Saloon at Eleventh and Morgan, just four blocks from where Sarah and John Davis lived. The fight, as a popular song later recounted, began when Lee accused Lyons of stealing his “magic Stetson” hat.

  Stackalee shot Billy once; his body fell to the floor.

  He cried out, Oh, please, Stack, please don’t shoot me no more.

  “Stackalee,” as he came to be known, was so outrageous that he bribed his way out of jail for a five-hour Sunday afternoon saloon cruise six weeks after his arrest. Accompanied by two generously bribed deputy sheriffs, he drew crowds and headlines as he visited his girlfriend near Twelfth and Wash, then bought a round of drinks for everyone at the bar where he had murdered Lyons. By then the shooting had sparked a turf battle between Stackalee’s friends, who were members of “The 400,” and Lyons’s friends, who belonged to a rival social club. “There is continual warfare between the two divisions,” wrote the St. Louis Republic. “Excitement over the crime is, and has been, ever since it occurred, at white heat among the colored people.”

  While official St. Louis prepared for the June 1896 Republican convention, the Bad Lands murders continued. By the end of the year all the Breedloves had fled the neighborhood, moving west to the still notorious, but somewhat less lethal, Mill Creek Valley, where blacks had lived since the 1850s. Bordered by Twentieth Street on the east and Grand Avenue on the west, the area derived its name from a dammed creek that had powered a flour mill earlier in the century. A web of train tracks formed its southern edge behind the magnificent, two-year-old Union Station, then the largest passenger terminal in America. Within its boundaries was Chestnut Valley, a stretch of saloons, bordellos and pool halls that clustered along Chestnut and Market streets across from the depot and catered to residents and layover passengers alike. Musician W. C. Handy, composer of “St. Louis Blues,” recalled nearby Targee Street during the early 1890s. “I don’t think I’d want to forget the highroller Stetson hats of the men or the diamonds the girls wore in their ears,” he said, adding a description of the area’s prostitutes. “There were those who sat for company in little plush parlors under gaslights.”

  In 1898, Sarah, John and thirteen-year-old Lelia shared a home with James Breedlove at 2142 Walnut Street, one block west of Union Station and only a few blocks from St. Paul Church. Following their pattern on Linden Street, Sarah and John lived in at least four homes on Walnut Street between 1896 and 1902. Twice they shared an address with James until he married in September 1899.

  Although the trains squealed through the night, and the Market Street revelers stumbled along their alley until daybreak, Sarah likely preferred the mix of new neighbors. Here, forced together by segregation, both laborers and middle-class blacks mingled on the same block. Among them was Maria Harrison, a board member of the orphans’ home and founder of the Missouri Federation of Colored Women, who lived across the street.

  At nearby L’Ouverture Elementary School, Lelia was surrounded by other black children from a variety of backgrounds. Her classmates’ parents included a journalist, a doctor, a music teacher and a railroad porter, though 95 percent were unskilled laborers, washerwomen or domestic servants. Girls with neatly parted hair and pinafores sat side by side at double wooden desks with boys in heavy woolen suits. Some children, recently arrived from the South, had never attended school. Though their classrooms were cramped and their supplies inadequate, the proportion of black students enrolled in St. Louis’s public schools exceeded that of white students during the last twenty years of the nineteenth century.

  Davis’s disruptive behavior made Sarah all the more determined to create stability in Lelia’s life. She was so insistent that her daughter attend school regularly that Lelia missed only six days of class between September 1898 and June 1899. But her 1899 school year was tumultuous. Sarah, rather than John Davis—who previously had been listed as Lelia’s guardian—was now named as Lelia’s parent on the September enrollment record, suggesting that they had separated. And while Lelia’s attendance remained excellent during the first quarter, the rest of the year was disastrous. She attended only twenty-three days of school between November and June, missing the entire third quarter. By the end of her seventh-grade year, she had been readmitted a startling six times.

  Was Sarah hiding from Davis during this time? Did she move away to protect herself and Lelia? Was Lelia ill? The answers lie in the part of her life story she wished to keep hidden. But clearly the consistency she had tried so hard to establish for her child crumbled that year. When Lelia reenrolled in September 1900, John Davis was once again listed as her guardian, perhaps because he and Sarah had reconciled. That year Lelia missed only thirteen days of school.

  Lelia’s June 1901 graduation was a ceremony L’Ouverture’s teachers took great care to fill with poetry, music and orations. But Sarah may also have felt that even on this day of triumph, she had failed Lelia. Unlike many of her classmates, Lelia had not been admitted to Sumner High School, perhaps because the months of school she had missed had prevented her from passing the entrance exam. It was a disappointment, to be sure, because Oscar Minor Waring, the city’s first black principal, was well known for inspiring his students with missionary zeal. An Oberlin graduate who spoke five languages, Waring had helped establish the curriculum for the first generation of black teachers in St. Louis.

  Because class and color lines were sharply drawn in St. Louis’s black community, Lelia—the dark-skinned daughter of a laundress—was excluded from the parties, teas and charity events hosted by the Twentieth Century Girls’ Club. A social group that included some of her schoolmates, the club accepted members only from those families it deemed prominent and worthy.

  But Lelia, with her flashing brown eyes and easy smile, surely did not go unnoticed among her peers. At sixteen she probably was near her adult height of close to six feet. And though her stepfather may have embarrassed her, Lelia was always well groomed, her clothes at least as well laundered, pressed and starched as those of Sarah’s best customers. But with no clear plans for Lelia’s schooling, Sarah fretted about her daughter’s future. As an adult, Lelia was passionate about music and dancing, so it is not hard to imagine that Chestnut Valley’s honky-tonks would have held a strong lure for a curious young woman.

  Tom Turpin’s Rosebud Cafe, headquarters for the city’s best ragtime pianists, was “open all day and all night” and shared an alley with the Davis/McWilliams household. For at least the first few months Turpin was open, James Breedlove and his wife, Hettie, lived across the street at 2213 Market. Turpin, “the uncrowned master of American syncopated music,” had penned “Harlem Rag” in 1892, just as the new music form was emerging. While Scott Joplin’s name and compositions have endured, it was Turpin whose piano playing first ignited a generation of St. Louis musicians.

  Whatever aspirations Sarah had for
herself, her hopes for Lelia were even greater. The possibility that her daughter might spend her life either frequenting bars or leaning over a washboard motivated Sarah to work harder. “I did washing for families in St. Louis, and saved enough . . . to put my little girl in a school in Knoxville, Tennessee,” Sarah proudly told a reporter years later. To keep Lelia from the delicious distractions of Market Street, she gladly sent $7.85 to Knoxville College for the first month’s room and board during the fall of 1902. She very likely welcomed the news that Sunday chapel was mandatory and that permits to visit the city were only “sparingly granted, and at night never without safe escort.”

  Founded by the United Presbyterian Church in 1875, Knoxville College—whose curriculum included high school and college-level courses—focused both on practical, “industrial” education for the descendants of former slaves and on “normal school” instruction to train teachers. Atop a hill shaded by oak, maple and cedar trees, the school looked down upon a sleepy town of only 50,000 residents, one-tenth the population of St. Louis, and with hardly any of the temptations.

  When seventeen-year-old Lelia arrived on the twenty-two-acre campus in September 1902, she was admitted as a seventh-grade student, a reflection of the lessons she had missed during her sporadic 1899 school year. As one of twenty-four students in her class, she studied handwriting, elocution, English grammar, arithmetic, geography, physiology and sewing. Like the school’s three hundred other students, she dressed in an intentionally unremarkable uniform: a $6 navy-blue serge Norfolk jacket and plain gored skirt in winter, a $1.75 navy chambray shirtwaist in spring. In Elnathan Hall, the girls’ dormitory, she and the other students were expected to help with laundry and dining-room chores.

  While Lelia was away, two of her mother’s three remaining brothers died within eight months of each other. First, in November 1902, forty-year-old James died of heart disease after a monthlong illness. Less than a year later, in August 1903, Solomon succumbed to tubercular meningitis, one of the contagious respiratory ailments that accounted for 16 percent of St. Louis’s African American deaths at the turn of the century. Now only Sarah, Louvenia and Owen remained of the original Breedlove siblings. But once again Owen had dropped out of sight, abandoning Lucy and their four daughters—Anjetta, Thirsapen, Mattie and Gladis—who had moved from Albuquerque to Denver in 1901.

  In November 1903, just weeks before Sarah’s thirty-sixth birthday, John Davis claimed that she had deserted him. Certainly it was a long-overdue decision, and may actually have happened even earlier than he recalled. To no one’s surprise, Davis wasted no time moving in with Susie.

  Because Sarah so rigorously tried to obliterate any memory of Davis, the details of their final separation are skimpy and contradictory, pieced together from faulty memories almost twenty years after the fact. Their failure to legally divorce was an unfortunate oversight that eventually would cause trouble for both Sarah and Lelia. But during the final months when they lived together—while Davis continued to flaunt his relationship with Susie—Sarah had begun quietly seeing a man named Charles Joseph Walker, possibly as early as the fall of 1902, when Lelia left for Knoxville. Conveniently, he lived at 1519 Clark Street, just east of Union Station and within easy walking distance of Sarah’s home.

  Listed in the 1900 St. Louis city directory as a newsman, Walker likely sold subscriptions and advertising and may have done some reporting for one of St. Louis’s three black newspapers, possibly The Clarion. He may also have worked for a time as a barber and in a saloon, the kinds of jobs that helped hone his skills of persuasion. Walker, who had just enough formal education to impress Sarah, struck her as a man with the right amount of ambition to match her own. In turn, he admired her drive and desire to succeed. He was a mix of boaster, charmer and self-promoter, fancying himself a natural-born salesman. Of medium build, he loved fine suits and considered well-shined shoes a necessity. He was “what you would call yellow,” an acquaintance later remembered, referring to his light complexion. C. J. Walker, Sarah believed, was someone with whom she could build a future.

  One of the friends who may have encouraged Sarah to leave John Davis was Jessie Batts Robinson, a member of St. Paul AME Church, who was to become a lifelong confidante. An 1889 graduate of Sumner High School, Jessie had taught at Banneker Elementary School during the early 1890s. In a class photograph during that period, her serene and pleasant face is framed by smoothly twisted French knots at the nape of her neck and atop her head. If she and Sarah did not meet during the year or two that Lelia attended Banneker, they most certainly became acquainted in the fellowship hall at St. Paul. And although their experiences were vastly different, Jessie early recognized Sarah’s eagerness to improve her life. As one of the privileged few who had benefited from Oscar Minor Waring’s tutelage, Jessie felt duty-bound to assist women like Sarah. At some point, she opened her home to mother and daughter, exposing them to a world of culture, etiquette and letters far removed from the drunken outbursts of John Davis.

  Once Jessie married, she became an active member of the Court of Calanthe, the women’s auxiliary of the Knights of Pythias. Modeled on the white Knights of Pythias, which had been founded in Washington, D.C., in 1864, the fraternal organization was one of the many secret societies developed by blacks during the nineteenth century for the health and social welfare of their communities. Eventually Jessie would persuade Sarah to join the Court. Her husband, Christopher K. Robinson, held leadership positions in the group, serving as Grand Chancellor of the order of Missouri during 1895 and later as Supreme Grand Secretary of the national body. A slim, brown-skinned man, whose oval face was distinguished by a neatly trimmed mustache and a receding hairline, “C.K.” was publisher of The Clarion. In that role, he often interacted with the mayor and other prominent St. Louis citizens.

  * * *

  With Lelia enrolled in school at Knoxville, Sarah had accomplished more than she had ever believed possible. Now it was time to work on herself. During that period she was “educated in night school in St. Louis,” according to one source. Although no public school records exist to verify the dates of her enrollment, it was not unusual for adult black women to attend school, as did sixty-three washerwomen who studied bookkeeping, English, reading, arithmetic and geography in night school at Dumas and L’Ouverture in the fall of 1900. In 1903 students older than twenty paid twenty cents per week for a five-week course at Dumas, Delaney and L’Ouverture. There were also free evening schools during the fall of 1904, including one at L’Ouverture from seven to nine o’clock three nights a week and one offered by George Vashon, who was “forming female classes for instruction in language and belles-letters, mathematics and penmanship . . . three evenings of each week.”

  St. Paul’s Mite Missionary Society also allowed Sarah to develop social skills while doing good deeds. By helping those who were now as needy as she had been when she first arrived in St. Louis, she gained confidence. As fellow members of the church and the missionary society, Jessie Robinson and Sarah worked together on community projects. “Membership within church clubs blurred, somewhat, the economic, educational, occupational and social distinctions between the women,” historian Darlene Clark Hine has written. “To be sure, the better educated and more socially prominent women generally dominated the presidencies of the more prestigious church clubs. With rare exceptions, however, what counted was the amount of time, energy, willingness to work, fund raising ability and leadership qualities which individual women exhibited.”

  Sarah quickly took the initiative to create leadership roles for herself. Touched by a Post-Dispatch story about an elderly man struggling to support his blind sister and invalid wife, Sarah collected money for the family from her friends. “She felt it was her duty to do even more [so] she arranged for a pound party through which means groceries in abundance were given, also a purse of $7.50,” a St. Louis newspaper reported many years later. No longer the recipient of charity, she had become, in her own small way, a benefactor.
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br />   Around this time, her relationship with C.J., a more self-assured attitude and an improved status seem to have merged to make Sarah wish for a more smartly groomed appearance. Especially self-conscious about her hair, she was no longer content to cover it with the head wraps that now seemed to her more suitable for plantation cotton fields than city life.

  In the mid-1890s, shortly after Sarah married John Davis, her hair had begun to fall out. The complaint was a common one for women of the era, due usually to a combination of infrequent washing, illness, high fever, scalp disease, low-protein diets and damaging hair treatments. Stress triggered by Davis’s mercurial behavior may also have aggravated her hair loss.

  In a photograph taken around the time of her marriage, Sarah’s gaze was determined and focused. Primly dressed, she wore a single piece of jewelry—a simple silver brooch—below the piping of her high-necked collar. But, in an era when long tresses dominated newspaper illustrations and the covers of ladies’ magazines, she was less than satisfied with her look. Though she had likely fussed over her hair for the sitting, the best she could do was to smooth her short, stubbly sides and fashion a dry, fuzzy puff of bangs above her forehead.

  When her hair had begun “breaking off and falling out,” Sarah later said, “I tried everything mentioned to me without any result.”

  Her experimentation soon would lead to a solution, not just for her hair but for her life.

  CHAPTER 5