My Heart Laid Bare (63 page)

“Why do you hurt me, 'Lisha? When you know that I have never stopped loving you. And if you are ‘black'—and if I am ‘white'—what is that to
us
? What is Father's curse to
us
?”

Since the Philadelphia days as St. Goar's beautiful, mysterious daughter, Millie has been aware of the career of Prince Elihu, the radical Negro revolutionary of whom it was predicted he wouldn't live for more than a year—how many years ago. Her father refused to discuss Prince Elihu with her, as he'd refused to discuss poor Thurston, but Millie hadn't needed Abraham Licht to confirm what was clear to her through studying newspaper and magazine photographs minutely. “There couldn't be two young men like 'Lisha. So like 'Lisha. Impossible!”

And what of this teaching of his, that the entire white race is damned and only the colored races of the world will be redeemed?

Millie believes it an artful variation of Father's grand scheme: the Society for the Reclamation & Restoration of E. Auguste Napoléon Bonaparte. Here, the scheme is the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, boasting more than one hundred thousand members, whose plan it is to emigrate back to Africa by the year 1935. Elisha can't be serious, it must be a scheme. A brilliant game, though dangerous.

Yet it seems that many people, white as well as Negro, do take Prince Elihu seriously, whether as a savior or a madman; or a traitor to his country. Millie had read with astonishment of how Prince Elihu voluntarily returned from Central America to surrender to federal authorities in San Francisco, to answer to absurd charges of “wartime sedition” and to receive a harsh sentence of twelve years in prison with no possibility, as Attorney General Palmer insisted, of parole. (Though in fact President Harding pardoned Elihu anyway—to the consternation of Millie's Stirling in-laws who are, like most Richmond whites, genteel Christian racists.)

How could this be? Millie wondered. Had 'Lisha failed to heed Father's admonition not to be seduced by The Game?

Millie has long worried that something may have happened to 'Lisha in the intervening years. A blow to the head, severe illnesses . . . (She'd read, greatly upset, of his three-month tour of Africa during which time
he'd been dangerously ill.) For it's impossible to comprehend how the 'Lisha she knew so intimately, closer than any brother, could believe such cruel nonsense—that Caucasians are fallen, diseased and doomed; but a degenerate subspecies of the original Homo sapiens who were Negro. Quite apart from the doubtful science of this belief, which Millie has seen refuted in such journals as
Atlantic Monthly,
it's a fact, isn't it, that Millie, whom 'Lisha had vowed to love forever, is
white
? “How can he then believe that ‘whites' are inferior to ‘blacks'? In love, we were equal. He knows that.”

Going squirrelly
is one of the colorful catchphrases of this colorful era, prevalent in popular songs, comic strips and jokes. Millie laughs, to think that
going squirrelly
may be à la mode, and Prince Elihu is riding the crest of the mode. The more absurd the lie, the more easily it might be believed.

“But I would be more desirable to him,” she tells herself, “than any Negro woman, as I
am
white.”

Yet: would Millie leave her children behind? Yes she would leave them if 'Lisha insists. Or—might she bring them along? “If we eloped to Europe, for instance. He is said to be a wealthy man, and I have saved money of my own. The children could come . . . if they wished. For a while.” She paces through the upstairs of the gracious old house plotting, rehearsing. What she will say to Warren. What she will say to 'Lisha. What she will say to her children.

Yes she will go to New York. But no—“Ridiculous! I would not drive across Richmond to throw myself at any man's feet.”

Then one morning in early summer idly skimming the Richmond Sunday paper, the decision is made for her as if she'd rolled dice: on page 2 there is an article headlined
HARLEM LEADER ELIHU TO SPEAK AT RALLY
, and on page 19 there is an article headlined
MIAMI EVANGELIST PLEDGES MILLION-DOLLAR MINISTRY
. Millie reads these seemingly unrelated articles in tandem, with mounting excitement. The first reports that Prince Elihu will preside over the First Annual Universal Negro Confraternity Rally in Madison
Square Garden, Manhattan, on 19 June 1929; over one hundred thousand participants are expected. The second reports that Reverend Thurmond Blichtman of the New Church of the Nazarene, Miami, Florida, has received more than $1 million in donations as a result of an intensive tour through Florida earlier in the year, and that he'd had a vision from God of exactly the church he would cause to be built on a “sacred piece of property” on Biscayne Boulevard overlooking the bay. The focus of the slightly scandalous article is Reverend Blichtman's newly emergent fame, or notoriety, in Florida; evidently the man is a mesmerizing preacher who recites the Gospels in an impassioned voice that provokes men and women to break down in tears and rush forward to be “saved.” Rival preachers and ministers complain bitterly that this “Northern carpet-bagger” has been stealing their congregations from them—“That man knows no shame,” a Baptist leader has charged. A prominent Methodist minister has accused Blichtman of “satanic powers of seduction.” Blichtman refuses to reply to his critics except to say he prays for them; in the meantime he's amassed an undisclosed amount of money from donations for the construction of a New Church of the Nazarene in Miami. Millie is initially drawn to the article by the accompanying photograph of a strongly built man of middle age, fair-haired, handsome, with something damaged about his face. He's kneeling on the ground, hands clasped at midchest in prayer.
Thurston!
Millie thinks.

Peering through the magnifying glass Warren uses for close reading, she studies the grainy photo, breathless with excitement.
Reverend Thurmond Blichtman. New Church of the Nazarene. My lost brother. Can it be?

Something slips off the edge of the wrought-iron table (they're break-fasting on the terrace, this warm May morning) and shatters. Tabitha comes forward quickly to remedy the harm. “Millie darling, why are you so—nervous?” Warren asks in his kindly, exasperating way; and Millie, thrusting the newspaper from her, yawns and stretches and declares she isn't nervous at all—“Only restless! Richmond is so
finite.
”

IT'S REVEREND THURMOND
Blichtman who has made up Millie's mind for her. Like her eldest brother, she will bravely seek her destiny.

Speaking to Warren of her longing to see her brother Darian and her sister Esther in upstate New York in such a wistful way that Warren will imagine it's he who has thought of a train trip north for Millie—“To revive your spirits.” Millie will travel to Schenectady to visit Darian, and travel on to the west to visit Esther in Port Oriskany where her sister has become involved in what Richmond citizens would decry as an “immoral” movement . . . nurses, welfare workers, volunteers, nearly all female, crusading for a newly founded organization, the American Birth Control League. (Since becoming a well-to-do Richmond matron, Millie finds this title so coarse, so crude, she'd be embarrassed to utter it aloud in mixed company. Birth control! “Though it's a very good thing of course, for the lower classes. And yet—think of the innocent children who would never have been born!”)

At the Richmond station, Millie kisses her adoring husband, and Betsey and Maynard, good-bye. She'll be gone, she promises, only two weeks. “Already I miss you, darlings,” Millie hears herself say, a lilting soprano voice, her eyes shining with happiness and audacity and something like terror; as if, stepping up into the train, gaily waving at her family only a few yards away, she has already stepped into a void, and will never return.

IMAGINING AS THE
train speeds relentlessly north
he might be, he must be sensing my approach. My arrival. My return to his life.

In Manhattan, Millicent Stirling loses no time checking into the Waldorf-Astoria, which is the only hotel she knows, the hotel in which she and Warren have stayed previously; next evening, she takes a taxi to Madison Square Garden for the rally, or rather to the vicinity of the Garden, for there's so much traffic in the streets, so many vehicles and pedestrians, and mounted policemen shouting into the crowd, the driver can't bring
her within two blocks—“This is as far as I go, ma'am.” Millie smiles to see the man frowning and shaking his head in the rearview mirror.
He wonders who I am, a white woman; wonders why I have a special invitation to such an event.

This rally of 19 June 1929 will be, as newspapers promise, a “historic” event. Never have so many Negroes gathered together for such a purpose, in the very heart of a white metropolis; only Prince Elihu, leader of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, could draw such a crowd. Millie has costumed herself for the occasion, quite cleverly she thinks: to disguise, as best she can, the color of her skin, she's wearing a stylish tunic dress of dove-gray silk with long sleeves, and a high lace collar; her stockings are of a matching hue, though sheer silk; she wears white eyelet gloves and a flat-crowned hat of Spanish style, made for her by the leading Richmond milliner, in glazed black straw with a black dotted swiss veil—“Both ladylike, Mrs. Stirling, and
very
‘sexy,'” as the milliner has said. Now Mrs. Stirling, on foot, as rarely she's on foot in such a place, wide city streets, avenues, an unfamiliar and inhospitable atmosphere, is breathless with excitement, like a young girl embarked upon an adventure unknown to her elders; finds herself carried along by the throng of noisy people, black faces on every side, pushing into the interior of Madison Square Garden by several doors. The marquee boasts
FIRST ANNUAL NEGRO CONFRATERNITY RALLY.
Everywhere are six-foot posters of
PRINCE ELIHU
, a fierce, handsome youngish Negro in a white caftan, wearing a helmet with a white ostrich plume, an amazing costume, a quite effective costume Millie thinks, like Prince Elihu's fine, fierce, intelligent eyes, his clenched jaws, that expression both noble and truculent—“It
is.
'Lisha.” Millie would know her lover anywhere, as he would know her, even in disguise.

As Millie stumblingly ascends a flight of steps, jostled by the hurrying crowd, she hears someone shout, “Ma'am? Ma'am!”—and turns guiltily to see, about ten feet away on the sidewalk, a helmeted policeman, white, eyes hidden by a tinted visor; but Millie pretends she hasn't heard, and escapes inside.

Inside, the air is far denser and warmer than in the street; for there are too many people; too many; the smells are beginning to define themselves to Millie's sensitive nostrils; where she'd halfway imagined a kind of path cleared for her, as Mrs. Warren Stirling of Richmond, Virginia, a white woman known to Prince Elihu, even while knowing such an expectation was nonsense, she's confused that she's so . . . anonymous, even in her white skin.

In the foyer, long lines press forward to the ticket counters, for there are many who haven't purchased tickets beforehand, like Millie; the interior of the great, high-ceilinged building is dizzy with the ring and echo of thousands of voices; an air of intense excitement, expectation; here and there are pickets, enemies of the Negro Union?—pamphlets thrust rudely into Millie's gloved hand, and Millie is too polite to refuse—
All-Race League Protests Negro Zionism—Manifesto of the NAACP—Black Socialists Unite!—Why Did Jesus Die for You?—“Prince Elihu” Traitor to Race & Nation.
There are raised voices, arguments; sudden scufflings and struggles; moments of eerie stillness when everyone in Millie's vicinity freezes, to see what is happening; giant Negroes in uniforms sweated through beneath the arms, bearing the insignia of the Negro Union, are engaged in hauling protestors away, walking, or dragging, them swiftly and deftly against the incoming stream of people which parts to let them through.

Millie's beautiful, costly Spanish hat has been knocked askew on her head, and the veil, heated and dampened by her quickened breath, clings to her face. Millie adjusts the hat, blindly using her three-inch ebony hatpins; she imagines eyes glancing upon her, more curious than startled or disapproving.
A white woman, a white lady—here?
Millie has begun to think that she's in foreign territory though still in the United States; perhaps she should have planned her strategy differently . . . a telegram to 'Lisha, notifying him of her arrival, instead of this planned surprise.

Tickets are $1. Millie pays with shaking hands, her eyelet gloves already mysteriously soiled.

Inside the vast hall, however, the atmosphere is less frantic. Earnest young Negro boys and girls, in navy blue suits and white shirts, are ushers; they pass out pamphlets titled
The World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union: Salvation Here & Now,
with the glorified likeness of Prince Elihu on the cover. From somewhere out of sight a brass band is playing loudly, quick-stepping military music. (Millie recognizes one of 'Lisha's old favorites—“Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!”) Millie is escorted to a seat many rows from the stage, and a hard, uncushioned seat it is, so very different from seats in the Richmond Opera House; she's imagined she came early to the rally, and might sit in the first row center so that, once she removed her veil, Elisha might notice her; but clearly she hasn't come early enough.

“'Lisha has become a master of The Game,” Millie thinks, glancing uneasily about.

And what a variety of men, women, children: some of them dressed as if for Sunday, in colorful pastels, with snap-brim straw hats, patent leather shoes, vests, ties, enormous flowered hats, elbow-length gloves; others, the majority, in more ordinary workaday clothes, though clean and well groomed, like the reliable, devoted Negroes of the Stirlings' household; others visibly poor, with mismatched clothing. Here and there Millie sees, not wishing to see, an obviously deranged person; one of them, an obese woman, sits only a few seats away, angrily fanning herself with a pamphlet and singing what sounds like “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood”—a hymn Millie has heard Tabitha sing in the kitchen. And here and there in the crowd Millie sees a Caucasian face—except, when she looks more closely, she decides that the individual is only just very light-skinned, in some cases creamy-skinned, with fair brown hair, or red hair; Caucasian features mixed with Negroid features; a ghost-blend of races that seems to her beautiful, haunting.