Authors: Patricia Bell-Scott
Tags: #Political, #Lgbt, #Biography & Autobiography, #History, #United States, #20th Century
Despite the difficulties at home and her heavy courseload,
Murray graduated in 1927 with honors and her second high school diploma.
She entered Hunter College in the fall of 1928, intent on becoming a writer and a member of the
Phi Beta Kappa honor society. But the confidence of having earned two diplomas with honors was replaced with insecurity and trepidation. Murray was a
southerner in a student population of five thousand New Yorkers, where only a few hundred were black. Most of her classmates and teachers welcomed her; still, she felt self-conscious and
nervous about competing with whites. She concentrated in English and history. She embraced Phi Beta Kappa’s motto, “Love of learning is the guide of life,” though her grades put membership out of reach. She joined the Journalism Club and the International Student Club. She adopted Pauli as her official name.
The recognition that her presence upset “
the delicate balance in neighborhood relationships,” a pride in race instilled by
Aunt Pauline, and an inability to help with housework led Murray to move out of her relatives’ home the summer before the stock market crashed.
She lived for a while at the
Emma Ransom House of the Harlem
YWCA, commuted to school, and worked a series of jobs as a dishwasher, waitress, night-shift elevator operator, maid, and switchboard operator. The pay was meager, the hours long. She survived on coffee and rummaged through refuse for food and cigarettes. She rarely slept more than two hours at a stretch.
Murray’s efforts to keep her eyes open in class amused her classmates. She sat near the windows, wiggled in her seat, wrung her hands, and ran to the restroom to douse her face in cold water. Nothing helped. Her academic performance declined, as did her
health. By the year’s end, she was anemic and underweight.
The strain of working round the clock, the lack of time to study, the disappointment over her grades, and the shame of not having soap, toothpaste, medicine, or school supplies precipitated a “
nervous breakdown.” She left Hunter at the close of her sophomore year. She was entirely self-supporting, so she worked full-time while she tried to recover.
On November 28, 1930, Murray married William “Billy” Roy Wynn, another struggling student. “
It was a dreadful mistake,” she would write years later. Attracted by “
mutual loneliness and rootlessness,” they married secretly, fearing that Murray would be evicted from the YWCA if the marriage became public. “
Sexually inexperienced,” penniless, and without a place of their own, the couple soon separated. They would remain legally married for the next eighteen years but would lead separate lives.
Desperate for a change, in the spring of 1931 Murray jumped at
the chance to drive to California with a friend. During this trip, her first to the West Coast, she penned the
poem
“The Song of the Highway.” The opening lines—“
I am the Highway, / Long, white winding Highway”—celebrated her “
wanderlust.”
Murray’s exuberance was soon squelched by a letter from Aunt Pauline that had been forwarded from New York to Vallejo, California. Her aunt was ill, and she wanted Murray to come home immediately. Since Murray had no money and hitchhiking by car might take too long, she risked hopping an eastbound freight train at the
Southern Pacific Railroad yard.
Hundreds of thousands of youths, males and females from all ethnic groups, rode freight trains in search of work and a better life.
Riding the rails, in contrast to the pleasant drive west, terrified Murray. She was in danger of being apprehended, shot, crushed on the tracks or inside a boxcar, or assaulted should male riders discover she was female. Everyone assumed, to her relief and as she intended, that she was a boy. She was wearing “
scout pants,” high-top shoes, a leather jacket, and a newsboy cap.
Murray’s adolescent build, her cropped hair, and her clothing—like that of other young women alone on the road, for whom comfort and security were constant concerns—reinforced a male persona. After ten days as a stowaway, she reached the Jersey City trainyard “
so cinder-blackened” that it took three baths to cleanse the stains from her body.
Aunt Pauline’s health took a turn for the better, and Murray resumed her life in New York City. Her thirst for travel was satisfied for now, but her desire to write grew more intense. She transformed her diary entries about her train adventure into the
short story
“Three Thousand Miles on a Dime in Ten Days.” In it, she recounted the “
jail-birds, veteran hoboes, suckers, gamblers, murderers” she had met as she jumped freight cars carrying cattle, food, and lumber products. This story, which would be published in 1934 along with “Song of the Highway” in
Nancy Cunard’s
Negro
anthology, placed Murray in the company of such
Harlem Renaissance icons as
Zora Neale Hurston, Langston
Hughes, and
Countee Cullen and that of influential white writers such as
Theodore Dreiser,
Ezra Pound, and
William Carlos Williams. Murray was perhaps the youngest of the 150 contributors, and she had the distinction of being “
the only one in the book not represented by a purely
racial
piece of
writing,” Cunard boasted.
Cunard, a British writer-activist who had rejected her upper-class family background, loved Murray’s writing and the accompanying photograph of Pete, a baby-faced
male character featured in her story. Pete was
actually
Murray, and she asked Cunard to publish this image with no mention of the author’s sex in the contributors’ notes. Cunard thought the snapshot of Murray’s “
boy-self” adorable, she wrote back, adding that “we will use that” and list the author as “Pauli Murray, a name for boy or girl.”
Murray reenrolled at
Hunter in the fall of 1931. She managed to stay in school,
working odd jobs, for the next two years. She lived and shared expenses with
Louise E. Jefferson, an art student at Hunter. Crippled by polio in
childhood, Jefferson would nonetheless become an accomplished swimmer,
photographer, illustrator, publishing house art director, and cofounder of the
Harlem Artists Guild.
Jefferson’s self-discipline and purposive approach to her studies had a positive impact on Murray, who was sometimes scattered and impetuous. Murray’s
writing improved, and she went from barely passing to make making Bs and As in her courses. The academic fraternity for English majors,
Sigma Tau Delta, tapped her for membership in her senior year. Her essay “A Working Student” appeared in the 1932 Christmas issue of the
Hunter College Echo
magazine.
Murray graduated with a bachelor of arts in January 1933. She was one of four blacks in a class of 247 women. It was the peak of the Depression and a few months before
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt moved into the White House.
Unemployment, which was above the national average in New York City, was estimated to be as high as 50 percent for blacks, regardless of
educational background. It took Murray most of the year to find a job, and after ten months with
Opportunity
magazine, her health failed. She resigned and signed up for
Camp Tera on her doctor’s orders.
· · ·
CAMP TERA WAS AN OASIS
for Murray. Frail and shy, she was happy to discover among the residents an old friend of hers from the
YWCA, who was now escorting newcomers around the
site. Margaret “
Pee Wee” Inniss was an immigrant from Trinidad and one of the earliest recruits. Though she had only a married half brother in the United States and no college training, she dreamt of running her own interracial camp for children. An indomitable spirit, she availed herself of every free course and training opportunity she could find. Pee Wee, who was a prankster, was well liked; she directed plays, organized sports teams, and served as circulation manager for the camp’s biweekly bulletin,
Tera Topics
. She also made a practice of writing frank letters about her concerns to public officials, including Eleanor Roosevelt.
Murray was impressed by both Pee Wee’s audacity and the fact that the
first lady wrote back. Murray would
one day wage her own “
confrontation by typewriter,” she called it, with ER and the president.
Murray and Pee Wee might have been assigned to the same room in an old wooden cabin because they were among a handful of black enrollees. The “
narrow cubicle” they shared held their cots, footlockers, and a dresser. Ordinarily, any hint of racial
segregation raised Murray’s ire. However, she was ill and lonely, and it pleased her to have the company of a friend.
Surrounded by the smooth, red-brown cliffs of
Bear Mountain, stands of mountain laurel and hemlock, the glistening waters of Lake Tiorati, and a congregation of birds, chipmunks, deer, and rabbits, Murray felt a serenity she had never before known. There were no work requirements other than keeping her
personal space and the common areas clean. Even as a child, she had not had this kind of leisure.
Life at Camp Tera reflected Eleanor Roosevelt’s belief that exercise in the open air enhanced one’s overall well-being. Here, Murray could choose activities from hiking, swimming, canoeing, and relay racing to ice-skating, tobogganing, and horseback riding. She could participate in dramatic skits, discussion groups, and songfests. She could play an assortment of ball, board, or card games and take art, crafts, and dance classes.
Murray’s favorite pastimes were hiking and curling up in a corner to read and write. She had no aptitude for or interest in the domestic arts. She had not learned to cook, and she never would. More comfortable “
with a pen than a needle,” she hated sewing. Athletic and tomboyish, she preferred outdoor work, like chopping wood, to housekeeping.
The food at Camp Tera was wholesome and plentiful, and Murray’s appetite was insatiable. For breakfast, there was fruit, cereal, eggs, toast, and coffee; for lunch and dinner, ham or frankfurters, sauerkraut, scalloped potatoes, cabbage, bread and butter, cocoa, and tea.
Thanks to the first lady, the residents enjoyed turkey, dressing, and holiday sweets at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Food, shelter, exercise, and rest brought Murray nearly to full strength in a month.
Her sense of well-being got an additional boost from a new friend, Margaret “Peg”
Holmes.
Peg was a round-faced, golden-haired camp counselor from an upper-class family in Putnam County, New York. She was athletic, fun-loving, and popular. Residents affectionately nicknamed her “
the second Babe Ruth.” Peg taught English and dance. She also supervised outdoor sports and
Tera Topics
. She and Murray were close in age. They liked to hike and read
poetry together.
The friendship with Peg and the verdant landscape stirred Murray’s
creative juices. Her poem
“
Poet’s Memo,” which appeared in the 1934 Christmas issue of
Tera Topics
, was replete with romantic phrases like “Your face, beloved,” sensual imagery such as “wavelets sighing,” and allusions to the Greek myth of
Pan, the half-human, half-goat god said to watch over all wildlife. That Pan was also known for his seductive powers and that Murray referred to Peg privately as Pan suggests that this poem was perhaps an homage to Peg as well.
· · ·
ON THE SUNDAY ELEANOR ROOSEVELT ENTERED
the social hall with Jessie
Mills, the
camp’s officious director, Pauli Murray was overtaken by “
the tremor of excitement” that engulfed the residents and the staff. She averted her eyes and “
pretended to read a newspaper.” She had never imagined being so close to the
first lady, whose unassuming manner belied her background.
Born in New York City on October 11, 1884,
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of three children and the only daughter of
Anna Hall Roosevelt, a beautiful socialite, and
Elliott Roosevelt, the dashing younger brother of President
Theodore Roosevelt. ER’s brothers, Elliott and
Gracie Hall, were born in 1889 and 1891, respectively.
Eleanor grew up privileged, yet she was no stranger to personal tragedy. When she was eight, her mother died at twenty-nine of diphtheria, and ER and her brothers went to live with their maternal grandmother,
Mary Ludlow Hall. ER’s brother Elliott died of diphtheria in 1893, and her father died a year later at thirty-four of alcoholism and a seizure suffered after jumping out of a window in an apparent suicide attempt. Eleanor was ten.
In 1899, ER’s grandmother sent her to Allenswood Academy, a private school near London, England, which offered an academic course of study to girls from wealthy families. At Allenswood, Eleanor grew in self-confidence and worldview under the tutelage of headmistress
Marie Souvestre. ER wanted to stay at the school for four years. But she came home after three, at her grandmother’s insistence, to make her New York society debut.
In 1905, ER
married
Franklin Roosevelt, her distant cousin—fifth, once removed. She would give
birth to seven children in ten years. Her only daughter, Anna, was born in 1906, sons
James in 1907, Franklin in 1909 (he died before his first birthday, from influenza), Elliott in 1910, Franklin Delano in 1914, and
John in 1916.
John was only two when ER discovered her husband’s affair with
her former social secretary Lucy Page Mercer. Eleanor offered
Franklin a divorce. His mother,
Sara Delano Roosevelt, threatened to disinherit him if he left his family. Franklin promised not to see Lucy again and reconciled with his wife.
In 1921, doctors diagnosed FDR with
poliomyelitis, which left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. A rising star in the
Democratic Party before paralysis struck, he had been elected to the
New York State Senate in 1910, served as assistant secretary of the navy from 1913 to 1920, and run for vice president on the national ticket with
James M. Cox in 1920. After a period of rigorous rehabilitation, Franklin resumed his political career with the support of his wife. He was elected governor of New York in 1928 and president
in 1932.
ER was glad for the nation, the Democrats, and her husband, but she had “
never wanted to be a President’s wife. And I don’t want it now,” she told Associated Press reporter
Lorena Hickok, who had covered her during the
campaign. Franklin’s election to the presidency meant relinquishing several activities that gave ER personal meaning and self-satisfaction. One such commitment was her post as teacher and administrator at the
Todhunter School for girls in New York City. ER had commuted between Albany and Manhattan and kept teaching when her husband was governor. This would not be possible for the president’s wife.
The prospect of what her life might become depressed ER.