Our Kind of People Read online

“I know there’s a whole history and world of wealthy, professional black people,” explained Lewis as we completed lunch and walked to his waiting limousine outside, “but I don’t know how to crack it and introduce my kids to it.”

  Once I got over the initial shock that this multimillionaire was, on the one hand, hobnobbing with white millionaire investment bankers, yet was stuck outside of black elite circles, I told him about the elite black organizations and activities that he should immediately introduce to his children. I told him about the old-guard families dating back to the 1860s and about how they lived and where they lived today. I told him about the sixty-year-old Jack and Jill organization, a national invitation-only social group for black kids from well-to-do families. My brother and I had grown up in it and met our closest black friends there.

  I also talked to Lewis about the Boulé and the Links, considered to be the most prestigious private social groups for, respectively, black men and black women. And though he was somewhat familiar with the topic, I talked in detail about the proper summer resorts, sleepaway camps, boarding schools, and black debutante cotillions.

  “You oughtta turn all of this into a book,” Lewis said as he jotted down some of my suggestions.

  I laughed at the time because his remark seemed like a subtle mocking of my detailed knowledge of all the issues and groups he should consider. Then, as we rode north up Park Avenue in the black limousine, I thought that a book about the black elite and its history of thriving in the awkward position between two worlds—one black and one white—would be interesting indeed, but probably only to the wealthy blacks who already knew the stories and the rules. These black individuals already knew the distinctions between the old-guard blacks from Washington, Atlanta, Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles. They already knew about the obsession our group had with Episcopal churches, “good hair,” light complexions, the AKAs, and Martha’s Vineyard.

  But as I thought more about the idea of this book and discussed it with people outside the insular circle who belonged, I discovered that there was a broader audience. I discovered that having grown up within the circle, I had been too close to see that the experiences really were unique. There was a story here that began as early as the 1870s with the nation’s first black congressmen and the first black millionaires.

  As I completed law school, I put the book project away for another time. I worked on other books and became a corporate attorney in New York. Over the next couple of years, I lost touch with Lewis, even though I frequently read about him in the news, following his purchase of Beatrice Foods and the subsequent torching of his $5 million summer home on Long Island in 1991. During our occasional conversations, he informed me that his daughters had been enrolled in Jack and Jill as I had suggested, that Leslie had started at Manhattan’s Brearley School, and finally that Leslie had been accepted into Harvard. He said that she and her younger sister had a strong black identity. It was good to hear and it reminded me again of the book project.

  The real in-depth research on this book did not begin until the early days of 1993. Ironically, it was the same month that I was to receive the tragic news that this friend and mentor, Reginald Lewis, had died suddenly of a brain tumor. It was announced on the front page of the New York Times on the day of President Clinton’s inauguration. As I began the first of more than 350 interviews, and the research that would take me throughout the country visiting libraries, manuscript collections, newspaper archives, and private homes, I had in my mind what Reginald Lewis had said to me several years earlier: There needed to be a chronicle of a community that was hidden from so many people.

  Although it’s a world I’ve known all of my life, and although it’s an important part of our nation’s history, it’s a world that is filled with irony and conflict. This book was an opportunity to reveal a rarely discussed aspect of American history. It was an opportunity to capture the stories and lives of people like Lewis and many others, who have lived at the boundary of two worlds and been misunderstood by both.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Origins of the Black Upper Class

  Bryant Gumbel is, but Bill Cosby isn’t.

  Lena Horne is, but Whitney Houston isn’t.

  Andrew Young is, but Jesse Jackson isn’t.

  And neither is Maya Angelou, Alice

  Walker, Clarence Thomas, or Quincy Jones.

  And even though both of them try extremely

  hard, neither Diana Ross nor Robin Givens

  will ever be.

  All my life, for as long as I can remember, I grew up thinking that there existed only two types of black people: those who passed the “brown paper bag and ruler test” and those who didn’t. Those who were members of the black elite. And those who weren’t.

  I recall summertime visits from my maternal great-grandmother, a well-educated, light-complexioned, straight-haired black southern woman who discouraged me and my brother from associating with darker-skinned children or from standing or playing for long periods in the July sunlight, which threatened to blacken our already too-dark skin.

  “You boys stay out of that terrible sun,” Great-grandmother Porter would say in a kindly, overprotective tone. “God knows you’re dark enough already.”

  As she sat rocking, stiff-lipped and humorless, on the porch of our Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard, summer home, she would gesture for us to move further and further into the shade while flipping disgustedly through the pages of Ebony magazine.

  “Niggers, niggers, niggers,” she’d say under her breath while staring at the oversized pages of text and photos of popular Negro politicians, entertainers, and sports figures who were busy making black news in 1968.

  Great-grandmother Porter, the daughter of a minister and a homemaker, was extremely proud of her Memphis, Tennessee, middle-class roots. While still a child, she had worn silk taffeta dresses, had taken several years of piano lessons, and had managed to become fluent in French. Her only daughter had followed in her footsteps, wearing similarly elegant dresses, taking music lessons, and attending the private LeMoyne School a few years ahead of Roberta Church, the millionaire daughter of Robert Church, the richest black man in the South. She often reminded us that one of her sisters, Venie, then grown and married, had lived for years on Mississippi Boulevard next door to Maceo Walker, the most affluent and powerful black man in Memphis. Great-grandmother was proud of many things, such as being a Republican like the Churches and most other well-placed blacks in those early years. Like all blacks in racist southern towns in the early 1900s, she despised the insults, the substandard treatment, and the poor facilities that the Jim Crow laws had left for blacks. But like many blacks of her class, she was able to limit the interactions that she and her family had with such indignities. Rather than ride at the back of the bus and send her daughter to substandard segregated public schools, she and her husband bought a car and paid for private schooling. For my great-grandmother, life had been generous enough that she could create an environment that buffered her family against the bigotry she knew was just outside her door.

  Even though it was 1968, a period of unrest for many blacks throughout the country, Great-grandmother—like the blue-veined crowd that she was proud to belong to—seemed, at times, to be totally divorced from the black anxiety and misery that we saw on the TV news and in the papers. In public and around us children, her remarks often suggested that she was satisfied with the way things were. She often said she didn’t think much of the civil rights movement (“I don’t see anything civil about a bunch of nappy-headed Negroes screaming and marching around in the streets”), even though I later learned that she and her church friends often gave money to the NAACP, the Urban League, and other groups that fought segregation. She said she didn’t think much of Marvin Gaye or Aretha Franklin or their loud Baptist music (“When are we going to get beyond all this low-class, Baptist, spiritual-sounding rock and roll music?”), even though she would sometimes attend Baptist services. She was proud when a black man finally
won an Academy Award, but was disappointed that Sidney Poitier seemed so dark and wet with perspiration when he was interviewed after receiving the honor.

  An outsider might have looked at this woman and wondered whether she liked blacks at all. Her views seemed so unforgiving. The fact was that she was completely dedicated to the members of her race, but she had a greater understanding of and appreciation for those blacks who shared her appearance and socioeconomic background.

  Disappointed and disillusioned by how little she saw of herself and her crowd in the pages of Ebony magazine, Great-grandmother looked up and once again focused her attention on me and my brother.

  And then she thought about her hair.

  Stepping back inside the house for her ever-present Fuller brush and comb, she was, no doubt, frustrated by the fact that her great-grandchildren were several shades darker than she, with kinky hair that was clearly that of a Negro person.

  My brother and I noted her disappearance into the house and thus once again ran out of the shade and danced around the sand- and pebble-covered road, breathing in the sunshine and the fragrance of the dense pine trees that rose from the layers of sand and brush.

  “Young men—young men,” her voice called from the rear bedroom, “you aren’t back in that sun, are you?”

  “No, ma’am. We’re in the shade, ma’am,” my eight-year-old brother, Richard, called back with complete conviction as he stopped just out of my great-grandmother’s range of vision, thrusting his bare brown chest and oval face into the ninety-six-degree July sun, boldly willing his skin to grow blacker and blacker in defiance of her query.

  Even at age six, I knew the importance of class distinctions within my black world. As I moved quickly to the safety of the shade, beckoning my brother to protect his complexion from the blackening sun, I gave legitimacy to my great-grandmother’s—and many of my people’s—fears. At age six, I already understood the importance of achieving a better shade of black.

  Unlike my brother, I already knew that there was us and there was them. There were those children who belonged to Jack and Jill and summered in Sag Harbor; Highland Beach; or Oak Bluffs, Martha’s Vineyard; and there were those who didn’t. There were those mothers who graduated from Spelman or Fisk and joined AKA, the Deltas, the Links, and the Girl Friends, and there were those who didn’t. There were those fathers who were dentists, lawyers, and physicians from Howard or Meharry and who were Alphas, Kappas, or Omegas and members of the Comus, the Boulé, or the Guardsmen, and there were those who weren’t. There were those who could look back two or three generations and point to relatives who owned insurance companies, newspapers, funeral homes, local banks, trucking companies, restaurants, catering firms, or farmland, and there were those who couldn’t. There were those families that made what some called “a handsome picture” of people with “good hair” (wavy or straight), with “nice complexions” (light brown to nearly white), with “sharp features” (thin nose, thin lips, sharp jaw) and curiously non-Negroid hazel, green, or blue eyes—and there were those that didn’t. I had a precious few of the above, while many I knew and played with were able to check off all the right boxes. In fact, I knew some who not only had complexions ten shades lighter than that brown paper bag, and hair as straight as any ruler, but also had multiple generations of “good looks,” wealth, and accomplishment. And, of course, I also knew some black kids who could claim nothing at all.

  It was a color thing and a class thing. And for generations of black people, color and class have been inexorably tied together. Since I was born and raised around people with a focus on many of these characteristics, it should be no surprise that I was later to decide—at age twenty-six—to have my nose surgically altered just so that I could further buy into the aesthetic biases that many among the black elite hold so dear.

  During my youth, it was often painful for me to acknowledge that I had one foot inside and one foot outside of this group. I never quite had enough of the elite credentials to impress the key leaders in the group, but my family and I checked off enough boxes to be embraced by a segment of this community. Sometimes I knew where I was lacking and sometimes I didn’t. For example, I knew that my complexion was a shade lighter than the brown paper bag, but that my hair—while not coarse like our African ancestors’—had a Negroid kink that made it the antithesis of ruler-straight. I knew that we lived in the right neighborhood, summered at the right resorts, and employed the right level of household help, but that we had not attended the right private schools or summer camps. While my grandparents owned businesses and property that brought them and their children an unusually high standard of living, none of them had gone to the right schools. My mother was accepted by the old guard’s most exclusive women’s social club, but my father belonged to a fraternity that the elite group considered to be “distinctly middle-class.” My brother and I grew up in the country’s most exclusive black children’s group, yet we were never invited to serve as escorts in the best debutante cotillions.

  But whether it was mainly the skin color, the hair texture, the family background, the education, the money, or the sharpness of our features that set some of us apart and made some of us think we were superior to other blacks—and to most whites—we were certain that we would always be able to recognize our kind of people.

  The characteristics of the black elite have roots that can be traced back almost four hundred years to when slavery began in this country. When the first Africans arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, neither the white Dutch or Portuguese slave traders nor the white American plantation owners had any knowledge of, or interest in, the tribal and cultural differences between the Mandingo, Dahomean, Ashanti, Mbundu, Ewe, or Bantu blacks who were brought from different regions of Africa. They had no knowledge—or interest in letting the rest of white America know—that these blacks had come from established villages where they were already skilled in crafting iron, gold, leather, silver, and bronze into tools, artwork, and housewares, and where they were already weaving clothing; speaking different languages; growing tomatoes, onions, and fruits; raising livestock; practicing different religions; and establishing laws, banking mechanisms, medical treatments, and various other cultural traditions. The Ivory Coast, Guinea, the Gold Coast, and other areas of West Africa were simply profitable ports of call for the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, British—and later, American—slave traders and shippers who captured, dehumanized, raped, and sold more than fifteen million men, women, and children on blocks at boat docks up and down the East Coast of the United States. To the traders, a sale at an average price of $500 per man and $250 per woman or child (these South Carolina 1801 prices eventually rose as high as $1,300 or $1,400 by 1860) made the business of human bondage a profitable one that required no conscience and no need to draw cross-cultural connections.

  Prior to 1442, when the Portuguese first arrived in West Africa to capture blacks and begin the four-hundred-year period of black slavery, Africans had their own class distinctions that were based on tribe, locale, and the individual tribal member’s assigned role in his community. All those distinctions became moot in the New World.

  When black slaves arrived on many southern plantations, they were ultimately divided into two general groups. There were the outside laborers who worked in the fields harvesting rice or tobacco, cutting sugarcane, picking cotton, or building roads and structures. Included among this outside laborer group were those slaves who worked at smelting iron, digging wells, and laying bricks. Many slaves built the very plantations and buildings around which they worked. Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and George Washington’s Mount Vernon were both important homes built by slaves. And, for the most part, throughout the South, these outside laborers lived in windowless, unfloored shacks, or in structures close to their owners’ livestock.

  The second group of slaves were those who performed the more desirable jobs inside the master’s house: cooking, cleaning, washing, and tending to the more personal nee
ds of the owner’s family around the home. While these laborers were also slaves, with no more or fewer rights than the outdoor workers, the distinctions between the slaves in the field and the slaves who served as butlers and “mammies” in the house were not at all subtle. The terms “house niggers” and “field niggers” grew into meaningful labels as generations of slaves in the master’s house gained more favorable treatment and had access to better food, better work conditions, better clothing, and a level of intimacy with the owner’s family that introduced the house slave to white ways, minimal education, and nonconsensual sexual relations.

  As the caste system among the slaves was gradually instituted by slave owners and their families, the slaves themselves came to believe that one group was, indeed, superior to the other. The plantation owners began to place their lighter-skinned slaves in the house, thus creating an even greater chasm between the two groups—now based on physical characteristics, not just random assignment. Because these lighter-skinned blacks were perceived as receiving greater benefits and a more comfortable lifestyle, resentment among the darker-skinned field slaves only grew. “Although it was illegal to educate slaves,” explains history professor Dr. Adele Logan Alexander of George Washington University, “it was far more likely that the house slave would learn to read, be introduced to upper-class white traditions, be permitted to play or interact with white family members than would a field slave. In fact, slave-owning families found they could run their homes more efficiently when their house slaves were more knowledgeable and educated.”

  Not surprisingly, both whites and “house niggers” came to consider the dark-skinned “field niggers” to be less civilized and intellectually inferior.

  Since many white slave owners established clandestine and forced sexual relations with their female house slaves, the mulatto offspring (who were also assigned slave status) extended the size of the house slave staff. In fact, it was to the owners’ benefit to mate with as many of these female slaves as possible, for each new child was a new slave. While none of these illegitimate offspring had any more rights than the unmixed African slaves, they became a part of a growing phenomenon of lighter-complexioned house slaves who separated themselves even further from the field blacks.