CAN ANYTHING BEAT WHITE?

A Black Family’s Letters

When Ann Petry sat down to write her best-selling novel “The Street,” she was writing from a heritage that included fighters and survivors, men and women who struggled against poverty, racism and illness. They survived and documented their struggles in letters written over almost twenty years.

Ann Lane Petry’s maternal grandfather, Willis Samuel James, slave, fled the “patterrollers” in Virginia during the Civil War. Taught by his children to read and write, Willis believed “there is a deal of trouth … the best place for the negro is as near the white man as he can get.” He followed that “trouth,” working as coachman for Governor Marshall Jewell of Connecticut and buying a house in a white neighborhood in Hartford.

Willis had sixteen children by three wives. The letters in this collection are from the second wife, Anna E. Houston James, and her children, of whom Ann’s mother, Bertha James Lane, was the oldest. Shortly after the last of her nine children was born, Anna James contracted tuberculosis and went to her brother’s home in New Jersey in a futile attempt to recover her health. Her letters, the oldest in the collection, recount her struggles to get well, and brim with concern and loving care for her children.

Bertha was nineteen when her mother died, and she assumed the role of mother to the large family. At the same time, she began to run her own businesses – hairdressing, chiropody and lace making, using her income to help support her brothers and sisters. She followed her father’s “trouth” when she and her husband Peter Lane moved to a tiny town on the Connecticut shore where the families of the wealthy insurance executives escaped Hartford’s summer heat. Peter and Bertha had three daughters, the youngest of whom was Ann Petry.

Bertha’s brother Willis H. James, alias L.J. St. Clair, went off to war just before his 22nd birthday and sent home graphic descriptions of his tour in the jungles of the Philippines. Skirmishes with the guerrillas in the mountainous terrain punctuated the grinding loneliness of the 48th Infantry, U.S. Volunteers (colored). Isolation turned to desperation as the company became separated from its supply train and had to live like the local people, foraging for food and clothing. Willis survived his ordeal and received a field promotion to sergeant. After his discharge, his need for excitement sent him South into mortal danger. Enforcers put bloodhounds on his trail, tracking him into a Georgia swamp. He was captured and wrote to Bertha from the lockup to send $35 so he could bribe the sheriff’s deputies and escape the inevitable lynching.

While Willis slogged through the jungle, a brother and two sisters attended Hampton Institute and Normal School in Virginia. Harriet enrolled just before her father married for the third time. Though she had tuberculosis, she studied, worked and played. When she was strong enough, Harriet made baskets for Bertha to sell, as their father didn’t pay the school expenses. Her illness frequently confined her to bed and prevented her from earning money. Before she became bedridden for the final time, Harriet was planning her wedding.

Harold E. “Rama Hama” James grew up during his stay at Hampton and discovered a passion for farming. With frequent use of slang, his boyhood letters sound modern and feature colorful descriptions of life at the school, including an industrial accident in which he cut off part of his thumb, and the deaths of two students. Though Harold lived with the same poverty as his sisters, his letters do not express the same anguish. In typical kid fashion, he was more interested in gifts of candy than in new clothes until the situation became desperate. Harriet’s death broke Harold’s heart, and he never returned to Hampton.

Like her brother Willis, Helen James Chisholm roamed. After a sea crossing from San Francisco that made even the captain sick, she went to work as a maid in a school in Honolulu. During her stay, Helen met the last Hawaiian queen and attended a reception given by the wife of the territorial governor, Sanford Dole. A traditional luau and a vacation on the beach at Waikiki enlivened her days of hard work.

About a year after she arrived in Hawaii, Helen survived another rough sailing to the west coast of Hawaii. There she taught and cared for Kona Orphanage’s fifty boys and girls, including the children of lepers. For variety, the Kailua-Kona area offered volcanic eruptions and local residents who threw rocks through the windows of the Christian church because they thought the devil was inside. Upon her return to the States, Helen attended Atlanta University, where she studied with W.E.B. DuBois, and later wrote detailed accounts about teaching at the Penn School in South Carolina and at Florida State Normal School. Though she lived in the South at the beginning of the Jim Crow era, Helen devoted minimal attention to racial issues. When she traveled, she found ingenious ways of circumventing Jim Crow laws, and she displayed her own prejudices: Buddhists were “heathens,” white southerners “dirty and disgraceful.”

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