The Hidden Story of J. P. Morgan’s Librarian

Greene’s practically decade-long collaboration with Morgan was arguably a very powerful relationship of her life exterior her household, and I feel the curators have accomplished a terrific job of exhibiting the peculiar intimacy that collectors and curators share. The ledgers, letters, playing cards, and different ephemera on show doc not solely what Morgan purchased but additionally what Greene turned him on to. Although collectors and curators or librarians often keep knowledgeable distance, it’s inevitably disrupted once they disagree about a purchase order and whether or not it really works within the assortment; it’s a group sport for 2.

Morgan had the cash and the dream—and a terrific eye—however Greene had the imaginative and prescient and creativity to see that the library may inform a narrative, not a lot concerning the accumulation of stuff however about man’s deep need for information, and thus reality. Ciallela and Palmer counsel that if Greene had advised the reality about herself she wouldn’t have had her extraordinary profession. However lies demand fixed feeding, and the work of sustaining her fiction will need to have been draining. When you’re going to be white, another person must be Black—and ideally stereotypically so, the higher to emphasise your God-decreed superiority. When her maid died, in 1910, Greene wrote to Berenson concerning the “poor little black factor who had been extra than a mom to me” and “my trustworthy and adoring slave.” In 1921, after seeing Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” starring the Black actor Charles Sidney Gilpin, she wrote to Berenson, “An actual (New York) darky—and amazingly effectively accomplished.”

The language Greene used with white folks was maybe not so removed from that of the light-skinned, class-conscious Black society through which she spent her early years—which thought of dark-skinned Blacks to be much less “distinguished.” Born in 1879 in Washington, D.C., which, because the historian Willard B. Gatewood famous, was then “the middle of the black aristocracy in the US,” Belle Marion Greener was the third youngster of Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener, a musician and a instructor, and Richard Theodore Greener, a lover of books and artwork who, in 1870, had been the primary Black graduate of Harvard School. In 1872, he turned the principal of the Preparatory Excessive Faculty for Coloured Youth, the nation’s first public highschool for Black college students (and one of many faculties the place Genevieve had taught music). After they married, in 1874, Genevieve adopted her husband to South Carolina, the place he had change into the primary Black professor on the College of South Carolina. They returned to D.C. after Reconstruction fell aside, and Greener supported his rising household by working as a lawyer and because the dean of the Howard College Regulation Faculty.

The Greeners had 5 youngsters, together with Belle (two others died in infancy), and, in 1888, settled in New York, the place Greener served for a number of years as an examiner on the Municipal Civil Service Fee and led the trouble to boost cash to construct what’s now often known as Grant’s Tomb. In 1898, when Greener was struggling to search out work, he sought out the assistance of Booker T. Washington. Quickly, he was serving in President William McKinley’s diplomatic corps. (In line with Strouse, Republicans gave international jobs to a couple distinguished Black males to draw the Black vote.) Greener was despatched to Vladivostok, a distant Russian outpost. Earlier than turning into a diplomat, he had separated from Genevieve, presumably owing to their differing views on race. Genevieve was already passing as white in some contexts; presumably, the kids had been, too. Greener died in Chicago in 1922, seemingly with out seeing the kids he had with Genevieve once more.

By selecting whiteness, Genevieve set a dangerous instance for her offspring. The lesson it taught them was that whiteness was “higher,” its energy the one sort value claiming. On this manner, she condemned herself and her youngsters to a void of historical past. They had been racial mushrooms, sprouting out of nowhere, with no everlasting floor to face on. They might belief nobody, as a result of that they had nobody, and I can solely think about the corrosive impact this may have on the spirit.

As soon as Genevieve and her youngsters started passing in New York, they needed to assume new or, relatively, reimagined identities. The household abbreviated Greener to Greene. Genevieve modified her maiden title from Fleet to Van Vliet, to align it with the outdated Dutch names that had been then distinguished in New York society. Greene and her brother, Russell, added da Costa as a center title, to attach themselves, the curators write, “to a fictional Portuguese heritage that may assist clarify their darker complexions.” (The opposite siblings had lighter pores and skin tones and didn’t hassle to make this transformation.)

A rat a cockroach and a pigeon sit together around a table.

In an effort to assist help her household, the industrious Greene dropped out of highschool, at Horace Mann, after a 12 months and, in 1894, started working as a messenger and a clerk for Lucetta Daniell, the registrar at Lecturers School. By 1896, she was Daniell’s assistant, and Daniell was her protector and mentor; Greene finally discovered one other advocate in Grace Hoadley Dodge, one of many founders of Lecturers School. Each ladies inspired her to return to highschool—the one manner she may obtain her longtime dream of turning into a librarian. (Greene as soon as advised a journalist, “I knew undoubtedly by the point I used to be twelve years outdated that I needed to work with uncommon books. I liked them even then, the sight of them, the fantastic really feel of them, the romance and thrill of them.”) Daniell and Dodge’s help led Greene to enroll on the Northfield Seminary for Younger Girls, in western Massachusetts, a college for clever college students of modest means. In a letter of help, Dodge wrote to the spouse of the varsity’s founder:

The household has a tragic historical past[.] The Mom was a Mt Holyoke Graduate, a instructor—She married a person, with Spanish Cuban & Negro blood a lawyer who graduated the pinnacle of his class at Harvard! He turned out intelligent however dangerous and after horrible experiences she left him & has been supporting her 5 youngsters with horrible battle. . . . Whereas the hint of Negro blood is noticeable, Belle has all the time related intimately with one of the best class of white ladies & on the School was a terrific favourite with many being entertained by them & going out with them— The Mom needs to make the lady a real noble lady & she has qualities for such if below such affect as Northfield. . . . The Mom, after all, is white with good ancestry and Belle inherits brains & capacity.

There is no such thing as a proof of Genevieve’s having attended Mount Holyoke, or of Richard having “Spanish Cuban” blood (a time period chosen to differentiate it, little question, from “abnormal” Cuban blood). However to see the racial worry and justification in Dodge’s letter is to see how a lot Genevieve had already accomplished to perpetuate sure myths, together with that of the “shiftless” Black man. To explain a pores and skin shade is to say nothing concerning the individual. However, should you create a narrative round it, you possibly can set off all types of issues, together with puritanism and the nasty, uncomfortable thrill of the unique. Greene needed to clarify her light-brown complexion someway, so why not make her a sufferer of it, and Richard the darkish marauder sullying Genevieve’s and his daughter’s whiteness—as a result of isn’t that what Black males do?

We stay in a world the place miscegenation remains to be usually reviled. And artists starting from D. W. Griffith to Adrienne Kennedy have made artwork out of racial—learn sexual—hysteria. Kennedy’s play “Funnyhouse of a Negro” tells the story of a younger light-skinned Black lady who lives in thrall to her dark-skinned father and white-skinned mom. Close to the top of the play, her inside voices all communicate collectively:

He by no means tires of the journey, he who’s the darkest one, the darkest one of all of them. My mom regarded like a white lady, hair as straight as any white lady’s. I’m yellow however he’s black. . . . How I hoped he was useless, however he by no means tires of the journey. It was due to him that my mom died as a result of she let a black man put his arms on her. Why does he maintain returning?

I’m wondering if Greener “returned” to his daughter all through her life, not as a person however as a darkish shadow her coronary heart couldn’t let go. Earlier than her loss of life, Greene destroyed her diaries and the letters in her possession, so we’ll by no means know. It’s as much as us to think about how she, a fatherless, culturally deracinated lady, might need felt as she made her manner by way of Northfield and, in 1900, by way of Amherst School’s Summer time Faculty of Library Financial system. Courses on matters resembling cataloguing, the Dewey decimal system, and handwriting helped the long run librarian hone her abilities, which she additional sharpened at Princeton College’s library, the place she went on to work, for an annual wage of 4 hundred and eighty {dollars}—a bit lower than eighteen thousand in at present’s {dollars}. (Librarians, like schoolteachers, stay on the backside of the monetary ladder. To economize, Greene roomed together with her boss, Charlotte Martins, and Martins’s household.) It’s unclear how Greene bought the job, however it’s virtually sure that she wouldn’t have gotten it if the directors had realized that she was Black. Recognized then because the “Southern Ivy,” Princeton had a variety of college students from the previous Confederacy.