It was very important for me to know his specific addresses when I was researching his life in Paris because one of them led to information that shed a valuable, if oblique, light on the kind of world in which he lived and worked.  This, in turn, partially filled a gap in the documentary record I was compiling from archival sources.  In 1896, Frederick gave his address as 23 Avenue Niel, which is a short walk north on one of the grand and broad boulevards radiating like spokes from the Arch of Triumph.  It is a large and imposing seven-story apartment building with decorative ironwork on the façade, and has preserved its upscale appearance to this day.

As I found out from contemporary newspaper articles, a very rich young American woman, Della Rogers, lived at 23 Avenue Niel with her mother at about the same time as Frederick.  She was an opera singer, heir to her Denver grandfather’s millions, and had come to Europe in 1894 to begin what proved to be a highly successful career, including a debut at the world-famous La Scala opera house in Milan and performances in Paris and St. Petersburg.  Her wealth and talent were enhanced by her beauty, which made her a favorite in Parisian society and even attracted a marriage proposal from an impoverished Rumanian nobleman of ancient lineage, a certain Prince Ghika, who, as a newspaper wryly put it, “was fascinated by Miss Rogers’ brilliancy or her wealth.”  Miss Rogers was not interested, however, and rejected the prince “in the most emphatic way.” 

The coincidence that Frederick and Della Rogers and her mother had the same nationality and address is of course not enough to suggest that there was any additional connection between them.  But the fact that a woman of her wealth and standing would have chosen to live at the same address where Frederick worked clearly implies that his employers belonged to her social class and also had money.  In turn, this leads to the conclusion that Frederick had successfully transplanted himself to yet another European city and culture, that he continued to work in the upper reaches of his profession, and that, therefore, he was very good at it.  There is abundant additional evidence supporting this conclusion, as well as the fact that he quickly became fluent in French.

            “The white guests have the right to object to me,” he explained . . . “they belong to a superior race.”

            “But,” said Chukovsky, “I do not object to you.  I don’t feel any difference; we don’t understand color prejudice in Russia.”

            “Well,” philosophized the preacher, “you are very kind, but taking the scriptures as authority, I don’t consider the Russians to be white people.”

Chukovsky did not report his reaction to this remark or what scriptural authority the preacher may have had in mind.  But presumably it was the Biblical story in Genesis 10 about how Noah’s sons established the new nations of mankind after the Flood, with Ham being the progenitor of the African peoples and others, including those in Eurasia.  Nevertheless, what Chukovsky said to the black preacher is very telling because it foreshadows Frederick Thomas’s acceptance in Russia.  Since people of African descent in the Russian Empire were even rarer than in Western Europe, the Russian attitude toward them was even more accepting than that of the English.  And no matter what the basis for the black preacher’s remark may have been, there is another fascinating dimension to it—a reflection of the widespread Western bias that, when considered in their totality (and perhaps excepting certain writers, composers, and noblemen), the Russians themselves are not quite Europeans and have a strong Asiatic streak in them.

Wells may have had more in mind than just the appeal of being treated like an attractive human being.  Routine news from the United States at this time would certainly have poisoned a black person’s possible nostalgia for home.  In October of 1894, American newspapers reported that “race war” was brewing in Kentucky and New Orleans and that “whites and blacks were arming.”  The same month, a newspaper in London published an article about lynching in the United States.  News like this surely contributed to Frederick’s decision to stay in Europe.

But in another and more important way, the change between the United States and England was like climbing out of a ship’s dark cargo hold onto the top deck bathed in brilliant sunshine.  “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” did not mean in England what they did in the United States.  In London, for the first time in his life, Frederick experienced what most of his fellows back home would never know—being viewed by whites with curiosity, interest, even affection, rather than with toleration, superciliousness, or contempt. 

It was not that Victorian England was a color-blind sanctuary.  For generations, the British Empire had subjugated and exploited entire civilizations in South Asia, Africa, and many other places around the world.  In the United Kingdom itself, unabashed racism was directed toward the Irish, the Jews, and others.  But because there were very few people of African descent in England at this time, and even fewer blacks from the United States, the attitude towards people like Frederick was surprisingly accepting—“surprisingly” especially from the point of view of Americans who happened to be visiting the British Isles.

The seeming contradictions of British snobbery dismayed one American visitor in the 1890s.  He noted that in the great university towns of England, one could see “negroes” at college balls waltzing with aristocratic young women and ladies of high position, all of whom would have considered it grossly inappropriate even to acknowledge a familiar tradesman in the street.  Another American who brought his prejudices with him was shocked by the sight of “two coal-black negroes and two white women” in a fashionable London restaurant.  “My first impulse was to instantly depart,” the American admitted, “for such a sight in the United States would surely not have been possible.”  But in the end there was little he could do except acknowledge ruefully that “In London a negro can go into the finest restaurants and be served just like a white man.”  (to be continued)

Burton was struck by the number of different nationalities among the nearly 900 passengers in steerage aboard his ship and by the generally free, friendly, and helpful relations among these largely simple folk.  Left without organized entertainments, they improvised for themselves as best they could.  Most spent the better part of the day on deck, strolling, playing cards, reading, passing books back and forth.  Mothers played with their children, old men dozed, young people watched each other with shy interest.  One afternoon, not long after the voyage began, harmonicas and accordions began to appear, enough to make up a veritable orchestra, and a fiddler brought his instrument up on deck.  At first, a solitary man began to dance a jig or a fling; soon several couples joined him.  Some of the bolder young women began to draw the initially reluctant young men into the dancing; later in the voyage this was no longer necessary, because, as Burton noted, “the young men didn’t wait to be asked.”  The forward part of the steerage deck was spacious enough for the growing impromptu revel, and a crowd of several hundred gathered to watch, including those in the most expensive cabins—the “saloon passengers” as they were termed, who looked down from their promenade deck with what Burton guessed, or hoped, was a degree of envy.  As the ship continued its steady crossing, couples that had first paired off on the dance floor began to reappear in various out-of-the-way nooks on deck.  Sometimes they achieved a modicum of privacy by concealing themselves behind a big shawl that was stretched over something, with only two pairs of shoes peeping out.  When night fell, the number of such couples increased greatly, at least until 9 p.m., at which hour women travelling in steerage were required to go below for the night.  A master-at-arms would begin his rounds with a bull’s-eye lantern and a corps of assistants, playing a kind of good-natured game of cat and mouse with the young women, who, with much banter and laughing, tried to hide behind ventilators, dodge into doorways, disappear in the middle of a crowd of young men, or run quickly to the other side of the ship. (to be continued).

Because it was late summer, most of Burton’s fellow passengers on the outbound voyage were tourists from the United States.  For many it was their first trip to Europe, but the majority were returning to visit their birthplaces in the United Kingdom and elsewhere on the Continent.  Some of the passengers were returning home after touring the United States for a few weeks.  Others had sad family business to attend to, and one bent-over old man was going home after many years “for the privilege of dying in the old sod,” as he put it. 

Passengers in this class were regimented in accordance with the patriarchal norms of the time, and their accommodations were Spartan in comparison to the upper decks.  But overall the conditions were quite humane and dictated by practical considerations.  In fact, they resemble something like an ocean-going, modern-day hostel for young backpackers or retirees traveling on a shoestring who are willing to eschew certain comforts to feed their wanderlust and save money.  One wonders if there would be a market for cheap ocean “cruises” like this today.

Because there were no private cabins in steerage, passengers in this class were segregated by three categories—single men, single women, and married couples.  All could mingle freely on deck, but were kept apart below.  The single men’s quarters where Burton stayed were two flights down, in the warm and stuffy belly of the ship, and consisted of a series of communal rooms off a central passageway, each with bunk beds for sixteen or more.  An innovation that Burton noted was that each bunk came furnished with bedding and table utensils; in the recent past, every passenger in steerage had to equip himself with such things for the duration of the voyage.  The furnishings provided were simplicity itself—a straw mattress and a blanket, a deep ceramic plate and a tin cup that could hold a pint, a silver-plated spoon, and an iron knife and fork. 

When called to meals, the passengers gathered in the central passageway and lowered a series of plain wooden tables and benches that were folded up against the ceiling while not in use.  Burton and a friend whom he happened to meet on board approached their first meal “honestly dreading the experience,” as he confessed, and “fearful of being overcome by the close atmosphere.”  Because they did not know the ropes and there were not enough seats at the tables for them and several other novices, they wound up putting their plates on shelves attached to the walls for this purpose and eating standing up.  Service was nothing if not casual:  stewards appeared carrying huge pails of soup, which they ladled generously into the passengers’ large tin cups.  But to Burton’s surprise and relief, the soup “tasted good in the gloomy, hot steerage”; indeed, he hastened to add, “it would have tasted good if we had been sitting at a white-covered table in a first-rate hotel.”  Following this came boiled beef and potatoes, and “Again the supply was bountiful; again the quality was good.” 

However, when the meal was over, Burton and his friend were shocked that they had to scrape and then wash their own dishes as best they could in tubs of plain water that quickly became greasy; but together with others who were squeamish or inept at first, they got into the routine.  What helped them adjust to the various shocks of traveling on the cheap was the good nature of the stewards, who went about their business with brisk informality and in plain shirtsleeves. 

At the other meals, the passengers were also fed simply but amply.  Burton was especially impressed by the tasty small loaves of bread that they were served, and by the fact that 3,500 of them were baked every day in the ship’s galleys.  He also liked the hearty breakfasts, which consisted of Irish stew or oatmeal porridge with molasses on alternating days, together with bread, butter, and coffee.  The only problem with the food, which included desserts on occasion, was that it became tiresomely repetitive during the weeklong crossing.  It was obviously in the shipping companies’ interests to feed and treat steerage passengers as well as possible since word of mouth would affect future business. (To be continued).

Passenger ship traffic between New York City and London was frequent, quick, popular, and affordable in the 1890s.  Approximately half a dozen ships left every week during the fall of 1894, with several English ports as the final or intermediate destination, and transported thousands of passengers with the most varied backgrounds and incomes.  The vast majority went in “steerage,” which was the cheapest way to travel, and which accommodated surprising numbers of laborers, workers, and others on the lower rungs of the economic and social ladders.  International travel was also much simpler in those days than it is today:  you bought a ticket and went.  There was no special “security screening,” and Americans going abroad did not even need a passport to leave the country, although they could get one in advance if they wanted.  England kept detailed lists of all passengers arriving in its ports, as did the United States, but did not require visitors to have passports on entry.  In Continental Europe the rules varied, but Americans who decided that they would like to travel between countries and had not gotten passports at home could apply for them easily and quickly for a small fee from any American consulate or embassy.

Frederick left New York in the fall of 1894, probably on October 9 aboard the S. S. Lahn of the North German Lloyd shipping line.  Her ultimate destination was Bremen in northern Germany, but on the way she was scheduled to call at Southampton, a major port on the south coast of England that was a popular entry point for Americans and had a direct rail connection to London.  The S. S. Lahn was a new ship, commissioned in 1887, and capable of carrying one thousand passengers, including seven hundred in third class, or steerage.  This is how Frederick went, which is confirmed by the financial plight he would soon face in London.  If the most expensive fare for this trip at that time started at $60 to $70 and could go considerably higher in a first-class cabin, and $45 to $50 in second class, steerage was a relative bargain at $10 to $15 one way, or perhaps several hundred dollars today. 

In the 1890s, transatlantic travel by people of average or even humble means had become such a widespread novelty that it aroused public curiosity.  In response, an enterprising reporter, Frederick R. Burton, decided to investigate what it was like by travelling to England and back in steerage and describing his impressions in detail for the readers of the Boston Daily Globe.  What he saw on board was likely a fair approximation of what Frederick experienced as well. (to be continued).

Williams was a typical American “self-made man,” and parts of his life would surely have served as one of a series of models for young Frederick.  When Williams first came to Brooklyn a decade or so earlier, he ran a medicine show that featured battery-charged “liver bags” as a cure for rheumatism and his own song-and-dance numbers in blackface.  But Williams did not continue in this questionable vein and shortly before Frederick met him tried his hand at real estate.  In 1893, with the financial backing of a partner who had made his money manufacturing “Tutti Frutti” chewing gum, Williams bought a 300-acre tract of marshland called Bergen Beach on Jamaica Bay, which defines the eastern edge of Brooklyn.  The original plan to develop the tract as a residential community failed, however, and the partners decided to transform it into a summer entertainment complex, which came to hugely successful fruition several years later.  In the meantime, Williams pursued another form of “theatrical business,” as Frederick would refer to it later.  He became a stockholder in a new theater being built in Brooklyn in 1894, and then, when this succeeded, began to buy theaters on his own.  In less than a decade, he owned seven and had become the biggest entrepreneur in vaudeville in the New York area.  In 1912, he sold his chain of theaters to Benjamin Franklin Keith, “the father” of American vaudeville, and the owner of a network of theaters spreading from Chicago to the Atlantic seaboard; the fabulous sum was between five and six million dollars, or the equivalent of more than one hundred million in today’s money. 

In many ways, Williams did not resemble what one might imagine a prominent showman during the Gilded Age to be.  He was modest, soft-spoken, and gentle, eschewed the flashy diamond pinky ring, and was honest in his business dealings and fair to his employees.  Striving to provide the best possible entertainment, he personally chose acts for his theaters during recruiting trips to major vaudeville venues in Europe.  Two stars still remembered today, Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Laurel (of Laurel and Hardy fame), would get their American start in one of Williams’ theaters.  When Williams died in 1923, he left half of his entire estate, which included his grand house on thirty acres at East Islip, Long Island, to establish the “Percy Williams Home” for “the care and maintenance of old and infirm players of the dramatic and vaudeville stage.”  In his will, he wrote, “I made my money from the actors; I herewith return it to them.”  In a striking gesture of kindness, Williams also bequeathed “one month’s wages for each year of continuous employment” to each of his household servants. 

Frederick was long gone from the United States by this time, but it seems reasonable to infer that he too had been treated well in his day.  It is also possible that by working for Williams, Frederick was able to observe and to learn from an estimable and successful businessman.  At the very least, a valet was in a position to overhear some of his employer’s comments to others; a humane employer like Williams could also easily have engaged his valet in conversation.  Given the resemblance between the kinds of light theatrical entertainments that Williams ran in Brooklyn and that Frederick would come to operate in Moscow, the attention to every detail of the business that each showed, the undemonstrative way in which Frederick would hold himself, and the decency with which he would treat his employees, one wonders if Frederick ever fantasized about following in Percy Williams’ footsteps when he was laying out his employer’s evening clothes or bending down to light his cigar?

Here's a link to the video of the talk I gave last Friday about THE BLACK RUSSIAN in Clarksdale, Mississippi, near which Frederick Thomas was born in 1872.  The venue was the beautifully restored "Cutrer Mansion," built by the successful and flamboyant lawyer, John "Jack" Cutrer, who defended the Thomas family interests in a trial in the local chancery court (and who, with his wife, Blanche, was a model for some of the characters in Tennessee Williams' plays).
http://www.clarksdaleinfo.com/misc-videos.php

The Clarendon Hotel in Brooklyn where he became “head bell boy” was a new, large, prominent, and strategically located establishment in its day.  Opened during the summer of 1890 two blocks north of City Hall and opposite the Central Post Office, on the corner of Johnson and Washington Streets, it was also just a few steps away from Fulton Street with its elevated railroad that ran to the Brooklyn Bridge a dozen blocks away.  A cable car service took passengers across the bridge to lower Manhattan and dropped them off within easy reach of New York’s City Hall, thus putting the Clarendon at one end of a transportation system that linked the two municipalities’ administrative centers.  Six stories tall, built in a heavy style that a local newspaper called “Romanesque,” richly decorated, with 160 rooms and an octagonal turret atop prominent corner bay windows, the Clarendon was the site of many meetings and banquets organized by locally important organizations and individuals. The building no longer exists and the entire neighborhood has been reconfigured by new construction and roads leading to Brooklyn Bridge.

To service the number of guests that a hotel of this class and size could accommodate would have required a dozen or more bellboys, or “bellhops” in today’s parlance, on duty at any given time.  Summoned by a bell at the front desk and expected to “hop to it,” their job would have entailed carrying luggage, showing guests to their rooms, and making sure that everything in the room was working properly.  Bellboys would typically be on their feet all day and because they were always on public view their physical appearance, from uniform to grooming to deportment, would reflect directly on the establishment they served.  They would also provide information to guests about the hotel’s services and local attractions and were on call to deliver packages, run errands and bring food and drink to guests’ rooms.  Each of these interactions was the occasion for receiving a tip, so a bellboy would be nothing if not accommodating, no matter how difficult a guest might be.  A bellboy would also often be the eyes and ears of the management, as when on a Sunday morning in April, 1893, one of them reported the sound of a gunshot on the Clarendon’s top floor, which proved to be the suicide of a troubled guest.  A bellboy might also be the first discreet source of information about anything illicit that a guest would not wish to ask about at the front desk; for this, a more generous tip could be expected, and so it would have paid bellboys to know where and how urban vices could be procured. 

Frederick was twenty-one at this time and as the “head” of a crew of bellboys had a responsible position that reflected his experience and his skill in both serving and managing people.  It was his job to give individual bellboys their assignments, to keep track of their hours for payroll, to train beginners, and to resolve complaints made against them.  Frederick would have had to balance being a figure of authority toward his fellow coworkers—and since he was black, they could have been nothing else—with being an employee and a servant of whites.  It would have been Frederick’s prerogative to go out of his way to provide an exceptional service to an important client himself.  Like a headwaiter’s, a head bellboy’s salary and tips would reflect his rank in the service hierarchy.

Frederick settled in Brooklyn, which in 1893 was not yet officially part of New York City but an independent municipality with a population of nearly one million, or almost Chicago’s equal all by itself.  Separated from Manhattan by the East River, but joined to it since 1883 by the celebrated “New York and Brooklyn Bridge,” as John Roebling’s iconic contribution to the New York skyline was originally called, as well as by numerous ferries, Brooklyn existed as a separate entity more in name than in practical consequence to most people on either shore.  Together with the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island, Brooklyn would be annexed by Manhattan and designated a “borough” of the vastly enlarged city only on January 1, 1898.  On this date, the new New York became the second biggest city in the world, yielding only to London and followed by Paris and Berlin.

Like Chicago, the New York metropolitan region was still overwhelmingly white in 1893.  It was also filled with immigrants from all over Europe and their first-generation children.  The abject poverty of many of them, together with their foreign babble and alien customs, made longtime Yankees fear for the future of their city.  To acculturate and redeem these motley newcomers, white New Yorkers initiated a variety of reform efforts at the end of the nineteenth century, but they typically ignored the less numerous native-born blacks who were arriving simultaneously.  Blacks were also made to feel unwelcome in Manhattan and many chose to live in the outlying areas.  Brooklyn became especially popular with blacks after the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863 when white mobs attacked them throughout Manhattan in an attempt to destroy the city’s black working class.  But even in Brooklyn the black population in 1893 was very small and amounted to only 1.4%, or some 13,000 people out of a population of 950,000.   

New York and Brooklyn also resembled Chicago by limiting what blacks could do for a living, what they could do for pleasure, and what services they could receive.  On the one hand, the courts usually struck down overt racial segregation, public schools were officially color blind, and a small black elite thrived in the city.  But on the other, hospitals kept blacks separate from whites, expensive restaurants would not serve blacks, and theaters seated patrons by race.  Housing was another perennial problem for many blacks in New York and by the end of the nineteenth century became known as the “lodging evil” among reforming circles.  White tenement owners in the city rented to blacks only reluctantly and overcharged them when they did.  The high cost of housing forced numerous black families to take boarders into their apartments to help pay the rent.  Because of the low wages they earned, single male lodgers frequently had to share a room in an arrangement that was known as “batching it” and that carried with it the awkward right to bring a woman home for the night.

Planned as a celebration of the 400^th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the New World and of the emergence of the United States onto the world stage as a technological, economic, and political power, the Exposition was the prize that Chicago won over New York, Washington, D. C., and St. Louis.  Built on a 600-acre site on the shore of Lake Michigan to the south of the city center, the fair consisted of over 200 mostly neo-Classical buildings that displayed various technologies, industries, entertainments, including exhibitions from numerous foreign countries and cultures.  Over 27 million people attended the Exposition during the six months that it was open, which was equivalent to nearly half of the entire population of the United States.  The scale of the Exposition brought thousands of workers eager for employment, both during construction and later.  Black people were not excluded entirely from the work force, although they were relegated to lower positions; the organizers also grudgingly designated a “Colored American Day” on August 25.  But the fair’s nickname as the “White City” was well deserved, and not just because many of the buildings were painted to look like marble.

The shock that hit Chicago a week after the Exposition opened was the failure of a major financial institution—the Chemical National Bank; this was followed by the collapse of other banks throughout Illinois.  The panic that began in May spread quickly over the entire country and the stock market crashed that month;  a second, more severe crash came in July.  Chicago was hit more severely than anywhere else.  This was aggravated by the various forms of business speculation that had sprouted up around the World’s Fair.  By summer’s end, the country was in the grip of the most serious economic depression that it had yet seen, with hundreds of thousands of unemployed.

Among the victims were waiters at the Auditorium’s restaurant, where Frederick had worked.  Prior to July 10, they received $60 a month, which was a good salary that reflected their elite status as well as the celebrity of the hotel.  On July 10, however, the management announced that it would have to reduce the waiters’ wages to $40 and $45 a month because of a drop in business.  The waiters accepted the cut and stayed on even when several of them were laid off for a week without pay.  Then, on August 1, the management announced that waiters’ salaries would have to be reduced further—to $30 a month.  Two committees of waiters tried to find the hotel’s owner to discuss their objections, but could not find him.  They then turned to the headwaiter, but as a newspaper reported, he “coolly informed them that they could work for the salary offered or quit.”  All forty-nine did so.

This is probably the threat that Frederick faced.  He decided that he could do better during the worsening economic crisis by heading east, to New York City.  From all accounts, the situation there was not as bad as in Chicago. 

New York also had more of everything that had originally made Chicago attractive—more people, bustle, excitement, power, towering buildings, and hotels and restaurants where one could find work.  New York was the one city in the country that ambitious Chicagoans envied.  And the only siren call that ambitious New Yorkers heard came from the great cities of Europe.

Additional perils that waiters faced included irregular employment:  owners routinely reduced the number of waiters when business was slow and did so with little or no warning, as a result of which many waiters worked on a day-to-day basis.  Owners would also often charge waiters for the cost of any dishes that they might break and could either fine them for being late or force them to work as long as six or eight hours extra without pay for a single instance of tardiness. 

Such discrepancies and inequities inevitably radicalized many of the waiters.  In the years immediately preceding Frederick Thomas’s arrival in Chicago in 1890, black waiters organized two of their own unions with the assistance of the national Knights of Labor, the “William Lloyd Garrison Colored Waiters Local Assembly,” which had four hundred members, and the “Charles Sumner Waiters’ Union,” a later splinter group.  With some few exceptions, Chicago’s organized white labor movement was generally racist and rejected blacks.  But these two black unions were able briefly to coordinate plans with the “Culinary Alliance” of German emigrant waiters and to carry out successful strikes during the spring and early summer of 1890.  As a result, many restaurant owners agreed to the strikers’ demands, which included wages of $30 a month, 12-hour workdays and regulation of breakage and other charges.  Similar initiatives were organized in 1892 and 1893, the years when Frederick was working as a waiter, with increased numbers of black strikers participating. 

It is striking that many years later, Frederick would be remembered by his employees in Moscow and Constantinople as a generous and humane employer.  It is likely that this is due in part to what he had experienced in the United States while still a young man.

Goins also discusses the subtleties of human psychology as they realte to the job; for example, in connection with tipping:  “A waiter should never make any demonstration of gratitude when receiving a tip, beyond a polite acknowledgment; for if the attention of other guests is attracted to the circumstance of his receiving it they will feel that they are not likely to receive as good treatment at his hands as the giver of the tip, and will consequently be on the lookout for something to find fault with.” 

Any waiter who took all of Goins’s instructions to heart would emerge a transformed man.  The intricate waltz of glass, porcelain, and silverware that he would have to perform while serving in a good restaurant during Chicago’s Gilded Age was just a part of the physical, mental, and emotional training that would extend beyond the dining room. And all phases of Frederick’s future career testify that he mastered such lessons quickly and well.  (To be continued).

However, black waiters were not just gifted or cynical actors in a ritualized transaction designed to maximize their income:  they also took pride in their profession, which required tact, charm, deportment, and mental and physical agility.  We can get a sense of this pride, and of the training and experience that underlay it, from The American Colored Waiter, a handbook published in Chicago in 1902 by John B. Goins, a black headwaiter with eighteen years of experience who ran a school for black waiters.  Goins is precisely the sort of man who could have mentored beginners like Frederick in their complicated craft.  Moreover, judging by Goins’s photograph in the book, which shows a handsome man with his head tilted upwards slightly by a tall white collar and an expression of serene dignity on his face—the instruction he provided to a waiter would have extended to the entire man.   Frederick’s future career trajectory in Europe shows that he was a very apt pupil.

The first things that Goins discusses are the waiter’s dress and appearance.  He provides a dauntingly detailed list of articles of clothing that “every first class waiter should own,” including “One black serge jacket, One black low cut vest, Two white jackets, Two or three pairs doe or cheviot black pants, One full dress coat and vest, One Tuxedo coat, One low cut white vest, Two pairs white gloves.”  He then continues with ties, shoes, shirts, cuffs and collars, before concluding that “Every waiter should own a corkscrew; also a lead pencil.” 

Goins also provides detailed advice about cleanliness and hygiene:  “Shirts should be changed as often as twice a week; collars four times.  In winter, underwear should be changed twice a week, and in summer daily.  The reason for this is evident, as from the nature of the waiter’s work it is impossible not to perspire; and an undergarment saturated with perspiration is unfit to wear another time in the dining room.”  He instructs beginners how to apply for work:  “in neat black clothes, pants creased, white shirt, shoes polished, cuffs, black tie, teeth and finger nails clean, your face clean shaven.  If you wear a mustache keep your hands off of it when talking, which is an indication that you will do so in dining room.”  The best time to apply is between 9 and 10 am, and, Goins explains, you should never present yourself at the dining room door but should seek out a special waiting room.  (To be continued).

In just two generations, a frontier settlement established in 1833 on the swampy shore of an inland fresh-water sea had grown into the second largest city in the United States with a population of 1,100,000; it was overshadowed only by New York’s 1,500,000, and was the fifth largest city in the world.  Rather than being stunted by a devastating fire in 1871 that left its business district and a third of its total area in ruins, Chicago’s growth accelerated in the last third of the nineteenth century as it rebuilt itself into a modern metropolis and became a center of industry, commerce, and transportation.  This city with the world’s first skyscrapers became an icon not only of American technological prowess and economic might, but of modern industrialized civilization in general.

Frederick may have moved five hundred miles north of Memphis and a world away from the South, but at the end of the nineteenth century blacks in Chicago were still hardly free to do or to become anything they wanted.  After working for a prominent florist for the better part of a year, Frederick launched into a profession that would be his mainstay for the next twenty years as well as his springboard to wealth in Russia:  he became a waiter.  By setting out on this career path, Frederick assumed one of the few roles that was available to him because of the racist labor patterns in the city. 

There were so few blacks in Chicago in the early 1890s (a little more than 1% of the population) that they would not have been very noticeable in the general ebb and flow of humanity on the city’s streets.  However, there were certain occupations and places in the city where their numbers were concentrated.  Fully one third of the entire black population was employed in domestic and personal service, which included workers in Chicago’s myriad restaurants and hotels, in private homes, and on trains as Pullman porters.  This was by far the largest niche that blacks filled. When Frederick entered the profession around 1892 there were some 1,500 black men working as waiters everywhere in the city, from chains of inexpensive restaurants to elegant hotels such as the Palmer House or the Auditorium Hotel. 

Especially in the upscale dining rooms, the waiter’s job was more complex and competitive than many of us probably realize today.  And Frederick soon became a master of this surprisingly demanding craft.

But there’s another aspect of this outfit that’s also worth noting—the venerable practice in the history of art of “ennobling” representatives of so-called “primitive” peoples by posing and garbing them in a way that evokes “genuine” noblemen in the dominant culture.  Here is an example of a native American portrayed in the manner of an English lord (there are myriad similar others).

In this light, Django’s “Blue Boy” outfit marks him as one of nature’s and society’s true elite. 

But, of course, his outfit also looks ridiculous in the antebellum South, which is what an enslaved black woman suggests to him in the film.  As a result, he undergoes his most significant sartorial transformation:  he dons the slim pants, torso-hugging jacket, cowboy hat, and revolver that are the trappings of a genuine hero of the American popular cinematic imagination—a gunslinger.  Moreover, as a crowning touch, he puts on the ultimate sign of cool—dark glasses (whose specific provenance in Tarantino’s highly allusive film have also been traced).  "Cool" may very well be today's equivalent for "nobility."

I was struck by the inevitable similarity between how clothing “elevates” Tarantino’s character and how Frederick Thomas was seen by American tourists in Moscow and Constantinople when he was rich and famous, and dressed the part (how he gets there, I’ll describe in my blog later).  Americans were not used to seeing a suave and self-assured black man in elegant evening clothes, with a sparkling diamond stick pin and ring, presiding over a fancy and popular nightspot that he owned. Several Chicagoans who visited his Aquarium entertainment garden in Moscow in 1912--which they characterized as one of the city's most renowned "institutions"--were so "astonished" by his "prosperous" and "diamond bedecked" appearance that they felt compelled to report their discovery to a local newspaper once they got home.  Django's "incongruous" appearance also elicits shocked responses from whites, albeit very crude, racist ones.

As for the movie itself--I found it interesting as an artifact, up to a point;  and also as a cultural phenomenon because of the amount and kind of attention it garnered in different circles.

The article about the documentary has already sparked interest, and links and reposts have appeared far and wide, from Albuquerque, New Mexico to New Delhi, India.

These black Americans were accepted in the Soviet Union in a way that resembled how Frederick Thomas was received when he arrived in imperial Russia decades earlier.  There was, however, one major difference:  the Soviet Union welcomed black Americans for propagandistic reasons, whereas Russians under the old regime simply ignored Frederick’s skin color, letting him thrive according to his abilities. 

I had the pleasure of contributing some remarks in Yelena’s film, the current trailer for which is available on Youtube.  And more information about the project is on the website for Yelena's production company Red Palette Pictures.

But Coahoma County is part of the Delta—a region that its detractors and defenders alike have called the most Southern place on earth.  By the late 1870s, Reconstruction was over and white authority throughout the South firmly reestablished.  This is why the Thomas family’s double prominence also became the cause of their ruin.

The first blow was an attempt by a rich white planter who resented their success to steal their land. Although shaken by his ploy at first, the Thomases rallied soon after, and, in a move that was not at all characteristic for black people at that time and place, fought back in court.  Even more remarkable is that they won the first round in what turned out to be a long process full of dramatic twists and turns.  But when the planter escalated by appealing to the state supreme court, the Thomases decided to get out of harm’s way and moved to Memphis.

Frederick’s first exposure to urban life would prove to be decisive because after Memphis he would never again return to the countryside or to farming.  He also got his first “service”-related job in Memphis, and he briefly attended a more advanced school than the one in Coahoma County. 

But Memphis was also where the second blow struck the Thomas family:  Frederick’s father, Lewis, was brutally murdered by another black man.  Contemporary newspaper accounts played up the shocking details, which allowed me to reconstruct exactly how it happened.

After this, the Thomas family disintegrated.  In the fall of 1890, aged eighteen, Frederick began his years of travel, a period that would last nearly a decade.   And for a young Southern black man of his era, every step he took was a highly unusual rejection of his past, as he first moved North, then to Western Europe, and eventually to the almost unimaginably distant Russian Empire. 

Gates's article also puts into perspective the remarkable achievement of the Thomas family in acquiring their farm in Coahoma County, MS, in 1869 (as I described in earlier posts).  And the fact that Frederick's father began with 200 acres, and increased his property to 600 acres over time--all on his own--makes his achievement nothing less than amazing.

Here is an example of a black work song that Lomax collected, "No More, My Lord." Although recorded on the eve of the Second World War, it's a musical reminiscence of much earlier times, and is the kind of singing that Frederick probably heard in his youth.

The Delta in general and Coahoma County, MS, in particular, with Clarksdale at its epicenter, had an enormous influence on American twentieth-century music and, via the popularity of American culture, on music around the world.  The old, slave-era spirituals, which survived into the 1900s, morphed into gospel music, which in turn gave rise to “soul” after the Second World War.  “Blues,” the famous guitar-accompanied laments about life, love, and loss, originated in the area too, growing out of slave-era field songs, “hollers,” and “work calls.”  They became one of the primary roots of jazz when the great migration of blacks to the North, and especially to Chicago, took place after the Great War.  Delta musicians who had played a style of music in the early twentieth century that they called “slow drag” and “barrelhouse,” recognized it later when it came back to them as “jazz” and “swing.”  After World War II, blues and gospel also fed into rock and roll, and thus into countless other types of popular music around the world. 

Visitors still come to Clarksdale from everywhere in the United States and abroad to travel the “blues trail”—a network of sites associated with famous early twentieth-century practitioners and performers of the blues.  When I was there several years ago to do research in the Coahoma County Courthouse, there were some young people from Holland staying next door to me in the motel.  The “Crossroads”—the intersection of Highways 49 and 61 on what is now the ragged southern edge of Clarksdale is where the legendary blues man Robert Johnson is reputed to have sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to play guitar as he wished. 

Despite the enormous changes Frederick experienced after he left the South, music was a constant in his life.  He claimed that it was what originally sent him to Europe.  His cultivation of musical variety acts and new trends in popular music helped to make him rich in Russia.  He is still remembered by aficionados in Istanbul for introducing jazz to a wildly enthusiastic public after the Great War.  And two of his sons continued his tradition by becoming performers themselves—one was a jazz singer in Turkey and the other sang gospel and Russian cabaret in Paris.

African Methodist Episcopalian services were intense emotional experiences, whether they were Sunday services held in local churches, or large regional “meetings” to which black people traveled from widely scattered parishes and that could last for weeks.  Members of the congregation would not simply listen passively to the sermons or sing hymns at the appointed moments, but would respond emphatically and loudly to the preacher’s words.  When they sang, they did so at the tops of their voices, swayed their bodies to the music, and clapped out the rhythm with unrestrained energy.  Entire congregations would achieve something like a collective ecstasy, especially if a service was one of a series held every night during a meeting.  Individuals would stamp, jump, weep, and shout in a frenzy that could last for hours, until exhaustion set in.  Women would fall down to the floor, exclaiming and crying, men would drop to their knees, the entire space of the church ringing with their shouts of “Lord, take me,” “Jesus save me,” “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and “Jesus died for me.” 

However, many years later in Europe, Frederick would choose to identify himself with an entirely different religious tradition, and with the "highest" of the Old World churches.

On the positive side (there would, unfortunately, be tragedies ahead as well)--Frederick’s parents showed their leading position in the local black community by establishing one of the earliest African Methodist Episcopal churches in Coahoma County, possibly only the second or third after the “mother” A. M. E. Church in Friars Point, which was then the county seat.

Before and during the Civil War, it was common throughout the South for enslaved blacks to attend their masters’ churches.  Blacks might have had to use a different church entrance from the whites, and they would have had to sit apart from the white congregation in the back of the building or in the balcony, but the preaching and hymns they heard were the same.  Social control of blacks was the primary reason for this arrangement.  If blacks were always under white eyes, they would be unable to organize any sort of resistance or rebellion.  Having blacks attend white churches would also allow white ministers to try to reinforce the docility of the slaves by choosing apt texts for their sermons, such as Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans (13:1-7), which urged obedience to masters.  After the war, whites refused to let the newly emancipated blacks participate fully in the life of their churches and the freedmen either left their old congregations on their own or were expelled from them.  In Coahoma County, a Methodist church had been established in Friars Point around 1852 with a sizeable congregation that included 192 whites and 38 blacks.  When the war ended in 1865, blacks left this church and founded their own on a site only a few yards away (which is now covered by the town’s much-expanded levee).  They affiliated themselves with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, appointed a black pastor, J. C. Holbrook, and named their church “Bethel.” 

The A. M. E. Church had a long tradition of serving blacks and had been founded in the north in 1815 by a splinter group of black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church.  Together with the Baptist Church, the different denominations of Methodists dominated black religious life in the South after the Civil War and do so to this day.  The ablest missionary of the A. M. E. Church, T. W. Stringer, arrived in Mississippi in 1865 and after establishing himself in a Vicksburg began to spread his denomination rapidly throughout the state.  By 1870, the A. M. E. Church had nearly 5,000 members, thirty-five churches, and thirty Sunday schools.  By 1877, the A. M. E. Church had gotten big enough to establish a separate North Mississippi Conference with sixty-two churches and over 5,000 members.  This is the religious wave that must have swept up the Thomases as well.

It was also one that the vast majority of black people in the Delta would never know because they would never be able to escape the dependency of sharecropping.  Here is an example of how other black people had to live.  On January 1, 1867, a white farmer, Reuben Davis, signed a year-long contract with the Ishmael Gooch family of freedmen to work his farm in Tallahatchie County (which borders on Coahoma).  Davis agreed to furnish the family of eight, two of whom were small children, with land, farming utensils, a team of mules or horses, and half of the feed for the team.  He would also pay the Gooches one half of the annual crops of corn and fodder, one third of the cotton raised, and let them use land for a personal vegetable garden.  The black family agreed to “faithfully perform said year’s service” by planting, raising, and harvesting the crops, to “feed themselves,” and to furnish the other half of the fodder for the team.  They also agreed to pay for any damage to the animals and tools, and for “all lost time.”

The last point was potentially perilous because the contract stipulated that “failure to perform good and faithful work” would be considered “lost time” as well.  Riding one of the horses or mules without the owner’s permission would incur a severe $25 fine.  Davis also reserved the right to divide the family’s shares of the crops among individual members “according to the amount of labor performed and the expense incurred by each one.” 

Freedmen were regularly cheated and exploited because of loopholes in contracts and the dishonesty of many whites.  In 1868, one black couple in the Delta earned only $39.30 for the year, or approximately half of what was due them, because their white employer penalized them for the eleven weeks of work that the wife missed during the course of twelve months.

Thanks to his parents’ skill and good fortune, Frederick escaped such experiences during his childhood.  But there can be no doubt that he knew of them. 

Before the Civil War, at least half of the biggest plantations in the Delta were owned by absentee proprietors who lived elsewhere in Mississippi or the South and who hired overseers to supervise their estates.  The lives the overseers led, and their attitude toward the property and slaves they managed, usually differed markedly from those of the absent planters.

Most of the land in the Delta was owned by a small number of rich white families.  Overseers, like the majority of other whites in the region, owned little or no land; and they were kept at arm’s length by the rich landowners whose social pretensions would not allow them to mix with what they considered lower white classes.  Because the overseers were salaried employees, their future depended on how well they did their jobs, which meant primarily how much cotton they got the slaves to produce and the income this generated.  As a result, their interests did not always run parallel to those of their employers. 

Landowners with large estates were inevitably concerned with the health of their slaves, who were an expensive investment.  The landowners were also eager for more slave children because this increased the valuable labor pool at very little extra cost.  Indeed, this was one of the factors in the sexual exploitation of slave women by whites because their mixed-race children would remain slaves; and it was illegal in Mississippi to emancipate anyone born to a woman slave, even if the father was the planter himself.  However, whatever humane or economic considerations might prompt a landowner to urge his overseer to foster the well-being of his slaves would often run up against the bottom line.  Because an overseer was judged by the amount of money that he made for his employer, it was in the overseer’s interest to drive the slaves as hard as he could. 

This was some of the background against which the Thomases’ success after the Civil War has to be seen.  They had begun to stand out in a way that would inevitably breed white resentment.

Early in 1869, at a public auction at the courthouse door in Friars Point, a town on the Mississippi River that was then the seat of Coahoma County, Lewis bid on a sizeable piece of land consisting of two hundred acres of fields, forests, swamps, and streams.  It had belonged to a white farmer who lived in another county and who had died intestate, as a result of which the probate court instructed the man’s lawyer to sell the property for whatever he could get.  Lewis is likely to have known the property because it was near the land that belonged to his former masters, the Cheairs brothers.  Announcements of the coming auction were duly posted at the courthouse several weeks in advance, and when the sale was over Lewis had won with a top bid of ten cents an acre.  Even with the depressed land prices in the Delta after the Civil War, this was a bargain.  What made his purchase even more of a bargain was that he had three years to pay the total price of twenty dollars in annual installments of six dollars and sixty-six and two-thirds cents each, with interest at six percent.

This event transformed the Thomases' life and immediately made them one of the most prominent black families in Coahoma County.

(To be continued!)

When it was a question of suppressing black initiative, violence was never far below the surface.  Moreover, it could be directed at anyone.  James Lusk Alcorn was one of the richest planters in the region both before and after the Civil War, with extensive holdings in Coahoma County, where the Thomas family lived.  He was also a prominent politician with a liberal stance toward freedmen, and would go on to become the governor of Mississippi and a United States Senator.  However, when word got out that he was going to rent land to a black family, he was perceived as a traitor to his race and his two-story farm home at Yazoo Pass was burned to the ground by the Ku Klux Klan.  The Klan also torched several buildings on a plantation near Frairs Point in Coahoma County because a local planter had rented land to blacks.  

This was the poisonous atmosphere in which Frederick Thomas's parents had to find a way to succeed.

(To be continued!)