Riding With Mr. Washington

I was telling a white friend about my great-grandfather, a lawyer, newspaper editor, and college professor who began his career in the 1890s, when her face wrinkled in puzzlement.

“Was he married to a white woman?” she asked.

Stunned, I stammered, “No,” and explained that in South Carolina—where laws prohibiting intermarriage dated back to the 1700s—it might have cost him his life just to have gazed too long in a white woman’s direction.

Our conversation was decades ago, but I still sometimes marvel at how little my friend knew of Black history, and how her ignorance (there’s no other word for it) fueled the incredible assumption that a Black man could have made something of himself only by marrying a white woman. Though I tried to explain, I’m not sure she understood that African Americans like my great-grandfather have always managed, somehow, to invent and reinvent themselves despite a world that regarded them as less than human, improvising a way out of no way. What could be more American than that?

One day in the late 1970s, my mother, Ruth, a librarian at the Library of Congress, ventured into the attic of her Washington, D.C., rowhouse. There she found trunks, suitcases, and cardboard boxes filled with letters, diaries, photographs, and a few flaking copies of The Light, one of the newspapers that my great-grandfather edited. A few letters dated from the late 1800s—they’d been there since her father bought the house in 1928.

After Ruth died, I inherited this material, but 20 years would pass before I finally began to examine the trail she left for me to follow. What I discovered was a distinguished family tree. I found forebears who’d repatriated themselves and died in Africa. I found a great-uncle who collaborated with Langston Hughes on a musical during the Harlem Renaissance. I found that great-uncle’s sister, who met François “Papa Doc” Duvalier during her two-year sojourn in Haiti in the 1940s. And then there was that great-grandfather whose story my friend was unable to imagine.

Named Casper George Garrett, he invented himself after Reconstruction’s end, a feat that inspires me as much as the story of his great-grandfather, an African who bought his freedom in 1819 and then managed, somehow, to release his wife and two of his children from bondage. Happenstance allowed C. G. Garrett to escape slavery—he was born just months after the end of the Civil War—but the rest was his doing. Educated by Black and white missionaries who ventured south after war’s end, and encouraged by his mother, he taught in a country schoolhouse before training as a teacher, then went on to earn bachelor’s and law degrees. He seldom practiced as a lawyer, but he edited or published three newspapers and taught for more than 20 years at Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina. And if all that was not enough, he was active in local and state Republican politics, helped found the Colored State Fair, and was a staunch advocate for laymen in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church.

My search for Garrett, and those who’d come before him, was a quest for what the historian David Levering Lewis dubbed “psychic citizenship” in an email he sent me. Born in the United States, I spent my childhood in Jamaica. When I returned at age nine, I felt out of place, a burden that has never quite eased. The more I learned about Garrett’s life, the more I felt both admiration and a sense of connection. It isn’t just that he went from almost-slavery to becoming certified to appear in South Carolina courtrooms when he was only 24. It is what he did afterward, becoming an example of what the historian John F. Marszalek calls “unknown black leaders”—men and women little recognized outside their communities who selflessly devoted themselves to education and uplift in the difficult decades that marked “the nadir of the Negro’s status in American society,” as another historian, Rayford Logan, put it. These Black Victorians—sober, industrious, thrifty, and self-restrained—worked in hope of a better future.

Though parts of Garrett’s program to better the race and, eventually, prove its members worthy of full citizenship sound a lot like the now-discarded notion of respectability politics—he believed in education, homeownership, obeying the law, voting, and “proper leadership”—I sometimes think we could do worse than to return to those principles today. Saying that I admire him, however, is not to imply anything so simple as hero worship. To claim him, I also had to accept his failings.

Though Garrett was ambitious, he often failed to achieve his goals because he lacked the ability to compromise. Seeking the editorship of the A.M.E. Church Review, comparable to W. E. B. Du Bois’s Crisis in its time, he alienated the Church’s bishops by demanding a greater voice in AME affairs for laymen. Not surprisingly, he was not appointed. Later, during World War I, he encouraged Black men to pay their poll taxes because a “man who fights for his country’s flag should vote for his rulers.” But he also caused a Black pastor who had allegedly made anti-white statements to flee for his life when he accused the pastor of “race rot.” And he met with U.S. Senator Nathaniel B. Dial, offering to relay information about warring Republican factions, in the hopes that the senator would support him for a federal appointment; Dial did not.

One of the highlights of Garrett’s life came when he was one of nearly 30 “prominent colored citizens of South Carolina” invited to accompany Booker T. Washington on a train tour of the state in 1909. The tour was part of Washington’s lifelong endeavor to convince white Americans that Blacks had progressed sufficiently since slavery to be worthy of white southerners’ “friendship and good will.” The men who accompanied Washington on his “special car” (there seem to have been no women) were pastors, doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and journalists: proof of that progress. And yet, Garrett’s name was 13th on the official list of those “distinguished and prominent” men onboard, and set in substantially smaller type than those that preceded his. Worse, he was identified as C. F.—not C. G.—Garrett.

Such slights symbolize the frustration of Garrett’s life: doomed to be counted as one among many, he too seldom led. Perhaps it was inevitable, given that there was so much that was protean and quixotic about him, an American restlessness and refusal to be confined that expressed itself in his crisscrossing the country on AME Church business from Florida to Canada, South Carolina to California. Columbia remained his home, but he surveyed a greater interior landscape.

I began by recounting one friend’s reaction to the story of my great-grandfather, so I’ll end by recounting what another friend, this one Black, said when I told her how Garrett had been selected to ride with Booker T. Washington. “Well,” she sniffed, “while your great-grandfather was on that train with Booker T. Washington, my great-grandmother was on her hands and knees, scrubbing some white woman’s floors.”

The difference in circumstance is obvious, but my friend’s great-grandmother did have something in common with C. G. Garrett’s mother, who washed, ironed, and cooked for others so that her only son could go to school. Like my friend’s ancestor, Garrett’s mother did what she had to, working to give others the chance at opportunities denied her. She aspired to more, even if she herself could not enjoy it. She and the other Garretts reached toward the green light of the American dream, even as it eluded them. What could be more American than that? They were my forebears, but their story just might be yours, too.