Interviewee: Jane White Viazzi Session #1

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Interviewee: Jane White Viazzi Session #1

Interviewer: Judy Weinraub New York City

Date: March 25, 2009

Q: This is Judy Weinraub. I’m with Jane White Viazzi in her Greenwich Village apartment, and we are about to record our conversation. Good afternoon.

Viazzi: Yes, we are. Good afternoon.

Q: How are you? Why don’t we start by your telling me a little bit about where and when you were born and something about your childhood.

Viazzi: All right. I was born in New York. I am one of the very, very few people who was ever born in New York instead of coming to it. I was born in a sanitarium up in Harlem on 137th Street and what was then Lenox Avenue.

Q: And what was the sanitarium?

Viazzi: It was called the Edgecombe Sanitarium.

Q: It wasn’t a full hospital?

Viazzi: I wasn’t a mental case. [laughter] But anyhow, it had a—well, we will diverge straight away because the sanitarium had a very interesting history. It was a small, maybe four-, five-floor building that had been bought by pinching and scraping by a group of black doctors who ostensibly were associated with Harlem Hospital. But Harlem Hospital—I’m speaking of the late nineteen hundreds, 1919, 1920, ’21—would not permit black doctors to function. They were there on kind of not even the masthead, but they were formalities in order to meet some kind of law in the city of New York. But they couldn’t—I mean, surgeons couldn’t operate. These were black doctors and surgeons who had graduated from the really distinguished black medical hospitals, all in the South, actually. So they put their monies together and bought this building and established the Edgecombe Sanitarium so that they could function. My family, my mother had her two children, me and my younger brother. She had a thyroid operation in that hospital, and I remember it as being, well, rather like a country hospital. It had plank flooring and sheer white curtains at the windows, and the air blowing the curtains in and a great smell.

Q: It sounds quite nice.

Viazzi: A lovely place, a lovely kind of simple place, you know. Of course, a lot of medicines and developments in medicine hadn’t even been thought of yet. And it was not a deprived place. It was just a very simple sanitarium.

But they were very famous, this group of doctors. At the head of it was a doctor Louis T. Wright, who came from Atlanta, Georgia, the same way my father did, and was a distinguished surgeon and was finally appointed by the then mayor of New York as the first black police surgeon on the police force of this city, and also he became the chairman of the board of the N.A.A.C.P. So it was all kind of interrelated. But he was our family doctor, and that’s where I was born.

Q: Now, for the record, tell me your parents’ names.

Viazzi: My parents’ name, my mother was Leah Gladys Powell White. She was born in Philadelphia. She was a twin. She never went to college. She went to school in Philadelphia and took stenography courses, so she was adept as a stenographer and secretary. My father was Walter Francis White, although he dropped the Francis, born in Atlanta, Georgia, who became, between the years 1931 and 1955, when he died, the executive secretary, the national executive secretary, of the N.A.A.C.P.

He succeeded James Weldon Johnson in that post in 1931, but he had been part of the New York N.A.A.C.P. since 1919, when he emigrated from Georgia at Mr. Johnson’s behest, because Daddy was a really energetic pro-civil rights worker even before they were known as civil rights. He was always on those battlements, and he had been part of the Atlanta branch of the N.A.A.C.P. All the cities were developing their own branches that dealt mostly with local problems, but then would refer them to the national office. And his particular pursuit there in Atlanta was against some kind of teacher exclusion of black teachers from the local schools there, and James Weldon Johnson recognized him for what he was and imported him to New York.

In the offices of the N.A.A.C.P., my father met this really gorgeous woman, and they married in 1922, and I was born really very quickly thereafter, shall we say. [laughter]

So I lived all of my life in New York. I went to a local school, which was part of the whole Ethical Culture spread of schools. They were progressive schools. And Daddy, through his connections, leaned on the school—this is shortening it—to open up its school register to black students. And in this case, I was, as I also was later at Smith College, kind of the guinea pig. I say that with no rancor. I was the guinea pig.

Q: Let’s go back for a second to your family house. Your parents are often referred to as being important figures in the Harlem Renaissance. Does that ring true to you?

Viazzi: Oh, absolutely. Oh, yes. Daddy wrote a couple of novels, and the first one, Rope and Faggot was the first, I believe, and then he wrote a subsequent Flight—I can’t see them here. I have obviously—

Q: We can check.

Viazzi: You can fill that in.

[White’s novels were The Fire and the Flint (1924) and Flight (1926). He also wrote A Man Called White (1948) and How Far the Promised Land (1955). Rope and Faggot (1929) was a biography of Judge Lynch].

[unclear] Which by some assessors of the Harlem Renaissance gave him the credit for having started the whole thing by publishing that book. H.L. Mencken was a great fan of his. Carl Van Vechten was a great fan. And Daddy was responsible for bringing a lot of those people who didn’t have a clue about Harlem. It was like going up the Congo River, you know, to see some native tribe. But he opened up that society that was up there, and I’m speaking of a really sophisticated society, but outside of the boundaries of white society at the time.

Q: I’ve read that there were a lot of receptions and parties and things like that at your home.

Viazzi: Parties like mad. I mean, we’re talking of the twenties, for heaven sakes. For all I know, bathtub gin, but not from our bathtub, I don’t think.

My mother, as I say, was this great beauty whom people would visit, you know, would try and get on the invitation list to these parties, which were held in many people’s apartments, but very importantly in ours in 409 Edgecombe.

[Interruption]

Viazzi: And Sergei Eisenstein came to one of the parties, and thereafter pronounced that Gladys White was the most beautiful woman he ever saw. Isn’t that heaven? [laughter]

Q: It certainly is, and I believe it.

Now, since this project is in the service of our perceptions about food and how that’s changed, were you allowed to be part of the parties? Do you remember what the food and drink were like?

Viazzi: Yes and no. It was speaking of, what, 1928 and into ’32. So ’28, I would have been six years old, so I was locked up in the back room. My brother was then two, so we were not privy to the parties.

Q: Not drinking bathtub gin, yes.

Viazzi: When it got to ’32, then I was ten years old, and they would let me out occasionally. I remember the crush of it all and the sounds of it all and the kind of raucous engagement with each other, white and black. There was something kind of dangerous and wonderful about that mixture, because that was not going on below 110th Street, believe you me. It started to be reciprocal that black people would be invited down to a select party, often in the Village, you know, because the Village has always been sui generis.

Q: Did your mother cook for these parties?

Viazzi: She must have done, because we had no servants. For a short time, we had a helper who lived, I believe, well, if not in the building, at least near the building, and needed—she had a child of her own. I’ve forgotten what her name was. I wrote it down because it came to me once, and now it’s disappeared again. But she would come in to help with the parties, but I don’t think she did the cooking. I think my poor mother did all this stirring of huge pots and whatnot.

I don’t seem to have a memory of the food served in our house, but I remember it when my parents used to start including me when they would go within the building to, for instance, the painter Aaron Douglas’ house. He and his wife, Alta, had a smaller apartment within that building, and I remember being included, you know, when my parents would go downstairs to their apartment, and I remember huge tables of food. It was rather like southern black food.

Q: So this was an apartment building or a house or—

Viazzi: This was the apartment building into which we moved in 1927 when I was—well, I was five by the time we came back. In 1926, my father got a fellowship enabling him to write—

Q: These books.

Viazzi: —these books. He was also given the choice of any other country than the United States, and that was so that he could concentrate on it, otherwise, because he was already associated with the N.A.A.C.P. But he took leave of absence, and he was no fool, so we moved to France, didn’t we? [laughs] Either that or Italy, but he chose France. France, of course, in the mid-twenties was terribly in, and we lived on the French Riviera in Ville Franche, a real villa overseeing the Mediterranean. I mean, this all seems like—

Q: Not bad.

Viazzi: Not bad at all. It seems like I’ve made it all up, but I didn’t. And the thing that drove them out in about eight or nine months, because we weren’t there for an entire year, was even though the villa rented for something like a hundred dollars a year or something minimal, it got to be too expensive on the money from this fellowship or this grant, and the Riviera got to be very kind of the place to go, so all the merchants and the shops upped their prices, and it got to be prohibitive for my parents.

So we came back in—I don’t know. I had my fifth birthday on the terrace of the villa. It was called Villa Sweet Home. Isn’t that to die? [laughs] And I remember balloons and a cake in the sunlight on that lovely terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, and I thought, “Well, this would be my life.”

But in August—that was October, and by July or August, the money started to run out and the whole thing soured, so we came back. By that time, Daddy had returned to the United States because he had to take up his work with the N.A.A.C.P. again, and it just came to an end, not an unpleasant end, but an end. When we came back, my mother, brother, and I, I was five, my brother was, what, four. He was just a little—he was one year old, if that.

Daddy had found us this magnificent apartment in 409 Edgecombe, which is at 155th Street and Washington Heights, I guess is the area. It’s reputed to be the highest bluff in the city of New York. Superb tripartite apartment building with wood floors and candelabra and molding and, I mean, you name it. We were very fortunate, we children, you know, to move in there. And we lived there from, what am I speaking of, 1927, in various configurations, until my mother left it in ’65. So that’s, what, thirty-odd years, whatever.

Q: So that was your home base when you went to school and when you went to college.

Viazzi: Exactly, yes.

Q: So you went to school first—

Viazzi: At Ethical Culture School here on—well, there was a sub-school belonging to them in the West 70’s in a brownstone, and then once you got to a—

Q: A certain grade, yes.

Viazzi: —certain grade or something or other, then moved into that building at, what is it, 67th Street and Central Park West.

Q: Where it [the Society for Ethical Culture] is now, yes.

Viazzi: Yes. Then when you got to junior high school, yes, and high school, one went to Fieldston, which is up in Riverdale. So whatever, however many years that comprises, I had my whole prior-to-college experience at—Algernon Black, who was one of the original pillars of the Ethical Culture School, was a great friend of Daddy’s, Mr. Black and Mr. White, on committees together and whatnot and so on. But that didn’t affect me one way or the other. I mean, I didn’t get any privileges out of that. Actually, what we considered to be the privilege was that I, by dint of Daddy’s hard work, got to be educated there, you know.

Q: Were there other black children there?

Viazzi: I don’t remember any of them. I remember a very lonely kind of existence, I think, because I have subsequently talked to people who are associated or were and at least know its history better than I, but there may have been one or two others at some point. But whether I was—for instance, this is off, and I’ll just say it quickly. I have a friend who is writing the definitive biography of Lena Horne, and he comes to me and asks me for opinions and judgments and edits and whatnot, and here is Lena claiming that she was the first black child going to Ethical Culture. And I said, “Wait. Who am I and who is she? Now let’s get ourselves straight.” I don’t know.

He said, “Well, that’s very—I’ll check on that.” But then he never got back to me to tell me whether that was so or not, because she went to Ethical Culture in Brooklyn.

And I said I don’t know that there was ever a branch or, you know, another part of Ethical.

Q: You just helped him with his research.

Viazzi: But anyway, this is apropos of whether I was the only black student or not. I think for a while there I may well have been and then, you know, kind of the whole thing opened up.

Then I graduated from there and I went to Smith College, which is under the same kind of aegis of the—

Q: Was it difficult for you to get in to or be accepted there?

Viazzi: No. There, again, Daddy had been influential. He believed profoundly that we should all be educated, whatever color we were, and we should be educated in the best possible way. So as with all of his aims, they were very high. I mean, he wasn’t talking about Brooklyn College or something, even though Brooklyn College may be equivalent. But he was aiming very high and at these institutions that up to then didn’t have a clue about black and white.

So the reason I call myself a guinea pig is that he and W.E.B. DuBois, who had a daughter named Yolanda, and Dr. Louis T. Wright, who had two daughters named Jane and Barbara Wright, Jane Wright went to Smith ahead of me, so I was not the first one at Smith. My cousin, Minnie Gladys White, who was the daughter of Daddy’s elder brother, went to Smith. She was a summa cum laude magna this and plus that, very, very intelligent. So we were that kind of, in DuBois’ words, the talented tenth, that were there as role models. Let’s face it. And it’s difficult to be a role model. I mean, you have to watch yourself all the time, just all the time, and you have to watch yourself from the standpoint of what are other people thinking. Now, is that a chore or not?

Q: Was there pressure on you to be a young lady or—

Viazzi: All of the above. But then my mother was a great lady, so she inculcated ladyness in me, which I often have violated. [laughter]

Q: That’s a relief.

Viazzi: Oh, yes. Oh, you better believe it. She was your white-gloved lady, you know.

Q: Do you have any recollection of what college food was like at that point?

Viazzi: Of what?

Q: Of what Smith food was like.

Viazzi: I remember things like rice pudding. Each house at Smith had its own kitchen and its own cooks, really, not chefs. I don’t remember it being bad. It seemed to me to be all right. Daddy liked a number of southern dishes. He loved grits, for instance. He loved ham, you know, fried ham. He loved rice. All of those kind of southern starches he liked a lot. Mother was not a great cook of those things. I mean, she could do them, but she was not into it. We were into—really ahead, way ahead of its time—fresh vegetables.

Q: This was at home.

Viazzi: This is at home under my mother’s hand.

Q: Do you think there were market stands, or where would she have gotten them?

Viazzi: There were markets. The markets in my whole period in Harlem through the early sixties, the markets were bad, bad, bad. I venture to say they have improved some now, but when I used to do the shopping, we’re speaking of in the fifties and the sixties, and—well, the seventies, I wasn’t there. But let’s say the late forties, fifties, and early sixties, I would have to go like ten blocks or so to a supermarket, and even then it was kind of mini super, you know.

Q: So it’s interesting that your mother managed to find decent produce.

Viazzi: Yes. I don’t know where that happened, because I don’t think there were carts, but maybe there were. I mean, there were produce carts down in the Lower East Side. Maybe there were in Harlem at the time.