The Butler: A Witness to History - Hardcover

9781476752990: The Butler: A Witness to History
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From Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow Wil Haygood comes a mesmerizing inquiry into the life of Eugene Allen, the butler who ignited a nation's imagination and inspired a major motion picture: Lee Daniels' The Butler, the highly anticipated film that stars six Oscar winners, including Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey (honorary and nominee), Jane Fonda, Cuba Gooding Jr., Vanessa Redgrave, and Robin Williams; as well as Oscar nominee Terrence Howard, Mariah Carey, John Cusack, Lenny Kravitz, James Marsden, David Oyelowo, Alex Pettyfer, Alan Rickman, and Liev Schreiber.

With a foreword by the Academy Award nominated director Lee Daniels, The Butler not only explores Allen's life and service to eight American Presidents, from Truman to Reagan, but also includes an essay, in the vein of James Baldwin’s jewel The Devil Finds Work, that explores the history of black images on celluloid and in Hollywood, and fifty-seven pictures of Eugene Allen, his family, the presidents he served, and the remarkable cast of the movie.

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About the Author:
A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow and a writer for the Washington Post, Wil Haygood has been described as a cultural historian. He is the author of a trio of iconic biographies. His King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., told the story of the enigmatic New York congressman and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. That was followed—after publication of a family memoir—by In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr., which was awarded the ASCAP Deems Taylor Music Biography Award, the Zora Neale Hurston-Richard Wright Legacy Award, and the Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. In 2009, he wrote Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson, which told the story of the famed New York pugilist known as much for his prowess in the ring as his elegant style outside of it. Haygood is an associate producer of Lee Daniels’ The Butler.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
The Butler THE BUTLER’S JOURNEY


HE WAS OUT there somewhere. By now he’d be an old man. He had worked “decades” in the White House. Maybe he had passed away virtually alone, and there had been only a wisp of an obituary notice. But no one could confirm if that were so. Maybe I was looking for a ghost. Actually, I was looking for a butler. I couldn’t stop looking.

Yes, a butler.

It is such an old-fashioned and anachronistic term: the butler. Someone who serves people, who sees but doesn’t see; someone who can read the moods of the people he serves. The figure in the shadows. Movie lovers fell in love with the butler as a cinematic figure in the 1936 film My Man Godfrey, which starred William Powell as the butler of a chaotic household. More recently, the butler figure and other backstage players have been popularized in the beloved television series Downton Abbey. My butler was a gentleman by the name of Eugene Allen. For thirty-four years, he had been a butler at the house located in Washington, DC, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which the world knows as the White House.

Finally, after talking to many, many people, on both coasts of the country, and making dozens and dozens of phone calls, I found him. He was very much alive. He was living with his wife, Helene, on a quiet street in Northwest Washington. Eugene Allen had worked—as a butler—in eight presidential administrations, from Harry Truman’s to Ronald Reagan’s. He was both a witness to history and unknown to it.

“Come right in,” he said, opening the door to his home on that cold November day in 2008. He had already taken his morning medications. He had already served his wife breakfast. He was eighty-nine years old, and he was about to crack history open for me in a whole new way.

This is how the story of a White House butler—who would land in newsprint the world over after a story I had written appeared on the front page of the Washington Post three days after the historic election on November 4, 2008, of Barack Obama—actually unspooled.

IT ALL BEGAN in summery darkness in 2008, down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Midnight had come and gone, and the speech was being summed up and analyzed and written about. Yet another Democratic presidential hopeful had been pleading with a throng of students and voters about why they should vote for him. The rafters of what is known as the Dean Dome on the campus of the University of North Carolina were packed. The candidate, who possessed a smooth and confident disposition, was on his way. The audience was multiracial, young and old. The instantly recognizable guttural voice of Stevie Wonder was jumping from the loudspeakers. Some of the old in attendance were veterans of the movement, as in civil rights movement: the sixties, segregation, those brave souls gunned down and buried all across the South. Now the candidate was before them, shirtsleeves rolled up, holding the microphone. “I’m running because of what Dr. King called the fierce urgency of now, because I believe in such a thing as being too late, and that hour, North Carolina, is upon us.” The words had a churchy, movement feel to them, and then–senator Barack Obama was effortlessly lifting the throng up out of their seats. The noise and clapping pointed to believers. But still, it was the South, he was a black man, the White House seemed a bit of a fantastical dream. History and demons were everywhere, though the candidate seemed impervious to all that.

I was one of the writers covering the Obama campaign that night for the Washington Post, flying in and out of a slew of states over a seven-day period. Following the Chapel Hill rally and speech—and after I’d interviewed a few folks inside—it was time to move outside and head for the bus, which would take us journalists back to the hotel. The night air was sweet and rather lovely. Suddenly, I heard the oddest thing: cries, and coming from nearby. I turned my head and squinted through the dark. Just over there, on a bench, sat three young ladies—college students. I stepped toward them and asked if anything was wrong, if there was anything I could do. “Our fathers won’t speak to us,” one of them said through her sobs, “because we support that man in there.” They had all been inside the Dome. The speaker’s cohorts nodded through reddened eyes. She went on: “Our fathers don’t want us supporting a black man, but they can’t stop us.” Their words stilled me. I sat talking with them for a while. Their sobs faded away, and the looks on their faces soon returned to a kind of resplendent defiance. They were staring down their daddies; they were going to be a part of the movement to get this black man to the White House. Maybe I was half-exhausted, maybe I was in a dreamy state of mind, maybe those tears had touched me deeper than I knew. But then and there, in that southern darkness—as if I had been kicked by a mule—I told myself that Barack Obama was indeed going to get to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the White House.

Just days after that night in Chapel Hill, I told Steve Reiss, my editor, that Barack Obama was going to win the presidency, and because he was going to win, I needed to find someone from the era of segregation, and find them right now, to write about what this upcoming and momentous event in American history would mean to them. And I wanted the person to have worked in the White House, I told him. My editor’s eyebrows arched. “Hmm.” Reiss sighed. He didn’t believe Obama would win, but he did believe my intentions. He wanted me to finish a couple of other hanging assignments, then I could go in search of this ghostly person. He wondered: how far back would I look for this White House employee? “Are you talking the nineteen sixties?”

“Farther back,” I said.

I wanted to find a black man or woman who had worked and scrubbed inside the White House, who had washed dishes there, who had drunk from those COLORED ONLY water fountains in America during the Jim Crow years. I did not mind that people around me were constantly saying America would not elect a black man as president.

A black employee at the White House in the 1950s? The White House operator told me it was their policy not to give out names of former employees, and she knew of no White House office that would assist me in such an endeavor. There are always walls, roadblocks in a reporter’s work, and I told myself this was nothing to fret about. Besides, I had a source on Capitol Hill, in a congressman’s office, someone who would help. But after much back-and-forth, this source couldn’t gain any guidance from the White House either. Others were soon offering blank stares, or long pauses on the telephone, with no possible names or even leads. Then, with me wondering if such a person could be found, someone told me about a lady in Florida who used to work at the White House, who might know of just such a person.

The woman in Florida, a former White House employee, gave me a name. “If he’d have passed away I would have heard about it,” she said. “The last time I saw Eugene Allen he was standing outside of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, getting into a taxicab. He was attending a reunion at the White House. He worked there many years as a butler.” She did not know exactly how many years.

If Eugene Allen were still alive, I had to find him. If he had been getting into a taxi when last seen by my Florida contact, that meant he likely lived in the Washington, DC–Maryland–Virginia region. The phone books were full of Eugene Allens. By the time I had made forty calls without tracking down this particular Eugene Allen, I began to wonder if this man still lived in the area. People age and become snowbirds. They move to California, Arizona, Florida. And, of course, they die. The unsuccessful calls kept mounting.

“Hello, I’m looking for Mr. Eugene Allen, who used to work as a butler at the White House.” It was about the fifty-sixth call.

“You’re speaking to him.”

· · ·

The subway train rumbled under the surface of DC. The butler had given directions to his home. It was a working-class neighborhood through and around which the 1960s riots had once swept. On my way to his street I walked past a fish fry joint, and storefront churches, and small clothing stores. In front of the butler’s home, the front gate had been left noticeably ajar: expecting company.

“Come right in,” Eugene Allen said. His back was slightly bent, and he stepped about with little grimaces. He introduced Helene, his wife, who was reclining in an easy chair with her cane lying across her lap. She was smiling warmly. They lived alone. After he was seated, both were quick to let me know that they’d talk with me, but only after they watched their beloved game show, The Price Is Right. They watched back-to-back episodes, watched them with an intensity that told me not to dare interrupt, so I didn’t.

Splayed on an end table were half a dozen magazines with then–Senator Barack Obama’s picture. It was easy to tell how proud they were of his candidacy. As game show images flickered on the wide-screen television (a gift from their only child, Charles, a Vietnam War vet who worked as an investigator with the State Department), I saw on a wall the only picture that hinted at employment at the White House: the Allens standing with President and Nancy Reagan at what seemed a very formal affair. I still was unsure of exactly how many presidents Eugene Allen had worked for.

“Eight presidents,” he told me.

Eight? He could tell I was surprised.

“That’s right. Eight. Started with Harry Truman and worked all the way up to President Reagan.”

He started telling me about his life. Born in 1919 in Scottsville, Virginia, on a plantation, he grew up working as a “house boy” for a white family. They taught him kitchen skills, and he came of age washing dishes and setting tables for that family. There was nary a hint of bitterness in his voice about his upbringing. But like Huck Finn, he wanted to light out for the territory. He got as far as Hot Springs, Virginia, home to the renowned Homestead Resort. With his refined skills, he got a job there as a waiter.

In the 1930s, jobs for Negroes anywhere quickly spread on a grapevine that was stitched together by church members, Pullman porters, bellhops at Negro hotels—the vanguard of what would form the backbone of the black working and middle class. While in Hot Springs, someone told Eugene Allen about a job in Washington, DC, at a country club. He’d heard about the high steppers and good tips at country clubs. He threw his suits in a trunk and soon found himself in the nation’s capital.

The Depression lay like a hard stone across the land, but he had a job in Washington, and he liked it. He wore nice suits, hats with soft brims, and two-toned shoes. (In some photos that survive from the era, there he is, sitting on the hood of a car, in a natty suit and fedora, looking like a million bucks though flat broke.) At a party one night in 1942 he met Helene, also a transplant to DC. She had relatives in Washington who sent letters and magazines to the small town in North Carolina where she was born and raised. Desperate to get out of the Jim Crow South, she begged her father to let her go live in this mecca her relatives described. Though he initially said no, she kept asking until he finally relented. Now in DC, she and Eugene were eyeballing one another across the music and bobbing heads at a nighttime soirée; she thought surely he’d ask for her phone number. It was a wartime city, and moments were precious. Life was so unpredictable. But he was too shy. “So I tracked his number down,” she says. They both chuckle. They married a year after meeting.

By 1947 they had saved enough to purchase their home on Otis Place in the city. Eugene was working at the country club. The job required a certain degree of smoothness, of discretion, and those were traits he possessed, traits that gained him favorable attention from the politicians and bankers who belonged to the country club. Five years later, in 1952, someone at the country club told him they were looking for “pantry workers” over at the White House, and that he should go over there and talk with Alonzo Fields. “I wasn’t even looking for a job,” he told me.

Fields, a black man, had risen from butler to maître d’ at the White House. An Indiana native, he had trained at the New England Conservatory of Music in hopes of teaching someday. When his benefactor died, his music dreams were thwarted, so he had made ends meet by working as a waiter. He joined the White House staff during the Hoover administration and would work there for twenty-one years under four presidents. He had no earthly idea that Eugene Allen, the man sitting before him, would far surpass him in number of presidents worked for and years served.

Fields talked to Allen about the prestige of working at the White House, how discretion was to be valued and practiced. Fields must have picked up on Allen’s air of quiet dignity because he hired him to work in the pantry. The starting salary was twenty-four hundred dollars a year. In 1952, it was decent money. Helene, a vivacious sort, now owned bragging rights: her husband worked at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a fact she was quick to drop on neighbors and fellow churchgoers. It bestowed a certain importance on the Allen family.

Allen admits he was quite nervous when Fields came looking for him one day shortly after he began work at the White House. He told Allen it was time to meet President Harry Truman. “Just listen to this man,” Truman said to Allen, pointing his finger in the direction of Alonzo Fields, “and you’ll be okay.” The years began to roll by. Allen was promoted to full-fledged butler. To celebrate that and other occasions, he and Helene would throw little dinner parties down in their basement, which was fairly stark save for a noticeable black-and-white portrait of Jackie Robinson, which hung on a wall near the bar. They’d be joined by fellow butlers and their wives, neighbors, and acquaintances from their church. Mixed drinks would be served and folks would start, after a week of being buttoned-up, to relax. Guests would plead around the card table and makeshift bar for any information about what went on at the White House. Eugene was ever tight-lipped.

After having left the White House all these years later, Eugene Allen was more open. He admitted he could hardly have envisioned how history would evolve during his years—thirty-four in all—spent at the White House. He reminisced about shaking the hand of every president he had worked for, and about spending nights in the White House when the weather forbade his getting home. He reminisced about flying on Air Force One, and about all the Easter egg hunts for the children. He talked about all the state dinners and White House luncheons.

“I was there, honey,” Helene pipes in. They both smile: old souls, old love.

During the tense Little Rock school desegregation crisis, he watched President Eisenhower argue with Arkansas governor Orval Faubus over the phone. It made him mighty proud when Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the black schoolchildren. He was there when President Kennedy had to protect James Meredith on the campus of the University of Mississippi in 1963 as the school, by court order, was forced to allow the first black student to enroll. The stories come more frequently now, but back then, when Helene would ask him about the social and racial strife engulfing the country and what it was doing to the president he was serving, Eugene Allen was mostly silent.

There were sweeter moments...

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  • Publisher37 Ink
  • Publication date2013
  • ISBN 10 1476752990
  • ISBN 13 9781476752990
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages112
  • Rating

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