Guest of Honor by Deborah Davis

Author:Deborah Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

When Booker T. arrived at the White House on Sunday, September 29, for his scheduled 9:00 PM meeting with TR, the building was quiet. The Roosevelt children were sleeping (bedtime was usually eight o’clock), and reporters were unlikely to be around at this late hour because most assumed there would be no important news on TR’s day of rest.

Booker T. was escorted to TR’s library by two black servants in traditional livery. African Americans had played an important part in White House history from the very beginning. It was a rare president (notably James Buchanan, who preferred white, traditionally trained British servants) who didn’t employ a sizable African American staff—an army of porters, valets, messengers, waiters, maids, cooks, footmen, laundresses, and laborers—to keep the mansion running. “The tone of the house was distinctly southern,” according to White House historian William Seale, and, in fact, most of the president’s servants were Southern blacks. Though they “performed a thousand duties,” they were generally invisible because they worked backstairs and behind the scenes. Within the black community, however, some of them had become legends.

One of the first was Benjamin Banneker. Although he never worked at the White House, he was thought to have been a key member of the team that planned the capital. Born in 1731, the grandson of an English dairy maid and a slave who had been a gifted scientist and engineer in his native Africa, Banneker was a curious little boy who followed in his grandfather’s footsteps and grew up to be a skilled surveyor and astronomer. He was so skilled, in fact, that in 1791 he was recruited to work with urban planner Pierre-Charles L’Enfant in designing America’s new capital city.

Described by the Georgetown Weekly Ledger as “a large man of noble appearance” who “resembled Benjamin Franklin,” Banneker was praised as an “Ethiopian, whose abilities . . . already prove that Mr. Jefferson’s concluding that that race of men were void of mental endowment, was without foundation.” Banneker was an author, scientist, mathematician, farmer, astronomer, urban planner and, like Franklin, the publisher of his very own almanac.

Some overly enthusiastic admirers credited Banneker with single-handedly re-creating L’Enfant’s plan for Washington after the Frenchman was fired from the project and left town in a huff. In fact, Banneker played somewhat of a lesser role—Congress had a copy of the original plan on file—but he was a remarkable surveyor and scientist nonetheless.

When construction commenced on the President’s House in 1792, many of the carpenters, bricklayers, stone masons, and general laborers were black. Not that most of them had any say about where they worked. They were slaves whose owners hired them out as day laborers. “Jim,” Len,” “Jess,” and “Bill,” to name a few of the men listed in the financial ledgers, did the work while their masters pocketed their “wages.” Even the White House’s architect James Hoban collected sixty dollars a month for the services of the slave carpenters he owned and leased to the project.

The day was long, usually twelve hours.

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