The Original Black Elite by Elizabeth Dowling Taylor

Author:Elizabeth Dowling Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

OVER THIS PERIOD, THE MURRAY FAMILY HAD THEIR UPS AND downs. Two days after Daniel Murray and his son returned from their visit to Buffalo and Cleveland in the fall of 1901, eight-year-old Harold was taken ill with sore throat and chills, followed by a fever so intense his mouth broke out in fever blisters. Though he recovered in a week or so, his parents were “constantly uneasy” because “he is never hearty and free from ailment, his appetite is so variable and he is so likely to be sick through indiscreet eating.” On the heels of Harold’s illness, the sister Murray was closest to, Ellen Butler, died of stomach cancer. She’d been suffering for months. By the first week in September, her state was so precarious that Murray anticipated that she “may drop off any moment.” The end came on October 7. Ellen was survived by one child, Kate Proctor Jordan; her youngest daughter, Ella Butler Seville (for whom Murray had earlier served as guardian), had died the year before at thirty-eight. In her will Ellen bequeathed $250 to her brother Daniel “in satisfaction of my debt to him (which is less than that sum) and is a token of my affection for him.”

Christmas 1901 brought a brighter day. The younger boys, Harold and three-year-old Paul, “had a merry time dealing with Santa Claus,” their father recounted. “Harold had a Magic Lantern, which he proceeded to show Christmas night, the faint picture of which gave excellent play for one’s imagination.” Nat was completing his senior year at M Street High School. Come spring, he attended a surprise party for John W. Cromwell’s daughter Fannie, who arrived home to find a “merry throng in the mazes of the dance.” Two weeks later, on April Fools’ Day, the Kappa Rho Tab Club, composed of M Street High School boys, gathered at the Murray home for their first party, a coed affair. After dancing, the young guests “marched in couples to the dining room, where a sumptuous repast was served and souvenirs of white and pink carnations were distributed.” Thus were children of the black upper class familiarized to the kind of social activities their parents indulged in. When Harold was only fifteen, he would become a member of the Bon-Bon-Buddies; the club, made up of high school sons of “well-known families of Washington,” held an afternoon “grand matinee,” complete with band, at the True Reformer Building.

Nat turned eighteen on April 10, 1902. He graduated from high school in June and went on to Hampton Institute that September to begin a three years’ postgraduate course in scientific agriculture. Henry, meanwhile, left Harvard after two years due to ill health. Thus, even as one son moved out of the S Street house, another returned home. Henry, having become familiar at Harvard with the newly popular game of football, taught it to his younger brother. Harold “is fairly crazy over the game,” their father told George Myers, and likes to demonstrate how he “can ‘hit the line’ whatever that is.

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