A picture of privilege

Chatfield farm, Loudon County, Virginia, 1951

My brother and sisters and I found this photograph, along with about 100 others none of us had ever seen, in a shoebox buried under a pile of dirty clothes on the floor of a closet in my father’s bedroom just after he died in 1999.  Some of the other pictures were quite remarkable, such as a series of snapshots taken by an Army photographer at the change of command ceremony in Bad Tolz, Germany, in 1945, when grandpa relieved General George S. Patton of his command of the 3rd Army after the war.  Grandpa was sent down there by General Eisenhower because Patton refused to de-Nazify Bavaria, of which he was Military Governor.  He was keeping Jewish survivors of the holocaust in conditions not much better than they suffered when the army liberated the concentration camps as the war ended. Grandpa and Patton had been in the Cavalry between the wars and had been friends for almost 25 years.  He told my father that relieving Patton was one of the saddest days in his life, even though he knew it had to be done.

The picture that caught my eye was this one.  It was taken by my grandmother in the summer of 1951.  That’s my mother on the right, I’m on the left, and my brother Frank is between us.  Walking past in the background wearing sweat-stained Army khakis is my grandfather and namesake, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr.

I should tell you what we were doing: We were picking Japanese beetles from the leaves of grandpa’s rosebushes and dropping them into a Ball quart jar full of kerosene held by my mother.  I can still remember the pungent odor of the kerosene in the summer heat and the thrashing around the beetles did when you dropped them into the jar.  This was what my grandparents thought of as “good exercise for the boys” when we were two and four years old.  It truly was a different time. 

The Black girl standing just behind my brother is Ruth Basil.  She is wearing a black cotton skirt and blouse with detachable starched white collar, cuffs, handkerchief, and apron. It is what would have been called back then a servant’s uniform.  Ruth Basil was 16 years old that day. 

This photograph of privilege is filled with anomalies, twists and turns from the ordinary.  The woman who took the photograph with her Kodak Brownie was my grandmother, Sara Randolph Truscott.  She was the fourth great granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson having been born into the Randolph family at Edgehill, their plantation only three miles or so from Monticello.  Despite the Virginia blue blood in her veins, she never inherited as much as a dime because the Randolph family went bankrupt in 1915 and had to sell Edgehill.  She moved to Arizona with her parents.  Her father went to work as a company doctor for the copper mine in Bisbee.  It was there that she met my grandfather who was stationed with the Cavalry at Fort Douglas, an outpost near the Mexican border.  They married and moved to Camp Marfa in Texas, now the site of Donald Judd’s museum and the Chinati Foundation.  I have photos of my grandmother in an ankle-length dress and bonnet in Marfa in 1920 splitting wood for the wood cookstove in the adobe quarters where they lived at the fort.

At the time this photo was taken, my grandfather had recently retired from the Army as a four-star general.  His retirement income from the army was $200 a month.  I’ve seen the government checks in his papers which are collected at the Marshall Library in Lexington, Virginia. The house you can see in the background was the first house they had ever owned, having spent the previous 25 years or so living in military quarters on army posts.  His retirement check was the only income they had, because he had never done anything but be an officer and Army pay, even for senior officers and generals wasn’t much. They had never been able to save any money.  Living on that small farm in a 150 year old house turned out to be more than they could manage, and later that year they were forced to sell the house and farm.  The CIA gave him the  job of running its operations in Europe, and they moved to Germany.

My mother, Anne Harloe Truscott, was the daughter of a colonel in the Army Corps of Engineers.  While serving as a Red Cross girl after the war in the Philippines, she met and married my father who was a  lieutenant in the Infantry.  At the time this photo was taken, his base pay was $260 a month. 

When we found this photograph in 1999, I was curious about what was going on in our lives in 1951, so I flew to Washington D.C. and rented a car and drove around Loudon County where grandpa’s farm was until I found it, thinking I might be able to track down the girl in the photo and talk to her about what life was like back then.  I found Ruth Basil still living in the same house she was born in, about a mile down the road from the farm where she was still working one day a week almost 50 years later for the woman who bought the place from my grandparents. 

This photograph was taken by my grandmother as a picture of her grandchildren and daughter-in-law, but it belongs to Ruth.  Look at her:  Ruth’s head is tilted forward, and at first glance, she appears to be watching what we’re doing.  But if you look closely, her eyes are looking up, directly at my grandmother, and she is smiling either shyly or slyly, it’s hard to tell.  But standing at its center, she dominates the picture with her body language and skin color against the whitewashed clapboard side of the farmhouse behind her.  She is the only person who beckons to the camera with her eyes.  Her smile seems to comment enigmatically on the people before her, and by extension, on the whole scene – the garden and the farm and my family and grandma and grandpa and what we were like back then, and how she felt about us, and how she felt about herself at the moment the shutter snapped. 

When I found Ruth, I asked her what was going on that day.  She told me that she had recently begun working for my grandparents in place of her mother, who was badly ill and would die within the year.  The house she grew up in was a log cabin that had been built by her great-great grandfather and grandmother, who had been slaves on the farm adjoining the one my grandfather had bought. Their house, and several others along the same road also built by freed slaves, were on land that had been sold to them by the man who enslaved them.  They were thus made to continue working for him to pay off the land he had sold them.  All the houses along the road next to Ruth’s house still belonged to the descendants of the freed slaves who built them. 

Nothing much had changed in Loudon County since the end of the Civil War, not even, in Ruth’s case, the nature of the work she did.  She was a servant to my grandparents, as evinced by the uniform she wore.  Ruth told me all the servants who worked for the white people in that area had to wear similar uniforms.  Ruth said everyone hated wearing those uniforms because they were hot, and the starched cuffs and collar and handkerchief had to be ironed every day.  Ruth said she didn’t mind putting on the servants uniform after her mother got sick because my grandparents were the only people who would hire a servant who didn’t cook, and she couldn’t cook because her mother had not wanted her to grow up to do the same work she did, so she had never taught her.

She said my grandparents paid her 50 cents an hour at a time when the going rate in that area was 25 cents.  She worked every day after school and every day during the summer, so she was able to make about $50 a month during school and more during the summer.  It was enough, she said, to support herself and her mother and little brother.  She said my grandfather did most of the cooking, and he didn’t mind it when she hung around the kitchen and watched him.  She had her own catering business now, and as she explained it, she had learned her skills at the stove from my grandfather.  Ruth’s brother, I would discover when I met him later that day at a church dinner, had recently retired from a senior position in the CIA.  He said grandpa was still fondly remembered for some of his Cold War skullduggery, among which was the construction of the Berlin spy tunnel under Soviet-occupied East Berlin in the mid-1950’s.

The day I visited Ruth, she was cooking a catered meal for a local Black church from nearby Upperville that was celebrating its 10 year anniversary.  As we stood in her hot kitchen before her Viking range with a large roast beef in the oven preparing green beans and potato salad and coleslaw and enough other side dishes to feed 200, we reminisced about the summer of 1951 many years ago. I don’t know why I remembered so much about grandpa’s farm and that time.  Maybe it was because that was the summer that dad left for Korea, the first time he would go away from us for an extended time on Army orders.  It was traumatic for Frank and me and it had to have been for mom, as well.  I was only four years old, but I can remember his leaving like it happened yesterday.  I must have smothered the wound of his leaving for war with memories that would remind me of him if he did not come back.  Whatever the case, it was the summer of my memory’s awakening.  The months and years that immediately followed are just as fresh to me.

The time came for me to ask Ruth the question I was most nervous about:  what was it like working for my family as a 16 year old Black girl in 1951? 

It would be more than a decade until the Civil Rights laws were passed.  Black people in Loudon County didn’t have any rights in 1951.  They couldn’t vote.  They couldn’t eat in the same places white people ate, or use the same bathrooms or water fountains.  Driving to Ruth’s house that morning, I had stopped at an old gas station on Route 7 where grandpa used to get gas and we used the bathroom and bought icy Cokes from a refrigerated water cooler.  The bathroom had a sign that said, “Whites Only.”  The Black bathroom was an outhouse at the edge of a field behind the station.  Black people weren’t allowed to reach into the chilled water to get a Coke.  They were made to buy them from a station attendant through a little sliding-glass window in the side of the station.

Still, I knew Ruth wasn’t going to say anything bad about my grandparents.  If you were Black and you were 65 years old as Ruth was in 1999, and you were talking to a white man, even one as liberal or enlightened or whatever you want to call it that I was, you trod carefully over ground that had been perilous beneath your feet your whole life.

This is how Ruth handled my question: “Oh, your grandmother was an angel!  And your grandfather was such a fine gentleman.  I loved going to their house every day.”

What was I like back then?  With a twinkle in her eye, Ruth said, “Your brother was a little angel, but you were a devil from the gates of hell!  I chased you from one end of that place to the other every day!”

The next day was Sunday, and Ruth took me to her church, not far from her house.  It was a small building, constructed of stones taken from the land where it was built on land purchased from a friendly white man shortly after the end of the Civil War by a group of freed slaves who put up the church and together paid off the land.  Her family had been going there since it was built.  Inside, a row of four pot-bellied stoves used for heat in the winter lined one side of the church.  Ruth introduced me to the other worshipers as the grandson of the people she worked for as a girl.  They were all descendants of the church’s founders.  Some had driven from a hundred or more miles away to get there for the service.

After church, Ruth told me a little of what it was like growing up as a Black girl in Virginia in the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s.  She attended all-Black schools, from grade school through high school, and she walked to and from school every day.  She told me sometimes she was passed on the dirt roads by yellow school buses full of white children.  It seemed to be a particularly painful memory for her, to be passed by white children who were being driven to school while she walked.  I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be nine or ten years old and a Black girl walking alone along a dirt road for several miles to get to school as cars driven by white men passed by kicking up dust and gravel.  I tried to form a picture in my mind, but I couldn’t.  It was too far from my own experience, the way I had lived my life not just as a boy but as a white boy.    

When we drove up to her house after lunch, I asked her what had happened to the log cabin she lived in when I visited there as a boy.  I had loved playing there on the afternoons she took Frank and me home to visit.

“Oh my goodness!” she exclaimed.  “I’m surprised you remember the log cabin!  It’s still here, but we covered it with aluminum siding.  Everybody did.”  She pointed down the road at the other houses, all of which had been log cabins.  They were sided in colored aluminum that gleamed in the sun.

The day my grandmother took the photograph you see above was a long time ago.  After her mother died, Ruth kept working at the farm for the women who bought it from my grandparents.  They raised racehorses and were well-off.  Working there, she was able to keep the house her great-great grandfather had built as a free man after the Civil War.   Eventually she got married and had a family and started her catering business.  The house was still in her family and would be passed down to her son when she died, she said.

Republicans piss and moan and squawk and complain every time someone mentions white privilege as if such a thing doesn’t exist.  They have made it part of their political movement to deny that slavery and segregation and racism and oppression are as much a part of our history as the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk or the greatness of our founding fathers or the magnificence of our Constitution or putting a man on the moon.  They want to wish it away with rhetoric and denial and hate.

But this photograph was taken in our lifetime, and its depiction of a white family, my family, being watched over by a Black girl attired in a servant uniform is real, and it is a photograph of white privilege.  We are all right there, my mother and me and my brother and my grandfather, and the woman who took the photo, my grandmother, was descended from a man who owned people just like Ruth’s great-great grandparents.  As white children in Virginia in the mid-60’s, my brother and I rode in the yellow school buses like the ones that passed Ruth on her way to school.  We and our parents and grandparents and everyone we knew who was like us had always had the right to vote, the right to eat anywhere we wanted, to travel anyplace we wanted to go, the right to use whatever bathroom we wanted to use, to sit anywhere we wanted to sit in theaters and public transportation, the right to go to the school that was closest to where we lived, any college we wanted to apply to, to work anywhere we were qualified to work. 

Our skin color gave us those rights.  Ruth’s skin color had enslaved her ancestors and denied to her the rights that were afforded freely to us.  We were privileged.  She was not.  That’s what white privilege is.  It is unfair.  It is wrong.  It is criminal.  And it is part of the history of my family and our country.

A lot of years had passed between 1951 and the day I helped Ruth cater the dinner for the church in Upperville, Virginia.   As I drove away from her house, I looked at the sign at the end of her driveway.  It read “Long Last.”  Those days were at long last in the distant past, the sign seemed to say.  I hoped so then, but I’m not so sure anymore.