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Belle Da Costa Greene, Book History, Race, and Medieval Studies1

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Belle Da Costa Greene, Book History, Race, and Medieval Studies1 43 Belle da Costa Greene, Book History, Race, and Medieval Studies1 By Dorothy Kim Abstract: Linking both Cheryl Harris’s opening to “Whiteness as Property” and Mikki Kendall’s opening in Hood Fem- inism to reexamine and position the details of Belle da Costa Greene’s family and her mother’s decision to move herself and her children across the color line, this article situates Greene, her family, her career, and her personal book collection in contrast to her roles as the first librarian, first director, and person-in-charge of the acquisitions and the shapings of the Pierpont Morgan Library. The article first discusses the complexities of “white heritage as property” and considers how manuscript and rare books collecting is another way to make white supremacist monuments of the “western civilization” past. The second part of the article addresses Belle da Costa Greene’s personal manuscript collection, her formulation of herself in relation to Black Orientalism, and the practices of manuscript cataloging. Finally, the article ends with an argument about how we can make racial and social reparations through various means, including manuscript cataloging, in order to do justice to Belle da Costa Greene’s work and professional importance. Cheryl I. Harris opens her article, “Whiteness as Property,” with Dorothy Kim teaches a passage from the US court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) and pro- Medieval Literature at ceeds to tell a personal narrative about her grandmother in the era of Jim Brandeis University. Her Crow. She writes: research focuses on race, In the 1930s, some years after my mother’s family became gender, digital human- part of the great river of Black migration that flowed north, ities, medieval women’s my Mississippi-born grandmother was confronted with the literary cultures, medie- harsh matter of economic survival for herself and her two valism, Jewish/Christian daughters. Having separated from my grandfather, who him- difference, book history, self was trapped on the fringes of economic marginality, she digital media, and the took one long hard look at her choices and presented herself alt-right. for employment at a major retail store in Chicago’s central business district. This decision would have been unremark- able for a white woman in similar circumstances, but for my grandmother, it was an act of both great daring and self-de- nial, for in so doing she was presenting herself as a white woman. In the parlance of racist America, she was “passing.” (Harris 1710) The subsequent paragraphs detail the daily encounters Harris’s grandmother had with her white co-workers and customers, and the emotional turmoil and exhaus- tion that “great daring and self-denial” generated within her. She writes: “The fact 1I would like to thank Tarrell Campbell for inviting me to be the Keynote for Celebrating Belle da Costa Greene: An Ex- amination of Medievalists of Color within the Field in December 2018. The bulk of my initial work in the Pierpont Morgan came in November 2018 in a series of all-day trips to the library. My thanks to the Pierpont Morgan Library, particularly Christine Nelson (Druze Heinz Curator) and Joshua O’Driscoll (Assistant Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manu- scripts), and to the Morgan Library staff for pulling Belle da Costa Greene’s probate documents and will from the NY City Clerk’s office. I also delivered a version of this talk at the invitation of the Beinecke Library on a roundtable on women book collectors in November 2019. 1/1 (December 2020) Quimbandas 44 that self-denial had been a logical choice and had made her complicit in her own oppression at times fed the fire in her eyes when she confronted some daily outrage inflicted on Black people” (1711-12). This personal history, according to Harris, [...] illustrates the valorization of whiteness as treasured property in a society structured on racial caste. In ways, so embedded that it is rarely apparent, the set of assumptions, privileges, and benefits that accompany the status of being white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect and that those who passed sought to attain—by fraud if necessary. Whites have come to expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law. Even though the law is neither uniform nor ex- plicit in all instances, in protecting settled expectations based on white privilege, American law has recognized a property interest in whiteness that, although unacknowledged, now forms the background against which legal disputes are framed, argued, and adjudicated. (1713-14) I open with Harris’s discussion of her grandmother’s passing as well as her arguments about “white- ness as property” for two reasons. First, to present how whiteness and property are “entangled” and, in the era of Jim Crow, deeply embedded in law and in the lives of everyday Black men and women. Second, to highlight Harris’s centering of intersectionality by foregrounding the actual lived issues and experiences of her grandmother, a poor Black woman fighting to keep herself, along with mem- bers of her family, financially solvent in Jim Crow America.2 Published almost two decades later, Mikki Kendall’s book, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women the Movement Forgot, also opens with a discussion of her grandmother, who “would not have described herself as a feminist. Born in 1924, after white women won the right to vote, but raised in the height of Jim Crow America, she did not think of white women as allies or sisters” (Kendall ix). I invoke Kendall’s work here because she makes a similarly salient point about intersectionality and the lives of Black women that she sees exemplified in her family’s history: We rarely talk about basic needs as a feminist issue. Food insecurity and access to quality education, safe neighborhoods, a living wage, and medical care are all feminist issues. Instead of a framework that focuses on helping women get basic needs met, all too often the focus is not on survival but on increasing privilege. For a movement that is meant to represent all women, it often centers on those who already have most of their needs met as a feminist issue. As with most, if not all, marginalized women who function as feminist actors in their commu- nity even when they don’t use the terminology, my feminism is rooted in an awareness of how race and gender and class all affect my ability to be educated, receive medical care, gain and keep employ- ment, as well as how those things can sway authority figures in their treatment of me. (xiii) Both of these Black feminist scholars and their works’ opening family histories help to situate Belle da Costa Greene, her family, her career, and her personal book collection in contrast to her role as first librari- an, first director, and the one-in-charge of the acquisitions and the shapings of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Her parents were well known; in the case of her father, politically prominent; in the case of her mother, from members of well-established Black families who “worked in higher-status professions as engineers, barbers, music teachers, and printers” (Ardizzone 27). Her father, Richard Theodore Greener, was the first Black graduate of Harvard University;3 taught at the University of South Carolina and was head librarian (though was driven out); obtained a law degree, and became Dean of Howard University’s law department. He was eventually dispatched to Vladivostok as a diplomat, or “Commercial Agent,” of the United States. 2See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991), 1241-299, doi:10.2307/1229039. Also “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” published April 1977, accessed October 29, 2020, https://combaheerivercollective.weebly.com/the- comba- hee-river-collective-statement.html 3Michael David Cohen, “Richard Greener: First Black Graduate of Harvard University,” Black Perspectives, published 1/1 (December 2020) Quimbandas 45 Belle’s mother, Genevieve Ida Fleet, had a different background as she “had been part of a stable community of free people of color in Georgetown and then Washington D.C., for most of the nineteenth century” (27). By the time he departed for Vladivostok, Greener had left his wife and five children living at the same address where they had moved in the late 1880s: 29 West 99th Street. This location was, according to Greene’s biographer Heidi Ardizzone, part of a “largely white area just west of Central Park, far north of the Tenderloin district and south of Harlem. Native-born New Yorkers, Germans, Scandinavians, Irish, Canadians, and white mi- grant Americans lived in multifamily dwellings […] It was a solidly working-class, lower-mid- dle-class neighborhood” (45). When Belle da Costa Greene’s mother made the decision to have her family pass as white, which seemed to have solidified by 1900, they were still at this official address though under the name “Green/Greene” instead of Greener on the census (53). I am linking to both Harris’s opening to “Whiteness as Property” and Kendall’s opening in Hood Feminism to reexamine and situate the details of Belle da Costa Greene’s family and her mother’s decision to move herself and her children across the color line. Her background as an African American woman connected to prominent Black families and the complexities of pass- ing matter to her work at the Pierpont Morgan Library and also to her own personal collecting histories. Like the grandmothers of Harris and Kendall, Belle da Costa Greene grappled with the tightening vise of Jim Crow, and racial passing was a constant in their lives and in the lives of their family members.
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