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An Illuminated Life:
Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege
by Heidi Ardizzone
W.W. Norton & Company
Hardcover, $35.00
616 pages
ISBN: 978-0-393-05104-9
Review by Kam Williams
“Princeton University was a particularly interesting place for Belle
to first be on her own and living as white... Princeton was
culturally very southern despite its northern location, and the
university was largely responsible for this.
Throughout the 19th C. Princeton had drawn its upper-class male
student body, as well as much of its faculty and administration,
primarily from the slaveholding South… Students even brought slaves
with them as personal servants during their school residency.
Moreover, Princeton was the only Ivy League school that had not
begun to admit any African-American students by the turn of the 20th
C.
In Princeton, segregation was institutionalized in practices of
discrimination and exclusion… hotels and restaurants barred African
Americans… African-American children could only attend a Black
grammar school; there was no Black high school. In other words,
Princeton operated with exactly the kind of two-tiered racial
segregation that made it virtually impossible to maintain a
mixed-race identity in public…
[Therefore] living in Princeton would have tested any continued
connection [Belle] may have felt with the Black community. ”
Excerpted from Chapter Three, Princeton (pgs. 65, 66 & 69)
Most African-Americans of my generation were raised with whispered
rumors about light-skinned relatives who had opted to pass for
white. Sadly, due to the United States’ virulent strain of racism,
this often meant that one might never see or hear from that crossing
over sibling, cousin, son or daughter again, given the sick
society’s strictly-enforced system of segregation.
For this reason, a book like the aptly titled An Illuminated Life
represents a priceless addition to the annals of African Americana,
for it represents a very revealing and detailed biography of a woman
who made just such a daring transition. Belle Marian Greener
(1883-1950) was born in Washington, DC to parents who were both
Black. Her father had been the first African-American to graduate
from Harvard while her mother hailed from a prominent Black family
which had been emancipated for generations.
It is important to note that “during Reconstruction and the 1880s,”
[Black people] “had faith that the race would be assimilated into
white society.” Thus, “the dramatic rise of racism in the 1890s came
as a great shock to the Black elite.” Since Belle came of age during
that repressive era of redneck backlash, the country’s sudden
reversion to an ante bellum agenda helps explain her behavior when
she came of age to move into the world on her own.
Changing her name to Belle da Costa Greene, she proceeded to claim
to be part Portuguese, as a means of explaining her olive
complexion. She moved to Princeton, New Jersey where, now as a white
woman, she landed the position as a librarian which would lead to an
enviable career as the curator of the manuscript collection of
industrialist J.P. Morgan, who had amassed a fortune as a Civil War
profiteer.
Author Heidi Ardizzone, Professor of American Studies at Notre Dame,
does a marvelous job of making her mysterious subject come alive
here, given the dearth of material available. For Belle was
understandably furtive about her life, “destroying personal papers”
and “maintaining different public and private personas.”
Though she never married, she is known to have kept the company of
several very powerful men considerably above her station, and to
have felt very comfortable moving among New York City’s wealthy and
well-connected. One can only imagine how much more bohemian Belle
might have blossomed and indulged her glamorous side, if she didn’t
have to look over her shoulder constantly, wondering whether her
roots might come back to bite her.
Simply, a fascinating must read.
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Lloyd
Kam Williams