Shanna Greene Benjamin - Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay

Half in Shadow

This book was published with the assistance of the Greensboro Womens Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

Founding Contributors: Linda Arnold Carlisle, Sally Schindel Cone, Anne Faircloth, Bonnie McElveen Hunter, Linda Bullard Jennings, Janice J. Kerley (in honor of Margaret Supplee Smith), Nancy Rouzer May, and Betty Hughes Nichols.

2021 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Benjamin, Shanna Greene, author.

Title: Half in shadow : the life and legacy of Nellie Y. McKay / Shanna Greene Benjamin.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020042509 | ISBN 9781469661889 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469662534 (pbk. ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469661896 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: McKay, Nellie Y. | African American women college TeachersBiography. | African American women scholarsBiography. | Womens studiesUnited StatesHistory.

Classification: LCC LC2781.5 .B46 2021 | DDC 378.1/2092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042509

Cover illustration: Photo of Nellie Y. McKay (detail). Courtesy of University WisconsinMadison Archives, #2020s00029.

kitchenette building by Gwendolyn Brooks reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions.

Prologue

Growing up, summertime meant family reunions, when extended family scattered across the country, and sometimes around the globe, reconnected over card games in the hospitality suite, under a shade tree at the cookout, or across the table at the banquet. Through porch talk, laughter, games, and food, we ritualized our connection to family, those living and those deceased. Over time, our numbers grew. What began in the yard I raked became highly coordinated affairs with hotel stays and buffet dinners celebrating superlatives: the youngest and oldest in attendance, the person whox traveled the farthest. There were small variances in execution from year to year, but one thing remained consistent: the reading of the family history.

Cousin Johnny, an impressive man who stood over six feet and spoke in a rumbling bass, would read this history aloud, tracing the roots of our family tree as he lifted up the names of relatives long gone. By remembering our history, we claimed our inheritance, affirmed our interconnectedness, and highlighted our shared legacy. The family history began as little more than a paragraph or two sandwiched inside a simple cardstock program. Later, it swelled into an extended narrative, accompanied by a multi-page computer-generated diagram of our family tree, bound together as a booklet. As a child, I marveled at the expansiveness of our tree and lingered on the pages with my name. I followed genogram symbolssolid and dotted lines, triangles and circlesdefining my place within my immediate family and among my extended relations. As I grew older, I became curious about the stories hidden behind the names or inside the lines delineating marriages and partnerships, siblings and cousins, deaths and births. How did my people come together? Why did they break apart? What did they endure? How did they triumph?

One afternoon, I acted upon my curiosity while visiting my paternal grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Griffin Greene. With college, graduate school, and jobs taking me from the South to the Midwest and back again, I visited Grandma Greene in the Oranges whenever I happened to land near New Jersey. She and her sisters, Alberta and Pauline, lived together in separate apartments within the same senior living facility, a building that was the former site of the YMCA where their mother, who I called Nana, had worked as a domestic. As I got older, I grew more appreciative of their knowledge, their wit, and their outlook, and looked forward to the times when it was just us. My academic training had introduced me to broad narratives about Black womens intellectual and social work, so as I listened to their stories, I grafted them onto a larger context and before long, saw how my academic training supplied new vocabularies to animate my personal history. Their stories fascinated me, and I looked forward to hearing multiple versions of the most colorful ones over and over again. I especially enjoyed one-on-one time with Grandma Greene because she never tired of telling me stories about my father when he was a boy. Then, one day, I decided to ask her about herself, instead of asking her about Daddy.

How did you and PopPop meet?

The question seemed simple enough. Grandma Greene was born in Chatham, Virginia, on 19 December 1922. When she was not quite ten, she moved with her parents and nine brothers and sisters to Orange, New Jerseya town in the northern part of what is now known as the Garden State. In 1931, my great-grandfather William C. Griffin made the trek of nearly 500 miles north with his family in tow because he yearned for more opportunities than those afforded to him in the South. In Virginia, he worked as a carpenter. Moving to New Jersey, he hoped, would allow him to fulfill his dream of becoming an architect. This would never come to pass. Fed up with not being able to build the type of dwelling for his family that he was capable of building, William C. took on work as a janitor. He was still working as a janitor at the time of his death.

In her response to my query, Grandma recounted the days when James C. Greene, the man who would become my PopPop, came courting. Day after day he showed up like clockwork, and they would sit and visit together on the porch, talking for hours. After it became clear that his visits were becoming a habit, Nana pulled Grandma aside and presented her with an ultimatum. If she was serious about this here James C. and marriage was on the horizon, then she had a choice: learn to sew or learn to do hair. As I listened to Grandmas story, my thoughts ran to Nanny, the grandmother in Zora Neale Hurstons classic Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and the episode when Nanny forces the protagonist to marry someone she thinks is a sure thing after she sees that shiftless Johnny Taylor lacerating her Janie with a kiss. In the novel, Nannys solution to Janies flowering womanhood, to the singing bees and creaming blossoms, was marriage and the security Nanny presumed it would afford. Perhaps Nana knew something similar when it came to my grandmother. If marriage was the likely outcome of all this time young Mary was spending with James C., then she would need a vocation. Doing hair and sewing clothes were respectable forms of employment for Black women because they did not involve cleaning white folks homes.

For a moment, Grandma stopped talking. But her story hadnt ended.

But I wanted to be a math teacher.

Her response hovered in the air like smoke. Almost immediately, my mind raced. Was it a coincidence that my father had earned his bachelors degree in mathematics, which he parlayed into an over-thirty-year career in computer technology, systems engineering, and management? I knew enough of my family history to know that the lack of access my grandmother had to higher education was not entirely a question of money: my great-grandfather did well enough for himself, in spite of his limited vocational options. But only the boys earned college degrees. While my Aunt Georgia, who died before I formed a strong memory of her, attended college briefly, she never finished. What could Mary Elizabeth Griffin Greene have been if Nana had granted her the space to pursue her calling? Grandma became a hairdresser, a salon owner, and eventually skilled in switchboard operation, typing, and keypunch. She was a successful entrepreneur, had a loving family, and maintained an extensive network of friends with whom she played cards and attended church. But hairdressing wasnt her dream. Her ambitions, thwarted. Her place in the genealogy, set. Grandma was wife to James C., mother to James L. and Charles E., grandmother to Shanna, Onaje, and James Jr. But this other part of her storyher yearning for a piece of life where she could cultivate her own abilities and pursue her own joyswas invisible to everyone except me.