The Black Russian (7 page)

Frederick left New York in the fall of that year, apparently on October 9, aboard the SS
Lahn
of the North German Lloyd shipping line. Its ultimate destination was Bremen in northern Germany, but on the way it was scheduled to call at Southampton, a major port on the south coast of England that was a popular entry point for Americans. The
Lahn
docked on October 16, after an uneventful seven-day crossing. Direct trains from Southampton to Waterloo Station in central London took two to three hours.

Some of the novelty of arriving in London would have been mitigated for Frederick by the changes he had already experienced in the United States. In fact, the contrast between the Hopson Bayou neighborhood and Chicago was in many ways far greater than that between the two greatest English-speaking cities in the world—New York and London.

But in another and more important way, the change between the United States and England was like climbing out of a ship’s dark cargo hold onto a top deck bathed in brilliant sunshine. “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” did not mean in England what they did in the United States. In London, for the first time in his life,
Frederick
experienced what most of his brethren back home would
never know—being viewed by whites with curiosity, interest, even affection.

It was not that Victorian England was a color-blind sanctuary. For generations, the British Empire had subjugated and exploited
entire
civilizations in South Asia, Africa, and many other places around the world. In the United Kingdom itself, unabashed racism was
directed
against the Irish, the Jews, and others. But because there were very few blacks in England at this time, and even fewer American “negroes,” the attitude toward people like Frederick was
surprisingly
accepting—“surprisingly” especially from the point of view of Americans who happened to be visiting the British Isles.

The seeming contradictions of British snobbery dismayed one American visitor, who noted that in the great university towns of England, one could see “negroes” at college balls waltzing with aristocratic young women and ladies of high position, all of whom would have considered it grossly inappropriate even to acknowledge a familiar tradesman in the street. Another American was shocked by the sight of “two coal-black negroes and two white women” in a fashionable London restaurant. “My first impulse was to instantly depart,” the American admitted, “for such a sight in the United States would surely not have been possible.” But in the end there was little he could do except acknowledge ruefully, “In London a negro can go into the finest restaurants and be served just like a white man.”

William Drysdale, a well-known American reporter making a grand tour of Europe—and who would soon have a memorable encounter with Frederick in Monte Carlo—wrote that

Drysdale approved of the way the English treated American blacks. He had also heard numerous lectures from Londoners about the barbarism of lynchings in the South and the general inhumanity of American whites toward blacks. But he got to know the English well enough not to be taken in entirely by their morally superior attitudes. He pointed out that their criticism of American failings

“So we all have our little failings,” he concluded wryly.

After arriving in London, Frederick applied for admission to a school that he remembered as the “Conservatory of Music.” He must have had very little money after paying for the voyage across the Atlantic, because he hoped that he could make
arrangements
to pay for his tuition and living expenses by working for the school. However, his application was refused. Were it not for the descriptions of how American blacks were treated in London in the 1890s, one might have thought that Frederick was rejected on racial grounds. It was more likely that the school was
unwilling
to take on a student who wanted to work his way through the program. Or perhaps he was judged to lack sufficient talent, as is suggested by the fact that he did not attempt again to study music in England or in continental Europe. Given the kind of adventurer he had become, he could have tried to enroll elsewhere at a later time if he believed in his own abilities.

He next tried to start his own boardinghouse in Leicester Square. He thus not only shrugged off his failure at the music school but also tried a new way to put down roots in a city that he found attractive. This was, moreover, an endeavor that capitalized on all the
experience
he had acquired in Chicago and Brooklyn. But whom could Frederick approach in London to borrow the money that he would have needed?

The answer may in fact have been entirely elsewhere. On
February
8, 1895, India, who was working as a cook in Louisville, Kentucky, mortgaged the family land in Coahoma County for a two-month loan of $2,000 at an exorbitant interest rate. How she came to be in possession of the land after everything that had happened and why she did this are unknown, but it could have been to get Frederick the money that he needed for his venture in London or to make ends meet as he was trying to set it up. The timing is plausible.

In any event, Frederick overreached himself in London. The plan for the boardinghouse failed, and he had to take a step back into the occupations that he knew best. He first worked in a
German
restaurant that he remembered as being called “Tube,” and then in a “Mrs. James’ Boarding House.” Shortly thereafter, perhaps in pursuit of a better job, or because of wanderlust, or both, Frederick left England for France.

Frederick’s arrival in Paris can be dated closely. He must have
gotten
there shortly before July 12, 1895, the day he received a letter of introduction from the American ambassador to France, J. B. Eustis, addressed to the Paris prefect, or chief, of police. Writing in French and using the standard phrases for a letter of this type, the ambassador expressed the hope that the prefect would welcome “Mr. Frederick Bruce Thomas,” who was residing at 23 rue Brey, when he presented himself to be registered. Among the duties of the office of the prefect was making note of foreigners who planned to live in the city.

The distance across the English Channel between Dover and Calais, which was the port of entry for boat trains to Paris, is only thirty miles, and the thrice-daily ferries in 1895 could cover it in less than two hours. Nevertheless, Frederick’s move to France would in some ways be a bigger dislocation than his move to England. However strange the pronunciation and idioms in Great Britain might have sounded to an American at first, the language was still the same, especially for someone whose ears had gotten used to regional variations as different as those of the Deep South, the Midwest, and Brooklyn. But throughout much of the rest of the world in the 1890s, and well into the beginning of the twentieth century, French was the second language of
business
, government, and culture. A monolingual American arriving in a foreign locale would find few English-speakers outside the major tourist hotels. To live and work in France, or anywhere else on the Continent, Frederick would have to learn French without delay. He had the right temperament to do so: his willingness to leave a familiar world in order to seek new experiences indicates that he was sufficiently confident and extroverted to be a good language student.

Frederick’s need to learn French was especially urgent because his job was once again that of butler or valet, which would require him to communicate quickly and easily with his employers, or, if these were English-speaking, with people outside the household, such as shopkeepers and tradesmen. Judging by the addresses he gave in several documents, his employers were well off: all the
addresses
are elegant buildings that have survived to this day and are located in fashionable districts of Paris near the Arch of Triumph.

France, like England, was accepting of blacks. In fact, the
attitude
toward blacks in Paris at this time was even more liberal than in London. The reaction of James Weldon Johnson, a black American writer, composer, and intellectual who first arrived in Paris in 1905, conveys what Frederick may have also felt:

The relative rarity of blacks in Paris made someone like
Frederick
an appealing object of curiosity and enhanced his chances of being employed. Because the French were far less conscious of class differences than their staid English neighbors, it is likely that he would have found working in Paris more congenial than working in London. In the streets and in the city’s shops, servants were greeted politely as “Mademoiselle” or “Monsieur” even by strangers who knew their actual status. A valet’s wages and hours would also have been better than a waiter’s.

Because Frederick was also a very handsome young man (as photographs of him c. 1896 show), Paris would have been a
wide-open
field for romantic adventures. A white American who knew the city well commented, with a hint of envy, that “Frenchmen do not connect the negro as we do, with plantation days. Fair women look upon him with love and admiration, as Desdemona looked upon Othello.” Even more relevant to Frederick was the man’s remark that “everywhere you find the same thing. Colored valets traveling with Americans are raved over by pretty French maids.”

Paris in the 1890s was seen worldwide as the capital of modern urban civilization—a place where everyone with any pretense to sophistication or social standing longed to be. Frederick’s life there
was the last stage of his basic education in the ways of the world. After Paris, with its museums and theaters, monuments and grand boulevards, cafés and fashionable shops, temples to haute cuisine and raucous vaudeville, there was little any other city in Western Europe could offer Frederick that he had not already seen.

During the next three years, Frederick traveled extensively, working in different cities for months at a time, and returned to Paris twice. This involved crossing multiple borders, and even though most
European
countries did not require passports from visitors, an official government document could still be useful as identification; it would also provide a traveler with protection in case he got into any kind of trouble. Frederick applied for his first passport in Paris on March 17, 1896. Among the questions he had to answer was how soon he would return to the United States, and he responded “two years.”
However
, it is not clear if he meant this or if he simply said whatever he thought would help him keep his options open (American passports had to be renewed every two years). It would not have been in his interest to make the embassy staff suspect that he might have left the United States for good. He also began falsifying his past, something he would continue later as well, by giving Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace, and Brooklyn as his permanent place of residence. Perhaps his reasons were that India was still living in Louisville and that not all blacks had been slaves there. Naming Brooklyn might also have forestalled offhand comments from the second secretary at the embassy, with whom Frederick dealt and who, like his father the ambassador, was a southerner.

After Paris, Frederick went first to Brussels and then to Ostend, a popular Belgian resort on the North Sea. There he worked at the Grand Hôtel Fontaine, which, although not particularly
expensive
, was recommended by Baedeker’s, a respected tourist guide at the time. Unlike most of the other hotels in Ostend, which closed
for the cold season, the Grand Hôtel Fontaine remained open all year. However, Frederick left and went on to the south of France.

The fall of 1896 is probably when he came to the Riviera for the first time, and this is where his expertise and skills were
recognized
and rewarded in a remarkable way: he became a headwaiter for the season. His employer was a Monsieur G. Morel, the proprietor of the well-known Hôtel des Anglais in Cannes. The hotel, on the northern edge of town, prided itself on having an admirable southern exposure, a beautiful pleasure garden, and a recherché cuisine and cellar, and on providing luxury, comfort, careful service, a lift, hotel baths, telephone, and entertainments such as tennis and billiards. The position of headwaiter in a large establishment like this that catered to a demanding international clientele carried considerable responsibility. It would also have been coveted by experienced,
native
French waiters. Frederick’s command of English—even though his English was heavily accented—would have been an asset for the hotel’s restaurant because many tourists from Great Britain came to Cannes. But he could not have gotten the job if he did not have command of idiomatic French, which he would have needed to
communicate
with the management, the waiters, and the rest of the staff. He would also have needed to develop a good understanding of the psychology and cultures of the different classes and nationalities of Europeans with whom he dealt.