Sylvia Plath Had Black Cousins

Uncle Christopher J. Nicholson checked "Negro" on his draft card, 1918. (Click image to enlarge.)

Sylvia Plath had African-American second cousins who were first cousins to her mother Aurelia Schober Plath. Using public records and genealogical tools, I drilled down into Sylvia's Austrian-born maternal relatives the Greenwoods and Schobers, and discovered:

Sylvia's great-aunt -- her grandmother's sister Anna Johanna Greenwood, from Vienna -- in Boston in 1906 married African-American waiter Christopher Nicholson.

Interracial marriages were legal in Massachusetts, but rare. Sylvia Plath's writings, and what we have of her mother's writings, never mention an Aunt Anna or Annie. I had thought that odd because Aurelia Plath and her mother so much valued contact and visits with relatives. Sylvia's future grandmother with her sister Annie as teenagers left Vienna in 1904 and together crossed the Atlantic to Boston, where they moved in with their brother. Both girls soon married professional waiters. Annie married Christopher J. Nicholson, born in Boston of parents from North Carolina.

In 1907 the Nicholsons moved to Philadelphia, where in November Christopher Jr. was born. The state of Pennsylvania registered the baby as "mulatto." Their daughter Deborah's birth certificate says "1/2 black, 1/2 white."

Nicholson was out of work for much of 1909 and the federal census for 1910 shows the family living in a South Philadelphia boarding house, its head and tenants all designated black except for Nicholson, 28, his wife, 26, and their son and daughter, all designated white. In 1911 the family moved to New Jersey. Its 1915 state census says Nicholson and the children are black.

Nicholson worked steadily as a waiter at Atlantic City's Royal Palace Hotel. In September 1918 he registered for the draft as Christopher Jessee Nicholson, checkmarking the category "Negro," and on the back of the card, the categories "Slender" and "Tall."

The couple had another son, Melvin, and a daughter, Martha. Seeking what happened to them led me to this horrifying photo:

The Nicholson children, ages 11, 8, 5, and 3, all died in October 1918, probably of influenza, and are buried in Atlantic City Cemetery, Pleasantville, New Jersey.

Their parents survived. Nicholson kept his job until Prohibition in 1920 led to layoffs of professional waitstaff. Atlantic City directories show him employed as a laborer through 1923. Then he is a waiter again, but after 1925 I found no further records. Anna Nicholson surfaces, alone, in the 1928 directory, working as a domestic. In 1932, as Anna Greenwood she married British-born Joseph Campbell in New York City. The couple moved to England in 1939. The story of their later life is posted here.

Sylvia's Plath's mother Aurelia Schober was 12 when her four cousins died. Did she know about them? Could anyone keep secret such a family tragedy? I think Aurelia, who lived with her mother for 40 years, probably knew. Did Sylvia know that she had African-American relatives? Probably not. But we do.

The Nicholson family should be added to Sylvia Plath's family tree.

Draft registration card: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-8BRR-L4C?i=3882&cc=1968530&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AKZJ7-ZNJ  Headstone: Findagrave.com. "England as of 1939": In January 2024 I researched Anna's later life and the story is posted here.

The Lost Lines of "Eavesdropper"

On October 15, 1962, in the middle of composing her Ariel poems, Sylvia Plath wrote the poem “Eavesdropper,” a lengthy, hateful vent about a nosy neighbor caught eyeing and judging the speaker’s property, spying through curtains after midnight, and crouching in the bushes to get an earful. And the eavesdropper was ugly, too! The poem’s final line: “Toad-stone! Sister bitch! Sweet neighbor!”

 

The “eavesdropper” was a real-life married woman in her fifties, Irene Sampson. Sampson and her husband bought the stone cottage vacated by Plath’s neighbors Rose and Percy Key, making Sampson Plath’s next-door neighbor during the turbulent autumn of 1962. In 2013 Irene’s niece wrote a blog post identifying Irene—who never read the poem “Eavesdropper”—as a much nicer person than the poem says.

 

Both the Hughes edit and the Plath edit of the book Ariel exclude “Eavesdropper.” Sylvia had submitted the poem in its original form to Poetry magazine, which accepted it and published it in August 1963 with more lines than appear in either Winter Trees (1971) or Plath’s Collected Poems (1982). Plath at the end of 1962 looked it over, deleted some lines and skillfully revised and rebroke others to form the version most of us know. Hughes noted that she made no final copy of the poem.

 

Poetry magazine’s online archive revealed the vivid line I had long searched for: “Sweater sets and treachery!” Will the forthcoming Complete Poems of Sylvia Plath print both versions of “Eavesdropper”? Even with the ethnic slur? Below, in italics, are the words that were cut. What is below is what followed the original’s stanza 5:

 

O yellow

Weasel unable

To rearrange the bitchy starvation,

  the dust lust!

I had you hooked.

I called, you crawled out,

A weather figure, boggling,

Chink-yellow, Belge troll, the low

Church smile

Spreading itself, bad butter.

 

This is what I am in for!

Your bone plates,

Your creaky biscuits,

Sweater sets and treachery!

Come to tea! Come to tea!

I shall stuff you with pillows!

Pillows and pillows of pure silence.

Flea body!

Eyes like mice

 

Flicking over my property . . .

 

“Belge troll” refers to Scandinavian legends about trolls crouched in the woods, ready to do mischief or evil.