Sylvia Plath's Black Relatives: Atlantic City Waiter

Century Association, 7 West 43rd St., New York

Sylvia Plath's black great-uncle Christopher Nicholson once worked in an exclusive arts-and-letters men's club, the Century Association in Manhattan, a palazzo with a Gilded-Age interior stuffed with books. Members ate and drank there, could stay there, tended by a staff that today numbers 42: cooks, "food runners," housekeepers, bookkeepers. 

From 1896 to 1934 "Negro" Elijah Hicks was the club's "hallman" and greeter, so highly esteemed that The New York Times published a tribute and seven "Centurions," all white, went to Harlem for his funeral.

Century Association renovation, 2000s

Christopher Nicholson claimed to be working at the Century in 1942 (hiring date and position unknown). Its members and guests, some famous, weren't always white: Ralph Ellison liked the club's martinis. I hope Nicholson borrowed and read books. In 1904, age 21, Nicholson had worked as a hallboy at -- believe it -- the Brookline, Massachusetts country club where Sylvia's grandfather Frank Schober was maitre d' in the 1940s and '50s.

It is little remarked that writer Sylvia Plath sprang from professional waiters and deli owners and deli workers, her own father having sold groceries in New York and lopped sausages in San Francisco. Did Sylvia know about her great-uncle Christopher? He was uncle to Sylvia's mother Aurelia. We don't know if Aurelia met him, but from the 1920s on Aurelia showed mild yet definite affinities for integrated YWCA camps and the brotherhood of man. By contrast, Sylvia in The Bell Jar described a black server so insolent that Esther Greenwood just had to kick him.

After Brookline, Nicholson worked his way up to waiting tables at Boston's elegant Hotel Touraine. Meanwhile Boston hotels were replacing black waiters with Europeans, such as Plath relatives the Schobers (Frank and Henry) and a Greenwood (Ernest), all Austrians and waiters at the Hotel Thorndike nearby.

In 1906 Nicholson married Austrian-born Anna Greenwood, a domestic. This gave her parents, her six siblings, and the Schobers a black in-law and his own family a white one. The Nicholsons soon left Boston for Philadelphia. After the 1910 strike and race riot the Nicholsons, now with children, moved to Atlantic City. Its tourists liked seeing black waiters and service workers, it made them feel good, so the work was steady.

Yet the jobs had their tensions. Poet Countee Cullen worked summers as a busboy in Atlantic City and in his first book (Color, 1925), published:

Of his busboy work Cullen wrote that it was "just a job, but it gives me time to study some of the vermin of the race, and since three-fourths of every race is vermin, I am in with the masses."

Multiplying the Nicholsons' difficulties was their legal but uncommon interracial marriage. Outside of New England their marriage was a crime. Confusion and conflict pervade the public records: Their son's November 1907 birth record calls both parents "mulatto." The 1910 federal census, taken at a black-owned boarding house, says the Nicholsons and their children are white. The 1915 New Jersey census says Anna is white and Christopher and their four kids are black.

The deaths, from influenza, of all four Nicholson children in October 1918 must have further strained the marriage. Shock, mourning, or going on strike with fellow African-Americans in 1919 cost Nicholson his waiter job. His brother Sylvester then joined the household and in 1920 both worked at Atlantic City's gasworks.

In 1925 Christopher was once again a waiter. It's my guess that around then Anna began an affair with a white British ironworker. It was serious enough that Christopher packed up and moved, most likely to New York. Anna stayed in Atlantic City, cleaning houses, until 1929, when the ironworker got U.S. citizenship, and they married in Manhattan in 1932.

Anna on her second-marriage document gives her maiden name, Greenwood, and her birthplace not as Austria but as Scranton, Pennsylvania. The couple moved to England. Christopher Nicholson's job at the Century did not last; Association archivist Brynn White found a list of staff dated 1946 and Nicholson isn't on it. Nicholson roomed in Harlem and never remarried because it seems he and Anna never divorced. City records indicate that Nicholson died in Manhattan in October 1956. [1] He was 73.

[1] New York, New York, U.S., Death Index, 1949-1965, p. 266.

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."

The federal census for 1910 shows the Nicholsons 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 lost his waiter job in 1919 and 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 in Atlantic City. 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.