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 an Atlantic City 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.

What Happens to the Estranged

After her children died of influenza and her husband vanished, Anna Greenwood Nicholson lived alone in Atlantic City and was working as a domestic when the Great Depression hit. Anna's whole family had come to the U.S. from Vienna, and Boston was her only American hometown, but her married sister there had a full house and would soon have a granddaughter named Sylvia Plath. Anna's mother and brothers knew Anna had married a black American and they never forgave her. Anna left Atlantic City but cannot be found anywhere in the U.S. census of 1930. She was 45.

Two years later in Manhattan, registering as Anna Greenwood, Anna married Joseph Campbell, born in Lancashire, England of Irish parents. Anna Campbell filed with Social Security in 1938. That was the last U.S. trace of her until her mother's obituary (1945) called Anna "Ina Champee of London, England," and her brother's obituary (1957) called her "Mrs. Joseph Chappell, England."

This told me that 1) Anna's family knew she had remarried but was unsure of her name. 2) Anna was alive in 1957 and had moved to England. 3) For a while Anna shared an island with her great-niece Sylvia Plath. So Sylvia wasn't the first in her family to reverse-emigrate: It was the errant, whispered-about great-aunt she never met -- who couldn't be, could she, the "gypsy ancestress" who got around?

Hard-to-get British records (below) show Joseph and Anna in 1939 lived far from London, in the Lancashire shipbuilding town Barrow-in-Furness, population then about 75,000: the industrial north as Orwell described it in Wigan Pier. Anna was ninth in a household of nine, six of them Campbells. I hope she liked these relatives better. Joseph worked as a "boiler fireman, heavy." The town survived two 1941 bombardments, and Joseph died in Barrow-in-Furness in 1959 and Anna in 1964. Joseph has a gravestone. Anna doesn't.

British National Archives register, 1939, address 12 Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, E.B., Lancashire, England. Anna's identity is confirmed by her birth date, 28 March 1888*, and her husband's. Housewives were listed as "unpaid."

*Anna's baptismal record says she was born 28 March 1885, but much of her life she used the date 1888.