The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (25 page)

One day, Mayfield confided to Allen that his doctor told him he needed bypass surgery—immediately. Mayfield said, “I know I have to have it done, and the doctor said I had to do it right away, but I’ll just wait until after the next presidential trip.” By the time the next trip came around, it was too late. Mayfield had a heart attack on his way to work and died at just fifty-eight years old. “He never got his heart fixed because he kept saying, ‘The president needs me now, I’ll wait until he goes on this next trip and
then
I’ll go to the hospital.’ He never made it.” It wasn’t that Mayfield thought he was the only person who could do his job, Allen said. “It’s just pride in station. It’s ‘I want to do my best for the president,’ and they go out of their way to do that.”

Nancy Reagan attended Mayfield’s funeral on May 17, 1984, and was so affected by his loss that she said at the time, “It doesn’t seem right here without him.” Butler Herman Thompson remembers
being moved when he saw her in the audience. “I thought it was very respectful.” Decades later, she said she still remembers getting the call that he had died, and how “shocked and saddened” she was by the news. She knew right away that “it just wouldn’t be the same without his smiling face at the elevator.”

The staff are all like family to each other. Many of them played golf together back during Freddie Mayfield’s day, and every Friday night a group of workers would gather in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building’s small bowling alley to play against Secret Service agents and police officers. When Nelson Pierce’s wife, Caroline, heard her old friend Freddie’s name, her face lit up. “He liked turkey necks. I’d have to save the turkey neck every Thanksgiving to send to Freddie.”

That camaraderie persists today. When one of the workers has a death in the family, or is having trouble paying medical bills, his or her colleagues pool together their money in a jar in the Butler’s Pantry on the first floor to help with the costs.

“You could be having a bad day and a butler would come in that morning and say hello to you and get you laughing,” Usher Nancy Mitchell recalled. “Somebody always comes in and picks you up.”

Butler James Jeffries comes from a long line of White House workers. In fact, nine members of his family have worked at the White House. His mother’s brother Charles Ficklin was the maître d’ at the house, and another uncle, John Ficklin, was a butler and later became maître d’ as well.

When Jeffries’s mother died in 2012, he recalled tearfully, “practically everybody was at my mother’s funeral except the president.” His mother had never worked at the White House, but Butlers Buddy Carter and James Ramsey and Storeroom Manager Bill Hamilton all came to show their support for the Ficklin family. And his colleagues contributed almost four hundred dollars in memorial
donations, though none of them were wealthy themselves. But Jeffries was even more amazed when the same thing happened after one of his uncles died. “My uncle, he didn’t work at the White House. But he was a Ficklin, and he had passed away down in Amissville, Virginia, and we’re going on and having the funeral, and all of a sudden I heard the door open in the church and Mr. West and the ushers and quite a few other people from the White House came to the funeral. I think they had a letter somebody read in the church from the president.” He paused. “I started crying because I felt so good that people thought enough of us to come.”

Jeffries still works a couple of days a week as a butler at the White House; he says he’ll retire “when my legs don’t want to let me stand up.” When he arrives at the White House, the first thing he does is check a list on the cabinet in the pantry that gives him his assignment. He could be on first-floor pantry duty, bartending, or pickup (carrying a tray to pick up dirty glassware). He said he prefers working as a bartender or cleaning dishes in the back, because holding trays loaded with glasses is hard work for a man in his seventies with arthritis. He said his manager recently asked him if he was all right after he became breathless rushing between the Butler’s Pantry and the East Room carrying two plates at a time. But he brushes off any such concerns—“I don’t want to complain,” he says—and these days his colleagues save him from doing much heavy labor, just as he did for the older butlers when he started, back in 1959.

“One time I remember the butlers had gotten so old that, when they were holding a tray with glasses or drinks on it, all of a sudden you could hear those glasses clanging because they didn’t have the strength in their arms,” he said. “I would go out there and take the tray from the guy and take his place so he could go on in the back.”

Butlers often make a lasting impression on the first family and
their aides. Desirée Rogers remembers the loss of longtime butler Smile “Smiley” Saint-Aubin, who passed away suddenly in 2009. Rogers called his death “one of the most poignant things of my tenure, and our team’s tenure.” Talking as though it were a loss in her own family, she said the Obamas held a service in his honor at the White House with his family.

“He was just an incredibly gracious man who was very, very good at what he did. That’s why they call him ‘Smiley’—always cheerful, always ready to serve, and always so helpful, whether it be something that our office needed or one of his peers needed,” she said, adding, “I think for all of us it was an incredible loss so early on, at a time when all of us were just learning our way. It was a tough time.”

The staff’s sacrifices do not go unrecognized. Charles Allen, the son of Butler and Maître d’ Eugene Allen, remembers a story his father once told him that shows the mutual devotion between the first family and their staff. Lady Bird Johnson was so worried about a butler’s cancer-stricken wife that she kept pressing him about her treatment. When she did not like his answer, she called up two of the country’s most well-regarded oncologists. That afternoon they flew in from New York and landed at Washington National Airport to meet the butler’s wife.

In a similar display of love and respect, Electrician Bill Cliber remembers Secret Service agents approaching him after the birth of his son.

“Where’s your wife at?” they asked.

“She’s at Washington Adventist Hospital in Takoma Park,” he told them. “Why?”

They said Lady Bird was thinking of sending her flowers. He pauses, tears beginning to fill his eyes so many years later. “No,” he said, disbelievingly. “The first lady went and got flowers and she
took them to her and gave them to my wife in the hospital.” His wife, Bea, sat next to him as he spoke, but she just shook her head when I asked her to elaborate. It’s a memory she wants to keep only for herself.

When Cliber thanked Lady Bird the next day, she told him it was the easiest thing she ever had to do as first lady.

CHAPTER VII

Race and the Residence

For any American that understands the complex history of this country, you feel it. Especially when you look at the drawings of how this home was built and you see many slaves who couldn’t enter the building working to create the building. Some of those folks could be my ancestors and there is a profound power and sense that comes with the fact that we are the first African American family to occupy this residence over the years.

—FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA

P
resident Obama’s historic 2008 election marked an important turning point in American history and was hailed by many as a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. Not much more than forty years before his election, African Americans were legally discriminated against in the Jim Crow South; about a hundred years before that, slave pens were set up in Lafayette Square within full view of the White House. Now, the nation’s first African American first family are being served by a mostly African American butler staff.

When they first moved in, the Obamas were circumspect around the residence staff. Some observers believed they may not
have been entirely comfortable having butlers wait on them. The first couple are, of course, deeply aware of their unique historic status. Not only is Obama the first African American to be elected president, but—as he noted in a much-heralded speech addressing race during the 2008 primary season—he is also “married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slave owners.” Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandfather Jim Robinson was a slave; her great-grandfather Fraser Robinson was illiterate when he was a teenager, though he later learned to read. Indeed, some of Mrs. Obama’s family members had jobs that were quite close to those of the residence workers—including her maternal grandfather, Purnell Shields, who was a handyman in Chicago, and one of her aunts, who was a maid.

Since his election the president has mostly tried to avoid getting mired in race relations, and his aides have had little to say about the relationship between the household help and the first family. But Chief Usher Stephen Rochon, who retired in 2011 as the first black chief usher, says that he noticed a special kind of understanding between the African American staff and the Obamas because “they’re from the same culture.” He cited the “sense of pride” among the residence workers “that this country had grown to this level to have a black president.”

For Desirée Rogers—now the CEO of Johnson Publishing, publishers of
Jet
and
Ebony
magazines—being the first African American social secretary, for this particular first family, had a special significance. “On Inaugural Day, what was most compelling to me is that I looked at all these gentlemen preparing for the arrival of the first African American president—I could not help but be taken at how they looked. They reminded me, quite frankly, of my grandfather, who obviously was a pillar in our family.” She said she wishes he could have been there to see it.

Rogers often heard the butlers say they never thought they would see the day when they’d be serving the first African American
president. They may have even tried a little harder than usual. “I could just tell the pride that they had in preparing for this first family to come in. It was a very touching moment for me as we prepared the house for their arrival and as I saw all of these gentlemen working so diligently to make sure that everything was just perfect when they arrived from the parade.”

Lonnie Bunch, the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and a member of the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, said he would be surprised if Michelle Obama never talked to the African American staff at the White House about their special shared circumstances. He’s quick to point out that the fact of the Obamas’ race alone doesn’t necessarily mean that their relationship with the African American staff is any closer or more personal than those of their predecessors. “But there’s an obvious understanding and appreciation of who these men and women are,” he said. “I think there’s a feeling, as Michelle has said, this could have been me or this could have been members of my family.”

Operations Supervisor Tony Savoy, who retired in 2013, insists that Obama’s arrival at the White House did not affect how he conducted his job. “I’m going to give my best, all I can, to the person, regardless of who it is,” he said. “I couldn’t give no more to him than I’d give to a lady president or to another white president. It wouldn’t make no difference. I would still give my 110 percent all the way across the board.”

P
RESIDENT
O
BAMA’S TWO
White House victories are especially remarkable given the troubled relationship between the White House and slavery. There was a thriving slave trade in Washington in the nineteenth century, though there were also many free people of color: by the time of the Civil War, census records show 9,029 free
blacks and 1,774 slaves living in Washington, D.C. Back in 1792 when construction of the executive mansion began, the new capital city was a primitive swamp, far removed from any major eastern hubs—and carved out of the slave states of Maryland and Virginia. In November 1800, when John Adams moved in, one-third of Washington’s population was black and most of them were slaves. African Americans—free and enslaved—helped build much of the nation’s capital, milling the stones used in the pillars and walls of the White House and the U.S. Capitol. These workers were leased from their masters to work at government quarries in Aquia, Virginia, paid only in food (pork and bread) and drink (daily rations of one pint of whiskey each). Little is known about them beyond a list of first names—“Jerry,” “Charles,” “Bill”—that appears in government records.

It’s hard to imagine what the grounds of the White House looked like as it was being constructed. A stone yard was erected on the northeast side of the mansion with dozens of large sheds housing worktables used for cutting stone. Close to the new walls of the house were two tall tripod rigs for hoisting the stone blocks into place. The rigs supported huge pulleys, some as high as fifty feet, which loomed over the massive construction site. Despite the grandeur of its architecture—it was likely the largest house in the United States until after the Civil War—the White House would remain a relatively unrefined place to live for decades after its first stone was laid.