The Residence - Inside the Private World of The White House (26 page)

Once the mansion was occupied, slaves were brought to work in the White House by every Southern president until 1860, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson. In 1830, during Jackson’s administration, the U. S. Census recorded fourteen slaves living on the premises, five of them under ten years old. “In essence, the African American fingerprint has been on the White House since its inception,” Lonnie Bunch points out. Because the
country’s earliest presidents had to pay the residence workers themselves, they had much less help; Jefferson only had about a dozen servants. Of the dozen, only three were white; the rest were African American slaves from Monticello, Jefferson’s Virginia home.

Many of the early Southern presidents tried to cut costs by replacing salaried whites and free blacks on the staff with their own slaves. President James Madison also relied on slaves from his home, Montpelier. His valet, a slave named Paul Jennings, eventually bought his freedom and went on to write the first ever memoir of life in the executive mansion.

President Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee slaveholder, decided to save money when he moved to the White House by replacing several white servants with slaves from his Tennessee home. The slaves who were visible to the public wore elaborate blue coats with brass buttons and yellow or white breeches. Most of them lived in crowded dorms in the basement or the attic, with its steep ceiling and poor lighting. The basement rooms were off of a forty-foot-long kitchen with giant fireplaces. During the first half of the nineteenth century, salaried servants and slaves slept on worn-out cots and mattresses.

By the time Zachary Taylor took office in March 1849, Northerners were expressing outrage about the practice of slavery. In a bid to save money, he supplemented the four servants he had on staff by bringing about fifteen slaves, some of them children, from his home in Louisiana, but he kept them largely out of view for fear of the public’s reaction. Slavery was finally abolished in the capital city in 1862.

The roles of residence workers evolved gradually. In 1835, the principal gardener was the only person listed in a managerial role in the Federal Register. Congress created the official post of “steward” in 1866, when President Andrew Johnson hired William Slade, an African American who was a personal messenger for President Abraham Lincoln, making him the first official manager of the
residence. The job description is in many ways akin to that of the modern-day chief usher, supervising all executive mansion staff and overseeing every public and private event. Because Slade was responsible for all government property in the mansion he was bonded for thirty thousand dollars—an astronomical sum in the nineteenth century. Slade’s small office was located between two kitchens in the basement. It had freestanding cupboards full of silver and porcelain and big leather trunks with china and flatware dating back to James Monroe and Andrew Jackson that were still being used in dinner service after the Civil War. Slade personally kept the keys to the trunks and checked off each piece as it was washed and put away after formal dinners. The White House would not see another African American chief usher until Admiral Stephen Rochon took the post in 2007.

More than a century after President Jefferson trimmed his expenditures by replacing white servants with black slaves, Franklin D. Roosevelt brought white housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt from Hyde Park to help control the first family’s wild spending. Not long after the inauguration, Nesbitt helped the first lady reorganize the household staff. Eleanor Roosevelt made the decision to fire all the white household staff (with the exception of Nesbitt) and keep only the African Americans. Yet, given her generally outstanding record as an advocate of civil rights, her reasons were surprising: “Mrs. Roosevelt and I agreed,” Nesbitt wrote in her memoir, “that a staff solid in any one color works in better understanding and maintains a smoother-running establishment.”

Before this dismissal of the white staff, there were separate dining rooms for white and African American workers. When African American staffers accompanied the president to the Roosevelts’ home in Hyde Park, New York, they were
not allowed to eat in the dining room designated for the help, according to Alonzo Fields, an African American butler at the time. Instead, they were told to eat in the kitchen. Because of this practice, Fields wrote in his memoir, “I had my reservations concerning the White House as an example for the rest of the country.”

A
S THE DECADES
passed, African American staffers would capitalize on their prestigious positions. Even though they were servants, they were servants in the most important home in the nation. Lynwood Westray started his thirty-two-year career as a part-time butler at the White House in 1962. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., he remembers making just six dollars a week working as a grocery store clerk in 1939. Now ninety-three, he recalled his time at the White House as he sat in the three-bedroom bungalow in northeast Washington that he bought for $13,900 in 1955—a few years after he and his wife, Kay, were married. Outside, four lanes of traffic whiz by. (“People are crazy now, driving each other off the road!”) In his entryway, framed pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama hang side by side; a Michelle Obama doll sits on a side table. Two framed Christmas cards from the Johnsons and the Carters hang in the dining room.

Westray was a member of Private Butlers Incorporated, a group of African American White House butlers who helped one another find jobs in private homes on the nights when they were not busy at “the house.” They were capitalizing on a growing need, Westray said. People in government would often call the maître d’ at the White House and ask for names of butlers to work their parties, giving them a chance to have world-class service (and bragging rights) at private events. So when he wasn’t working his full-time job at the postal service (he worked his way up from clerk to foreman), or working part-time at the White House, Westray served members of Congress, ambassadors, and other Washington power brokers at Georgetown dinner parties.

“They were tickled to death. They would introduce you, not as Sam, or John, or Charles, but as ‘mister.’ I was
Mister
Westray!”

Westray says that serving as a butler has traditionally been considered “a black job.” He said his friends didn’t realize how impressive his position was “until they found out that we were making all [that] money outside!” Because of their White House connection, Westray said, “The butlers had it made in this town!”

During one of our first interviews, Westray’s eyes lit up when his wife, Kay, walked slowly into the room supported by her walker, wearing bright red lipstick and a blue pantsuit. Their affection for each other was contagious; they teased one another constantly. When asked what their secret was to such a long marriage, Kay said: “You love a little, you cuss a little, and you pick up and you start all over again.”

Lynwood chimed in, beaming, “The first fifty years are the hardest.”

Kay passed away in May 2013, after sixty-five years of marriage, and now Westray says he hardly knows what to do without her. He talks about kissing her forehead right before she passed away, not with sadness but with a sort of wonder. “Death is a part of living,” he says. He keeps a laminated copy of her obituary in his shirt pocket and her ashes in an urn on the fireplace mantel, above her Christmas stocking, which was still hanging there on a spring day a year after her death. But he’s doing his best to move on. “I’m learning how to be single. I’m cooking, washing clothes, cleaning, all of those things I never did,” he says sadly. When he cooks for himself, he makes Kay’s favorite recipes, like fried apples, to prove to his family that he can manage on his own. But he won’t even consider dating: “I’m too old!”

For the first ten years, Lynwood Westray worked at the White House part-time, supplementing the income from his main job at the post office. After retiring from the post office in 1972, the chief usher invited him to join the regular force. “My wife didn’t want me to because of the hours.” But the Westrays’ only child, Gloria, said that her father’s job “opened up doors for them.” She loved telling people that her father worked at the White House—and found that
it added to her own self-esteem. “I had standards that were higher,” she says now. “I couldn’t be out being mischievous.”

As a teenager, Gloria says, she once came home from school to find the FBI waiting for her. “My mother was livid. Apparently this guy that I had been dating, he was a little older, and he was involved in something that wasn’t good and the FBI was questioning me, and I was like, ‘I honestly don’t know anything.’ You could imagine when my dad came home.” She promised her father that she would never see the man again; his reputation—and their family’s livelihood—were at stake.

She said she was often asleep when her father came home from work, but she would press him the next morning at breakfast about the glamorous dinner he had served the night before. Usually, the most she could get out of him was the menu.

Though Westray kept his secrets throughout his career, as he aged, he began sharing his stories. During one interview, he went to a closet to retrieve mementoes, including photos of himself serving drinks at a 1970 picnic on the South Lawn, a photo of him with Reverend Billy Graham after one of his Sunday prayer sessions at the White House, and even a jewelry box containing a small piece of hardened vanilla cake from Tricia Nixon’s wedding.

Westray happily recalls one night in 1976 when something extraordinary happened. It took place in the Red Room, with its ornate carved furniture and walls lined with gold-embroidered scarlet twill satin, nestled between the Blue Room and the State Dining Room on the State Floor. On the night in question, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip were guests at the White House, there to celebrate the bicentennial of the American Revolution. Westray, dressed in his tuxedo uniform, and his friend and frequent working partner Sam Washington, happened upon Prince Philip sitting alone late at night in the Red Room.

“Your Majesty, would you care for a cocktail?” Westray asked, presenting a tray of cocktails to the prince.

“I’ll take one . . . only if you let me serve it,” Philip replied.

Westray glanced at Washington. “He couldn’t believe it. No one had ever asked us that before.” Westray and Washington accepted the invitation, pulling up chairs, in shock, and allowing him to serve them a drink. He can’t remember what they talked about or what they drank, but that night the Duke of Edinburgh wanted to feel normal, if only briefly.

“He wanted to be one of the boys, that’s all.” Westray paused for a moment. “I was served by royalty. It blows your mind.”

In 1994, more than three decades after he first walked through the mansion’s imposing wrought-iron gates, Westray retired from the White House. He might have stayed longer, but after learning he needed triple bypass surgery, he did what he thought was best for the dignity of the executive residence and for the staffers who make it tick: “I would have been a disgrace to the men serving in the White House if I dropped a platter on someone,” he said. “It would be better for me not to be there.”

W
ESTRAY WASN’T THE
only butler to see a less-than-formal side of the Duke of Edinburgh. Alonzo Fields, who served as a butler and maître d’ from 1931 to 1953, described a similar encounter a quarter century earlier. It happened while he was serving the royal couple and their entourage breakfast at Blair House, where most foreign dignitaries stay. After then-Princess Elizabeth and her staff were seated, no one waited for her husband’s arrival to start eating. After the royal party had “nearly finished their melon,” the duke rushed in, saying, “‘I’m afraid I am a little late.’”

“He was in his shirtsleeves with his collar open and he grabbed a seat before anyone could seat him,” Fields, who died in 1994, recalled in his memoir. “The princess did not stop eating her melon, although the others stood while the duke was taking a seat. Seeing the duke
there in his shirtsleeves with his collar open gave me the feeling that this was the behavior of a commoner and not what you would expect from royalty. And I admired his audacity, for I know what a blasting I would have got if I had been visiting with my wife and had come out in my shirtsleeves. . . . It was pleasing to find the duke to be a human being who, no doubt, felt more comfortable in his shirtsleeves.”