Retribution
A Remembrance by Dr. Charles Payne, Yale '52
(1930-2007)

At 18 and away from Charleston, West Virginia to live alone for the first time, I came to Yale in 1948. I was a member of the first freshman class which was composed of non-veterans.

Some of my self-confidence and sophistication had been rudely challenged in New York when, dressed in my new gray suit, tie and accouterments from Frankenberger's Men's Department in Charleston, I was offered the chance to buy a choice diamond ring after only about 45 steps into Grand Central Station. After declining, I walked on somewhat amazed and chagrined by the ability of a New York hustler to pick me out of the crowd of exiting passengers. In any case, I was not amazed at Grand Central Station having been to New York with my Mother three years earlier. I looked at the Hoffritz collection of cigarette lighters, gifts, cutlery and Swiss Army knives, glanced at magazines and found the New Haven Railway and hence off to Yale without losing my suitcase, ticket, letters or spending money.

The trip to the University was accomplished by taxi and the sight of the "Old Campus" arising out of the Green like a medieval castle was impressive. I was assured when I asked the Campus Cop that the gates were never closed and that there was no curfew at 10:00 or 11:00 p.m. as there had been at West Virginia State College. He seemed somewhat bemused by my query but I was impressed. After following directions, I got the key to my assigned freshman room in Welch Hall, then found the building and after three flights of stairs, found the room. Yale had been designed in better times with only two students to a room, each with a bedroom and a common study. My letter informed me that I would have two roommates selected at random by names drawn from a hat.

Somehow it didn't come as a surprise, however, that my two roommates were also young men of color. Dick was from Cincinnati, (Wyoming, Ohio to be precise), tall, a mathematical whiz, and Jack, short, energetic and from New Haven. Jack wanted to live away from home and so was at least a mile and half away from home and felt good about it. After comparing letters, we decided that Yale didn't lie . . . it just had several hats. (It later transpired that the fourth Negro, as we were then called, was sufficiently fair to photograph white, and so was rooming with a freshman from Texas in the WWII Quonset huts out near the Peabody Museum. Nathan was happy there and so were his roommates so that his freshman experience was truly unique.

My parents arrived by car that afternoon, having driven from Charleston. They packed stuff I couldn't carry and gave me the thrill of traveling to school on my own. My Mother had packed Bates curtains and bedspread, sheets and other bedclothes, together with my radio, winter clothing, a few favorite books, my camera and other essential items together with two blankets. Mother was both wise and frugal and had summoned forth an olive drab blanket and one of more coarse wool with olive drub interwoven edging which, she said, had been in the family since World War I. Apparently the blankets had been kept in the fitted suitcases from the trunk of my Dad's old Packard touring car. My Mother had spirited away the suitcases and trunk when the car was sold after WWII. The blankets certainly looked as if they had been locked away, but while both smelled musty, the old woolen one certainly looked warm. It would be covered by the new bedspread which, I was reminded would match the curtains, so there was no further discussion. The blanket stayed and was appreciated later.

Freshman year now seems like a big pudding with events lying at or just below the surface like raisins. I had played football in high school and so went out for the Yale freshman team. No one at Yale knew anything about Negro high school football in West Virginia. Levi Jackson had been the varsity captain the year before, so this new black athlete got a really fair trial. Unfortunately, at 6' 3” and 176 pounds with full equipment in August, I was neither an offensive nor a defensive end. The fact that I could punt and pass and was the scrub team quarterback in high school gave me an unusual combination of useless skills which remained unused after the results of the first math quizzes were received. My father had not sent me to Yale to be an athlete.

Of more lasting importance was the discovery of station WJZ, New York one autumn afternoon and listening to a then 17-year-old Stan Getz play his first recorded solo at the end of the Coda to “Summer Sequence”, a Ralph Burns extended jazz composition performed by the Woody Herman orchestra. The discovery of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Machito, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Ventura and his Bop for the People and the whole world of modern jazz and bebop soon followed introduced by the late night voice of Symphony Sid Toren from Birdland and Bop City. I have grown up, grown gray and have been saddened as one-by-one these inventive musicians have died. I have also grown in introspection, appreciation and delight at the legacy that they have left to influence Rock and Roll, Rap and Hip-Hop, Reggae, Ska, and now World Music. Without having heard Sarah Vaughan, Harry Belafonte's recording of “Lean on Me” as a jazz vocalist and George Shearing's "The Fourth Deuce", I wouldn't have been able to study until 2 or 3 a.m. in the most challenging academic environment I had ever faced. It turned out that many of the white students had already seen the freshman courses at Yale through their preparatory schools but it was all new to me.

One lovely discovery was that I had family in New Haven. The Powell family lived there at that time and my Aunt "Princess" resided in the Hanna Gray Home on Dixwell Avenue. I do not know whether or not the home still functions but it was a place of quiet, escape and wonderment to walk down to visit Aunt Princess who must have been in her seventies. On far too few Sunday afternoons I could sit and talk with her and marvel at her clarity of thought and expression and her beauty. There was never a question as to why she was called "Princess".

I never understood the “heeling” system for participation in the Radio Station, WYBC, the Yale Daily News, the Lit and other activities and, as far as I know, it was never formally explained to anyone who didn't have a need to know. There wasn't enough time to do any of these things and stay abreast of the pre-med course requirements so that freshman year was work broken only by a “Dear John” letter from my high school girl friend who found it necessary to marry a young man from West Virginia State College; learning the amount of beer I could imbibe; an occasional date with a New Haven high school girl; Italian Neorealist post-war films like Bitter Rice and the Bicycle Thief and Christmas Vacation. To my regret, it seemed that the Ivy League began its Christmas vacation just as the more traditional schools, which did not have two week reading periods before exams, ended theirs. I got to see three or four friends boarding the trains back to school as I arrived on the Chesapeake and Ohio and that was that.

Summer passed none too rapidly. Because I was the first male honor student in my high school class, I took considerable kidding when my struggle to maintain a Dean's List average was mentioned. It seems that my female high school honor peers were leading the classes at their respective schools while I appeared to be a playboy way up there in New England. I do remember getting the reputation as being eccentric, if not totally mad, because I was collecting butterflies for Dr. Remington in the Zoology Department. The ecological distribution of Lepidoptera in West Virginia, not to mention much of the area South of the Holland tunnel was not readily available to the Yale zoologists. Spending two mornings a week in a meadow on the W.Va. State College campus with butterfly net, notebook and cyanide jar was a real stimulus to acquiring a rich vocabulary of humor. None of us students who collected were credited in the brief paper on the species variation of Colias philodice as deduced from the phenotypic pattern of their spots, but I took some pride in seeing it published.

Pierson College beckoned in the autumn and, to save train fare, my Mother allowed me to drive her prized 1946 Chevrolet sedan to New Haven via the West Side Drive through New York to the Merritt Parkway and into Connecticut. Mother and I carted my stuff up to one of the two rooms in the third floor of Pierson which we four Negro students had decided to share as roommates. Pierson, with a reputation as being very “white shoe” and with “Slave Quarters” seemed to be taking a risk in reducing its real estate values but we actually enjoyed the ambience. Unfortunately, one of our two rooms was on the opposite side of the hall from the other so we turned one into a living room and the other room housed two bunk beds. Yale had just begun allowing student telephones as I recall, and we enjoyed that luxury and the shared bill.

Mother and I then went down Dixwell Avenue to see Aunt Princess and, because I was told that she had once worked for Yale during the 1920's and 1930's, we invited her down to see that one of her family had, at last, achieved admission to Yale. The University had provided maid service for its young gentlemen, as I understand it, well into the 1930's. Apparently these ladies tidied up, made beds, removed trash, cleaned and otherwise served the students. Such had been the lot of aunt Princess and, for a maid to see a young member of the family enrolled as an Eli was a signal occasion.

To see an expression of panic and despair on the face of your seventy-odd year old beautiful aunt is a harrowing experience. Visions of fainting, heart attacks, strokes, rapidly course through your mind and both my Mother and I were quite concerned. Mother and Aunt Princess sat down on my unmade bed with the bedding piled at one end including the sheets and the folded blankets and had a whispered discussion, which was so obviously private that I did not dare intervene. Mother seemed reassuring and supportive and after some minutes the previous atmosphere of pride and smiles and even a subdued laugh was achieved. The rest of the day was extraordinarily pleasant. I was allowed to show off my accomplishments and my second year was off to a running start.

Just before Mother left to return to Charleston via New York for shopping, I asked her about the incident that had so shocked Aunt Princess. Family progress was underlined when Mother, quite seriously, told me that Aunt Princess was afraid that the Yale authorities would seek her out when they saw the coarse woolen, WWI surplus blanket on my bed. It seems that she had purloined it years before when she left Yale's employment, and now it had returned! Retribution was sure to follow.

I have told this true story to my own tribe, most recently my youngest son, the last of seven children, during his August vacation with me while swimming at Caesar's Creek lake park. We shared a coarse woolen blanket with olive drab trim, which will remain in our possession until at least the 21st Century.