The Black Russian

2: Travel and Transformation

During the next decade Frederick traveled widely, and for a young black man of his era every step he took was a highly unusual rejection of his past. He left the South and lived only in cities. He mastered urban skills and moved in worlds that became progressively more white. And he would eventually leave the United States.

From Memphis, Frederick traveled a short distance west and crossed the Mississippi into Arkansas. Because Arkansas had been a slave state, and its eastern portion was much like the Delta bottomlands in appearance, history, and reliance on cotton and corn, Frederick did not find it appealing and spent only two months there. He then turned north and “drifted” to St. Louis, as he put it. This was a longer trip of some three hundred miles and represented a more resolute change.

In 1890, St. Louis was the fourth-largest city in the country, with a population approaching five hundred thousand, and had begun the quintessential American form of urban growth—upward, via steel-framed, multistory buildings. Its industrial and commercial bustle, its surprisingly white crowds in which not even one person in ten was black, and its air filled with snatches of spoken German, Czech, and Italian must have appealed to Frederick. After spending just a few months there he headed even farther north to a city that epitomized the young, powerful, polyglot, brash United States.

By 1890, Chicago had captured the world’s imagination as the embodiment of the “American miracle.” In just two generations, a frontier settlement established in 1833 had grown into the second-largest city in the country, with a population of 1.1 million; it was overshadowed only by New York’s 1.5 million, and was the fifth-largest city in the world. Rather than being stunted by a devastating fire in 1871, Chicago’s growth accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century as the city rebuilt itself into a modern metropolis and became a center of industry, commerce, and transportation. Chicago, with the world’s first skyscrapers, became an icon not only of American technological prowess and economic might, but of modern industrialized civilization in general.

Emigrants from the Old World eager to reinvent themselves flooded into Chicago. They included Germans, Irish, Scandinavians, Poles, Lithuanians, Czechs, Italians, and Jews from several Eastern European countries. In 1890, an astounding 78 percent of the population had been born abroad or had foreign parents. An observer remarked that there were regions in the city where you could pass an entire day without hearing a word of English. It is bitterly ironic that American blacks, who were still concentrated largely in the South and who lived under conditions that were no better, and often worse, than those suffered by landless peasants in Ireland or impoverished laborers in Germany, did not have the same opportunities for change that many white foreigners were given. In fact, there were very few blacks in Chicago at this time; of the total population, they made up only 1.3 percent—about 15,000 people—with men somewhat outnumbering women. Even if many of the foreign emigrants in Chicago barely scraped out a livelihood and lived in filthy slums, they were at least given a chance to come to a place where they might be able to improve their lot. By contrast, Frederick’s arrival was part of a feeble trickle of native-born southern blacks who had started coming to Chicago in the years after the Civil War. The “Great Migration,” when hundreds of thousands would start streaming north in search of economic opportunity and to escape the intolerable conditions at home, would not occur until decades later, during and after World War I.

At first, Frederick got a job similar to the one he had in Memphis—except that this time he worked as a “boy” for a flower and fruit seller rather than for a butcher. Michael F. Gallagher was the owner of what was probably the most successful floral business in Chicago during the late 1880s and early 1890s, with a main store in the fashionable city center. On the eve of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, Gallagher opened a second store in an even more visible location on the city’s main lakefront thoroughfare and announced his newly achieved prominence by advertising his business as “Florists to the World’s Fair.”

Everything about Frederick’s first job in Chicago prefigures his future life and career. By working for Gallagher, he had entered what can be called an elegant service industry, one that existed for the benefit of people with money and social standing. No matter how lowly or demanding Frederick’s own labors might have been, he was nevertheless involved in providing adornments to those who could afford to pay for such luxuries. The kinds of customers he most likely saw and interacted with at Gallagher’s would also have presented him with models of gentility, and forms of posturing, that he would need to learn to understand and to satisfy.

Although Frederick had moved five hundred miles north of Memphis and a world away from the South, at the end of the nineteenth century blacks in Chicago were still hardly free to do or to become anything they wanted. After working for Gallagher for “8 or 9 months,” as he recalled, Frederick launched into a profession that would be his mainstay for the next twenty years as well as his springboard to wealth: he became a waiter. By setting out on this career path, Frederick also assumed one of the few roles that was available to him because of the racist labor patterns in the city.

One-third of the entire black population were employed in domestic and personal service, a category that included workers in Chicago’s myriad restaurants and hotels, in private homes, and on trains as Pullman porters. When Frederick entered the profession around 1892 there were some 1,500 black men working as waiters everywhere in the city, from chains of inexpensive restaurants to elegant hotels.

Especially in the upscale dining rooms, the black waiter’s job in those days was complex, demanding, and competitive—more so than is usual today, and differently. By reacting immediately and cheerfully to the client’s wishes—and all the clients in the expensive restaurants were white—the black waiter could be seen as simulating the enforced obsequiousness and racial subordination that had been, and still was, the norm for all blacks in the South. Even if the diner was a lifelong northerner for whom slavery had been an abomination, he would still be likely to enjoy the sense of privilege and worth that an exaggeratedly deferential black waiter would confer on him for the duration of the meal. An efficient waiter who strived to be likable also got bigger tips.

However, black waiters in Gilded Age America were not just gifted or cynical actors. They also took pride in their profession, which required tact, charm, dignified deportment, and mental and physical agility. Waiters who served the financial and political elite in the grand hotels and restaurants of the nation’s second-largest city acquired an enhanced sense of personal worth as well as a heightened social status in their own communities.

If the first job one has in a given profession acts as a tuning fork for the career that follows, Frederick started at a pitch of the highest quality. The Auditorium Hotel, where he began as a waiter, was the most important new building in Chicago and had one of its most elegant and modern dining rooms. Built between 1887 and 1889 on what is now South Michigan Avenue, it was hailed at the time of its completion as the “chief architectural spectacle of Chicago,” a symbol of the city’s civic progress, and even hyperbolically as the “eighth wonder of the world.” Frederick had found his niche in urban life: after the Auditorium Hotel he spent the next “one and a half years as waiter” in other restaurants in the city.

Frederick left Chicago around the summer of 1893, a momentous period in the city’s history. The World’s Columbian Exposition opened on May 1; on May 9, a banking crisis began, which led to a national economic depression that became known as the Panic of 1893. When the economy collapsed, thousands of workers, including those who had been attracted to the city during the boom period of the world’s fair, were left without jobs or prospects of any kind.

Frederick decided that he could do better by heading to New York City. From all accounts, the situation was not as bad there as in Chicago. New York also had more of everything that had originally made Chicago attractive—more people, bustle, excitement, power, towering buildings, and hotels and restaurants where one could find work. New York was the only city in the United States that ambitious Chicagoans envied. And the only siren call that ambitious New Yorkers heard came from the great cities of Europe.

Like Chicago, the New York metropolitan region was still over-whelmingly white in 1893. It was also filled with immigrants from all over Europe and their first-generation children. The wretched poverty of many of them, together with their foreign babble and alien customs, made longtime New Yorkers fear for the future of their city. To acculturate and redeem these motley newcomers, white New Yorkers initiated a variety of reform efforts at the end of the nineteenth century. However, they typically ignored the less numerous native-born blacks who were arriving simultaneously. Blacks were made to feel unwelcome in Manhattan, and many chose to live in the outlying areas. Brooklyn, which would remain an independent municipality until 1898, became especially popular with blacks after the Civil War draft riots of 1863, when white mobs attacked them throughout Manhattan. But even in Brooklyn the black population in 1893 was very small and amounted to only some 13,000 people out of a population of 950,000.

The job that Frederick found after he arrived in Brooklyn was predictable, in both personal and broader social terms. New York was like Chicago, once again, in restricting most blacks to lower-paying, subservient occupations. Within this narrow range of possibilities, however, Frederick was able to carve out a superior position for himself, one that represented an advance over his work as a waiter in Chicago. The Clarendon Hotel in Brooklyn, where he became “head bell boy,” was a new, large, prominent, and strategically located establishment in its day. Opened during the summer of 1890 two blocks north of City Hall, it was also just a few steps away from an elevated railroad that ran to the Brooklyn Bridge a dozen blocks away. A cable car service took passengers across the bridge to lower Manhattan and dropped them off within easy reach of New York’s City Hall, thus putting the Clarendon at one end of a transportation system that linked the two municipalities’ administrative centers.

Frederick was twenty-one at this time, and as the “head” of a crew of bellboys, he had a responsible position that reflected his skill in both serving and managing people. Bellboys would typically be on their feet all day, and because they were always in public view, their physical appearance, from uniform to grooming to deportment, would reflect directly on the establishment where they worked. It would have been his job to give individual bellboys their assignments, to keep track of their hours for payroll, to train beginners, and to resolve complaints made against them. Frederick would have had to balance being a figure of authority toward his coworkers—and since he was black, they could have been nothing else—with being an employee and a servant of whites. It would have been Frederick’s prerogative to go out of his way to provide exceptional service to an important client himself.

Frederick’s subsequent career shows that he impressed guests at the Clarendon: after working there for some months, he left to become a personal valet to a leading local businessman. Percy G. Williams had taken up temporary residence in the hotel in the early summer of 1894, which is when he probably met Frederick and hired him for the traits that any successful servant would need—resourcefulness and a winning disposition. Williams was in his late thirties and was on the verge of making his mark on the history of American popular entertainment as the biggest owner of vaudeville theaters in the New York area. There is good reason to assume that Frederick learned some valuable lessons from witnessing aspects of Williams’s career and character.

This is also the time when Frederick’s ambitions began to surpass the lowly roles that American society allowed him to play and at which he had begun to excel. With a good letter of recommendation from a well-known, rich, and respected man like Williams, Frederick could have continued in New York as a personal valet or even a household butler for many years. But in addition to his vocation, Frederick also had a passion for music. And it was strong enough for him to take the extraordinary step of leaving the United States to study.

Years later, Frederick would explain to an American consular official that “he went to Europe on the advice of his German musical professor, Herman,” who told him specifically to go to London. Frederick hoped to become a singer. It is possible that his studying voice in New York reflected the famous legacy of black church singing, which he would have known in his parents’ chapel in Coahoma County. As far as the German teacher is concerned, nothing is known about the man except that his influence on Frederick was crucial. That he was a foreigner surely explains why he was willing to cross the American color line and take Frederick on as a student; it also explains why he would have looked to Europe as a place to which Frederick could escape to develop his abilities.

In the 1890s, passenger ship traffic between New York City and London was frequent, quick, popular, and affordable. Approximately half a dozen ships left every week during the fall of 1894, transporting thousands of passengers with the most diverse backgrounds and incomes. The vast majority went in “steerage,” which was the cheapest way to travel, and which accommodated surprising numbers of laborers, workers, and others on the lower rungs of the economic and social ladders. International travel was also much simpler then than it is today: one bought a ticket and went. Americans did not even need a passport to leave the country.

Frederick left New York in the fall of that year, apparently on October 9, aboard the SS Lahn of the North German Lloyd shipping line. Its ultimate destination was Bremen in northern Germany, but on the way it was scheduled to call at Southampton, a major port on the south coast of England that was a popular entry point for Americans. The Lahn docked on October 16, after an uneventful seven-day crossing. Direct trains from Southampton to Waterloo Station in central London took two to three hours.

Some of the novelty of arriving in London would have been mitigated for Frederick by the changes he had already experienced in the United States. In fact, the contrast between the Hopson Bayou neighborhood and Chicago was in many ways far greater than that between the two greatest English-speaking cities in the world—New York and London.

But in another and more important way, the change between the United States and England was like climbing out of a ship’s dark cargo hold onto a top deck bathed in brilliant sunshine. “Negro,” “colored,” and “black” did not mean in England what they did in the United States. In London, for the first time in his life, Frederick experienced what most of his brethren back home would never know—being viewed by whites with curiosity, interest, even affection.

It was not that Victorian England was a color-blind sanctuary. For generations, the British Empire had subjugated and exploited entire civilizations in South Asia, Africa, and many other places around the world. In the United Kingdom itself, unabashed racism was directed against the Irish, the Jews, and others. But because there were very few blacks in England at this time, and even fewer American “negroes,” the attitude toward people like Frederick was surprisingly accepting—“surprisingly” especially from the point of view of Americans who happened to be visiting the British Isles.

The seeming contradictions of British snobbery dismayed one American visitor, who noted that in the great university towns of England, one could see “negroes” at college balls waltzing with aristocratic young women and ladies of high position, all of whom would have considered it grossly inappropriate even to acknowledge a familiar tradesman in the street. Another American was shocked by the sight of “two coal-black negroes and two white women” in a fashionable London restaurant. “My first impulse was to instantly depart,” the American admitted, “for such a sight in the United States would surely not have been possible.” But in the end there was little he could do except acknowledge ruefully, “In London a negro can go into the finest restaurants and be served just like a white man.”

William Drysdale, a well-known American reporter making a grand tour of Europe—and who would soon have a memorable encounter with Frederick in Monte Carlo—wrote that

Drysdale approved of the way the English treated American blacks. He had also heard numerous lectures from Londoners about the barbarism of lynchings in the South and the general inhumanity of American whites toward blacks. But he got to know the English well enough not to be taken in entirely by their morally superior attitudes. He pointed out that their criticism of American failings

“So we all have our little failings,” he concluded wryly.

After arriving in London, Frederick applied for admission to a school that he remembered as the “Conservatory of Music.” He must have had very little money after paying for the voyage across the Atlantic, because he hoped that he could make arrangements to pay for his tuition and living expenses by working for the school. However, his application was refused. Were it not for the descriptions of how American blacks were treated in London in the 1890s, one might have thought that Frederick was rejected on racial grounds. It was more likely that the school was unwilling to take on a student who wanted to work his way through the program. Or perhaps he was judged to lack sufficient talent, as is suggested by the fact that he did not attempt again to study music in England or in continental Europe. Given the kind of adventurer he had become, he could have tried to enroll elsewhere at a later time if he believed in his own abilities.

He next tried to start his own boardinghouse in Leicester Square. He thus not only shrugged off his failure at the music school but also tried a new way to put down roots in a city that he found attractive. This was, moreover, an endeavor that capitalized on all the experience he had acquired in Chicago and Brooklyn. But whom could Frederick approach in London to borrow the money that he would have needed?

The answer may in fact have been entirely elsewhere. On February 8, 1895, India, who was working as a cook in Louisville, Kentucky, mortgaged the family land in Coahoma County for a two-month loan of $2,000 at an exorbitant interest rate. How she came to be in possession of the land after everything that had happened and why she did this are unknown, but it could have been to get Frederick the money that he needed for his venture in London or to make ends meet as he was trying to set it up. The timing is plausible.

In any event, Frederick overreached himself in London. The plan for the boardinghouse failed, and he had to take a step back into the occupations that he knew best. He first worked in a German restaurant that he remembered as being called “Tube,” and then in a “Mrs. James’ Boarding House.” Shortly thereafter, perhaps in pursuit of a better job, or because of wanderlust, or both, Frederick left England for France.

Frederick’s arrival in Paris can be dated closely. He must have gotten there shortly before July 12, 1895, the day he received a letter of introduction from the American ambassador to France, J. B. Eustis, addressed to the Paris prefect, or chief, of police. Writing in French and using the standard phrases for a letter of this type, the ambassador expressed the hope that the prefect would welcome “Mr. Frederick Bruce Thomas,” who was residing at 23 rue Brey, when he presented himself to be registered. Among the duties of the office of the prefect was making note of foreigners who planned to live in the city.

The distance across the English Channel between Dover and Calais, which was the port of entry for boat trains to Paris, is only thirty miles, and the thrice-daily ferries in 1895 could cover it in less than two hours. Nevertheless, Frederick’s move to France would in some ways be a bigger dislocation than his move to England. However strange the pronunciation and idioms in Great Britain might have sounded to an American at first, the language was still the same, especially for someone whose ears had gotten used to regional variations as different as those of the Deep South, the Midwest, and Brooklyn. But throughout much of the rest of the world in the 1890s, and well into the beginning of the twentieth century, French was the second language of business, government, and culture. A monolingual American arriving in a foreign locale would find few English-speakers outside the major tourist hotels. To live and work in France, or anywhere else on the Continent, Frederick would have to learn French without delay. He had the right temperament to do so: his willingness to leave a familiar world in order to seek new experiences indicates that he was sufficiently confident and extroverted to be a good language student.

Frederick’s need to learn French was especially urgent because his job was once again that of butler or valet, which would require him to communicate quickly and easily with his employers, or, if these were English-speaking, with people outside the household, such as shopkeepers and tradesmen. Judging by the addresses he gave in several documents, his employers were well off: all the addresses are elegant buildings that have survived to this day and are located in fashionable districts of Paris near the Arch of Triumph.

France, like England, was accepting of blacks. In fact, the attitude toward blacks in Paris at this time was even more liberal than in London. The reaction of James Weldon Johnson, a black American writer, composer, and intellectual who first arrived in Paris in 1905, conveys what Frederick may have also felt:

The relative rarity of blacks in Paris made someone like Frederick an appealing object of curiosity and enhanced his chances of being employed. Because the French were far less conscious of class differences than their staid English neighbors, it is likely that he would have found working in Paris more congenial than working in London. In the streets and in the city’s shops, servants were greeted politely as “Mademoiselle” or “Monsieur” even by strangers who knew their actual status. A valet’s wages and hours would also have been better than a waiter’s.

Because Frederick was also a very handsome young man (as photographs of him c. 1896 show), Paris would have been a wide-open field for romantic adventures. A white American who knew the city well commented, with a hint of envy, that “Frenchmen do not connect the negro as we do, with plantation days. Fair women look upon him with love and admiration, as Desdemona looked upon Othello.” Even more relevant to Frederick was the man’s remark that “everywhere you find the same thing. Colored valets traveling with Americans are raved over by pretty French maids.”

Paris in the 1890s was seen worldwide as the capital of modern urban civilization—a place where everyone with any pretense to sophistication or social standing longed to be. Frederick’s life there was the last stage of his basic education in the ways of the world. After Paris, with its museums and theaters, monuments and grand boulevards, cafés and fashionable shops, temples to haute cuisine and raucous vaudeville, there was little any other city in Western Europe could offer Frederick that he had not already seen.

During the next three years, Frederick traveled extensively, working in different cities for months at a time, and returned to Paris twice. This involved crossing multiple borders, and even though most European countries did not require passports from visitors, an official government document could still be useful as identification; it would also provide a traveler with protection in case he got into any kind of trouble. Frederick applied for his first passport in Paris on March 17, 1896. Among the questions he had to answer was how soon he would return to the United States, and he responded “two years.” However, it is not clear if he meant this or if he simply said whatever he thought would help him keep his options open (American passports had to be renewed every two years). It would not have been in his interest to make the embassy staff suspect that he might have left the United States for good. He also began falsifying his past, something he would continue later as well, by giving Louisville, Kentucky, as his birthplace, and Brooklyn as his permanent place of residence. Perhaps his reasons were that India was still living in Louisville and that not all blacks had been slaves there. Naming Brooklyn might also have forestalled offhand comments from the second secretary at the embassy, with whom Frederick dealt and who, like his father the ambassador, was a southerner.

After Paris, Frederick went first to Brussels and then to Ostend, a popular Belgian resort on the North Sea. There he worked at the Grand Hôtel Fontaine, which, although not particularly expensive, was recommended by Baedeker’s, a respected tourist guide at the time. Unlike most of the other hotels in Ostend, which closed for the cold season, the Grand Hôtel Fontaine remained open all year. However, Frederick left and went on to the south of France.

The fall of 1896 is probably when he came to the Riviera for the first time, and this is where his expertise and skills were recognized and rewarded in a remarkable way: he became a headwaiter for the season. His employer was a Monsieur G. Morel, the proprietor of the well-known Hôtel des Anglais in Cannes. The hotel, on the northern edge of town, prided itself on having an admirable southern exposure, a beautiful pleasure garden, and a recherché cuisine and cellar, and on providing luxury, comfort, careful service, a lift, hotel baths, telephone, and entertainments such as tennis and billiards. The position of headwaiter in a large establishment like this that catered to a demanding international clientele carried considerable responsibility. It would also have been coveted by experienced, native French waiters. Frederick’s command of English—even though his English was heavily accented—would have been an asset for the hotel’s restaurant because many tourists from Great Britain came to Cannes. But he could not have gotten the job if he did not have command of idiomatic French, which he would have needed to communicate with the management, the waiters, and the rest of the staff. He would also have needed to develop a good understanding of the psychology and cultures of the different classes and nationalities of Europeans with whom he dealt.

After the Riviera season was over, in the spring of 1897, Frederick returned to Paris, where he worked as a waiter in the Restaurant Cuba on the avenue des Champs-Élysées. He then made an extensive tour of Germany, crossing the country from west to east, and working for short periods in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Leipzig. This zigzagging itinerary shows that he had not yet found a place that suited him entirely and that he was satisfying his curiosity to see other parts of Europe. Like other waiters in Europe, Frederick would have heard much about the strict discipline and perfect service practiced in German restaurants and hotels and might have been interested in sampling this world. But like others before and after him, Frederick probably discovered quickly that German patrons were very difficult to please. From Germany he returned to Paris, and late in 1897 he turned south once more, this time choosing first Nice and then Monte Carlo, the capital of the famous, diminutive principality of Monaco on the Azure Coast, where he would have a memorable encounter with a white American.

Drysdale, the reporter making a tour of Europe, arrived in Monaco with an English friend during the first week of February 1898, from Nice and other points farther west on the French coast. Already much impressed by the beauty of the countryside they had seen from the train, with picturesque hills on the left and the azure Mediterranean on the right, he emerged from the Monte Carlo train station only to be struck anew by the remarkable beauty of the town. At the center was the Casino, a grand, elegant, and lavishly decorated concoction of cream-colored stone. It stood on one end of a large square occupying the hill that towered over the area, and that was surrounded by what Drysdale described as a “fairyland of flowers and tropical plants as you may dream of sometimes but seldom see.” The extravagant luxury of Monte Carlo’s appearance, and the gorgeously decorated coaches, drivers, and horses that the town’s twenty-five hotels sent to the station to meet the train and attract guests, overcame Drysdale’s reservations and frugality. He and his friend decided to splurge on the Hôtel de Paris, which belonged to the Casino Company and was, as he admitted, “by many degrees the largest and finest and most expensive in the place.” It also faced the Casino, as it does to this day.

After being escorted by a regally garbed bellman to his handsome rooms facing the sea, Drysdale was in the process of unpacking and preparing to ask a maid for some hot water, in French, when he heard a voice behind him say: “Reckon I better look aftah dis ’Merican gemman.”

Without looking up, Drysdale guessed who had arrived at his door and felt a wave of relief. After traveling for months through the famous cities of Europe, he was delighted to encounter a friendly black servant from home, someone with whom he could feel “completely at ease,” as he put it, and to whom he could confide all the small cares and worries associated with travel. The various Dutch, German, Belgian, and French hotel “boys” had been perfectly obliging and attentive. But this young black man was a “colored friend and brother,” someone as familiar as if “you had brought him up from the cradle,” someone who, when compared with the Europeans, was “an electric light beside a flickering candle.”

Drysdale’s affection for Frederick was genuine, even though it was tainted by an unconscious patriarchal racism. Drysdale had been born in Pennsylvania and lived most of his life in New Jersey while he wrote for newspapers in New York City. Nonetheless, his comments about Frederick betray a nostalgia for a romanticized image of the old antebellum South that began to appear among northerners at the end of the nineteenth century, and that centered on the supposedly chivalrous nobility of the planters and their benevolent relations with contented slaves. Drysdale would also have enjoyed being waited on simply because he was a heavy man, and no longer young at forty-six; indeed, he was to die only three years later. Thus, he found it entirely normal to expect that a black man would be an excellent servant; to think of him as a “boy” even though he was in his mid-twenties; to refer to him as “Sambo,” as an “ebon” or “sunburnt angel,” or as a “dusky brother”; and to record his speech in a way that exaggerated its nonwhite, semiliterate pronunciation (despite the fact that Frederick had probably learned to modulate his native accent when dealing with affluent white clients).

Drysdale also concealed Frederick’s real name and referred to him as “George.” By doing this, he was consistent with how he concealed the names of others he encountered on his travels, including his English friend, presumably out of consideration for their privacy. Nonetheless, his choice of “George” may also have been dictated by the custom American whites had of referring to black servants by “generic” names that denied them their individuality. A striking example of this was porters on Pullman trains, all of whom were black and many of whom were former slaves hired after the Civil War. Passengers called every one of them “George” no matter what their names may have been, and did so automatically and “in honor” of the businessman George M. Pullman, who employed them.

Drysdale was of course curious about Frederick’s origins and began to quiz him. “I comes from Kaintucky, Sah,” was the reply (Frederick continued to misrepresent his origins). “Been on dis side de watah bout fo’ yeahs, Sah.”

And why had he come to Europe? “To see the worl’, Sah.”

Part of Drysdale’s sense of relief when Frederick appeared came from not having to struggle with French any longer. Instead of “de l’eau chaud,” all he had to say now was “bring me a jug of hot water.” By contrast, Frederick spoke French fluently and explained that he had learned it while living in Paris for about three years. He had come to the French Riviera several months earlier for additional language study—except that now he wanted to learn Italian. To his disappointment, he found what little was spoken in Nice to be corrupted with French and Provençal, the old language of the region, so that he had moved to Monaco instead. The Italian there proved to be badly flawed as well, prompting him to make plans to leave for Milan in a few weeks.

Drysdale had the opportunity to verify Frederick’s ability to speak French on several occasions and was much impressed by how good it actually was. Especially surprising was the cultural transformation that it captured. Although Drysdale said that he found Frederick’s “bluegrass dialect” more musical than the band playing in Monte Carlo’s public park, he also thought that the “negro dialect” Frederick spoke had such a coercive hold on him that he would never be able to speak “real English.” It was therefore a genuine shock for Drysdale to find that Frederick’s black southern accent did not affect his French at all—either when he spoke with Drysdale himself or when he spoke with Frenchmen fresh from Paris.

By contrast, Drysdale ruefully acknowledged that his own French was “naturally bad.” In keeping with the practices of the time, it is likely that Frederick’s language studies in Paris consisted less of classroom instruction than of walking and riding around the city in the company of an experienced teacher and repeatedly imitating both the practical, everyday expressions he used and his accompanying manner and gestures.

The elegance of Frederick’s French was echoed by his worldly manner, which Drysdale described as dignified, gentlemanly, and altogether fine. Frederick was also physically striking. He was a bit taller than average at five feet nine, and good-looking, with rich brown skin and generously proportioned features: high cheekbones, large oval eyes, a prominent nose, and a wide mouth that was quick to break into a captivating smile. He also liked to dress stylishly. Everything about Frederick said that he had transformed himself into a genuine cosmopolitan, one who felt free to travel around Europe as his fancy moved him, and without any concerns about being able to find suitable employment whenever he wanted it.

After helping Drysdale settle in, and brushing and cleaning his clothes in a way that “no valet in the world can do as well as Sambo when he chooses,” Frederick went to get the hotel register in which all guests were obligated by local law to write their names, home addresses, and occupations. The police checked the registers every day and guests were supposed to make their entries accurately. But Drysdale blithely dismissed this requirement and told Frederick not to bother him with such details and to register him under any name and occupation that he chose.

Frederick was entirely willing to play with Drysdale’s biography, as he did with his own when it suited him. Frederick’s years of successfully serving clients in half a dozen countries on two continents had made him into an excellent actor and judge of character. He had also gotten to know human nature too well to take entirely seriously all the moral pieties that laws and social norms were meant to reflect. Instead of putting his trust in abstract principles, Frederick invested in private relations; and he could be very generous with his affections.

Taking the black-covered book to a mantelpiece in the room, Frederick began to write in it with an expression that Drysdale characterized as showing “that he was going through a severe mental struggle,” an implausible description that says more about Drysdale’s racially inflected projections than about what proved to be Frederick’s adroit and ironic flattery. Asking “wheder dat’ll do, Sah,” Frederick handed the book to Drysdale, who sheepishly realized that the valet had “rather turned the tables” on him. He had registered him as “Hon. G. W. Ingram, residence Washington, occupation United States Senator, last stopping place Paris, intended stay in Monaco two weeks, intended destination Cairo, Egypt.”

To his discomfort, Drysdale realized that he would have to backpedal because “such false pretenses might lead to awkward complications”; moreover, he would have to find some way to retreat gracefully after saying that he did not care what Frederick wrote about him.

Thus it was that Drysdale’s young English friend received what Drysdale, with his rather cumbersome wit, chose to characterize as “the greatest honor of his life”—being transformed “for the moment into an American and a Senator.”

Like any valet or waiter, Frederick would have wanted to ingratiate himself with his patrons by assuming a deferential mien and manner, both because the job demanded it and because his income from tips depended on it. However, in his subsequent encounters with Drysdale, who spent about a month at the Hôtel de Paris before resuming his leisurely journey along the Mediterranean coast, we also get glimpses of Frederick’s poised self-confidence and of his mastery of local cultural norms, which he understood far better than his patron.

Frederick’s assurance and sophistication belied the primitivized portrait captured in Drysdale’s articles. When Frederick saw Drysdale and the Englishman crossing the hotel lobby toward the door on the first evening after their arrival, he hastened to intervene to forestall a possible social gaffe.

On another occasion, Frederick was able to explain to Drysdale and the Englishman how one gained entry to the Casino, which was off-limits to the local Monegasques: “You has to apply in persing fer de ticket, Sah…. But it ain’t no trouble ’tall, Sah. All you has to do is to walk in de do’, an’ dey’ll spot you in a minute an’ put you on de right track. Dey has won’ful sharp eyes, Sah.” To be sure, this is a minor comment about a routine event, but it is also an observation made by a man with an eye for detail, a job well done.

Frederick was unusually blunt about his own abilities in comparison with those of his coworkers, especially the native Monegasques. “Dey has to bring in all dere hotel waiters, Sah,” he explains to Drysdale at one point; “dese native dagoes don’t know nothing.”

Frederick’s sense of ease and self-assurance would only have been bolstered by the personal freedom and social acceptance he found in old Europe. His impression that he was better than his fellows at what they all did for a living could have goaded him to seek advancement as well. Indeed, part of Frederick’s reason for moving from country to country and job to job was probably that, in addition to satisfying his curiosity, he was searching for a place where he could put down roots and build a career.

Frederick left Monte Carlo for Italy around mid-March 1898. During the next year, he continued his exploration of Europe and, heading this time in a generally eastward direction, toward Russia, traveled to five new cities—Milan, Venice, Trieste, Vienna, and Budapest. Everywhere he went he followed the same pattern and worked in hotels or restaurants for periods of a few weeks to a few months, or presumably just long enough to have a look around and to earn enough money for the next leg of his trip. Frederick’s ability to find such work in different cities suggests that he had good letters of reference from previous employers as well as a winning way of presenting himself, which was its own best recommendation.

It was in the spring of 1899 that Frederick first got the idea of going to Russia. Although details are scanty, he appears to have been employed as a valet by a rich Russian, perhaps a nobleman, perhaps of very high rank, who planned to take him to St. Petersburg. He may even have accompanied a grand duke (this was the title given to the sons and grandsons of Russian tsars) who had met him in Monte Carlo and took a liking to him. But entering Russia, unlike the six countries in Western and central Europe through which Frederick had traveled thus far, was not routine. The authoritarian Russian Empire required passports. Moreover, no one could enter the country without also having his passport visaed by a Russian official abroad, something that was not entirely automatic. Frederick began the process of securing all the necessary documents in Budapest, and he completed his passport renewal on May 20, 1899.

In his passport application, Frederick listed his occupation as “waiter” and indicated that he was planning to return to the United States within one year. For this passport—in contrast to his Paris application—he gave his home address as Chicago. His disregard for accuracy suggests that whatever he said was simply a way to forestall suspicions that he might have expatriated himself. The only difference in Frederick’s physical description is that he now had a “black moustache” instead of being clean-shaven; he would eventually let it grow to an impressive width. Nothing in the application suggested that Frederick was going to Russia with intentions different from those that had led him to crisscross Europe; in fact, he noted that after visiting Russia he planned to return to France.

Armed with his new passport, Frederick was able to get his required second visa from the Russian consulate in Budapest. However, a visit like this required a brief interview that would have made any black American’s head spin. Unlike most of their counterparts in the United States diplomatic service, the Russian staff would not have cared that Frederick had black skin. If anything, his appearance might have awakened their curiosity because people of African descent were rare in Russia. But their lack of concern over race would have been replaced by a different bias that Frederick had not seen manifested elsewhere in Europe in quite as virulent a form—anti-Semitism. Official Russian government regulations required a consular officer to ascertain if an applicant for a visa was Jewish or not. The purpose of this regulation was to restrict the entry of Jews into Russia and to limit their freedom of movement if they were admitted.

In Frederick’s case, the matter would have been settled easily. But it is hard to believe that he would not have been struck by the question implying that Jews were, in a sense, the “Negroes” of Russia. He could not have been ignorant of anti-Semitism in Europe during the years he had been there, especially in France, where the notorious “Dreyfus affair”—the prosecution of a Jewish officer in the French army on trumped-up charges—raged from 1894 to 1899. But there is a difference between an outburst of hatred that received some popular support and contravened the laws of the land—as was the situation in France—and a system of official Russian laws and widespread public sentiment that recalled the Jim Crow South.

The comparison can be taken only so far. The Jewish population of Russia had never been enslaved. This is something that Russians had reserved for their own Christian peasants, who were liberated only in 1861, just two years before American blacks were emancipated. Also, the Russians liberated their serfs peacefully, by government decree, and without the horrific bloodshed of the American Civil War. Nevertheless, by applying for a Russian visa, Frederick was for the first time seeking to enter a country where his sense of belonging would be very different from what he had experienced in Europe thus far. In contrast to the other countries where he had been accepted more or less like anyone else, in Russia he would explicitly not be a member of a despised and oppressed minority. A black American would have felt this distinction with greater poignancy than most whites of any nationality.