Good Morning POU! Today’s post is part 3 of the Hannah Elias story from Black Fortunes, The Stories of the First Black Millionaires. This story continues to get juicer, where’s the screenplay??
In 1899, Hannah Elias moved out of her marital home and into a mansion on Central Park West purchased for her by her lover Platt. Her new residence was part of a collection of homes along the park meant to rival “Millionaires’ Row” on Fifth Avenue.
The house was palatial, standing four stories high and 224 feet wide. It included twelve rooms in all: two banquet halls, a ballroom, half a dozen bedrooms and bathrooms, and an English basement. Its exterior was made of red brick, stone, and mahogany and embellished with carvings of flowers, vines, and Greek deities. From its stained-glass windows, sunrooms, and projecting balconies it overlooked sheep grazing in the Central Park meadow.
Elias had been fascinated by the park since she had first visited New York and had dreamed of taking up residence along its border. Her new address was among the city’s white elite, which meant that extra steps had to be taken to conceal her race and affiliation with Platt. After moving in, Elias left the house only for emergencies, and on those occasions she rode in a covered carriage and wore a veil over her face. She turned the basement of her house into a medical suite equipped with a dentist’s chair and surgical tools so that all her checkups and teeth cleanings could be done in-house.
Hoping to preempt anyone becoming privy to the fact that they were living next to a wealthy black woman, she propagated false rumors about her ethnicity. At first, word was spread that she was Sicilian. Elias hired a young Italian man to come to her house and give her language lessons, but before long she started an affair with him. After a few weeks, she became paranoid that he was plotting to murder her for her money after reading a similar plot in a dime novel and fired him. Afterward, she switched to Spanish lessons and began telling people she was Cuban.
She assembled a team of servants for her home that included a black doorman, a French maid, a Senegalese maid, two Japanese butlers, a Chinese cook, and a full-time coach driver.
As her neighbors watched her assortment of servants come to and from the house, she became the envy of the block. Foreign domestics were the latest trend in New York high society. At swanky dinner parties and teas thrown by New York’s plutocrats, it was not uncommon to hear rich women boast that they had hired help from Germany or Sweden. Though Elias was unable to show herself in front of her rich neighbors, she still felt compelled to compete with them.
Shortly after moving in, she hired a fitness instructor after hearing that a neighbor’s wife had gotten her weight down to 84 pounds and became determined to surpass that mark. She also spent thousands of dollars every month draping herself in pearls, diamonds, and furs. Her extravagance, however, did nothing to cure the loneliness she experienced in her gilded jail. The white elite in the city were a social and tight-knit group. They traveled together, threw parties for one another aboard their yachts and in the ballrooms of their mansions.
Elias, as a monied black woman, however, was forced to become a recluse, fearing what might happen if she was discovered living among them. She had no friends other than Platt and could only watch men and women go by in the park from a seat in her window, never able to walk the promenades herself. She sought refuge in reading and collected books to help pass the time.
One day while reading about the Egyptian ruler Cleopatra, she had an epiphany. Similarities between their lives began to appear to her. As a girl, Cleopatra was exiled by her family. As a woman, she was able to return to rule through an alliance with a powerful older man, Rome’s ruler, Julius Caesar. Perhaps, Elias thought, if she remade herself and her surroundings in Cleopatra’s image, her home could become a palace, not a prison.
Elias charged her most trusted servant, a slight Japanese man with a thin mustache named Kato, with shopping for the items needed to transform her home. After a frenzy of effort, the walls and windows of the mansion were draped with satin and silk. The rooms were outfitted with perfumed pillows and chaises for Elias to lie on while her servants fed and fanned her with feather fans. She had Kato purchase a fountain that spouted scented water and installed it in her bedroom after reading that Cleopatra had had such an apparatus. When she was bored, she would clap her hands and order her servants to put on Egyptian period costumes and dance for her.
The pageant only minimally eased her malaise. She was the wealthy mistress of a powerful man, and with her investments and gifts from Platt she was worth close to a million herself. Save for Mary Ellen Pleasant in California, she was most likely the richest black woman in the United States. Yet because of her race she could not even leave her home. She began to think that perhaps she could find freedom if she could make herself white.
“When I was first called upon by this woman I was impressed by her desire to look as much like a white woman as possible,” recalled Dr. Edward P. Robinson, a “beauty doctor” Elias hired in 1900.
When Robinson first met with Elias in her home, he told her that he couldn’t change her tan complexion or her curly hair, but he could give her a new nose, noting that “her nose was typically African as it was depressed at the bridge and spread all over the face.” Robinson made eight house calls at $100 ($1,372) apiece to work on Elias. It’s not known what treatments he performed, but it was popular at the time to use paraffin wax to create a structure on the inside of the nostrils to project the tip of the nose outward. Such a treatment could be effective but needed to be redone on a monthly basis and was known to cause difficulty breathing. Nonetheless, after the treatment, Elias’s nose was more pronounced. “Ms. Elias now has a perfect type of Grecian nose,” the beauty doctor boasted.
After altering her nose, she searched for an expert to change her hair and hired a hairdresser who claimed she could make her locks straight. Elias was instructed to shave her head bald and apply an elixir to her scalp. The new hair, she was told, would grow in without kinks. However, when it started to grow again, it was as curly as before. Elias, who was left nearly bald, was forced to don wigs after that. She consoled herself by purchasing hairpieces made of Spanish hair that cost upward of several hundred dollars each.
She hoped she would have better results with her complexion. She found a man who claimed he could lighten her skin by applying a mask to her face for thirty days. When it was removed, he told her, her skin would be alabaster white. When she removed the mask, her skin color was unchanged, and by then the salesman had skipped town with the $1,000 ($13,726) she had paid him.
Elias was devastated. The night she removed the mask, she sent a servant to purchase a bucket of possum stew and some liquor that she called “nigger gin” from one of the city’s black establishments. When the servant returned, she ate the stew by scooping it from the bucket with her hands while sobbing. After the meal, she got drunk and began to dance a jig, ordering the staff to join her. She carried on well into the night, until she finally passed out and went to sleep.
The days were mostly the same after that. She would get worked up about something, only to sink into depression and drunkenness when the excitement wore off, and she realized she could escape neither her blackness nor the walls of her mansion.