There's a reason this celebrated librarian's life was not an open book
NEW YORK — In the waning years of the 19th century, Belle Marion Greener, daughter of a prominent African American civil rights advocate, started attending a private school in Massachusetts. Her mother, a fair-skinned Black woman, separated from her father, and by 1900, census records indicate, Belle's mother and all her children were listed as 'White.'
Belle dropped the last letter from her surname and added the Portuguese-sounding middle name da Costa, presumably because people of Portuguese descent were assumed to be darker skinned. Belle da Costa Greene now passed as White, and she went on to become a celebrated librarian, building what was then known as the Pierpont Morgan Library into one of the most formidable and rich collections in the world.
The Morgan Library & Museum's exhibition 'Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy' is aptly named but undersells what is a fascinating, deeply sad and provocative survey of Greene's complicated life. Her legacy is the work she performed for J.P. Morgan and his son Jack Morgan, searching out and acquiring rare and priceless books, manuscripts, prints, drawings and music. As founding director of the Morgan Library, she helped create an institution that remains vital some 75 years after her death in 1950.
But her personal life is what fascinates us today, especially given a new climate of what many see as publicly sanctioned racism and the erasure of African American contributions to public life. Greene destroyed her letters and journals, so much of what we want to know — How deeply did her change of identity affect her emotionally? How did she reconcile herself to the deception? — is unknowable. But throughout this exhibition, there are documents that give substance to our speculation, leading to the almost certain conclusion that it must have been exceptionally difficult and sometimes unbearably painful to live with the strain of perpetual hiding.
One of the most poignant artifacts is a handwritten note: 'The contents of this envelope brought a noble boy to his death. It is not fair to brand him suicide; this letter killed him.' The note was written by a friend of Greene's, about Greene's nephew and ward, Robert MacKenzie Leveridge, a Harvard-educated lieutenant in the U.S. Army Air Forces serving in England during World War II. Leveridge had been engaged to marry a young woman whose family discovered that he was African American. He may not have known himself — his mother and his aunt were both passing as White — but once his fiancée's family knew, the marriage was apparently doomed. The envelope probably contained a vicious letter from his betrothed, full of racial animus and deeply wounding to the young man. Although his death was publicly listed as 'killed in action,' he died by suicide.
This happened late in Greene's life, and it's unclear how much she knew about the particulars of her nephew's death. But his loss precipitated an emotional and medical crisis that may have been a stroke or heart attack. The whole episode demonstrates the dreadful peril for anyone passing as White, a peril she must have feared if her secret were known within the elite circles where she enjoyed a spectacular, flamboyant and storied existence.
Much of this exhibition is devoted to what Greene would have wanted her life's story to be: the hunt for bookish treasure, at auctions and sales across Europe, bringing back for the Morgan etchings by Rembrandt, gloriously illustrated medieval Bibles and religious texts, and the only extant copy of the first English edition of Sir Thomas Malory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur,' purchased for $50,000 in a sale that made newspaper headlines. She dressed well, so well that the newspapers took note of that, too, and when J.P. Morgan died in 1913, he left her a bequest of $50,000, enough to live comfortably, especially when supplemented by her substantial income as director of the Morgan. She went to the opera, collected art and carried on a long affair with Bernard Berenson, the longtime dean of American art historians who helped build substantial collections, including the one amassed by Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston.
All of that is documented with letters and books, including many of her major acquisitions for the Morgan. But then there is a 1913 painting by Harry Willson Watrous, 'The Drop Sinister — What Shall We Do With It?,' that shows a domestic scene with a blond child and two parents who may be of mixed race. The title references the anxiety about race pervasive in the United States during the age of Jim Crow and the emerging misuse of science and genetics to enforce rigid segregation. Also on view is a copy of the 1924 'Racial Integrity Act' passed by the Virginia General Assembly, which outlawed interracial marriage and defined White people as those 'with no trace of the blood of another race,' with the only exception one-sixteenth descent from a Native American to accommodate Virginians who claimed Pocahontas as an ancestor.
A society that defined race in these terms had no room for someone like Belle Greener but could celebrate Belle Da Costa Greene as a paragon of beauty, style, wit and ambition. Greene clearly relished that attention and appeared often in portraits and photographs, usually seen in profile and always stylishly dressed.
The Morgan exhibition makes a fascinating contrast with the National Gallery of Art's recently opened show devoted to the African American artist Elizabeth Catlett. Like Greene, Catlett was fair skinned, and early in her life, while living in Louisiana, she 'passed' as White to access a segregated movie theater. But she did that only once, and she spent the rest of her life passionately devoted to the liberation and dignity of African Americans.
The two women belonged to different generations and were pursuing very different careers. But Catlett paid a steep price for her activism, while Greene reaped the rewards of membership in elite cultural circles. Is there a moral or ethical dimension to Greene's decision to pass? It was a decision that neither helped nor hurt other people, except by the subtle calculus of role models and exemplars. And yet she could never have lived the life she did had she opted to embrace what we now call identity. Everyone has the right to invent themselves, especially in a country that celebrates self-invention. And given the pervasiveness of racial violence in 20th-century America, this wasn't just about self-invention. It was about survival.
Visitors to the exhibition are implicated in some of this ethical complexity. Greene's story, which was fictionalized in the 2021 novel 'The Personal Librarian,' is interesting to us because of that choice, to become Belle da Costa Greene and leave behind any trace of connection to her father, the first Black man to graduate from Harvard. Thus, we are interested in the one thing that she would not have wanted us to know about her. By retrieving from oblivion something she wished to erase, we may erase other things, especially those things — her passion for books, manuscripts and art — for which she would have wanted to be remembered.
We may try to wheedle our way out of this uncomfortable place by saying what is very likely true: Had she been born a century later, she wouldn't have made the choices she did. But that only underscores the darker and sadder truth of this country's paranoia about race, that we will never know the true extent of it, especially how deeply it impacted those who crossed the color line in search of safety, opportunity, even love.
I left this exhibition repeating a cliché of sorts: that this could be a movie or a miniseries. Which is shorthand for saying that it's a fascinating story, full of ethical and social complexity, with strange alliances between wealth, status and ambition and no tidy ending or easy moral message. It has the twists and turns of fiction. But it says a lot about race in America that we feel we need the scope and permission of fiction to get at the simple truth, which is always stranger and more incomprehensible.
Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian's Legacy continues through May 4 at the Morgan Library & Museum. www.themorgan.org
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