Europeans were to be viewed for a time as anarchists, as criminals, and later as communists. Czolgosz was to be executed, and tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans and other “undesirable” ethnics would be viciously oppressed in the following years.
The mind of a twenty-first-century American is scarcely equipped to contemplate just how long the trip back to Russia must have been, not merely in terms of hours and days, but as measured by the beating of one’s heart, the slow and subtle escape of all optimism from one’s tightened lungs. How painful it must have been, how omnicidal for Jacob, meaning the evisceration of everything he was, of everything that mattered to him—the extermination of hope. Though not of the same depth, nor coupled with the same fear as that which characterized the journey of Africans in the hulls of slave ships (after all, he was still a free man, and his journey, however aborted, had been voluntary), there must have been points where the magnitude of his despair was intense enough to make the distinction feel as though it were one without much meaning.
So he returned to Minsk, in modern-day Belarus, for another six years, it taking that long for him to save up enough money to make the journey again. When he finally came back, family in tow, it would be for keeps. His desire for America was that strong, borne of the belief that in the new world things would be different, that he would be able to make something of himself and give his family a better life. The Wise family continued to grow after his arrival, including, in 1919, the birth of Leon Wise, whose name was later shortened to Leo—my grandfather.
Jacob was the very definition of a hard worker. The stereotype of immigrants putting in eighteen hours a day is one that, although it did not begin with him in mind, surely was to be kept alive by him and others like him. There is little doubt that he toiled and sacrificed, and in the end there was a great payoff indeed: his children did well, with my grandfather graduating from a prestigious university, Vanderbilt, in 1942. What’s more, the family business would grow into something of a fixture in the Nashville community that the Wise family would come to call home.
But lest we get carried away, perhaps it would be worth remembering a few things about Jacob Wise and his family. None of these things take away from the work ethic that was a defining feature of his character, but they do suggest that a work ethic is rarely enough on its own to make the difference. After all, by the time he arrived in America there had been millions of black folks with work ethics at least as good as his, and by the time he passed at the age of ninety-three, there would have been millions of peoples of color who had lived and toiled in this land, every bit as long as he had. Yet with few exceptions, they could not say that within a mere decade they had become successful shop owners, or that one of their sons had gone on to graduate from one of the nation’s finest colleges. Even as a religious minority in the buckle of the Bible belt, Jacob was able to find opportunity off-limits to anyone of color. He may have been a Jew, but his skin was the right shade, and he was from Europe, so all suspicions and religious and cultural biases aside, he had only to wait and keep his nose clean a while, and then eventually he and his family would become white. Assimilation was not merely a national project; for Jacob Wise, and for millions of other Jews, Italians, and Irish, it was an implicitly racial one as well.
Even before assimilation, Jacob had been able to gain access to opportunities that were off limits to African Americans. His very arrival in the United States—as tortuous and circuitous as was the route that he had been forced to take in order to achieve it—was made possible by immigration policies that at that moment (and for most of our nation’s history) have favored those from Europe over those from anywhere else. The Naturalization Act of 1790, which was the very first law passed by the U.S. Congress after the ratification of the Constitution, made clear that all free white persons (and only free white persons) were to be considered citizens, and that this naturalization would be obtained, for most all whites, virtually as soon as we arrived. Yet, during the period of both of Jacob’s journeys—the one that had been cut short and the one that had finally delivered him to his new home—there had been draconian limits, for example, on Asian immigration. These restrictions would remain in place until 1965, the year his grandson, my father, would graduate from high school. If that’s not white privilege—if that’s not affirmative action of a most profound and lasting kind—then neither concept has much meaning any longer; and if that isn’t relevant to my own racialization, since it is the history into which I was born, then the notion of inheritance has lost all meaning as well.
And there is more of interest here too, as regards the Wise’s role in the nation’s racial drama. Though whites who came to America after the abolition of slavery can rightly claim they had played no part in the evil that was that particular institution, it is simply wrong to suggest that they are not implicated in the broader system of racial oppression that has long marked the nation. In addition to the receipt of privileges, which stem from the racial classification into which they were able, over time, to matriculate, there are occasionally even more active ways in which whites, such as the Wises, participated in the marginalization of black and brown peoples.
It was only a few years ago, during a workshop that I was attending (not as a facilitator but rather as a participant), that I really came to appreciate this fact. During the session, we had all been discussing our family histories, and at one point I mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that my comfort in and around communities of color likely stemmed from the fact that my paternal grandfather had owned and operated a business in the heart of Nashville’s black community for many years—an establishment I had visited dozens of times, from when I had been only a small child until I was a teenager.
Prepared to move on to another subject and wrap up my time to share, I was interrupted by a black man, older than myself, whose ears and eyes had quite visibly perked up when I had mentioned my grandfather and his business in North Nashville.
“I’m originally from North Nashville,” he noted. “What kind of business
did he have?”
“A liquor store,” I responded. “My family owned liquor stores all over town and my grandfather’s was on Jefferson Street.”
“Your grandfather was Leo Wise?” he replied, appearing to have known him well.
“Yes, yes he was,” I answered, still not certain where all this was headed.
“He was a good man,” the stranger shot back, “a very good man. But let me ask you something: Have you ever thought about what it means that such a good man was, more or less, a drug dealer in the ghetto?”
Time stood still for a second as I sought to recover from what felt like a serious punch to the gut. I could feel myself getting defensive, and the look in my eyes no doubt betrayed my hurt and even anger at the question. After all, this was not how I had viewed my grandfather—as a drug dealer. He had been a businessman, I thought to myself. But even as I fumbled around for a reply, for a way to defend my grandfather’s honor and good name, I began to realize that the man’s statement had not been a condemnation of Leo Wise’s humanity. It was not a curse upon the memory of the man to whom I had lovingly referred as Paw Paw all of my life. Anyway, he was right.
The fact is, my grandfather, who had spent several of his formative years living with his family on Jefferson Street, indeed made his living owning and operating a liquor store in the black community. Though the drug he sold was a legal one, it was a drug nonetheless, and to deny that fact or ignore its implications—that my grandfather put food on his family’s table (and mine quite often) thanks to the addictions, or at least bad habits, of some of the city’s most marginalized black folks—is to shirk the responsibility that we all have to actually own our collaboration. His collaboration hadn’t made him a bad person, mind you, just as the black drug dealer in the same community is not necessarily a bad person. It simply meant that he had been complex, like all of us.
The discussion led to the discovery and articulation of some difficult
