| OCR Text |
Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 347 WALLACE hENry ThUrMAN Although many blacks flocked to the Northeast—more than half a million during the World War I period—thousands also migrated to the West, especially the Pacific Northwest.8 Only sketchy, contradictory information exists about Thurman’s paternal family. In his brief autobiographical portraits, Thurman said that he came from a family of pioneer westerners.9 Richard Bruce Nugent, his long-time friend and a gay voice of the Renaissance, depicted Thurman’s family in an unpublished fictional manuscript that opened with Thurman’s great-grandparents. Nugent implied that Thurman’s earliest known paternal ancestor was a woman brought to the Salt Lake Valley with the Mormon pioneers. However, no evidence of any of his paternal ancestors in Utah before 1892 remains extant.10 When Thurman discovered that his paternal grandparents managed a hotel in California, he wired for reservations without announcing who he was. Thurman’s grandparents welcomed him.11 While Wallace was in California, Oscar Thurman—now paralyzed and suffering from what was diagnosed as tuberculosis of the throat—came to visit his parents. Thurman wrote that he almost fainted from the sight of his father, and he called Oscar “the most pitiful albeit nauseating sight I have seen in many a day.”12 More information exists about Thurman’s mother’s family, especially his maternal grandmother, Emma Ellen Gladen Jackson (“Ma Jack”), with whom Thurman shared a deep and lasting relationship. Emma Jackson was born in Osceola, Missouri, on August 10, 1862. She and her first husband, Missouri native Thomas Stanford Stewart, moved to Leadville, Colorado, in the early 1880s, where they lived with their two children, Beulah and Arthur. Jackson married her second husband, Wallace P. Jackson, on July 29, 1890, eighteen years before Thomas Stewart’s 1908 death.13 Two years later, in June 1892 and for unknown reasons, Jackson brought her two children to Salt Lake City, which had only a small African American population.14 At the time, the federal census records indicated that most of Utah’s blacks—male and female—worked as servants and waiters in commercial establishments and private homes.15 Records divulge only enough information about Jackson’s early activities in Salt Lake City 8 Quintard Taylor, “Susie Revels Cayton, Beatrice Morrow Cannady, and the Campaign for Social Justice in the Pacific Northwest,” in African American Women Confront the West: 1600–2000, eds. Quintard Taylor and Shirley Ann Wilson Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 189–204. 9 Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s, 67. 10 Ibid. 11 Van Notten, Wallace Thurman’s, 78. This is according to a letter Thurman sent to William Jourdan Rapp, a New York City editor and friend. 12 Ibid. At that time his grandparents lived at 1538 Fifth Street, Santa Monica, California. 13 Ibid., 59. 14 Ibid., 60. 15 Ibid.; Wallace Thurman, “Quoth Brigham Young: —This is the Place,” Messenger 8 (August 1926): 236; Ronald Gerald Coleman, “A History of Blacks in Utah, 1825–1910” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1980), 79–80. 347 |
