The Butler: A Witness to History Read Online Free PDF Page A

until it just stopped. Then I’d remind myself that her son had told me how she had expressed to him how happy she was feeling before she ascended the stairs for what would be her last night of life on earth—happy that the story of Eugene Allen would finally be written.
    Standing outside, on the porch, in the winter darkness, I’d wait until I heard the deadbolt lock click from inside. Then the butler would pull back the curtain and wave good-bye.
    My man Godfrey.
    My man Eugene.
    Allen once spoke of Nixon pacing the corridors of the White House, deliberating inner office turmoil and his distrust of the press. In a public setting, an American president always appears confident, bold, and assured. The public sees them surrounded by the trappings of power. Didn’t Kennedy himself look vibrant at Cape Canaveral, in those cool sunglasses and surrounded by his space dreams? There was the ageless Ronald Reagan seen chopping wood with an axe in that rustic California setting, an image that seemed to speak of virility and power. If a man’s home, however, is his castle, what is the White House in which he dwells? The front door hardly keeps nightmares or bad tidings away. Is it also, at times, a bewildering chamber where the imagination can drift and wander? It is quite easy to imagine EugeneAllen bidding me farewell, turning from the door, and descending into his basement, where it is all gathered, where his world remains frozen in time, like a newsreel stopped two floors beneath his Helene-less bedroom. The pictures of him and Ike, of him and boxing champs inside the White House, of him and Mamie Eisenhower, of him snapping that picture of Daddy King, daddy to the civil rights leader. Ruminating, like some of the presidents he served, walking in the quiet dreamscape of a late night to fortify himself for the days ahead, to remember some of the glory of what had gone on before. At home, the president of his own life.
    · · ·
    Some weeks later I returned to share news: the transition team of President-elect Obama would be sending a VIP invitation for Eugene Allen to attend the inauguration. There was more news: Hollywood movie producers had begun calling. There was talk of a desire to do a movie about his life. “Well, I’ll be doggone,” he said. He smiled through pain. All his life he had worked on his feet. Now the ailments seemed to be everywhere inside his body—shoulders, hips, calves. A VIP invitation and Hollywood calling: I wondered how much any of it really meant to him. There was no one in the house to remind him to take his pills. There was no one—on those evenings he was in the mood—for whom to set out the fine china and light a candle. The way he used to do in the White House. The way he used to do for Helene. I could haveshared the news over the phone, but I had grown fond of him by then. As I walked away from the home of Eugene Allen on that evening, I was reminded of my own neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio. The neighborhoods shared similarities: tidy streets, solidly built homes, yards with fences and rows of hedges. Working-class neighborhoods. When I finished college, I had returned to reside with my grandparents and not my mother. Old people charm me. Maybe the distance from this street in Washington to my own neighborhood in Columbus was not that great at all.
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    D URING THE HISTORIC campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, stories of America’s racial history were constantly unspooling in daily and weekly publications: Michelle Obama’s enslaved forebears had been traced to a plantation in South Carolina. The White House—the residence to which Barack Obama was trying to gain entrance—had actually been physically built with the labor of slaves. How black was Obama? Many denizens of the urban hair salons would point to his father’s being from Africa itself—the motherland. His story was so mesmerizing, so bewilderingly fascinating, that it was beyond irony. But the world of 1600 Pennsylvania