"We could not take the risk." And while she had many lovers (including famed art historian Bernard Berenson), she could marry none: Belle was cut off from her beloved extended family in DC: "Once Mama made the decision that we would live as white," she says. Paying a price for a new lifeīut as Benedict and Murray show, there was a terrible cost to maintaining that façade. As the literal face of the library, Belle became a power in her own right, courted by art dealers, embraced by the socially powerful, profiled as an elegant careerist at a time when working women were rare. And indeed, the Morgan Library became known as a private collection of rare books, manuscripts and art that competed with esteemed public institutions such as the British Museum. Belle could provide an important missing link: context. He knew that under her astute eye his collection would be more than an assortment of rarities only one of the world's richest men could acquire. In an interview, something about the young woman's intelligence and humor appealed to Morgan: She was hired on the spot.Īs the two began to work closely together, Morgan came to trust Belle's vision and expertise. Pierpont Morgan's nephew when they both worked in the rare books library at Princeton, young Morgan suggested to his uncle that he consider Belle as his personal librarian. When she became friends with financier J. The family's entire fortunes - where they lived, their occupations, everything - were completely dependent on Belle's white identity, as her mother constantly reminded her. (Contemporary portraits show an attractive woman who many Black people would immediately recognize as kindred apparently Gilded Age white folks were easier to fool.) Belle meets J.P.
That subterfuge became the cause of a huge rift - her parents separated, and Belle's family subsequently lived as white.īelle Marion Greener became Belle Da Costa Greene - the Da Costa name an allusion to a fabricated Portuguese grandmother, a convenient explanation for Belle's olive complexion. Greene's mother, Genevieve Fleet, determined that racial equality wasn't going to happen in her lifetime, and after the family's move to New York, she declared them white in the 1905 NY State Census. He was also an ardent race man, and spent his life pressing for racial equality. Greener, was the first Black graduate of Harvard. Greene was born into a prominent family of pale Black Washingtonians in 1883. What the world didn't know was that Belle Da Costa Greene was Black. As the personal librarian to financier J.P.Morgan, she pursued and curated a collection of rare books, manuscripts and art that became world-renowned. Their heroine, Belle Da Costa Greene, was one of the most prominent career women of her time. I wouldn't be me.Īnd that, basically, is at the crux of The Personal Librarian, a new novel by Heather Terrell (writing as Marie Benedict) and Victoria Christopher Murray. At several points in childhood and as an adult, I've loved the notion of being rich, but being white? I cannot imagine it. "Deep down, all Black people want to be white." I heard that in a social psychology class, repeated as if it were a truism.
WHO WAS THELIBRARIAN WHO CONTRIBUTED THE MOST TO THE MORGAN MOVIE
From Nella Larsen's 1929 classic, Passing, to the original Imitation of Life (the 1934 movie starred the incomparable Fredi Washington as Peola, the little girl who wanted to be white) to Britt Bennett's 2020 novel The Vanishing Half, the notion of a Black person posing as white to escape her Blackness just felt. I have a confession: I am not a fan of the passing trope.
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