Greene’s nearly decade-long collaboration with Morgan was arguably the most important relationship of her life outside her family, and I think the curators have done a terrific job of showing the peculiar intimacy that collectors and curators share. The ledgers, letters, cards, and other ephemera on display document not only what Morgan bought but also what Greene turned him on to. Though collectors and curators or librarians usually maintain a professional distance, it is inevitably disrupted when they disagree about a purchase and whether it works in the collection; it’s a team sport for two.
Morgan had the money and the dream—and a great eye—but Greene had the vision and creativity to see that the library could tell a story, not so much about the accumulation of stuff but about man’s deep desire for knowledge, and thus truth. Ciallela and Palmer suggest that if Greene had told the truth about herself she would not have had her extraordinary career. But lies demand constant feeding, and the work of maintaining her fiction must have been draining. If you’re going to be white, someone else has to be Black—and preferably stereotypically so, the better to emphasize your God-decreed superiority. When her maid died, in 1910, Greene wrote to Berenson about the “poor little black thing who had been more than a mother to me” and “my faithful and adoring slave.” In 1921, after seeing Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones,” starring the Black actor Charles Sidney Gilpin, she wrote to Berenson, “A real (New York) darky—and amazingly well done.”
The language Greene used with white people was perhaps not so far from that of the light-skinned, class-conscious Black society in which she spent her early years—which considered dark-skinned Blacks to be less “distinguished.” Born in 1879 in Washington, D.C., which, as the historian Willard B. Gatewood noted, was then “the center of the black aristocracy in the United States,” Belle Marion Greener was the third child of Genevieve Ida Fleet Greener, a musician and a teacher, and Richard Theodore Greener, a lover of books and art who, in 1870, had been the first Black graduate of Harvard College. In 1872, he became the principal of the Preparatory High School for Colored Youth, the country’s first public high school for Black students (and one of the schools where Genevieve had taught music). After they married, in 1874, Genevieve followed her husband to South Carolina, where he had become the first Black professor at the University of South Carolina. They returned to D.C. after Reconstruction fell apart, and Greener supported his growing family by working as a lawyer and as the dean of the Howard University Law School.