Mary Dickerson Donahey to Charles W. Chesnutt, 4 February 1932
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The Society of Midland Authors1
Feb. 4 1932
Dear Mr. Chesnutt and all the rest ---
Your letter reached us in the midst of our first snowfall of this most peculiar season! It found Bill2 doing the hall over. Depression? I should say yes! He having nothing else to paint, has taken to walls, which is good for the house and him too, and of course he is finishing up a fine hob.
I am just crawling about aboutafter a week of flu or grippe or something enervating. Plenty of time however. I had just got through my last book which is to be published in May. Mysterious Mansions. I think you would all like to read it. It is aimed at adults though appearing as a junior, and has to do with my life on Blackwell's Island.3
Buck4 wrote us and we too wish Delehunte5 wou:ld sell to him.6 Bill goes to the extreme of wishing we could force her to. He says he will do the dirty work if you can tell him what dirty work to do! Is there any way at all we can get rid of her? Any corner we can turn, andy stunt we csn play? She is a bad neighbor in everyway. Worse than we expected. She was unloaded on us against all our wills. We two have no feelings of anything but distaste and don't care what yarns she tells of us so let us throw her out if we can do it legally! Can't we?
Glad you are better.7 I wish we could see you all for a visit. Bill should have taken more time for his trip last fall--if he had started earlier we could have stayed more than six days but I had to be back on Oct. 28 which cramped our style. I would have loved to linfger at Chesterland. In many ways I like it better than the northern place!8
Thanks again, for all your helpfulness with taxes, and love to everyone. I suppose small John9 is in school now! How time flies!
Affectionately MaryHave you read Embreee's Brown America?10 It ought to make people think--if they'll read it! If you have n't it I'll lend you mine if you like.
Correspondent: Mary Augusta Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) was a White journalist and author of children's books. She was originally from New Jersey, grew up in New York City and worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from 1898 to 1905. She married the cartoonist William Donahey (1883–1970) in 1905 and moved with him to Chicago, where she wrote children's and young adult books, cookbooks and newspaper columns. The couple befriended the Chesnutts in the early 1900s, when they were part of the Tresart Club and the Chester Cliffs Club.
1. The Society of Midland Authors was founded in 1915 by and for published authors from twelve Midwestern states of the U.S and is still in existence. Its headquarters are in Chicago. Both Mary Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) and her husband William Donahey (1883–1970) were members by 1930; Chesnutt was not. Mary Dickerson Donahey was the organization's secretary at the time this letter was written. For readability, the remainder of the letterhead is not transcribed in the body of the letter but is included in this footnote as unformatted text. The letterhead can be seen in its entirety in the accompanying image of the letter. The text of the remainder of the letterhead is as follows: PRESIDENT MARGARET AYER BARNES 1153 NORTH DEARBORN ST. CHICAGO VICE-PRESIDENTS ILLINOIS MARY HASTINGS BRADLEY INDIANA MEREDITH NICHOLSON IOWA EDWIN FORBES PIPES KANSAS WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE MICHIGAN ARTHUR H. VANDENBERG MINNESOTA OLE E. RÖLVAAG MISSOURI J. WILLIAM HUDSON NEBRASKA BESS STREETER ALDRICH OHIO CLARENCE STRATTON SOUTH DAKOTA JOSEPH MILLS HANSON WISCONSIN ZONA GALE SOCIAL CHAIRMAN ARTHUR MEEKER, JR. SECRETARY MARY DICKERSON DONAHEY 2331 CLEVELAND AVENUE CHICAGO TREASURER HARLAN WARE HOTEL SHERMAN CHICAGO LIBRARIAN RENEE B. STERN DIRECTORS BAKER BROWNELL LLEWWLLYN JONES FANNY BUTCHER CLARA INGRAM JUDSON GEORGE DIELON DOUGLAS MALLOCH ALICE GERSTENBERG ARTHUR MEEKER, JR. EDGAR J. GOODSPEED MARION STROBEL MITCHELL DAVID HAMILTON HARRIET MONROE [back]
2. William (Bill) Donahey (1883–1970) was a White writer and cartoonist from Westchester, Ohio. After graduating from the Cleveland School of Art in 1903, he briefly worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where he met and married Mary Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) in 1905 and became friends with the Chesnutts. The couple joined the Chester Cliffs Club and built a cottage on the land. After 1905, the couple moved to Chicago, where he worked for the Chicago Tribune and produced a widely syndicated comic strip, the "Teenie Weenies," which ran intermittently from 1914 until his death and became the basis of an advertising campaign for a canned-goods company in the 1920s as well as for several books he co-wrote with his wife. [back]
3. Mysterious Mansions was published by Doubleday, Doran & Company in late 1932. It is set on Blackwell's Island, now Roosevelt Island, New York, in the East River between Manhattan and the borough of Queens. Mary Dickerson Donahey's father was a storekeeper on the island when it housed the City or Charity Hospital. [back]
4. Edmund Vance "Buck" Cooke, Jr. (1905–1976) was a visual artist who worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in the 1930s and was interested in moving to the countryside and joining the Chester Cliffs Club, a small stockholding corporation founded by Chesnutt and some friends in order to purchase land for summer homes in Chester Township in Ohio. In 1939 Cooke moved to a farm near Peninsula in the Cuyahoga Valley with his family. His father, Edmund Vance "Buck" Cooke (1866–1932), was a well-known Cleveland poet and, like Chesnutt and Dickerson Donahey, a member of the Tresart Club that was founded around the same time as the Chester Cliffs Club. [back]
5. Mary Ellen Delahunte (1870–1951) was a White woman who lived in Cleveland most of her life. In 1921, she purchased a plot of land from A. Frank Counts (1881–1946) and his wife Eula (1869–1942), members of the Chester Cliffs Club. The Counts had not consulted the other members of the Club and gave Delahunte the impression that she was not responsible for property taxes or repairs relating to the property. This led to conflicts within the Club regarding Delahunte's unpaid tax bills. [back]
6. See "Buck" Cooke Jr.'s January 27, 1932, letter to Chesnutt, regarding his interest in purchasing Mary Ellen Delahunte's plot and becoming a Chester Cliffs Club member. [back]
7. The specific illness is not clear. In a number of letters written in 1931 and 1932, Chesnutt and his correspondents vaguely refer to his deteriorating health but do not address specifics. After he died on November 15, 1932, his death certificate, completed by the attending physician, listed hypertension, arteriosclerosis, and a hypertrophied prostate as causes of death, as well as toxemia and herpes zoster as contributing causes. [back]
8. William Donahey (1883–1970) and his wife Mary Dickerson Donahey (1876–1962) went to Grand Marais on Michigan's Upper Peninsula for their summer vacations. They owned an unusual cottage on Grand Sable Lake: the barrel-shaped Pickle Barrel House, built for them in 1926, evoked William Donahey's Teenie Weenie cartoons and advertising illustrations. Ten years later, the Donaheys no longer found it feasible to live in, and it was moved to Grand Marais in 1937 as a tourist attraction. [back]
9. Chesnutt's grandson "Johnnie," John Chesnutt Slade (1925–2011), spent much time with his grandparents as a small child, since he and his mother, Dorothy (1890–1954), lived with them until the fall of 1931, when her husband John G. Slade (1890–1976) completed his medical degree at Howard University. Johnnie and his mother also spent the summers with his grandparents in Idlewild, Michigan. [back]
10. Edwin Embree (1883–1950) was a White writer with abolitionist roots who attended Kentucky's integrated Berea College (founded by his grandfather John Gregg Fee, 1816–1901) and later Yale University. He worked for the Rockefeller Foundation, ultimately serving as its vice president in 1927, and then became president of the Rosenwald Fund (1928–1948), a philanthropic organization that provided financial support for African American and Jewish institutions and individuals. Embree published Brown America: The Story of a New Race (New York: Viking Press, 1931) with the express intent of combating White readers' "amazing lack of knowledge of Negroes as a group" (280). [back]
