Seattle Pioneer’s Legacy: A Proud and Confident Family

Today, he is a family legend. In 1888, at age 18, John Thomas Gayton was asking for trouble.

He was smart, proud, ambitious--qualities that could get a black man lynched in the cotton field country around Yazoo City, Miss. They’d already come for his brother, and J.T. was worried they’d come for him.

Then the white doctor who employed him as a coachman announced that he was heading West to a frontier town called Seattle. Would he like to come along?

J.T. Gayton never looked back.

Four children, 17 grandchildren, 26 great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren later, there’s no need to remind a Gayton that February is Black History Month.

Long after the frontier was settled, these sons and daughters of a pioneer kept on pioneering. Attorneys, athletes, professors and entrepreneurs, they trace a century of African American achievement. All credit their successes to the patriarch who mapped the way.

Take pride in yourself and your race, J.T. would say. Serve your community.

And above all, never forget you’re a Gayton.

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Those early years in Seattle, J.T. Gayton worked whatever jobs were open to blacks, which is to say anything with low pay and long hours: servant, house painter, barber.

In the mid-1890s, he hired on as a waiter at the Rainier Club, an exclusive gathering spot for Seattle’s white establishment. By 1901, he’d risen to head steward.

The way he carried himself--shoulders back, chin up, the hint of a knowing smile on his face--won him notice. In 1904, a judge hired him as bailiff at Seattle’s new U.S. District Court. He stayed 40 years, eventually being promoted to court librarian.

Some say he looked more like a judge than the judges, impeccably dressed in bow tie, pince-nez eyeglasses and dark suits. He was seldom without a cane, which he carried more for show than support, a different one for every suit. In summer, in his lapel he wore a yellow rose from the garden tended by his wife, Magnolia.

Young attorneys sought J.T.’s advice before approaching the stern federal judges. Italian immigrants asked him for help in studying for citizenship exams. He’d invite them home, drilling them on the Constitution.

But there was another side to J.T. Gayton that few whites saw--the storyteller with a keen wit, a boisterous laugh and a way of drawing people into his circle.

Weekends, the Gayton home was filled with visitors. There were bridge games in the parlor and dances in the basement, where J.T. would lead the quadrille. He’d greet his guests with a ceramic pitcher, painted like a bird and filled with liquor. “Would you like something from the blue jay?” he’d ask.

He became a powerful figure in Seattle’s black community, helping to found the city’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church. J.T. always said that was where the “classy” people went.

He was even more powerful within his family. By example and by admonishment, he set clear and absolute rules for daughter Louise and sons John, James and Leonard.

A Gayton does not take handouts. A Gayton is not seen on Jackson Street. A Gayton works hard, goes to church and gives to the community.

Magnolia, a few inches taller and many decibels quieter than her husband, had her own way of cultivating family ties. There was no need to tell her who was coming; she always had plenty of food prepared.

Black peddlers would go door to door in those days, selling books about African Americans. These were books the library didn’t carry. Magnolia always bought them, then made sure her children read them.

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John Jacob Gayton, born in 1899, began the Gaytons’ second generation in Seattle. He was the first baby baptized in the church his father helped to establish.

More than any other child, John J. took the importance of family to heart. He and his wife, Virginia, reared eight children: Guela, Sylvia, John C., Gary, Philip, Carver, Leonard and Elaine.

During the Great Depression, John worked two or three jobs at a time--anything to stay off the dole. He was a janitor, a waiter, even a dogcatcher, despite the fact that he and canines shared an enmity so deep the dogs would start barking when he was two blocks away.

John and Virginia Gayton believed in the American Dream, even when America was not ready to share it with blacks.

In 1938, they wanted a bigger home for their growing brood. They found an ideal house--ideal, that is, except that it was in Madrona, an all-white neighborhood.

Virginia, relatively fair-skinned, dealt with the real-estate agent, but when the family moved in, their race was obvious. Windows were smashed. A neighbor offered them twice what the house was worth, just so they’d move away. They stayed.

The children of John and Virginia recall few conflicts once the neighbors got to know them. The boys had permission to fight anyone who called them the “n” word. With five brothers, each instructed to stick up for the other, they didn’t have to fight very often.

Virginia, who had studied at Howard University in Washington, told her children stories about accomplished African Americans. John brought home black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. The family would discuss them over dinner.

Carver, named after the black botanist George Washington Carver, once came home from school with a story that sent his mother through the roof.

His history teacher had told him slavery wasn’t all bad, noting that his own slave-owning grandfather once went clear to Canada to find a doctor to care for a slave.

Virginia marched into the school.

“That slave might have gotten medical attention,” she lectured the teacher. “But they’d give their prize horse or cow the best attention too. They were all property--horse, cow and slave.”

At school, the children were told by counselors they’d make good clerks or secretaries. At home, John and Virginia would ask, “Have you ever thought about being a doctor or lawyer?”

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The view from 30 stories up is impressive, even on a rainy Seattle day. The clouds hang just above the window of Gary Gayton’s office in the law firm of Gaitan & Cusack.

One wall is covered by certificates of Gary’s academic and legal achievements. The other is crowded with photos: Gary partying with Sugar Ray Leonard, Gary talking to John Wayne, Gary behind President Jimmy Carter at a White House bill-signing ceremony.

All eight children of John and Virginia Gayton attended college, and five have advanced degrees. Most of their cousins went to college too. The ranks of this third generation of Seattle Gaytons include a college librarian, a professor, two Boeing executives and a high school teacher. Philip Gayton owns two nursing homes.

“We were brought up with no inferior feelings,” Gary says, his foot propped up on his desk, his hand clutching a bottle of sparkling water. “We all grew up with a sense of pride in who we were.”

It wasn’t always easy for others to figure out who the Gaytons were.

“Gaytons: Troublemakers, or What?” read the headline of a 1970 profile of Gary and Carver in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

At the time, Carver had recently resigned from his job as the University of Washington’s first black football coach. Hired to help smooth the school’s rocky relationship with black athletes, he quit after several black players were kicked off the team for refusing to take a loyalty oath.

Gary, meanwhile, was an attorney in private practice whose clients included those “troublesome” black UW athletes, as well as local members of the Black Panthers.

Whites called his office with threats so frightening that one secretary quit.

Troublemakers, or what? In the ‘60s, some saw the Gaytons as Uncle Toms. Since they were solidly middle-class, they were seen as trying to succeed in white society, therefore betraying their black brothers and sisters.

Guela, 69, now retired from her own middle-class career as head of the University of Washington’s social work library, once was challenged by her own daughter, Virginia.

“You’re not black,” Virginia said. “You’re colored.” Black people should hang together, no matter what, Virginia said. Black is beautiful, she said.

No, her mother replied, not all black is beautiful. What’s within a person is what matters, she said, not the color of their skin.

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J.T. and Magnolia Gayton died in 1954.

The second generation is all gone too.

Guela, oldest of the third generation, is the Gayton matriarch now. Her address book is filled with scribblings, many scratched out and scribbled again, tracking the movements of a spreading family tree.

She lives in a neighborhood of manicured yards, in a white house overlooking Lake Washington. In her living room sits a Victorian loveseat, carved from cherry. It’s from her grandparents’ house.

She remembers how it felt to sit in that seat as a young girl. She’d be decked out in her Sunday-go-to-meeting dress, swinging her legs, eating her grandmother’s poundcake and watching as the grown-ups sang and laughed.

Family. When she sees today’s single mothers, the homeless children, the drug-racked slums, the unemployed fathers, Guela thinks about that loveseat and how good it felt to sit there.

“With family, you feel secure,” she says. “When I was young, I knew my folks were coming home for me. I know a lot of youngsters today who don’t have that. It’s so sad.”

Her brother Carver thinks a lot about such things too.

He’s 57 and has three grown children, but recently he started family life again with his second wife, Carmen. They have a 5-year-old boy named Chandler, one of the youngest Gaytons.

Carver worries about his son inheriting a city in which gang violence grows younger and more deadly each year, a nation in which blacks still earn less and go to prison more than whites.

Carver is director of university relations for the Boeing Co. Carmen is the personnel director for a big accounting firm. They live in Magnolia, one of Seattle’s wealthiest neighborhoods.

Young Chandler will not want for money. But Carver says he can pass on something even more precious to his son.

He’ll never forget he’s a Gayton.