Old Letters Shed Light on Interracial Love Affair

Alice Hanley, the daughter of poor Irish immigrants, never meant for the world to learn the secrets that she poured out to her black lover.

Love letters, stuffed inside a black lace stocking, lay undisturbed for decades in a dark corner of an attic until a couple renovating their century-old home pulled down an old ceiling. They tumbled from oblivion into history.

Now the letters supply a rare, firsthand account of what working-class people of the early 1900s thought about interracial relationships and the opposite sex.

“It was extraordinary even in the North to have an open interracial relationship,” said David Blight, an Amherst College professor of history and black studies who has reviewed the letters. “It can be a window into the lives of ordinary people.”

“Love Across the Color Line: The Letters of Alice Hanley to Channing Lewis” will be published in June by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Hanley began writing to the black cook in August 1907, apparently breaking off the relationship a year later. Historians suspect that he returned the letters to her, as dictated by custom, and she stashed them in the attic.

Pamela See discovered them in 1992 while renovating her home in Northampton, about 20 miles north of Springfield. She turned them over to a friend, a local reporter, who began researching records and contacting historians to learn more about the couple.

Hanley, an occasional housecleaner in her early 30s, wrote to Lewis about her visits to his Springfield home, a new dress that she bought with his money, and her hopes for them to be together in the future.

“I do hope we will soon be together never to part until death, and then after this wicked life I hope we will be together in heaven, where there are no partings,” she wrote.

Hanley also nags Lewis for money and expresses jealousy. She reproaches him in one letter for hitting her. “You finished me that night you hit me. It is too bad it happened so, but I will bear it all,” she wrote.

In another, she appears to refer to a pregnancy by Lewis that apparently ended in abortion.

“I know I am caught and the doctor tells me so too,” she wrote. “You always promised to stand by me if anything happened and I guess it has, so I hope to God you won’t leave me now, for I have no one to help me out of it--only you, for I went with no one else.”

Hanley looked to Lewis, who was in his early 40s, as her economic and social life raft. “She saw him as someone more connected and more powerful than she was. So whatever race meant to her, it did not mean to her that this man . . . was cut off from opportunity,” said Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, a Smith College historian and the book’s other co-editor.

In the letters, sometimes eight pages long, Hanley never once explicitly mentions that her lover is black--a fact uncovered later by census and other city records. Though Hanley tried to hide the relationship from her father, her brother and some of Lewis’ friends seemed to have accepted it.

The couple could not marry, though. Lewis was separated but not divorced from another white Irish American woman.

Some surviving relatives later read newspaper accounts of the uncovered letters with surprise. “I had no clue that this situation was going on. I think it was swept under the rug,” said James Hanley, 55, the grandson of Alice Hanley’s brother.

City records show that five years after their breakup, Hanley and Lewis had reconciled and were living together unmarried in Springfield. But they later separated, and Hanley married an Irish American and adopted a boy.

Hanley died in 1921, leaving some land, $339 in debts and a historical legacy that she could scarcely have imagined.