The hands on the wooden clock in Susan Cayton Woodson’s dining room haven’t moved since her repairman left town. Though it’s a Thursday afternoon in August, the clock–which has rotating windows displaying the month and day of the week–says it’s 6:26 on a Friday in March. Jefferson Davis gave it to Woodson’s great-grandfather, Hiram Revels, who in 1870 became the first black man elected to the U.S. Senate. Woodson, who runs an art gallery out of her Hyde Park condo, is one of Revels’s oldest living descendants. At 84 years old, she moves easily through her nine rooms, showing off a painting or a photograph with grace.
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spring by Washington State Uni-versity Press. After leaving Congress, Hiram Revels became the first president of Alcorn State University in Mississippi. Horace Cayton Sr. attended Alcorn (where he first met Susie Revels, while dating her older sister), graduating in the early 1880s. He migrated west and in 1894 launched the Seattle Republican, a weekly newspaper aimed at an interracial audience. It stayed in business for 19 years. According to Hobbs, Cayton earned a reputation as a staunch Republican, outspoken and unafraid of courting conflict in order to make a point. Susie graduated with honors from Rust College in Mississippi and, after an epistolary courtship, moved to Seattle to marry Horace. She served as associate editor of the Republican and immersed herself in civic activities that earned her the respect of her community. “Mother was an international person,” Woodson says. “She could talk to anyone. She could talk to the working-class people of Seattle. Read to them, talk to them, and settle their minds–even though they were hungry and on the street–she was great. Mother could talk to the world.”
But every family has its quirks, and in spite of the Caytons’, Woodson feels that she was loved and had a happy, normal childhood. She helped Revels steal their father’s car so he could stop a ship of nonunion workers from landing in the city’s port. On the day she was to come out to Seattle society, she absconded with some buddies and destroyed her white dress climbing up a flagpole in protest of some now forgotten injustice. Langston Hughes was one of the numerous starving artists and leftists who lodged in the Cayton home on visits to Seattle. “Nothing unusual,” Woodson says.
She and Robeson walked down 47th toward Madge’s apartment at the Rosenwald Building. Black people crowded the sidewalks, dressed to impress, entering and exiting black-owned businesses–the first she had ever seen. When they arrived, Woodson took a photograph of Robeson and the waiting driver to mark the moment. Robeson, dressed in a suit with a hat in hand, smiled into the camera, dwarfing the man next to him. That evening Woodson and Madge went to hear Robeson sing. Woodson was too stunned by the audience to pay much attention to the show. “You know something?” she said to Madge. “All we have to do is drop a bomb and all the black folks in the world would be dead.”
When it was clear that Susie was dying, Horace Jr. commissioned Cortor to do her portrait. He wanted to capture his mother’s image for history’s sake. “He could visualize it better than I could visualize it,” Woodson admits. “I wouldn’t think like that. But his vision of history was always there so that, yes, you paint the last daughter of Senator Hiram Revels.” Even in her weakened state, Susie did her best to stress political points with the more conservative Cortor as he worked. “She was mad when he’d leave,” Woodson says. “And the next day when it was time…she was looking out to see when he was coming.”
