Thursday Evenings

In memory of Alexander Cooper Spencer. What follows is based on my journal entry of 16th January 1997. From those notes I wrote the story in September 2018. It is now December 2025, nigh on twenty-nine years later. Most Thursdays, particularly in cold weather, I remember this man who could have been my friend if only I had made the time.

It used to be that trash collection in our part of Cambridge required putting glass bottles into an open blue plastic box and everything else into a standard trash can. Then came single stream recycling so now we have a green wheeled bin that will take paper, plastic and glass all together, the rest consigned to a can as before. The blue boxes are history, and for me, a history.

 Nancy and I had recently moved into our house on Erie Street in Cambridge. The place was in fairly rudimentary condition even though the previous owners had been living in it. The kitchen was barely functioning, every door in the house had a lock on it (connoting a former life of multi-occupancy) and the floor was undulating like an ocean swell, an indicator of failing foundations. While we waited for work to begin in the spring to remedy these and other defects, boxes were piled up on the ground floor and we were camping out on canvas chairs in the kitchen with a small round table at which we could eat.

It was a bitingly cold night in January, already dark, and I had put some beer bottles out on the curb into the blue recycling bin for collection the following morning. As I came out with a bag full of trash, I saw an elderly man stooping over, picking out bottles from the blue bin and popping them into a shopping cart, harvesting them I supposed for the 5 cent fee that he could get from a Redemption Center. Seeing what he was doing I said, “If you hang on a moment, I think I have some more bottles for you.” The old man looked up from what he was doing and underneath all his wrappings I could now see that he was black. “Is that a British accent I detect?” he asked, in a British accent. In an upper class English accent in fact. “Well, yes,” I responded, somewhat taken aback ,“you got me in one. But it sounds as though you might be British too.”

“Yes indeed,” he said, “I am British but originally I hail from East Africa.”

“Oh really?” I replied, “Jambo bwana, uhali gani?” asking him how he was.

“I am afraid your Swahili may be better than mine,” he said his plummy English tones now clearly discernible. “I left some time ago, when I was a child, and came to England for my education.” He went on to tell me that he was born in Mwanza in Tanganyika. Tanganyika, he said, not Tanzania.

“On the shores of Lake Victoria,” I interjected, “I once had a student from there, his name was Wenceslas Malangahe. He became an architect in Dodoma.”

“Oh, the Malangahe family is very well known in Mwanza, very distinguished. I can see you are knowledgeable about this part of the world.” I explained that I had taught in Kenya some years ago but I asked him to return to his own story. As he told it, his parents had died in a car crash and he and his sister had been taken into the care of the then Governor of the territory who also gave these two orphans his family name. When the Governor’s term was up, he and his wife returned to London bringing my interlocutor and his sister with them. They were sent to an English school and he had been admitted to Oxford.

“How extraordinary,” I remarked, “Which college did you attend?”

“Balliol,” he said.

“Good grief,” I couldn’t help exclaiming, “That was my college! I think it’s time for a cup of tea.”

Now remember, we were out on the street on a bitterly cold January night, I was putting out the garbage on a Thursday for the Friday morning pick up, and this elderly black man was picking bottles out of the recycling and putting them in his shopping cart. And we find we are graduates of the same Oxford college.

“That would be delightful,” he said, “It would be a great pleasure.” He expressed anxiety about his shopping cart full of beer bottles lest he should lose his cargo to a competitor, so we pushed it out of sight behind the car and went indoors. I introduced myself but before he could reciprocate his attention was caught by Nancy’s piano and was beginning to enthuse about it, imagining what a beautiful and gifted woman my wife must be when I told him that she was the pianist in the family. But then he was further distracted by the pile of music alongside, on top of which were some Beethoven scores. “Oh, the Schnabel edition! This is magnificent! But the Schnabel edition has not been published for some years…” he said, his voice trailing off in wonder. I think he must have been a little disappointed in my ignorance but was gentleman enough not to show it.

In the light I could see him more clearly. He kept his coat on but had taken off his hat, a sort of ersatz flying cap with an upturned peak and ear flaps, lined with something warm and furry. He was shorter than me, probably around 5’-6” or so, and in his 60’s or early 70’s. Now that I come to picture him in my mind, I realize he bore a striking resemblance to Archbishop Tutu. He had that rather square sort of face, very open, ingenuous. His hair was grey and he was a little balding. His eyes were old and weathered, red from exposure, milky with age. His manner was impeccable, that of an upper class Englishman from the Edwardian age, fully consonant with the short account he had already given of himself.

While I put on the kettle and found some tea bags and mugs he kept on talking. Quite soon into the conversation, if that is what you can still call such a one-sided affair, he told me that he was a seer, a clairvoyant, and that he had direct communications with scientists of the past (Galileo, Faraday and others) and of the future (unnamed) who together vouchsafed to him the unfolding of scientific theory and practice. At some point in the conversation I mentioned that I had a brother who taught medieval history at Oxford. This prompted him to add that he had one particularly strong and influential “teacher”, an Englishwoman, unnamed, who lived in the 14th century but communicates with him now and who he says is “very knowledgeable.” On the instructions of his “teachers” he is working on “thousands of experiments”. Similarly he is in constant communication with Beethoven who dictates to him new compositions, principally for piano but some orchestral works too.

He is also working on plans for a house. I told him I was an architect at which he expressed great delight saying this was a “very wonderful profession, bringing things of great beauty into the world.” Affirmation comes from the least expected quarters. His project for a house or rather, “a palace, more properly described” has an undisclosed site situated somewhere west of Cambridge. He has planned the whole thing on a 16-foot module, with the exception of the third floor gallery which has dimensions of 40 feet by 80 feet, “a total of 3,200 square feet.” This is where he will paint, translating the continuing thoughts of the great masters, hanging the masterpieces in the gallery. The whole building has “a total area of 300,000 square feet.”

We talked on for some time, or rather he talked and, not wishing to interrupt the flow, I interjected if only to indicate that I was paying attention. When our tea mugs were almost dry, Nancy and daughter Jessica arrived back from Harvard Square, cold and rosy cheeked, to find me in earnest conversation with this unknown person. Our guest leapt to his feet and with great charm and grace introduced himself as Stirling Alexander Cooper Spencer. He explained that his African name was Kiwawere but he had relinquished that name for that of his English family. But, as he remarked, time was getting on and he had to get back to the business of collecting bottles which he referred to without a hint of embarrassment. He was “delighted to have had this talk and to know that civilization is alive and well in Cambridge.” As I was showing him out and retrieving his shopping cart from behind the car in the driveway, I asked casually who had been the Master of Balliol in his time. He offered a name that I did not recognize and now I do not remember.

We bid each other goodbye, he going off to collect more bottles, I returning to the relative warmth of the kitchen.

We had started the evening as random strangers meeting in the street and had ended up as friends. Twenty years later, I am still a little ashamed to recollect that in breach of this new friendship I went through the packing boxes until I found a copy of the Balliol Register and looked up the names of the Masters of the college. Given Mr. Cooper Spencer’s age – perhaps 10 or 20 years older than me, it was hard to tell – the only possible Master to fit the dates would have been Sir David Lindsay Keir. Likewise, in subsequent weeks my search through books and later on Google, for permutations of the name Stirling Alexander Cooper Spencer has not revealed any former governors of Tanganyika, only an African American writer from Ohio, Doug Cooper Spencer.

A few weeks later, when the weather was warmer, I caught sight of Mr. Cooper Spencer (as I still feel bound to call him) wheeling his shopping cart full of bottles. We greeted each other warmly, taking up on some of the strands of our previous conversation. It was then, unprompted, that he corrected himself on the issue of the Master of Balliol. “It was David Lindsay Keir,” he said, “not [so-and-so]. I was mistaken in my recollection”.

On another occasion I met him on the subway (without his shopping cart). As I explained I was going to work, he let me know that he was going “to his lab in Dedham” (a suburb south of Boston). This is where his experiments were being conducted. Beyond that he was not at liberty to tell me anything.

Over the next year or two we met in the street and either waved to one another or stopped and shared some small talk. During the course of these conversations I learned that he had a room in the house of an Ethiopian woman near Central Square so it seemed to me that at least he had a place to hang his hat. I think he said that there was also a Ghanaian in the house.

Nancy and I were friendly at this time with Genevieve MacMillan who lived on the top floor of a tired old box of a building in Harvard Square. Mrs. MacMillan (“Ginou” as she was known to her friends) had been raised in the French Pyrenees, studied at the Ecole des Science Politiques (Science-Po) in Paris, and came to the United States as a G.I. bride, married to Robert McMillan, an architect who was to become one of the founders of The Architects Collaborative. The marriage did not last long and Ginou fled the isolation of the TAC compound in Lexington for the more vibrant culture of Harvard Square. She opened the Henri IV, the first French restaurant in Cambridge, and started investing in real estate in what was then a rundown market. These enterprises fueled her real passion, the collection of African and Oceanic Art, into which she had been initiated by Madeleine Rousseau, a Parisian salonnière and leading authority in the field. At the end of her life Ginou had amassed a vast collection of African art and artifacts, much of which was hung on the walls of her fourth floor apartment in an old and unprepossessing wooden building on Bow Street. “Walls” does not do justice to her genius. In fact she had ripped out all the lathe and plaster from the walls, leaving only the studs (which supported the roof) allowing a clear view and dappled light right across the floor. Clear, if it were not for the masks, fetishes, stools, thrones, musical instruments, adzes, coconut scrapers and other objects from a wide range of African cultures, hung from the ceiling and the studs and placed on every square inch of floor. An otherwise spartan apartment with only bare amenities for sleeping and eating was replete with these treasures[1].

As she became less mobile with age, Ginou made a habit of asking friends to come round to her apartment to have lunch with her, usually a bowl of soup and a piece of fruit. On one such occasion I told her the story of Mr. Cooper Spencer. She warmed to my description and suggested I invite him to come and have lunch the following week. Of course I said this would depend on when I next ran into him since I did not have an address or telephone number for him. So, this open-ended invitation rested with me for a few weeks until I saw him again in the street, wheeling his cart. I relayed the message, explaining who Mrs. McMillan was and asked him if he would be interested in joining me for lunch at her house. Mr. Cooper Spencer was delighted. His face lit up as he expressed how honored he would be to meet such a very fine lady.

I asked him what his availability was, to which he replied that he could not make it the following Wednesday but was otherwise free. A call to Ginou fixed our lunch at her house for 12 noon on Monday of the following week. I agreed with Mr. Cooper Spencer that we would meet at the Harvard Square news kiosk, just outside the subway entrance, at ten to twelve and walk from there to her house.

We met each other at the appointed time and place, at the kiosk. Mr. Cooper Spencer was dressed in a dark blue suit with a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie. He looked superb and his demeanor matched his presentation. He was beaming, clearly glad to be going to this important lady’s house. We walked down Mass. Ave, turned right on Plympton and at the bottom of the hill faced the front door of this shabby grey four storey wooden building. I didn’t see the look on his face when we were on the street but once we had pressed the bell and were buzzed in he did most definitely have a look of wonder and apprehension as we started up a rickety staircase passing mobiles made of weathered driftwood hanging at every level in the stairwell. On the fourth floor I knocked and pushed the door open to a great flood of light and this exhibition of African art hanging from every surface. The galley kitchen with a wooden counter was in the foreground, Mrs McMillan was on the other side, seated in a high backed chair, greeting us with as lively “Yoo-hoo!”

I made the introductions and we were all seated at a round table made from the side of an electric cable spool. I was asked to warm up the soup and cut the bread while Ginou and Mr. Cooper Spencer started to talk. Overhearing their conversation from the galley I could pick up his enthusiasm for her magnificent collection and her interest in his life and background. I was just bringing in the soup when I heard her ask in her rich and charming French accent, “And who has been the love of your life?”

“I did have a great love,” he replied, not missing a beat, “but it was not to be.” My heart was in my mouth as I stood stock still, soup in hand, waiting for him to go on. Ginou was looking at him with a seriousness confirming that this had not been a scurrilous or superficial question.

“She was a wonderful singer,” he continued, releasing us, me at least, from that momentary catatonia, “we used to play together and gave concerts. Schubert was of course a favourite but there were others too. She had a beautiful voice and we were in love. But she was a young Englishwoman and our friendship could not last. I came to MIT for my graduate studies. I have very fond memories.” It did not seem the moment to ask what subject he had been studying, when this was, or whether had even gained his doctorate. No gaps in the information could be filled with questions, only our own interpretation of the dimensions of that sadness. Ginou broke the pause and it emerged without his being asked that Mr. Cooper Spencer had been studying microbiology and had known her old friend Harold Amos. Harold was an emeritus professor at Harvard, a distinguished microbiologist, an African American from Philadelphia who amongst his other pursuits had worked in a French research laboratory and had become an avid connoisseur of good food and wine. He had not only been a patron of Henri IV but had been a regular tennis partner of Ginou.

All of this was regular grist to the Cambridge mill of social connection, with a twist of course, and time unaccountably flew by. At some point Ginou broke off the conversation, inviting Mr. Cooper Spencer to walk around the apartment to take in her collection while she had some architectural questions to ask of me. That business was soon finished but her guest was as if in a trance, walking slowly, softly as if in a place of worship. We observed him in silence for some minutes.

Breaking this period of contemplation, Ginou declared that she was going off to the Du Bois Institute at Harvard to listen to a panel discussion on slavery to be led by Skip Gates, Cornel West and Anthony Appiah. She asked us both if we would like to join her. I pled the pressure of work and needing to get back to my office but Mr. Cooper Spencer gladly accepted the invitation. I left them both walking up the street in continuing discussion.

I called Ginou the following day to thank her for lunch and for her gracious hospitality towards our now mutual friend. She had been charmed by him and was glad to have made his acquaintance.

“How was the panel discussion?” I asked.

“Oh, it was as one might expect,” she said, “nothing particularly new. I had to leave before the end but our friend stayed on I believe.”

It was a week or two before I met up with Mr. Cooper Spencer again. I had been anxious to hear his assessment of our lunch, of the collection of African material culture and was curious to know what he had made of the discussion at the Du Bois Institute. We bumped into each other somewhere on Magazine Street. I think it must have been a Thursday evening again, a time for picking up bottles from the blue bins. He was delighted to see me and effusive in his thanks for the wonderful lunch, the introduction to the marvelous Mrs McMillan and of course her stupendous collection of art. He wished me to please pass on his thanks and appreciation to Mrs McMillan.

“Of course,” I said, “I’ll be only too glad to pass this on. I know she was very happy to meet you and will be delighted to hear that you enjoyed it. But what of the panel discussion at Harvard? How was that?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “Well of course those professors are very distinguished and they raised some interesting historical points about slavery in this country. But I did have to question their shared assumption.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, “at the end the audience was invited to ask questions so I raised my hand to make a point that I think they had been ignoring throughout the discussion.”

“What was that?”

“I told them that they had been concentrating too much on the suffering associated with slavery – which may well all be true – but on the other hand they had failed to acknowledge that slavery was our lucky break.”

“You said that!”

“Well yes, because if you consider it, if slavery had not happened, we would all still be tilling the fields, engaged in the primitive agricultural economy that we had been living in for millennia.”

“So what was the reaction? What did they say?”

“Of course none of them had an answer. As I say, I don’t think they had examined the issue from that perspective.”

I should think not. Gates, West and Appiah must have been for the first time in their lives at a loss for words. Who was this well dressed black man with an educated English accent making a proposition that even the brightest of their grad students might not even think of, let alone have the temerity to ask?

I myself was stunned and if I had not been on my way to a meeting – whose meaning or purpose has now faded into obscurity – I would have stayed to debate him on this point myself. I should have stayed – this is a record of at least one of my regrets - but after a few more brief words we bid each other goodbye and hurried on with our respective business.

From then on, I saw less of Mr. Cooper Spencer even though I did keep looking out for him particularly on Thursdays when I knew he should be around. The winter of 2004 was particularly severe and by the time we were into February I was concerned that I had not seen him in some months. I did not know who the Ethiopian lady was, in whose house he had said he was staying, nor did I know how I would find her. I did go to two homeless shelters and asked if they had known of Alexander Cooper Spencer or if he had ever stayed there but the rules on confidentiality meant they could not tell me anything. The feeling I left with was more of despair than hope. I have not seen my friend since that winter, now 14 years ago.

Why am I writing this now, so long after the period in which I knew Mr. Cooper Spencer, or to put it more accurately, hardly knew him? Partly this is prompted by my having reached an age at which intimations of mortality seem more insistent than they used to be, family, friends and colleagues dying or succumbing to protracted and debilitating illness, sometimes both. And, it now occurs to me, I am probably around the same age as Mr. Cooper Spencer appeared to me then. The “All men are mortal” syllogism is closing in, bringing with it a heightened awareness of things done and not done.

It is the latter, the opportunities missed, the things I failed to do that come to the fore when I think of Mr. Cooper Spencer. I failed to ask crucial questions, I failed to inquire more deeply in response to what appeared to be his fantasies. Was he really a ward of a former governor of Tanganyika? Is he really in communication with a 14th century lady scientist, and with Beethoven and Leonardo? Did he really have a research lab in Dedham? To all of these questions the answer is, probably not. But how out of the blue did he manage to divine my Oxford college, how did he know about the Schnabel edition of Beethoven? Outwardly his affect was as strong a testimonial as one could wish for.

A clear thread to follow into what was real for him was his response to Ginou’s question, his not being able to fulfill the love of his life. Was it pure old fashioned British colonial racism that thwarted his relationship with the beautiful singer? Or was it just that things didn’t work out? What a joy it must have been to have shared that love of music, to perform together. That was not a fantasy. But equally what a crushing blow it must have been to know that joy could not be sustained, that it was for one reason or another, terminated. Was it this that had led him on a path from Oxford and MIT to picking up bottles on the streets of Cambridge?  Who had been there to nurture and support him at any step of the way or was he just alone, a black African in a lonely and competitive white world?

So many years later, I would like to talk to Mr. Cooper Spencer about these things, about our families, about his research and my architecture, about his views on development in Africa. I would like to have been his friend in a more substantial way than I was. Was work really too pressing, the affairs of the world too engaging, family life too engrossing and life too short to have missed an opportunity for the conversation from which comes, might have come, a deeper friendship?

The blue boxes for bottles have gone now. But I still think of Mr. Cooper Spencer on a Thursday evening, especially in winter, most especially when it is bitingly cold.

Hubert Murray

Thursday, 20 September 2018

[1] After her death in 2008, Genevieve McMillan bequeathed much of this collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and to Tougaloo College in Missisippi.