The Elevator Man Adheres to Form

Except in office buildings and large stores and hotels, this occupation is given over to the Negro, who spends twelve hours a day drowsing in a corner or standing to turn a wheel. Paul La[u]rence Dunbar wrote poetry while he ran an elevator, and ambitious if less talented colored boys today study civil service examinations in their unoccupied time; but the situation as a life job is not alluring. Twenty-five dollars a month for wage, with perhaps a half this sum in tips, twelve hours on duty, one week in the night time and the next in the day—no wonder the personnel of this staff changes frequently in an apartment house. A bright boy will be taken by some business man for a better job, and a lazy one drifts away to look for an easier task, or is dismissed by an irate janitor.
—Mary White Ovington, “Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York” (1911)

The elevator man’s job is a riddle of in-betweenness. He travels dozens of flights up and down, but he himself does not move very much. Both confined but always in motion, he is paid to “swing us cupid-like from floor to floor,” as Margaret Danner writes in “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form.” He is a connector, the Charon of ever more vertical cities in a world of lofty high-rises and skyscrapers. Though he labors long hours, his presence is increasingly a formality—indexing that a building will ensure its mostly white users arrive at their destinations in a certain style. He is both a worker and a decoration, a “flourish” and a figure.

He is also Black, a key aspect to the archetypal form of the elevator man since the job’s nineteenth-century invention. The rise of white-collar professions in the Gilded Age—expedited by elevators which permitted a greater density of businesses to lease space in centralized downtown locations—led to the creation of new kinds of jobs and laboring types. White women entered the white-collar workforce as typists and secretaries, new forms of work that held little appeal to white men. Black women had a harder time finding a labor form in white-collar America. Though they were a relatively cheap workforce, Black women’s employment suffered from the high costs of maintaining physical segregation in office spaces, necessitating separate bathrooms and lounges. As the historian Jacqueline Jones notes, the largest employer of Black clerical workers in the early twentieth century was the Chicago-based Montgomery Ward—which notably processed retail orders through the mail, conveniently hiding their Black female employees from sight. Ward’s Black employees had trouble finding nearby places to eat lunch, spurring the company to build its own cafeteria to “shore up its image and remove its Black employees from public view.” In a white-collar world, Black women were meant to work in a way that disappeared their forms.

Black men, however, had even fewer opportunities within the vertical microcosms made possible by elevator technology. Anxieties about the menacing physicality of Black men’s bodies originally impeded their employment in the confined spaces and workplaces that elevators tended to serve. In her 1911 analysis of Black labor in New York, Mary White Ovington gestures to this history, referring to the “office buildings and large stores and hotels” where Blacks still could not be employed as elevator men due to their potential proximity to unaccompanied white women in the tight space of the elevator car. Despite these anxieties, the Black “elevator boy” had become a familiar figure by the early twentieth-century, the latest in a long line of racialized positions—porters, drivers, and chauffeurs—who conveyed whites comfortably from one destination to another.

The elevator man is a riddle, and a metaphor, too. Unlike a porter, a driver, or a chauffeur, the Black elevator man lifted himself and others upward, quite literally, through the air—but he also soon became associated with social uplift. As Ovington notes, working elevators was the favored position of “bright boys” who could study during the time between the morning and lunch rush; eliciting tips from their white riders through good service and pointed flattery, they were also quietly launching the next post-elevator chapter of their upwardly mobile life stories. Paul Laurence Dunbar, the most renowned of these “bright boys,” haunts the scene of both Ovington’s and Danner’s visions of the elevator man. As a young man, Dunbar failed to find any opportunities in his native Dayton, Ohio, to be paid for his work as a poet and journalist. To keep himself afloat, he worked as an elevator operator for several years during the early 1890s in the Callahan building, Dayton’s first skyscraper—at seven stories, a relatively tall building for its time. From this origin, the mythos of Dunbar as the “elevator poet” grew with his literary acclaim. Critics have since credited his exposure to a diverse, multilingual public during his shifts at the Callahan as seeding his poetic interest in spoken dialects; Dunbar writes about and, at times, like the people he ushered between its seven floors.

By the time Danner’s elevator man enters this workplace in the 1950s, our spatial metaphor for social uplift has contracted to a cramped compartment—one that has room for one, maybe two, but certainly not all. The elevator man is now a gatekeeper, helping to maintain the social order instead of working toward its dismantlement. W.E.B. Du Bois notes this shift in the elevator man’s social function in his 1920 book of essays, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil, including the elevator man among the figures who slight him on an average day. In addition to the studious neglect of the milkman, the truculence of the policeman, and the women in streetcars who “withdraw their skirts or prefer to stand” in his presence, Du Bois feels the sting of “the elevator man” who “hates to serve Negroes.” Though Du Bois doesn’t state the race of the disgruntled elevator man, Du Bois’s explicit articulation of this figure’s specific hatred for Negroes suggests there is an irony to his disfavor. If so, this vision of the haughty Black elevator man who looks down on his own people echoes earlier historical depictions of house slaves charged with not only serving whites but enforcing white supremacy on a larger scale. Like his antebellum predecessors, the elevator man’s job is to charm and titillate whites, stay in his proper place, and keep others out.

Danner recalls this freighted history of the Black elevator man while she simultaneously reimagines his form. As Liesl Olson has discovered, an early version of the poem included an epigraph that read “not really the elevator man at the Newberry Library”; and it’s worth noting that Danner herself would have been quite familiar with the elevator in the Newberry building during her years of employment as an assistant editor at Poetry magazine on the fifth floor. This archival epigraph serves as a disavowal of historical readings, disassociating “The Elevator Man Adheres to Form” from real people and places before the poem can even begin. But the epigraph also prepares us for the internal contradictions of both the elevator man and of the poem that he inhabits. The elevator operator serves his mostly-white clientele with decorum and “polished pleasantries”; and yet Danner wishes that he would, or could, use his skills—mechanical and rhetorical—to also lift up “other tan and much deeper than tan” men who find themselves “winding down subterranean grottoes of injustice,//down dark spirals.” This elevator man is not just a striver, but a hustler of sorts, one aware of his striving in the bustle of modern life—and the poet treats his efforts with both tenderness and melancholic reproach.

The poem’s pronouns register this drama of individuals and collectives, agency and passivity. The “I” who speaks the poem is an active grammatical subject, but she also belongs to the plural grammatical object “us” that is transported by the elevator man “from floor to floor.” This “us” recognizes the elevator man’s work as a “display,” and Danner’s “I,” too, wishes that he could elevate those members of society who are blown backward rather than upward through life. While she describes the elevator man in terms of his “Ph D aplomb,” we are unsure whether he’s a pretender or academically “credentialed” to address lecture halls instead of elevator cars. Not only is his spectacular speech itself a kind of florid façade, but it also acts as a cloying spackle encasing those it falls upon. Upon receiving his verbal bouquet of niceties, the poem’s speaker notes that “I should feel like a cherubim/All Fleur-de-lis and pastel-shell-like.” But this shell fails to fully solidify, as Danner cuts the rhetorical cable that has been elevating the poem’s diction to plunge us into the gray, subterranean miseries of those living beyond the reach of the elevator man’s “lettered zeal.”

It is the clash between two visions—one of western Enlightenment’s rococo sweetness and light, the other of catastrophic racial injustice—that Danner breathes like “a hurricane of gargoyles” into the cramped space of the elevator, forcing its doors apart and its walls to fall away. While the elevator man may adhere to form, Danner transplants and rearranges social, grammatical, and literary forms throughout the poem, concluding with a wish for a world in which “this elevator artisan” might be allowed to make art that could transport those without access to the levers of uplift, the miracles of underground railroads, or the easy movement smoothed by a crystal stair.