Vital backstairs figure at White House:EACH NIGHT for 24 years, Emma Daniel Gray would diligently clean the White House. When she came to the president's chair, she would pause, cleaning materials in hand, and say a quick prayer.
The prayers asked for blessings, wisdom and safety for each of the six presidents she served. The granddaughter of a slave, she lived long enough to see a black man elected to the home she cleaned.
The prayer at the president’s chair is a Backstairs at the White House moment, a story that could have come from the 1979 Emmy Award-winning TV series about the professional household staff to the presidential families. Like the characters in the series, Gray took great pride in her work, travelling each day by public transport from her home to the residence of one of the most powerful men in the world.
She worked nights in the executive offices. Her official title was charwoman, from the time she started with the government in 1943 until her retirement in 1979. The first decade or so, she was assigned to what is now called the Government Accountability Office and a handful of other agencies. In 1955, she was transferred to the White House “because of her working habits, because of her excellent work,” said Lillie Collins, one of her daughters. “It wasn’t just her work, it was her character.”
That nightly pause for prayer was in keeping with her habits of a lifetime.
A member of Holy Trinity Worship Center International in Washington, she “loved President Carter because she felt he prayed a lot”, her daughter said, and she treasured a photograph of her shaking hands with him, as well as an autographed picture of her with Rosalynn Carter. John F Kennedy may have been her next favourite, because of the Christmas parties his administration threw for workers and their families, occasions that her children remember for Gray’s insistence that they dress up and behave properly.
Emma Daniel was born in South Carolina and was raised by her grandfather, who had been a slave.
“He was sold three times,” she told a newspaper interviewer about 10 years ago. “He paid his boss’s son 20 cents to teach him to read, and when he could read, he loved the Ten Commandments so much that people in the town began calling him Uncle Ten.”
She married William Gray, also from South Carolina, and they came to Washington in 1943, part of a wave of black southerners who sought opportunity there during the second World War.
Her husband, who worked as a custodian at the Government Printing Office, died in 1966. She never remarried. She had seven children, two of whom predeceased her .
But in a larger sense, her family expanded and prospered. When she died, she was the matriarch of six generations.
In retirement, Gray took her only airplane trip, to Hawaii.
Her family and friends treasured her cooking, especially her speciality, sweet potato pie. And she had a way of boosting the spirits of everybody.
“She learned early that you set the tone for your environment,” said her pastor, Bishop Royce Woods said.
“That’s why church was so important to her. She understood it to be that kind of institution, that was conducive to what you needed spiritually, emotionally and sometimes financially . . . She preached her own eulogy by the life that she lived.”
Emma Daniel Gray: born April 16th, 1914; died June 8th, 2009