KATHLEEN A. HAUKE
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even in death. There was no obituary in the New York papers under
her name or either of her pseudonyms. The death certificate lists
"Mona Manet, writer, white, 865 First Avenue, Manhattan, age
35," as having died of "congestion of the viscera."
America was in the throes of a steel strike that weekend with
500,000 workers idle, 12,000 in Detroit. Louella Parsons was extolling the movie Pinky for "attacking a daring subject in a daring way.
Jeanne Crain is superb as a Negro girl who realizes the folly of trying
to pass as white." In the movie Lost Boundaries Mel Ferrer was
starring in the true story of a Negro doctor and his family who did
"pass" in New Hampshire. Roxborough's former rival for the Hopwood drama prize, Arthur Miller, had a box office and critical
success with Death of a Salesman. The drama section of the New
York Times, which she may have read on her last morning, featured
University of Michigan professor Valentine Windt for directing a
Shakespeare festival in New York. Windt had been Roxborough's
teacher in Ann Arbor and she had interviewed him for the Michigan
Daily -but she would not have dared to approach him as "Mona
Manet." In Detroit, the American Weekly supplement to the Times
contained an article on the numbers racket, noting that John Roxborough had served two years in the Jackson Federal Penitentiary
(1944-46) for payoffs to police and city officials who had "protected" his business.
Elsie Roxborough's final passing hit the front pages in Detroit's
black press. The weekly Michigan Chronicle spread a banner headline, "ELSIE ROXBOROUGH DIES," and attributed the cause to
nerves rather than suicide because she had left no note. Whether she
actually committed suicide will never be known. Her stockings were
soaking in the wash bowl, a sign of her probable intention to go out
the next day. She had telephoned family the previous week for
money. Nevertheless, she may have desired to end her existence for a
long time, like the unsuccessful writer-heroine Russell Terrill in her
Hopwood entry, A World of Difference. Terrill has a speech on her
wish for death:
When I go to bed at night, I don't care whether I live until morning or
not - most times I fall asleep praying for death. I feel all lost in a great
vastness, and beaten.... I go through the usual automatic rituals,
eating tasteless food, talking meaningless talk, laughing soulless
laughter. I'm too much of a coward to really die - I've only prayed to
sneak out in my sleep.... If I were only of some use to the world!24
