“He was raised primarily by his grandmother who was a janitress according to the census record,” Whitmire said. “And she cleaned homes for wealthy Boston and Dorchester people. That is the key in terms of how he got into Harvard. One of the letters of recommendation is from a man who said that his grandmother has cleaned for his family for 30 years and his wife’s family. They were some of the founding fathers of Dorchester. They didn’t come on the Mayflower, but probably on the second or third ship over. And so the home that she cleaned is actually the Dorchester Historical Society today. And I was able to go to that and see where she lived. And so the man that she worked for observed that Reed was a very intelligent young man. And so that was the key to this woman who only had a third grade education who was a cleaning lady was able to get her grandson in all of these spaces like the Boston Latin School.”

Peggram was a little pretentious, speaking with a British accent and used British characters in his writing. And literature was his world.

“He studied Comparative Literature,” Whitmire said. “He studied Flaubert, Madame Bovary for his thesis from Harvard. And then he was studying Decadence in 19^th century French Literature. That’s why he was at the Sorbonne.”

Peggram obtained a Rosenwald fellowship and headed to Paris to study the original great works. But trouble was brewing in Europe.

“My subject, Reed Peggram, first went to Europe to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, France,” Whitmire said. “As soon as he got there, school didn’t start for a while, so he went off to Poland to see a friend of his. He went to England to meet some people. He had letters of introduction. And then after he met a Danish man and fell in love, he went to Copenhagen.”

Peggram was a very sociable person and met a lot of Americans during his relatively brief stay.

“Reed wasn’t the only Black person in Denmark,” Whitmire said. “There were other performers including a husband and wife dance team. And I couldn’t find much about Ola and Eddie except in the Danish records. So I think at some point, the police ran out of stuff to say. So they asked them, ‘How did you get into show business?’ How was that relevant, but they talked about how they got into show business. They were there for several months. But they were trying to leave while Reed was trying to stay. And he might have encountered them because he talked about running into Black people from Harlem who were performers, which was where they were from. And he ran into Valaida Snow who was also there and they hung out. She was a jazz musician imprisoned in Denmark during World War II and finally released. And so there were a few Black people hanging around there and he interacted with them. The story is fascinating. He interacted with a lot of interesting people who aren’t quite that famous but famous enough that people have written about them now in modern times even though they have been dead for decades like the guy he went to visit in Poland, Tony Sabanski. People know who he is. Or there is Steven Spinder who is a famous writer in England whom he went to go see. There were just a very fascinating experiences that he had even though it ended up kind of negatively.”

Peggram was hopelessly in love with Hoffman and decided to stay in Europe no matter the risk.

“A lot of people offered to bring him back from Europe,” Whitmire said. “Actually when he arrived in 1938, the State Department was already telling American citizens to come back home. But he had always wanted to go abroad. He studied French. He spoke like a native, one of his Harvard professors said. And so he refused to leave. And he was so in love with Arne, he didn’t want to abandon him. And so the Rosenwald Foundation offered him transportation to Portugal where people could catch a ship. They paid for the ship and even gave him some spending money. And he rejected all of it. He said, ‘If you can’t help my friend, I’m not going to leave.’ In his records, you can tell that Harvard was concerned. They were willing to help too. His grandmother and mother wrote to the State Department asking them to bring him back. But he was steadfast in terms of wanting to stay there.”

Peggram and Hoffman led a kind of nomadic life as they sought a way for both of them to come to the U.S.

“When World War II started, they were stuck in Denmark for several months,” Whitmire said. “They left in March 1940 and just a few weeks later, the Nazis invaded Denmark. They went to Paris to pick up his stuff and then they went to Florence, Italy hoping that his boyfriend, Arne Hoffman, could get permission to enter the United States. But he wasn’t allowed to. You couldn’t just enter the United States. You had to go through a whole process. And they ended up staying in Italy for five years.”

Eventually, the couple was separated after World War II. And the story ends like a love tragedy, in a way.

“After the liberation, Reed had a nervous breakdown,” Whitmire said. “He was actually getting mental health care in Italy. And then he took the ship back to America. And he was hospitalized for four years at Medfeld State Hospital in Medfeld, Massachusetts. Reed’s life kind of went downhill. He was a doctoral student at Harvard when he went to Europe. But mentally, he was unable  to work anymore after four years in a mental institution. So he got out in 1949-1950 and stayed at home. He lived with his mother who was now widowed and with his brother and his brother’s son.”