Yet Jefferson is describing a world of black confidence, not one of uncomprehending imitation or secret self-loathing. It matters that she grew up in Chicago when she did. In her youth, Chicago was the undisputed second city, a manufacturing powerhouse divided into ethnic zones. Violence often attended the spread of the black population. Black Chicago was large and had capital, substantial enterprises, and strong churches. Black institutions still had prestige in the black community. Negroland was real:
In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians. Like the Third Eye, the Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity.
Home life took place in and around Fortress Negro. “In the privacy of an all-Negro world, Negro privilege could lounge and saunter too, show off its accoutrements and lay down the law.” Jefferson writes about the group activities of childhood and the extracurricular schedule of her adolescence as rituals of cohesion, tribal defense against the social disorganization of black life in general. However, though she may have been born into Negroland, education was a mixed-race experience. She had access to white high schools and exclusive music camps. In her memoir, Jefferson takes up distinctions between classes and races, but also between genders, and it is as a girl’s coming-of-age story, a black girl’s story, in a time of social change, that Negroland explores yet more unexpected territory.
Women were conveyors of racial inheritance. Jefferson’s mother was present to correct her always. In one scene, she recounts how amused she and her sister were by what they considered the ignorant country language of the speaker, an old black woman, in the Langston Hughes poem “Mother to Son”: “Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.” Their mother listened, then explained who Hughes was, and then read the poem for them, calling on “all the resources of Negro life and history … turning dialect to vernacular.” Her mother, who grew up on Negro History Week, let them know that Hughes had even taught briefly at the Lab School.
The owners of The Chicago Defender, a leading black newspaper, were their friends, and they were aware that Ida B. Wells had worked in Chicago. Jefferson’s mother told them about the anthropologist Katherine Dunham and that major work of sociology, Black Metropolis by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. Her family read The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. They were not white people; they knew that Rosa Parks was not a Negro woman suddenly too tired to change seats, but rather the secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, chapter of the NAACP that had been meticulously preparing its challenge to segregation on municipal buses.
Jefferson grew up knowing that the women responsible for her believed in “feminine command.” “It’s never too hot for fur,” her grandmother said on a visit back to the South. As young black women, she and her sister were learning how to comport themselves as ladies. It was a kind of vindication. That nice-girl problem of how to attract boys without getting a reputation was further complicated by the history of black women forever being depicted in American culture as oversexed and animalistic, which justified the exploitation of their bodies. Respectability was therefore a grave matter. Nice black girls learned that women of achievement renounced vanity and lightheartedness, exhibited unceasing fortitude, and put the needs of others first. “I enjoy being irreproachable,” Jefferson writes.
The cost of self-control was easily underestimated. “Oh, the vehement inner lives of girls snatching at heroines and role models!” Meanwhile, as a nice black girl Jefferson was judged by standards of beauty that were of social history’s making: grade of hair, skin color, flat or straight nose, size of ass, shape of foot. Whiteness. “The fashion and beauty complex has so many ways to enchant and maim.” She takes pride in and has sympathy for Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge but conceives a teenager’s passion for Audrey Hepburn. “No! You cannot ever be white like these idols of feminine perfection. Let that final impossibility reproach and taunt you.”
Jefferson’s story becomes more and more about gender difference and where it intersects with race after she graduates from Brandeis College in 1968. Eventually, she is conspicuous as the only black woman columnist at Newsweek magazine. “The white world had made the rules that excluded us; now, when it saw fit, it altered those rules to include a few of us.” Her childhood is about Negroland at its segregated zenith, but childhood is a woman’s story waiting to happen, one influenced by—if not directly about—the feminist movement of the 1970s.
Jefferson is touchingly honest about her inhibited response to the black feminist sensation of that era, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1976). Shange, born Paulette Williams, was a nice black girl and Barnard College graduate who’d gone off the rails. However, Jefferson summons to the rescue the figure of Florynce Kennedy, the great activist lawyer in a cowboy hat, a beloved presence in radical circles in 1970s New York. Many black women back then argued that feminism was a white woman’s thing and that if you scratched a white feminist, you would find simply a white person. It was more important to address social needs along racial lines. Kennedy answered that black women had been copying bad ideas from white women for so long, it was crazy when they came along with a good one not to want to copy that:
[The black woman’s] history of struggle, degradation, triumph; her exclusion from the rewards of bourgeois femininity; her duty to strengthen the Negro family. Not a history one wanted to haul through one’s social life. Not a history one wanted to lumber into the sexual revolution with. Not a history one wanted to have sternly codified by white sociologists and Black Power revolutionaries who found the faults of The Black Woman much the same as those of The Negro Woman. She was bellicose, she was self-centered; she was sexually prudish when not castrating.
When Jefferson was growing up, race mattered, but gender didn’t. The fight for women’s rights was greeted with “mockery, contempt, or repressive tolerance.” Girls of her class were encouraged to take certain privileges for granted, but these privileges were designed to make them eligible for good marriages, i.e., yet more social status, and they were taught to “cherish that generic female future.” Black women historically had entered the white-collar workforce faster than black men, because of the relatively low status of clerical and secretarial work, and most of the black professional women Jefferson knew of as a girl were also wives and mothers. Sometimes she was warned to have something to fall back on, an acknowledgment that the black man’s economic life could be insecure. At the same time, a woman alone was an object of pity or whispers.
The question Jefferson asks of her experience is: How could she adapt her willful self to so much history and myth? The answer is that she didn’t. There is, in her account, no accommodation or acceptance of middle-class standards and life. This isn’t a memoir that tells us how a black person with opportunities got over her guilt and relaxed into the life of getting ahead that her family had sacrificed for her to have. She made instead a life as a journalist and critic and then another life in the high bohemia of New York intellectuals and artists, away from the conventions of her male-dominated professional world. “All that circumnavigating of race, class, and gender made for comedy too.”
Jefferson’s answer is also in her sophisticated tone and style, in the free and open manner in which Negroland is structured. Her book includes many brief anecdotes, digressions, and “dialogues” between unnamed characters. Paragraph headings announce “The Jefferson Girls,” “The Jefferson Girls and Ballet,” “The Jefferson Girls and Beauty,” “Another Negro History Week Lesson,” or “Boys.” What marks Negroland off from other works on such a potentially cringe-inducing subject is Jefferson’s literary sensibility: “I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.” Some of her most intense passages have
to do with her instinctive escape into Lewis Carroll or her immersion in the personalities of the sisters in Little Women and what their destinies portended for her.
Identity is fluid. “There’s a space in our consciousness where all this racialized material collects, never static, mutating or at least recombining.” Jefferson struggles with her own reticence. “I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race,” she observes. “You revere your grief.” Though she knows she has had more choices, and therefore more freedom, than most, there remained lines she dared not cross. Black girls in Negroland “had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity.”
Charlotte Forten, the granddaughter of a rich, free-born black Philadelphia sailmaker, kept a diary and went south in 1862 to teach freed slaves in South Carolina. Her diary stops when she falls in love with moonlit rides on horseback alongside a married white doctor from Boston. When her diary resumes many years later, she is the prim wife of a black minister from a prominent family much like her own. Angela Davis, who comes from a middle-class household in Birmingham, Alabama, and graduated from Brandeis four years earlier than Jefferson, refuses in her Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974) to write about herself as exceptional in any way—a principle dictated by her politics, her allegiance to her constituencies, rejecting the romanticism of her own image, a keeping faith with the four girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham in 1963. “Internalize The Race. Internalize both races,” Jefferson says at one point. “Then internalize the contradictions. Teach your psyche to adapt its solo life to a group obbligato. Or let it abandon any impulse toward independence and hurtle toward a feverishly perfect representation of your people.”
The constant for black men has been the threat of violence; the constant for black women has been that they were still women. Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen got kicked out of Fisk University for wearing bright colors. A’Lelia Bundles’s On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker (2001), a biography of her great-grandmother, the founder of a black cosmetics industry; Jill Nelson’s Finding Martha’s Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island (2005); Gail Lumet Buckley’s The Hornes: An American Family (1986) and her The Black Calhouns: From Civil War to Civil Rights with One African American Family (2016)—these works are personal as well as acts of retrieval and conservation. The authors can see themselves in the continuum of the histories they are recording. But Jefferson is coming at the subject of the black elite from an odd angle, examining it as a legacy of proscription and privilege, grief and achievement, love for and shame because of other black people; love for and terror of so-called white culture. “My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.”
The closest thing to her homage to ambiguity—from another nice black girl—is avant-garde playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s experimental autobiography, People Who Led to My Plays (1987). The new Americans must be able to think in contradictions, Henry Adams said in his Education (1907). “Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you,” Jefferson says. “That’s your first education.”
2016
THE AFRO-PESSIMIST TEMPTATION
Not long ago in the locker room of my Harlem gym, I was the eavesdropping old head who thought Black Panther was another documentary about the militants of the Black Panther Party from the sixties. I caught on from what the young white guy and the young black guy were talking about that Kendrick Lamar had written some of the film’s soundtrack. I almost said, “Lamar is woke,” but the memory of the first time I heard my father say a thing was “fly” rose up and shut my mouth.
In the current political backlash—the only notion the current administration has is to undo whatever President Obama did, to wipe him out—black America is nevertheless a cultural boomtown. My maternal cousins e-mailed everyone to go to Black Panther that first record-breaking weekend, like they were getting out the vote. Twenty-five years ago black people were the lost population, abandoned in inner cities overrun with drugs, exhorted by politicians and preachers to mend the broken black family. Black intellectuals were on the defensive, and bell hooks talked of the resentment she encountered from white people when she spoke of white supremacy instead of racism. Now white people are the ones who seem lost, who don’t seem to know who they are, except for those white Americans who join the resistance against white supremacy and make apologies to black friends for white privilege because, although they don’t know where else to begin, they do know that they don’t want to be associated anymore with the how-long-has-this-been-going-on.
For eight years, I didn’t care what right-wing white people had to say about anything. Obama’s presence on the international stage decriminalized at home the image of the black man, and the murdered black men around whom black women founded Black Lives Matter were regarded more as the fallen in battle than as victims. The vigils of Black Lives Matter drew strength from memories of the marches of the civil rights movement, just as the protesters of the 1960s were aware of the unfinished business of the Civil War as their moral inheritance. Obama’s presidency made black neoconservatives irrelevant. They fumed that on paper he should have added up to be one of them, but instead Obama paid homage to John Lewis. That was Eric Holder in the Justice Department. But as it turned out, not everyone was vibing with the triumphant celebrations at David Adjaye’s beautiful National Museum of African American History and Culture.
White supremacy isn’t back; it never went away, though we thought it had become marginal or been contained as a political force, and maybe it has, which only adds to the unhelpful feeling that this should not have happened, that the government has been hijacked. I think of the Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo in the election’s aftermath telling a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association that, had the same number of black people who voted in Milwaukee, Detroit, and Philadelphia in 2012 come to the polls in 2016, Hillary Clinton would have won in the Electoral College. What the 2016 presidential election demonstrated is that, as David Foster Wallace put it, there is no such thing as not voting.
I mind this happening when I am getting too old to run from it. Shit, do not hit that fan. My father’s siblings, in their late eighties and early nineties, assure me that we have survived worse. They grew up on Negro History Week. The Great Depression shaped their childhoods; McCarthyism, their college years. My father lived to see Obama’s election in 2008, but not the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013. He would have said that the struggle for freedom is ongoing. Look at how “they” managed to get around Brown v. Board of Education; look at Citizens United, he would say, he who had hawked NAACP memberships in airport men’s rooms or read from William Julius Wilson at Christmas dinner. I longed for him to change the subject, to talk to my Jewish friends about science, not racism.
* * *
In 1895, the year Frederick Douglass died, Booker T. Washington gave an address in Atlanta urging black people to cast down their buckets where they were. The black and white races would be like the fingers of the hand, separate but working together on essential matters. White people took Washington to mean that blacks would accept Jim Crow and not agitate for restoration of the civil rights they had exercised during Reconstruction. They would concentrate instead on self-improvement and economic development. Washington’s conciliatory philosophy made his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), a bestseller. He was hailed as the most influential black spokesman of his day. Theodore Roosevelt invited him to dine at the White House, much to the consternation of Washington’s white Southern supporters.
Washington’s program may have won him admiration among whites, but he never persuaded black people, as far as an angry W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois argued that the influence of three main attitudes could be traced throughout the history of black Americans in response to their condition: “a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt t
o adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion.”
For Du Bois, Washington represented the attitude of submission. He had no trouble with Washington preaching thrift, patience, and industrial training for the masses, but to be silent in the face of injustice was not being a man: “Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.”
Du Bois was not alone among black intellectuals in his condemnation of Washington, but it was not true that Washington had no black followers. For Washington, the withdrawal of black people from American political life was to be temporary. Black people would earn white respect by acquiring skills and becoming economically stable. If they couldn’t vote, then they could acquire property. However, Du Bois and his allies maintained that disenfranchisement was a significant obstacle to economic opportunity. Black prosperity was taken by whites as a form of being uppity: white people burned down the black business section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, furious at its success. Moreover, black Marxist critics of the 1930s held that Washington’s program to produce craftsmen and laborers uninterested in unions had been made obsolete by the mass manufacturing economy. Washington’s Tuskegee movement came to stand for backwater gradualism, of which the guesthouse for white visitors to the Tuskegee Institute was a symbol.
The Du Bois–Washington controversy described basic oppositions—North/South, urban/rural—that defined black America at the time. Identifying what Arnold Rampersad has called “an essential dualism in the black American soul,” Du Bois also explored the concept of “double-consciousness”: “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”
Busted in New York and Other Essays Page 22