Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  Who are “you”? How does your sociological vita—race or ethnicity, class, gender, family history—affect your answer?

  Whoever you are, reader, please understand that neither my parents, my sister, nor I ever left a dirty bathtub for Mrs. Blake to clean. (My sister and I called her Mrs. Blake. Mother called her Blake.) She was broad, not fat. She had very short, very straightened hair that she patted flat and put behind her ears. When it got humid in the basement, where the washer and dryer were, or in the room where she ironed clothes, short pieces of hair would defy hot comb and oil to stick up and out. We never made direct fun of her hair—we would have been punished. But we regularly mocked Negro hair that blatantly defied rehabilitation. Mrs. B.’s voice was Southern South Side: leisurely and nasal. Now that I’ve given my adult attention to the classic blues singers, I can say she had the weighted country diction of Ma Rainey and the short nasal tones of Sippie Wallace. Vowels rubbed down, endword consonants dropped or muffled.

  Mother made it clear that we were never to leave our beds unmade when Mrs. Blake was coming. She was not there to pick up after us. When we were old enough, we stripped our own beds each week and folded the linen before putting it in the hamper for her to remove and wash.

  Mother’s paternal grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt had been in service, so she was sensitive to inappropriate childish presumption.

  Mrs. Blake ate her lunch (a hot lunch that Mother had made from dinner leftovers) in the kitchen. When her day was done, Mr. Blake and their daughters drove to our house. He sent his daughters to the front door to pick her up. They had the same initials we did. Mildred and Diane. Margo and Denise. Mother brought us to the front door to exchange hellos with them. Sometimes Mrs. Blake left carrying one or two bags of neatly folded clothes. Did Mildred and Diane enjoy unfolding, surveying, and fitting themselves into our used ensembles and separates?

  “Do we have Indian blood?” I ask.

  “Why are you asking?” Mother answers.

  I want to know, after two weeks as a Potawatomi tribe member at the Palos Park summer camp in the Illinois Forest Preserves, being led down foot and bridle paths, sharing space with deer, birds, amphibians, and small mammals.

  According to an official history of Palos Park village, Indians “roamed the hills” there in the eighteenth century, along with French explorers, traders, and soldiers, but the first white man to “settle” Palos was James Paddock, in 1834. Now, some 120 years later, Denise and Margo Jefferson have become two of the first Negro girls to attend the Palos Park camp alongside the descendants of white settlers.

  And one of those descendants had asked if I had Indian blood. When I said I didn’t know whether I did or not, she scanned my face and said, “You must. Ask your mother when she comes to pick you up.”

  On the last day of camp the little descendant stood beside me as Mother emerged from her car. Cotton piqué rose-and-white-striped dress. Light brown skin. A Claudette Colbert cap of dark hair. Beneath her black sunglasses a hooked nose asserted itself. The little descendant turned to me, nodded, and whispered, “I told you, you have Indian blood. Ask your mother on the way home.”

  Why should this be information I’m denied? It would be exciting to be something other than just Negro. I wait till we get home, till Denise and I have made our way through talk of cabinmates and counselors, hikes and canoe trips, through the success, achieved once more, by our normality. Then I ask my question and Mother sighs.

  “Ye-sss”—drawn out to telegraph reluctance—“we do have some Indian blood. But I get so tired of Negroes always talking about their Indian blood. And so tired of white people always asking about it.” Here’s an unexpected similarity between Negroes and whites: the slightly pathetic need to believe we have Indian blood, or at least, through camp rituals, cultural kinship rights.

  The next summer a full-blooded Indian comes to the camp. Denise and I take her up, enjoying her sweet manner and her dark, shining waist-length braids. Mysteriously, on the last day of camp, no one arrives to take her home. We volunteer our mother.

  L. gets into the backseat with us and tells Mother where she lives. The three of us grow quiet as Mother drives, drives, and drives. Finally we arrive at a shabby group of apartment buildings. No trees, no trimmed shrubbery. We don’t hug, but we say goodbye till next summer. L. gets out of the car, turns and walks toward one of the big ugly housing project buildings. She has on a rust-colored shirt and the same jeans she’s worn every day at camp. Mother starts the car and speeds away. None of us says anything about L.

  The next summer, neither she nor any other recognizable Indian appears at Palos Park. Another Negro does, though. R. arrives a few days after the rest of us. He’s in my age group, he’s a little bit chubby, and he wears glasses, not as thick as mine. He’s definitely browner than I am, by several shades. He’s dark brown. I notice how carefully his blue jean cuffs are rolled—folded up and ironed—and how just-from-the-package his navy and white shirt looks with its crisp, three-button collar. I know he has bad hair because it’s been shaved so close to his scalp.

  At the end of the week my counselor takes me aside. Can I help R. fit in better? she wants to know. Can I talk to him? Everyone is still calling him “the new kid.” I’m mortified. I hate it when I’m supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties. I will, I tell her, making myself sound agreeable. And I do. I can see the two of us even now, me and him, making trite, labored conversation. Neither of us smiling.

  He leaves my mind after that. We had no more encounters. But here’s what I want to know. Why wasn’t Phillip asked to talk to R.? Because Phillip was a Negro too, and he was there for those two weeks. (Denise had graduated to the four-week Camp Martin Johnson, an interracial camp where she and a cluster of family friends established their own in-group.) Phillip was a boy, so he should have been asked to talk to Ronnie. Phillip was my friend; our parents were dear friends. Phillip had Negro hair, but it was curly, frizzy hair no one would mind patting. Phillip had pale olive skin and crisp, neatly tailored features.

  “Phillip should have been asked to talk to Ronnie!” I exclaim years—decades—later, telling the story to a white friend.

  “The counselors didn’t read Phillip as Negro,” Elizabeth says. She’s seen a picture of us standing with our mothers in Washington Park. “Phillip settled into the landscape of whiteness.”

  Yes. We map it out. Maybe the counselors never even debated the matter. But if they did, they must have reasoned that R. would be more comfortable talking to someone who looked more like him.

  I feel a surge of grief when I think of him now. And inside that grief is guilt because I looked down on him. And inside that grief is shame. Because “looked down on him” is accurate, but not sufficient.

  I dreaded him.

  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.

  —If, as was said, too many of us ached, longed, strove to be be be be White White White White WHITE…

  —If (as was said) many us boasted overmuch of the blood des blancs that for centuries had found blatant or surreptitious ways to flow, course, and trickle tepidly through our veins and arteries (cephalic, aortal, renal, femoral, jugular, subclavian, and superior mesenteric)…

  —If we placed too high a value on the looks, manners, and morals called the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon…

  White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

  Denise and Margo wear matching woolen coats with Persian lamb collars. They tuck their hands into Persian lamb muffs. They are in a state of self-enchantment. They rarely wear matching clothes, but these
ones make a statement. Denise and Margo are a matching set and a set piece. Their clothes are the rewards of immaculate girlhood: dresses of taffeta and velvet with lace collars, petticoats, ankle straps, pocketbooks and initialed handkerchiefs, seasonal gloves of cotton and kid, matching coats and muffs. Straw hats and headbands with flowers. Not a single flower, corsage style, but an oval row, like a bower.

  The bower of girlhood. We don’t talk or laugh loudly in public. We don’t slouch. Our speech is crisp and unaccented. When our aunt Ruby, a primary-school teacher, visits from California, she has me put a penny in a bank each time I say “gee.” I enjoy it. I enjoy being irreproachable.

  Beauty standards for girls are stringent in 1950s Negroland. Negro girls must be vigilant about their perceived deficiencies. Be ruthless. Catalogue and compensate.

  • Flat feet instead of high arches.

  • Obtrusive behinds that refuse to slip quietly into sheath dresses, subside, and stay put.

  • “Ashy skin.” White sediment on the surface of brown skin that has gone unoiled for too long. Knees and elbows must be attended to. “Elbow grease” is not a metaphor.

  SKIN COLOR

  Ivory, cream, beige, wheat, tan, moccasin, fawn, café au lait, and the paler shades of honey, amber, and bronze are best. Sienna, chocolate, saddle brown, umber (burnt or raw), and mahogany work best with decent-to-good hair and even-to-keen features. In these cases, the woman’s wardrobe must feature subdued tones. Bright colors suggest that she is flaunting herself. Generally, for women, the dark skin shades like walnut, chocolate brown, black, and black with blue undertones are off-limits. Dark skin often suggests aggressive, indiscriminate sexual readiness. At the very least it calls instant attention to your race and can incite demeaning associations.

  GRADES OF HAIR

  1. Dead straight hair can be grown into thick, lustrous braids that stretch to the middle of the back, even to the waist.

  2. Glossy hair with waves and curls: this evokes allusions to Moorish Spain and Mexico.

  3. Tighter waves with a less shiny texture: this hair can be brushed almost straight but must be maintained with light hair cream. Humidity can make it rough in the back (the kitchen) and frizzy around the face. Apply quick light strokes with a hot comb.

  4. Nappy hair, stage 1. Requires heavy hair cream daily and regular hot comb use. Usually does not grow past the shoulders.

  5. Nappy hair, stage 2. Requires heavier and heavier applications of hair cream and constant hot comb use. Usually does not grow beyond the middle of the neck.

  NOSES

  The ones nobody wants are broad and flat with wide nostrils. Wide nostrils are never good, but a narrow tapering nose that ends in flared nostrils is acceptable, even alluring. An aquiline or hooked nose suggests American Indian ancestry. It can also be called Roman. Small, pert, upturned noses are invariably welcome.

  THE JEFFERSON GIRLS

  Do not have flat behinds, but theirs are cleanly shaped and not unduly full.

  Neither Jefferson girl has one of the top three grades of hair.

  Their mother works the hot comb and the curling iron through it. She oils it daily; besieged by rain or intense humidity, Negro hair reverts to bushy, nappy, or kinky textures. “Bushy” is the word used most; “nappy” and “kinky” are harsher, coarser words. Denise’s hair is worse than Margo’s by a few grades. On the other hand, when Margo was very young, she was silly enough to believe her hair would turn blonde when her mother washed it. Fortunately, she aired this belief, and it died a clean, brisk death. Hair oil can stain ribbons and headband flowers and the inside rims of pale embellished straw hats worn to church and dress events if your hands aren’t clean when you put them on and take them off.

  Mrs. Jefferson has a prominent Roman nose. Denise has a small, trim nose; more decorous than pert. Though Margo’s nostrils flare, they do not flare in a way an unsympathetic observer could fixate on.

  Both girls have full but not extravagantly full mouths. They’d prefer smaller, narrower ones, but the basic shape is clean.

  No one could justly call them big-lipped.

  THE JEFFERSON GIRLS AND BALLET

  The elder, Denise, has a more than respectable arch, even by the demanding standards of her Scottish ballet teacher, Edna McRae. Their father’s high curved arch is a thing of beauty, which his daughters study with acquisitive rapture when he stretches out on the bed after a long day at the office. Margo and her mother have flat feet.

  We see every dance company that comes to Chicago: the Royal Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, American Ballet Theatre. We pore over ballet books: A Candle for St. Jude, The Classic Ballet: Basic Technique and Terminology, tales of les petits rats, the young Paris Opera Ballet students, profiles and exquisite pictures of major dancers. Alicia Markova, Margot Fonteyn, Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Alicia Alonzo…

  In the catalogue of physical features rendering Negroes unfit or at least unsuited for ballet, muscled, un-slender bodies figure as prominently as flat feet. There are exceptions, and we repeat their names eagerly, doggedly, dutifully.

  Janet Collins, Metropolitan Opera Ballet

  Raven Wilkinson, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo

  The skin of Raven Wilkinson radiated sufficient pallor to justify her inclusion in a band of twenty-four sylphs haunting the glades of a Europe basking in ethereal melancholy, their bodies mere extensions of luminous white tulle and satin. Janet Collins had an epidermal undertone that ruined visual and narrative consistency onstage. She had been accepted by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo on condition that she paint her face and limbs white. She refused, packed her leotards and tights, and left the building. Instead she set her feet on the roads that led to race- and myth-driven musicals (Run, Little Chillun’, The Swing Mikado, Out of This World) and to modern dance, where small groups of Negroes and Asians performed on the stages of Ys and civic auditoriums, often beside those ethnic Caucasians (Jews and Catholics) less likely to have found their way to ballet.

  She was thirty-four years old in 1951, when the Metropolitan Opera Ballet selected her to embody heroines in operatic interludes set among French gypsies, Ethiopian royals, and biblical Semites. It was groundbreaking, though everyone knew the Metropolitan Opera Ballet was not a first-rate company. It was an auxiliary, a subsidiary. (They always wait till you’re past your prime, our parents and our Negro journalists complain. The Metropolitan Opera didn’t invite Marian Anderson to make her debut there till 1954. She was the gypsy fortune-teller in A Masked Ball and she was fifty-eight years old.)

  Denise was seven in 1951 when she told our mother she wanted to take ballet lessons. Serious ones. Till then, she spent her time at the Beatrice Betts Ballet School playing with friends and fluffing up her tutu. Mother consulted artistic Negro friends who knew about the best white teachers and who among them was most likely to take a non-white student.

  Your daughter has real talent, says Miss Edna McRae, whose studio was downtown in the Fine Arts Building. Still, considering onstage convention and offstage prejudice, she will probably have to dance with an all-Negro modern company like Katherine Dunham’s. We aren’t ashamed of Katherine Dunham, we’re proud; she is a worthy dance pioneer with a university education, and not a minor university either: the University of Chicago, our mother’s school. Her Caribbean and African dances are based on her PhD research into the culture and folklore of those regions. “Folklore” is the word generally used. It suggests tradition, but it’s a few tiers below “civilization.” No matter how much formal training they have, no matter how hard they study and practice, these dancers/performers are enacting rituals many in their audience believe are driven more by biology than by art. Why, then, with some of the best ballet training Chicago possessed, would Denise choose to do what most Americans believed it was her body’s natural inclination to do? Especially since her teacher warned that it was probably her only option?

  Denise has a talent
and an arch. Her feet curve becomingly in pointe shoes.

  THE JEFFERSON GIRLS AND BEAUTY

  Denise’s skin is burnt sienna. Margo and her mother are café au lait, and the blue veins in their hands can be seen by anyone. Which, on a timeline stretching back to post-Reconstruction, would secure their membership in the best Negro churches and clubs; ensure their presence at events like the 1930s dinner dance given by a Washington, D.C., men’s club that called itself the What Good Are We’s. “Don’t bring any brown-skinned girls,” his host told their burnt sienna bachelor father, who was doing his internship in Baltimore. And he did not. No ladies browner than Margo and her mother were present that night, and their numbers were scant. Pale beige, cream, and ivory, even alabaster, were on abundant, radiant display.

  When they watch the Miss America pageant, her daughters do not find Mrs. Jefferson lacking in any way.

  “Mama, you could be a Miss America!” they cry one morning when she picks them up from a rapturous night spent watching the contest at their grandmother’s. Their mother’s laugh deflects them, as does their grandmother’s smile. (These children know so little about the world. We won’t lecture and disillusion them, but we won’t encourage this line of thinking; we’ll change the subject.) The two of them know exactly who is beautiful, who is pretty, and who is attractive by the national beauty standard. “Attractive” is a word for women who’ve made the most of their assets, but whose assets aren’t enough to make them pretty or beautiful. They know what clothes play up their strengths, what makeup mutes their flaws. Mother considers herself attractive. She and Grandma believe that most Negro women are considered, at best, attractive.

  A few years later, still faithfully watching the pageant, Denise and Margo feel acute disappointment when Miss Hawaii, who clearly has native ancestry, does not place among the finalists. She’s named Miss Congeniality instead. And Mother decides it’s high time we know the story of her sorority sister Geraldine.