Geraldine was a beauty by all objective standards. We’d seen her at Mother’s club meetings, her keen symmetrical features, her gleaming hair with waves like Jane Russell’s, her Mexican-brown complexion. Geraldine had won the Cap and Gown beauty contest when she was a student at the University of Chicago. She was a serious young woman, so she hadn’t campaigned for it; she’d been nominated by a male friend who hadn’t asked her permission. Still, she won the most votes.
And then university officials realized that she was one of their Negro students and had her disqualified.
She’d never wanted it, she always said.
And she never forgave them for taking it from her.
Equal opportunity should mean that an audience of Americans would be ready, willing, and eager when you, an unimpeachably outstanding Negro woman, stepped forth to stir, win, command their admiration.
—
Truly heroic women achieved fame by putting the needs of others first, however. This demanded unceasing fortitude and the renunciation of all things lighthearted. This demanded the renunciation of vanity.
Two large elderly women in large antique chairs take up the October 1955 cover of Ebony magazine. Their suits have straight, undeviating, and ankle-shielding skirts. Small, inadequate hats sit on their heads. They have no interest in the pink corsages pinned to their shoulders. One is a Negro, and she will never be on the cover of Life magazine; the other is a Caucasian who has been there twice: She is making a gracious and noteworthy guest appearance at Ebony. Mary McLeod Bethune is the Negro, broad and stout. Lanky, big-boned Eleanor Roosevelt is the Caucasian. When attractive women in suits cross their legs at the knee, we see a shapely column of thigh draped in fabric, then a second, bared column of flesh. These two women seem to have no legs. They have wide laps. Their hands rest there, as do the troubles of the world.
Surely they look like this because they have been working day and night, years, struggling to defeat the forces of prejudice and ignorance. Working to prove that people like us deserve our rights. They have renounced the feminine privileges we are learning at our mothers’ shapely knees. Still, our mothers want us to honor Mrs. Bethune. Without such women, they say, we would not have the opportunity to be nice Negro girls whose mothers are ladies.
Another Negro History Week Lesson
Mary Jane McLeod was born in a small log cabin to hardworking farmers who had been slaves. With the help of their seventeen children, the McLeods of South Carolina farmed their five acres diligently. Some days Mrs. McLeod earned extra money by cooking for the family of her former master. She would often bring little Mary along on these visits, and it happened that one day the nine-year-old, bored perhaps, or lonely, wandered out to the playhouse, where the white children were studying. Her eyes swept over a host of unfamiliar objects—pencils, slates, books, magazines; as her hand reached out to claim one, a voice said, “You can’t read that—put it down,” then added more kindly, “I will show you some pictures over here.” It was too late. The black child had been mortified—into ambition.
Intensely ambitious and smart little girls from humble backgrounds need the protective coloration of cheerful spirits, and religious faith. They must work unceasingly when they win scholarships to Negro seminaries and white Bible colleges; they must make clear that no task is too lowly, no request unwelcome. A plain and cheerful face is useful too: it helps endear such a child to all female schoolteachers (Negro and white) intent on promoting the doctrines of modesty and humility; it can shield her from any male instructors who might be gripped by desires they have been encouraged to act out with colored girls.
Mary made herself a favorite at every school she attended. She would boast, in later years, that she was of pure, undefiled African stock, descended on her mother’s side from a nation of female rulers. In early years she did not boast. She practiced deference, duty, and decorum. And she made sure to excel.
She longed to go to Africa as a missionary. The Baptist Mission Service informed her that they had no place in Africa for a Negro missionary, so she returned to the American South and became a missionary to young black girls threatened by poverty, ignorance, and degradation. She built a matriarchal kingdom from the ramshackle materials of Negro life in Florida.
—
In the year 1904 Mary McLeod Bethune (by then a wife and mother) opened her Daytona Educational and Industrial Training Institute on a former garbage site, in a cabin scrubbed and swept clean for five little girls who would learn reading, writing, cooking, sewing, and health and hygiene; would be converted from indigence to competence and be offered propriety in place of promiscuity. Her husband was not especially supportive; three years later they parted ways.
Footnote to Negro History Lesson:
Little Carrie Butler of South Carolina was five years old when Mrs. Bethune opened her school. Had her parents been able to send her nearly 575 miles to Daytona, in 1925 sixteen-year-old Carrie might have been preparing to graduate. She might have been standing proudly in the doorway of a building called Faith Hall, ready to weave rugs, cane chairs, and raise poultry in the home with her husband, ready to teach other young girls how to turn domestic labor into the principles of domestic science, ready to become a nurse. Instead she would become an unwed mother that year, bearing the female child of the twenty-five-year-old lawyer Strom Thurmond Jr., whose parents employed her as a maid.
By 1927 Mrs. Bethune had turned her little school into a bona fide college. Then she founded the National Council of Negro Women and fought for our rights year after year, fought to prove to a doubting country that we were hardworking and high-minded, bent on improving ourselves, our communities, and our families. Lifting us as we climbed out of the chasm of history.
When Franklin Roosevelt collected a small group of prominent, highly accomplished Negroes for his “Black Cabinet,” she was the only woman.
Children being the agreed-on provenance of all accomplished women, she was sent to the National Youth Administration. Negroes being judged qualified advisers on few affairs other than their own, she directed the Division of Negro Youth. Through her National Council of Negro Women, Bethune managed to diversify: members turned their energies to politics, jobs, housing, and civil rights. Just as Eleanor Roosevelt was doing from her secure domain as first lady.
—
They are old now, Mrs. Bethune and Mrs. Roosevelt. They always looked this way, though, even when they were young and photographed wearing velvet and crepe de chine, strands of pearls and garnets circling their necks and falling down their sloping bosoms. The upswept hair, the shapely little hats are like a nervous decorator’s afterthoughts in a gloomy house. Nothing could soften Mrs. Bethune’s broad nose and dark skin; temper the pale wrinkles and faltering chin of Mrs. Roosevelt.
Yet we owe women like this our lives.
And their worthiness numbs even as it stirs us.
Even in 1955, at the age of eight, I am not interested in Bethune-Cookman College. Even that early, I know my sister and I would never be sent there. Everyone knows President Roosevelt was much better looking than his wife. This is not a position my friends and I want to be in when we marry. We can’t achieve what Mrs. Roosevelt did, so we’ll just pay for being plain.
Denise is in our parents’ bedroom, at Mother’s vanity dresser. She tries on earrings and necklaces; she hazards a provocative smile; she puts her right elbow on the glass-covered dresser top and places her chin on her hand. (Her ballet class hand, soft but alert and slightly rounded.) Before dinner she will ask: “Who do I look more like, Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge?”
I am listening to records. Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Oklahoma!…I perform rake bravado, soubrette whimsy, judicious womanliness. The beautiful young lieutenant from Main Line Philadelphia has found himself in love with a beautiful brown-skinned girl in the South Pacific. She is Polynesian and speaks no English. (We know, though the rest of America may not, that Juanita Hall, who plays her mother, is really a Negro.)
—
It’s weekend television time.
Sammy Davis Jr. is going to be on The Milton Berle Show.
Dorothy Dandridge is going to be on The Jerry Lewis Colgate Comedy Hour.
Lena Horne is going to be on The Frank Sinatra Timex Show.
These are seminal moments in the viewing mores of the nation.
After dinner, the four of us gather in the TV room. Our parents are on the couch; Denise and I push the hassocks as near to the TV as we can, or stretch out on the floor till we’re told to sit up.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome…”
Sammy Davis Jr. does a swing-run onto the stage. He wears a taut, close-fitting suit and rectangular black-framed glasses.
My parents saw him live in New York.
My father: “He can do it all!”
My mother: “He certainly can.” (Pause.) “He still has too much oil in his hair.”
They’ve talked about how men in show business tend to use too much oil or oil that’s too thick. These men don’t always use stocking caps either, which settle the hair into thin ridge-waves that don’t have to pretend to be straight.
Sammy can dance (beautifully) and sing (very well). He enunciates crisply, with no trace of a stock Negro accent. He imitates the racially neutral vocal stylings of Nat King Cole and Billy Daniels and the racially white vocal stylings of Cary Grant, James Stewart, and James Cagney. This is cheeky and very satisfying. Daddy sits back on the couch. We hear him chuckle. Mother leans forward eagerly and tips her cigarette into the aquamarine glass ashtray.
Sammy isn’t on his own, though—not yet. He is followed onstage by two quiet, portly, balding men. He is still tethered to his father, Sammy Davis Sr., and to the kind employer of his childhood he still calls “Uncle Will.” He is still part of the Will Mastin Trio.
“He’s carrying them along,” Mother comments impatiently. The older men have the generic smiles of vaudeville second-stringers who learned years ago how to frame the star, keep time, recede, do their specialty step, recede, and exit—from stage and memory. They speak with mild and genial Negro accents. They’re from an age before television, before Broadway theaters like Ed Sullivan’s, where cheerful white people sat, eager to be entertained; before TV rec rooms, before dens where Negro families sat waiting to be entertained and hoping not to be denigrated. Will Mastin and Sammy Davis Sr. are folk art before folk art becomes museum-worthy.
“It’s time for them to go,” my father says in a gentle, definite way.
—
Lena Horne’s nostrils flare; they do not spread. The bridge of her nose is thin and exact. The nose of Dorothy Dandridge is a little bit fuller, but it’s not full. And she has a dimple right above her lips. Cupid’s-bow lips. Maidenly lips. Lena’s smile is wide, but her lips are not. She has high, wide Indian cheekbones, so she needs a wide smile. Her top lip is so narrow that she probably has trouble applying lipstick properly. Like my grandmother.
Lena and Dorothy can wear their hair any way they want. Upswept with bangs and tendrils, like Jennifer Jones; shoulder-length with wave clusters, like Elizabeth Taylor; trimmed to a cap of wayward curls, like Ava Gardner, who’s from the South and may have black blood. They look glamorous; they look comfortable in evening gowns and fur stoles. Like Mother and her friends. But most people don’t know we Negroes dress like that.
—
Dorothy Dandridge sings in a studio-set apartment. When a woman sings on a television show she’s supposed to be singing in her cute living room or her frilly boudoir. There’s a window frame with curtains behind her. She’s waiting for her gentleman friend. She can peer into a mirror and pout. She can perch on a small cushioned chair and kick her legs up. She can fling herself onto a love seat. She can pick up a real poodle when the song ends and hug it coquettishly.
Dorothy Dandridge wears a pale ruffled ball gown in her single-miss apartment. She has put her hair in a society-hostess bun with a center part. There are four strands of pearls around her neck. She looks down, as if she’s misbehaved, then lifts her head and smiles.
“Blow out the candle,” she sings pertly,
Blow out the candle,
Blow out the candle so the neighbors won’t see!
She cups her hands at her waist, clasps them at her throat—opera singers always do this on TV—throws her head back just a bit, and smiles again. She extends an arm, then flings it up and flicks her wrist. It’s almost Spanish! Her shoulders move slightly, no more than a few measures, and off the beat. Then she sways her hips, pretending not to notice that they’re swaying. (“Just enough,” says my mother.) She mimes snuffing out a candle like French maids do in operas.
Won’t you blow out the candle,
So there will be no scandal?
And no one will know
You’ve been ki-i-i-ssing me!
“Why couldn’t they give her a real song? Ellington or a show tune,” my father wants to know. He doesn’t want to know; he knows, and we know too. “She did the best she could do with that ditty.”
But Lena Horne has made her way into the show-tune penthouse. Lena Horne sings Cole Porter. She’s wearing a black sheath with full-length, see-through sleeves. The white curtains behind her curl and drape.
“While tearing off a game of golf…” Hah!
My father doesn’t care about golf, but plenty of his friends do.
The collar of her sheath is made of tulle netting, and it matches the cuffs. Tulle ruffles cuff her wrists. Lena Horne doesn’t move her body at all. She stands in profile the whole time. Her behind is perfectly round, not big. One arm is poised at her waist. The other moves stealthily toward the fancy chair that goes with a vanity dresser that isn’t on the set.
She places her wrist on the chair back with extreme care. (“Hauteur” is my mother’s word.) She has ballet hands, but they’re a little pointed. They’re show business ballet hands. She lets two fingers touch the curve of the chair and move back and forth.
“Ah just adore his asking for more…” This time the “I” is “Ah,” while “adore” comes out “adoharr” and “more” (her eyes widen and stare out on “more”) rolls itself into “mohrr.”
The syllables stay crisp, though. They’re not guttural. They’re a design carved onto the surface of each word. She stretches her mouth open, widens it and shows her teeth. Even and gleaming in perfect formation. She smiles but curls her lips as she sings “But my heart belongs to Daddy.” She turns her face away and lifts her chin. For the last line—“ ’cause my daddy, he treats it so well”—we see only her profile.
My parents talk about what she does with her face. Lena mugs, they agree, but she can get away with it. She’s a beauty.
And she used to be bland. Then she married Lennie Hayton. He was a bandleader and arranger, a big wheel at MGM. He gave her sophisticated arrangements and taught her how to put a song over with personality, with pizzazz. To rule it, not defer to it.
Lennie Hayton is white, but when you see pictures of them in Ebony, he’s the one who looks grateful. He’s always smiling. He’s standing behind her most of the time, with his white hair and little beard. Lena knew what she was doing.
She never has the lapses in taste Dorothy Dandridge has. One Sunday night on Ed Sullivan the curtains part to show Dorothy in a strapless gown that pushes her breasts up and toward each other and out toward the waiting audience. In a whispery voice, sometimes closing her eyes and sliding her head back toward undulating shoulders, she chants, “He’s a smooth operator, a cool sweet potato and a gone alligator.”
I�
��m here to tell you
One natural fact
(CHA cha cha CHA CHA CHA CHA!)
I like it like that!
You drive me wild
You make me shout
Have mercy Mister Percy
Now cut that out!
“Mercy Mister Percy?” my mother repeats when Ed Sullivan has extended his arm, thanked Miss Dandridge, and gone to a commercial break. “Why doesn’t she just say ‘Master’ and sing it standing on an auction block?”
Everybody knows Dorothy Dandridge wants to marry a white man. She’s never managed to turn a white lover into a loving husband, and she’ll never stop trying. Everyone knows Otto Preminger won’t marry her, though she hoped he would after he directed Carmen Jones and she became the first Negro woman to get an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Carmen was a wanton, which we resent seeing Negro women play since most people think that’s what Negro women are, but at least Carmen started out as a gypsy in a French opera.
Two years later Dorothy Dandridge was supposed to play Tuptim in The King and I—Tuptim the refined Burmese maiden pledged to the king of Siam by her ambitious father, yet loving the gently handsome Lun Tha, to whom she was first betrothed.
But Dorothy Dandridge turned the role down: Tuptim was little more than a slave, she declared. And how the Negro establishment lauded her decision. So Dorothy Dandridge denied hundreds of Negro girls the chance to sit rapturously in a movie theater watching a Negro woman pad delicately across palace floors in Oriental silk (turquoise, fuchsia, emerald green, and gold), voice sweetly chanting, eyes faintly slanted, and hair straight and dark as a raven’s wing. Exquisite, chastely arousing; worthy of worship, anguish, sacrifice. Played instead by the Puerto Rican Rita Moreno.
What misbegotten scruples! The enthrallment of a beautiful Asian woman is not squalid; it is refined through ancient rituals of the Orient that white people must acknowledge despite their racial and cultural misgivings. We Negroes long for such an aura. When my school stages a musical revue that year that includes “The March of the Siamese Children,” I get to be one, in red sateen, with a topknot, rouged cheeks and lipstick, eyes drawn to a wide slant with a teacher’s blunt makeup pencil. A year later, I watch the Japanese Miiko Taka enchant Marlon Brando in Sayonara. He wants to marry her, and in the end he does. It’s profoundly exciting.
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