Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  We have bought an apartment house. Three of the four floors are ours. We rent the fourth to a divorcée, Mrs. Collins (Negro), who makes hats and who walks through her apartment in bright filmy robes and mules with swansdown trim. She smokes, and slurs her words with husky precision. Like Peggy Lee singing “Black Coffee.”

  To our left is round-faced, genial Dr. Hall (Negro), who wears a brown felt fedora in winter and a pale straw one in summer. I would say that his complexion was dark tobacco. Jesse Owens (famous Negro athlete) lives at the end of the block for a time but takes his children to another pediatrician. In the pale stone house on the other side are Mr. and Mrs. Willie Hull. They have lightly Southernized voices. Mr. Hull is a cabdriver. Mrs. Hull is a nurse with full bangs and shoulder-length dark curls. Their daughter Shirley is my age; we often play together in her backyard or mine.

  Now nobody burns crosses, or twists their face into ugly grimaces and shouts. We’re coming, and the neighborhood is going. Brrring goes the telephone up and down each block. “Hello, we’re savvy white realtors and you’re angry white homeowners. Let us buy your houses now and sell them to the Negroes at much higher prices than you or any other white person would pay. You’ll be laughing all the way to the bank. Let them pay to ruin the neighborhood if they want it so much.”

  —

  “Mother, were there ever white families on our block?” I ask twenty years later.

  “Oh yes, my child, they were there. There was one right next door before the Hulls came. They had two children. About your age. And they encouraged them to have as little as possible to do with you girls.”

  One Summer Day in 1952…

  Mrs. Jefferson put Denise and Margo in bed for their afternoon nap, then went downstairs to the breakfast room. She sat at the table and poured herself a cup of coffee. She was planning or daydreaming. The blinds opened onto the backyard. The pansies were in their beds, the roses on their trellis. It was a lark-on-the-wing snail-on-the-thorn moment until she saw the two white children from the house next door open the gate, enter our yard, head for our brightly painted swings, and settle their little fannies onto them.

  Another tale from the crypt of Negro childhood. I interrupt to ask what they looked like.

  “Like two white children. Nothing special. Murky blonde hair.”

  “Were they both girls?”

  (sigh) “I think so.”

  Mrs. Jefferson watched as the swings began to move, then she stood and straightened her shoulders. Did her thoughts run along these lines?

  The thousand injuries of Caucasians I had borne as I best could, but when they ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat…

  When she stepped onto the porch there was nothing urgent or harsh in her manner. “Girls,” she said calmly but firmly, “Margo and Denise are taking their naps. They won’t be down to play, so you can go home.”

  And they do. But they return the next week. And the week after that. Each time, Mrs. Jefferson steps onto the porch and speaks the same words. Each time, they leave silently. After the third visit, they come no more. And within a year they are gone forever.

  A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. A wrong is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make herself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.

  —

  Now, so many years after, Mrs. Jefferson will look down, lower her voice, and end the tale thus: “I was too intimidated to confront their mother.”

  I can’t bear to think of her intimidated. “Of course you were,” I rush in. “Those police homeowners were probably still doing plainclothes duty.”

  Silence.

  She’s silent, so I try a slavery joke. “You had to watch out for the Park Manor pattyrollers.” It’s corny and gets a dutiful pre-laugh sound. I must do better.

  “Mother, all I regret is that those people moved before we got our badminton set. That would have finished them off completely.” She gives me a look that acknowledges my skill, or at least my good intentions. Then she stands up, ending the conversation, still ashamed of herself.

  —

  Mother looks stylish and confident when she drives us to school each morning. On the first day of kindergarten I fight not to be separated from her and weep with abandon. It takes two adults—Mother and the teacher, Miss Thurston—to dislodge me from the maternal body and haul me into the classroom. Within the week I’ve adapted, with the help of my red dress. I want to wear it each day, for a time at least, because it makes me feel brave. Mother May I? Yes, you may.

  The second week I come home in triumph, mimicking a classmate who still sobs each morning. “I wanna go home to Ma-ah-ma!” I get the three-note quiver perfect, to my parents’ delight. The red dress goes back to its normal place in my well-stocked wardrobe.

  We’re taught coordination skills. Tumbling, bouncing two balls, one in each hand. Sometimes Miss Thurston puts us in a circle and has us wrestle two by two. Did boys and girls wrestle each other or were the contests strictly boy/boy girl/girl? What I do remember is the nervous excitement of standing in the circle watching fierce little bodies grasp and thrash each other until Miss Thurston ends the round. I know I wrestled vehemently with Judy Winter, which leaves me feeling icky and squeamish. Is this because Judy won the match? Was I embarrassed by the fierceness of my inner gladiator? Was I discomfited because I sensed that our grappling, tumbling bodies emphasized to all that we were two of four Negroes in the class?

  First Grade

  I play so hard at recess that I often come home with the sash of my dress ripped on one side and hanging down. The jungle gym, tag—I never know what I’ve done too much of to make it happen. I feel that the sash is tattling on me the way I tattle on my older sister when she overpowers me.

  Each winter morning we go into the cloakroom to take off our coats, jackets, boots, and leggings. One day when we girls were already in the classroom, we heard a great stir from back there—moving feet, boys’ voices, urgent shhhhhhhhhhhs. Our teacher, Miss Polkinghorne, a benign little round woman with white braids wrapped around her head and granny glasses, must have hurried into the cloakroom. Or sent an assistant there. For the noise stopped, and the boys were ushered into the classroom in silence. At recess one of the girls, who must have heard it from one of the boys, told us sotto voce that T. had pulled his pants down in the cloakroom. Why did he do it? Had an alpha boy like S. challenged him? T. is lively but not one of the mischievous ones I’d have picked to pull his pants down. In my mind now, though, it’s he who totes the biggest boy’s lunch pail to school each day. A large black-domed structure with a V in the middle, ridges on either side, and two mighty aluminum buckles.

  Second Grade

  I’m placed in a small advanced reading group. It’s done quietly; we children understand that we are not to boast about it. Then a first-grade girl joins the group. Soon it becomes clear, though she never says so, that she hasn’t just been placed in our reading group, she’s been skipped to second grade. Is she smarter than the rest of us? The community learning spirit of Lab includes constant assessment of yourself and your competition.

  In the fall of 1955 an important mayoral race is in progress. Who are your parents voting for, Merriam or Daley? the teacher asks one day as we sit tailor-legged in our discussion circle. Merriam Merriam Merriam, Merriam, Merriam Merriam Merriam, said classmate after classmate. Many of their parents are University of Chicago professors. Merriam is the son of a University of Chicago professor and dean. Merriam is the liberal, intellectual candidate who has criticized the relentless workings of the Democratic Party machine.

  My grandmother had once been a Democratic Party precinct captain, as had Democratic Party candidate Richard J. Daley. Daley and his Negro ally, Congressman William L. Dawson, have strong opponents in Negroland, but I’ve heard adult debates: Dawson is one of only two Negroes in the United States Congress, and Daley beha
ved well when Emmett Till was murdered. I know my parents are almost certainly voting for Daley.

  The teacher gets to me. “Merriam,” I say without pausing. No one else has paused. I’m sure I use my prim, obliging voice; I may even have widened my eyes slightly, and given a little smile to suggest that I knew how predictable it was. I know that a badly told lie is as bad as no lie at all.

  Third Grade

  Miss Randolph, who becomes Mrs. Boverman midyear, is dark-haired with a sprightly June Allyson haircut. (The ends curl up just below her ears; the bangs are side-swept.) She is lively, she is enthusiastic, and she casts me as the daughter in a play our class writes about a Hopi Indian family. I believe we showed their traditional reservation ways first, followed by their excited visit to a large midwestern city. Were we documenting cultural difference and adaptation? All that mattered to me was that I had a leading role.

  Our music teacher, Miss Schoff, has curly dark hair, which she ties with a black velvet ribbon. She wears a red Chanel-style suit. We sing folk songs (what house didn’t have The Fireside Book of Folk Songs on its piano stand?); we sing folkloric popular songs like “Jambalaya” and “Shrimp Boats Are a-Comin’ ”; we sing Stephen Foster songs like “Swanee River” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair”; we sing spirituals. We sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” slowly and softly; we let loose on “Rock-a My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham.” After that Miss Schoff has us dance to it, and after watching she singles me out for a solo in front of the class. I fling my arms out and whirl round and round in triumph.

  Those of us who have siblings in the sixth grade keep close watch on their doings. Word comes down one afternoon that Denise has beaten the star boy, B., in the fifty-yard dash. Bobby says his brother Steve said that B., not Denise, won the race. Hotly, I tell him he’s wrong. The boys back Steve; the girls back me. We start shouting. And suddenly Bobby and Daphne throw themselves at each other and fall to the floor punching, flailing, and scuffling. Miss Randolph has to step in before it becomes a gender riot. Denise tells me later that B. made her race three times. “Let’s do it again, Denise.” She kept on winning. One two three.

  All third-grade classes take French with Monsieur Pillet. “Do you remember when he took a group of his students downtown to the Hilton to show us off to the MLA?” a Lab friend writes me years later. “My mother drove us.” I don’t remember our being shown off at the Conrad Hilton. I remember my terror as his mother drove me home afterward; at one point I could tell she wasn’t sure how to get to my neighborhood. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell, and I couldn’t give her directions. Finally, somehow, we reached streets I recognized and I could say, “We’re almost there,” and thank her with an air of cheer when I got out of the car. I couldn’t tell my parents I’d been afraid she’d never find our house.

  —

  Nothing highlighted our privilege more than the menace to it. Inside the race we were the self-designated aristocrats, educated, affluent, accomplished; to Caucasians we were oddities, underdogs and interlopers. White people who, like us, had manners, money, and education…But wait: “Like us” is presumptuous for the 1950s. Liberal whites who saw that we too had manners, money, and education lamented our caste disadvantage. Less liberal or non-liberal whites preferred not to see us in the private schools and public spaces of their choice. They had ready a bevy of slights: from skeptics the surprised glance and spare greeting; from waverers the pleasantry, eyes averted; from disdainers the direct cut. Caucasians with materially less than us were given license by Caucasians with more than them to subvert and attack our privilege.

  Caucasian privilege lounged and sauntered, draped itself casually about, turned vigilant and commanding, then cunning and devious. We marveled at its tonal range, its variety, its largesse in letting its humble share the pleasures of caste with its mighty. We knew what was expected of us. Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.

  Early Summer, 1956

  Two Negro parents and two Negro daughters stand at a hotel desk in Atlantic City. This is the last stop on their road trip: after Montreal, Quebec City, and New York, the plan is to lounge on the beach and stroll the boardwalk. It’s midday, and guests saunter through the lobby in resort wear. The Caucasian clerk in his brown uniform studies the reservation book, looking puzzled as he traces the list with his finger.

  “You said Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson…”

  “Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson,” says my father.

  The clerk turns the page, studies the list again, running his eyes and his index finger slowly up and down. Just before he turns it back again, he stops. “Oh, here you are, Doc. The hotel is so crowded this week. We had to change your room.”

  Trailing their daughters, the father and mother follow the uniformed bellboy into the elevator. It stops a few floors up; they get out; he leads them to the end of a long hall then around a corner, unlocks the door, and puts their suitcases just inside a small room, which leads into another small room. We’re looking out on a parking lot.

  When the bellboy leaves, our father goes into the larger small room without saying anything. He stopped talking when the clerk’s finger reached the bottom of the first page. “Unpack your towels and swimsuits,” our mother orders. “Read or play quietly till we go to the beach.” She follows our father into the other room and shuts the door.

  We unpack quickly so she won’t be annoyed when she comes back. Just what is going on? All the other hotels had our reservations. Mother has said that a lot of white people don’t like to call Negroes “Doctor.”

  At the beach we settle on our new towels and fondle the sand. Our parents, Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson, sit on their own blanket talking in low voices. Mother never swims, but our father loves to. Today, he takes us to the water’s edge and watches us go in and come out.

  It’s getting cooler, it’s late afternoon; time to fold the towels neatly, put them in the beach bag, and return to the hotel. “Take your baths,” our mother says, but only after she has taken a hotel facecloth and soap bar to the lines on the bottom of the tub that don’t wash away.

  “Where are we going for dinner?” I ask. “What should we wear?”

  “We’re eating here,” Mother answers.

  “What about the hotel dining room?”

  “We’re ordering room service and eating here,” she says in her implacable voice. “And we’re leaving tomorrow.”

  Denise speaks up for both of us:

  “We just got here. We didn’t get to stay long at the beach. Why can’t we eat in the hotel dining room?”

  We resent the bad mood that has come over our parents. We want the beach and we want the boardwalk we’ve been promised since the trip began.

  Mother pauses, then addresses herself and us. “This is a prejudiced place. What kind of service would we get in that restaurant? Look at these shabby rooms. Pretending they couldn’t find the reservation. We’re leaving tomorrow. And your father will tell them why.”

  Our father has not smiled since the four of us walked into the lobby and stood at the desk as the clerk turned us into Mr. and Mrs. Negro Nobody with their Negro children from somewhere in Niggerland.

  The next morning we are told to sit on the lobby couch while our parents check out; we don’t hear what our father says, or if he says anything.

  We drive back to Chicago, an American family returning home from the kind of vacation successful American families have. We’d stayed at the Statler Hilton in New York and eaten in their restaurant. We’d pummeled and pounced on the bolsters of the Château Frontenac in Quebec. When Daddy asked strangers in Montreal for directions, their answers were always accurate and polite. Only Atlantic City went wrong. In the car our parents reproach themselves for not doing more research, consulting friends on the East Coast before taking the risk.

  —

  Such treatment encouraged privileged Negroes to see our privilege as more than justified: It was ha
rd-won and politically righteous, a boon to the race, a source of compensatory pride, an example of what might be achieved. In the privacy of an all-Negro world, Negro privilege could lounge and saunter too, show off its accoutrements and lay down the law. Regularly denounce Caucasians, whose behavior toward us, and all dark-skinned people, proved they did not morally deserve their privilege. We had the moral advantage; they had the assault weapons of “great civilization” and “triumphant history.” Ceaselessly, we chronicled our people’s achievements. Ceaselessly, we denounced our people’s failures.

  Too many of us just aren’t trying. No ambition. No interest in education. You don’t have to turn your neighborhood into a slum just because you’re poor. Negroes like that made it hard for the rest of us. They held us back. We got punished for their bad behavior.

  1956, a Month After Our Trip

  Professionals and small businessmen live on one end of our block. At the other end of the block is Betty Ann, somebody’s daughter, we don’t know whose. She has lots of short braids on her head, fastened with red, yellow, and green plastic barrettes. She wears red nail polish and keeps it on till it’s nothing but tiny chips. I beg to be allowed to wear red nail polish outside, and not just when I dress up in Mother’s old clothes. No, comes the answer; red nail polish on children is cheap.

  In the summer Betty Ann saunters up and down the block letting the backs of her shoes flap against her heels. When she finds something ridiculous she folds her arms and goes Oooo-oooo-OOOo, Uh-un-UNNNh. When she laughs she bends over at the waist and shuffles her feet. Denise and I start to do this at home. “Where did you pick that up?” our mother asks. “Don’t collapse all over yourself when you laugh.”