Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  One afternoon we see Betty Ann playing double Dutch with two girls we’ve never met. They laugh a lot and say “Girrlll…” Then they start to turn the ropes.

  Betty Ann’s the jumper. She leans in, arms bent, fists balled, gauging her point of entry. Turn slap turn slap turn slap and there she goes. Her knees pump, her feet quick-slap the ground, parrying the ropes till, fleet of foot and neat, she jumps out. Rapt and envious, we watch them take turns. Now Betty Ann doesn’t come down to play jacks with us or borrow Denise’s bike. She and her friends laugh and eat candy, and jump double Dutch. After a week of this we stroll down the block hoping they’ll ask us to join. After a few days they do. Denise isn’t good but she’s not bad: she swings the rope correctly and manages a few solid intervals before the ropes catch her. My swinging isn’t fast or steady enough, and the ropes reject my anxious feet in seconds. By the time I clamor for a third try, Betty Ann and her friends say no.

  It’s not the no I remember, it’s their snickering scorn. I’m used to being the youngest and clumsiest when I play with Denise’s friends, but if one of them mocks or reproves me, another pets me to make up for it. If they act too badly, their mothers intervene. Or Denise does, and after a short quarrel and apology they resume play.

  Not now. Betty Ann’s Ooo ooh ooooo, Un-un-unhhhh is definitive. Denise raises her voice: We have to go home now. Betty Ann and her friends laugh a little harder. Denise sets a slow pace, as if we’re leaving by choice. My father and uncle are waiting in front of the house: they’ve heard the laughter and looked down the block to see us in shamed, haughty retreat. I bask in their sympathy. Over dinner the adults concur: We will never play with Betty Ann again. She and her friends are loud and coarse. They envy you girls. We moved to this neighborhood just five years ago. We may need to move again.

  —

  I enter fourth grade that fall. Mrs. Pollak has a pleasant, calm manner and she’s our music teacher as well as our homeroom teacher. Once again we sing Stephen Foster songs and once again we sing “Swanee River.” I love that song, with its octave upswing on “Swa-NEE—Riv-EEEER.” One afternoon I march around the living room singing it as loudly as I had in class that day: “All the world is sad and dreary, everywhere I roam / Oh darkies! How my heart grows weary! / Far…”

  “Margo,” comes Mother’s voice from the kitchen, followed swiftly by Mother herself. “What did you just sing?”

  I repeat myself: “All the world is sad and dreary, everywhere I roam, / Oh dar—” She stops me flat as the k approaches.

  “Margo, do you know what ‘darkies’ means?”

  I do not.

  “It’s an ugly word about us. People don’t use it anymore, but when they did, it meant the same thing as ‘nigger.’ ”

  As I take that in, Mother fumes. “Mrs. Pollak should know better. When you sang that song last year, Miss Schoff was sensitive. She changed the word to ‘lordy.’ ”

  Is it a need for thematic symmetry that makes me think this was the same year Grandma sees me playing a game in her front yard that the little white girl next door had proposed? We bend down, slump our shoulders, lower our heads to the ground, and sling rounded arms back and forth, chanting “I’se from the jungle.” Suddenly my grandmother is at the screen door telling me to come inside. She informs me sternly and solemnly, “That was an ugly game. That little girl was playing it to insult you. To insult Negroes and say we are like monkeys.”

  These memories are as much about being humiliated by adult knowledge as about race prejudice. My mother and grandmother exposed errors I’d made. I felt humiliated in front of them. My teacher seemed to like me, but not enough to spare me a humiliating racial slur. I’d been having a fine time with the little white girl next door until we started playing “I’se from the Jungle.” It’s so easy for a child to feel all wrong in the eyes of adults. And when you have no idea that what you were doing is wrong…I hated being caught unawares. It was so dangerous, so shameful not to know what I needed to know.

  Q: Why must I know? Tell me again.

  A: So you won’t let yourself be insulted and humiliated. So you won’t let your people be insulted and humiliated.

  There are so many ways to be ambushed by insult and humiliation.

  * * *

  * The words that follow read “Crosses were burned and the two houses were stoned.” I couldn’t bear to place them on the same page with all the rest. I’m so sick of that burning cross: I hate that it’s a cliché of bigotry, drama that never loses its real-life power. But how many times can you read about it? The stones are more shocking. More primal and foreign—I can’t protect myself against their shock and power. But there’s something else too. I want to shield my father, even though he’s dead. He and his family fled Mississippi in 1918 and settled in California a few years later. They purchased a home in what he later called “a modest white working-class neighborhood.” A cross was burned on their lawn the day they moved in. My grandfather sat on the porch of his new Los Angeles home all night holding the same gun he’d once pulled on a group of recalcitrant white men in Coffeeville, Mississippi. And then the plot shifted. The family sued, went to court, and won the right to keep their house.

  All the bright young faces, generations of them, learning the standard race curriculum of wounds and grievances! The advance or demise of The Race depends on what you do, what you are, what you long to be. That was our fact, that was our fear. Will the generations that come after be at all exempt? Will they show the damage too many of us inherited?

  Or acquired.

  Or drove ourselves toward.

  I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.

  I was happy in the sanctum of that neo-Gothic elementary school. Getting out of Mother’s dark red Oldsmobile each morning, climbing the wide stone steps of Blaine Hall with the other girls and boys, looking up at its spires, then entering one of three vast arched wooden doors; walking through the entrance with its stone benches, a sense of something shaded and towering in the halls our voices drifted through. It never occurred to me till I read Ruskin on Gothic architecture that this pragmatic prairie offshoot might have marked me as he said it should—affirmed that imagination was as valued as fact; appealed to the humble and the refined; celebrated arts and customs that official culture deemed rude.

  We’d walk through the halls to the library, with its childhood classics and its useful learning books. Every one of Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books: crimson, green, red, yellow, olive, gray, brown. Because of my piano lessons I did my duty with biographies of composers. Why do I remember Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart so clearly as they thrilled adults with their piano playing in court after court? Handel’s mother and sisters clustered joyfully around him, celebrating his first major appointment with the chant

  George Frideric Han-del

  Or-ganist and Choi-r-master!

  —

  Are they meant to signal a precocious feminist awareness? (Nannerl’s father made her retire when she turned eighteen and marriageable. Handel’s mother and sisters were just that—Handel’s mother and sisters.)

  Maybe they signal my early worship of child stars and my wish to be one.

  I found Althea Gibson’s autobiography in the library too: I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. Here was blunt ambition, blunt need. Which impressed and slightly embarrassed me. Her tennis triumphs were irrefutable, even though I knew Negroes were usually overpraised for sports and underpraised for art and academics. The one thing I wished she hadn’t done was describe how she straightened her hair with Dixie Peach before and after matches. Why write about that? Especially Dixie Peach. The name was countrified; the oil was heavy and greasy. We used Ultra-Sheen in my family (which didn’t need to be written about either).

  Every sixth-grade class put on a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. All the younger grades were invited, and if you
r older sibling was in one, it gave you status. Denise was Hebe in H.M.S. Pinafore: when the First Lord of the Admiralty declared himself “the Monarch of the Sea,” she curtsied and sang, “And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts.” Do children today find bliss in Gilbert and Sullivan? They gave us verbal dexterity and gestural finesse. We mimicked adult rituals without forgoing the rules of childhood pleasure: rhythmic certainty, sonic variety, happy endings that succeed parodic threats and dangers.

  In the car on the way to school Denise read poems aloud, swashbuckling through Victorian thumpers about carnage and dire suffering.

  Stitch Stitch Stitch,

  In poverty, hunger and dirt!

  And still with a voice of dolorous pitch—

  Would that its sound would reach the rich—

  She sang the song of the shirt.

  I loved nonsense poetry. Mother read Lewis Carroll aloud with me, and when I was alone in the car with her I’d recite his poems. “Humpty Dumpty,” “Father William,” “Jabberwock,” the cheerful treacheries of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Lewis Carroll let you murder, bully, and impose your will systematically on people, animals, landscapes, and vocabularies. But Edward Lear led you into a strange, sweet world of aliens with mellifluous names and human longings.

  Jumblies

  Quabbles

  The Yonghy Bonghy Bo

  Melancholy untainted by realism.

  He weeps by the side of the ocean,

  He weeps on the top of the hill;

  He purchases pancakes and lotion,

  And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

  —

  Mother arrives home from her errands one afternoon to find Denise and me sitting on the stairs, splaying our limbs this way and that, raucous with laughter.

  Listen, Mama, listen! we cry, and start to recite a poem we’ve just read.

  Well, son, I’ll tell you:

  Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

  It’s had tacks in it,

  And splinters,

  And boards torn up,

  And places with no carpet on the floor—

  Bare.

  But all the time

  I’se been a-climbin’ on,

  And reachin’ landin’s,

  And turnin’ corners,

  And sometimes goin’ in the dark

  Where there ain’t been no light.

  So boy, don’t you turn back.

  Don’t you set down on the steps

  ’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

  Don’t you fall now—

  For I’se still goin’, honey,

  I’se still climbin’,

  And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

  We declaim the opening lines—“Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”—then start to rush; we want to get quickly to the “I’se” and the dropped gs, to that place where “kind of” becomes “kinder”…

  We read it like Willie Best would read it on The Stu Erwin Show, with wide-open mouths, gruff dips on the “I’se,” and lots of tremolo.

  We read it like our favorite characters on Amos ’n Andy—Calhoun (Denise), the hyperactive, scheming, bloviating attorney-at-law, and Lightning (me), behind everyone’s physical or mental beat with his hapless limbs, crossing eyes, and high-throated meandering syllables. Neither parent approved of the show and we were discouraged from watching. Forbidding us would only have made it more alluring.

  Now we are crouched over the book acting like little picaninnies. We’re surprised by the silence that meets our last, extravagant “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

  Our mother speaks slowly so we have to sit up and pay attention.

  “That is a beautiful poem and, girls, you are butchering it. You’re reading it in ignorant dialect. Langston Hughes is one of our leading, best poets. This is how it should be read.”

  And she calls on all the resources of Negro life and history, softening the “I’se,” removing the heavy downbeat on the first syllable of every verb (which makes the dropped g sound like a clumsy off-pitch note), lowering her voice so everything isn’t mezzo forte, turning dialect to vernacular. What are parents to do, when they’ve taken all steps to ensure that their children flourish in the world at large, to claim their right to culture and education, when suddenly this chasm of ignorance and inferiority opens up to swallow their cultivated little selves? How did these demons of scorn and mockery find their way into your children?

  —

  When Langston Hughes taught at the Lab School for three months in 1949, he taught writing in the kindergarten, the grade school, and the high school; he taught “The Negro in Poetry” and gave two readings of his own poems.

  What had happened?

  Did his work leave the premises when he did, in 1949?

  Was that famous poem still part of the curriculum, and were we butchering it out of embarrassment? Had we not been exposed enough at home to Negro poets? (How alien “Mother to Son” would have looked lying in the weeds outside A Child’s Garden of Verses, which our mother read to and with us.)

  In its way segregation was a fortress. Hostile forces threatened and intruded, but life inside could be ordered. Some of our friends went to black or mostly black schools. They learned white culture inside the fortress, surrounded by versions of themselves, taught—at least sometimes—by versions of their parents and neighbors.

  That was how Mother had grown up, and now we’d given her cause to brood. “When I was your age we celebrated Negro History Week. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was founded by Carter G. Woodson right here in Chicago. We read The Crisis. We were so proud when we sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ at assemblies and church programs.”

  How were those of us being naturalized into white culture to be protected without the shield of cultural segregation? How was active intellectual pride to be instilled?

  From that day forward Mother began her own cultural enrichment course with evening and weekend contributions from Daddy. Though the aim was national, the focus was Chicago, with a special emphasis on friends and acquaintances.

  Did you girls know that—

  The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the case against restrictive covenants in housing argued by our friends Earl Dickerson and Truman Gibson on behalf of Carl Hansberry, an acquaintance and the father of Lorraine Hansberry?

  Our own Provident Hospital was the first in this country founded and run by Negroes, and the founder, Daniel Hale Williams, was the first doctor to perform successful open heart surgery?

  Ida B. Wells, a civil rights activist who spearheaded campaigns against lynching, lived and worked and organized here in Chicago?

  Our friend Allison Davis was the first Negro to be tenured at a major university (the University of Chicago)? He has done groundbreaking work on race and culture and the flaws of IQ testing.

  The Chicago Defender was once the most powerful newspaper in Negro America? It’s run by our friend Robert Sengstacke with the help of his wife, Myrtle. Ebony, Jet, and Johnson Publishing were started by our friend Johnny with the help of his wife, Eunice.

  Our friend the Reverend Archibald Carey, of Quinn Chapel, has been an alternate delegate to the United Nations and chairman of Eisenhower’s Committee on Government Employment Policy?

  Black Metropolis, a major work of sociology, was written about Chicago by two Negro University of Chicago scholars, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton?

  Oscar De Priest, Helen Harvey’s cousin, was the first Negro elected to Congress in this century?

  Katherine Dunham grew up here, got her anthropological training at the University of Chicago, and started her dance company here?

  The National Association of Negro Musicians began in Chicago?

  Our friend Etta Moten starred in the 1943 production of Porgy and Bess and sang (with dignity and skill) in Gold Diggers of 1935 and Flying Down to Rio? Her husband, Claude Barnett, also a Chic
agoan, founded the Associated Negro Press.

  Our friend Ralph Metcalfe Sr. was an gold medalist at the 1936 Olympics?

  Do you really want to know as little as your white schoolmates know about where we came from and what we’ve accomplished?

  Fifth Grade

  Miss Torrance has her hair cut like Doris Day as Babe in The Pajama Game. Bangs in the front, short and flat in the back. She casts me as Amahl in our class production of Amahl and the Night Visitors. We listen and listen to Menotti’s score; we memorize it. It’s like a fairy tale, with its predictably exciting flurries of drama and prettiness. We lip-synch as if lip-synching were operatic destiny. I feel none of the terror of Not Living Up, have none of the mixed feelings that in later years will make me do things like (1) throw myself down a small flight of stairs in college so I can say I’ve been injured and can’t try out for the fencing team; (2) plunge excitedly into an essay assigned by a magazine long after I was a published writer, then withdraw, convinced that I couldn’t possibly do it.

  I want nothing more than to be a boy on a crutch in Bethlehem between the years 7 B.C. and 3 B.C., a boy known to tell fanciful stories, a lying boy, and why not, tending sheep alone all day with no friends, for how could the other lithe-limbed shepherd boys and girls think much of him? A boy whose mother is so poor, she must sell their sheep and send him off begging (beggars lie). A boy who struggles to be the man of the house but wants desperately to be a child whose mother is solicitous and indulgent instead of scared and impatient; a boy who hates being a cripple, who should protect his mother but can’t; a boy who feels he should be exceptional and is not; a boy who tells lies not just to get attention but because he has imagination. A boy rescued by the intervention of myth; a boy recompensed by miracle.

  How we work, Sandy Mentschikoff and I! She is Amahl’s anguished, desperate mother, and she is amazingly expressive: a full-bodied, full-hearted parent, acquainted with grief. We’re applauded, acclaimed by our classmates and their parents. It’s thrilling.