Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  —

  The Lab School combines seventh and eighth grade to produce a class of academically precocious eleven- and twelve-year-olds who are profoundly disoriented socially. We are called pre-freshmen.

  “You were like little insects buzzing through the halls,” an upperclassman recalled. We were nervous, we were eager, we were stranded between pre- and full-tilt adolescence. Buzz buzz buzz.

  That year was, still is, a blur of striving and confusion.

  Reading and rereading Agnes de Mille’s Dance to the Piper. The need to be special projected desperately, ecstatically, onto icon after icon. Audrey Hepburn (The Nun’s Story, Funny Face); Leslie Caron (The Glass Slipper, An American in Paris); Tammy Grimes (the television version of Archy and Mehitabel).

  Watching an actor who’d come from the Goodman Theatre to our English class recite Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” Not a day went by when I wasn’t seized by the futile envy of the little Spanish monk.

  Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!

  Water your damned flower-pots, do!

  If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,

  God’s blood, would not mine kill you!

  What I craved was a landscape on which to enact—on which to exude—the hauteur of the vengeful duke.

  —E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose

  Never to stoop.

  I decide I will be a character actress.

  —

  At a class entertainment in Sunny Gym, I stand several feet behind M. and B. as they arrange themselves on chairs and sing “When Love Goes Wrong (Nothin’ Goes Right).” It’s the Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell duet from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. They don’t do the vamp dance; they’re more in Gidget mode. Pertly sad, poutily sweet. My task is to help with the last eight bars, which are sung in two-part harmony: my voice is a steadying influence on the lower part. I’m clearly visible, but I act as if I’m behind a curtain.

  —

  The Voice Speaking Choir is directed by the high school drama teacher, Sheila Belmont. She has a smoky voice and a long lean figure; she has shoulder-length blonde hair and striking hand gestures. She could be in the Beat nightclub scene in Funny Face, or she could play the Kay Thompson fashion editor.

  She must have taught pre-freshman drama: How else would she have picked Mary and me for this prestigious high school choir?

  We rehearse intensely for the concert, which will be given in Mandel Hall. (Mandel Hall isn’t just for student concerts: professional musicians and actors appear there.) Our program includes group dramatic recitations, dramatizations of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia,” and Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” We do the big “River City” number from The Music Man. And Paul Butterfield, who’s a senior, plays the kind of blues Muddy Waters and Junior Wells play in clubs not so far from where I live.

  My parents go to jazz clubs and buy jazz records, though. My sister and I listen to rock and roll, not blues. Paul Butterfield reminds me that, through these hard-core rough-and-tumble bluesmen, I have access to a new kind of cultural legitimacy. White bohemian legitimacy. Beat legitimacy—Negro, white, and avant-garde.

  —

  I’m doing badly in both my social lives. My best Negro friend at Lab is a year older and a lot more socially adroit. Is she really my best friend? (Even today I love the confident tone girls use when they say “This is my best friend.” I couldn’t bask in that confidence; I was always competing with others for her attention. I could lose her any minute, rotate out of the light of chosen friend, hover in the shadows with other aspirants. And once there I’d see those other girls, the ones whose friendship I’d passed up for this major prize. Now it was lost to me, and they had new best friends.)

  I don’t have a best white friend anymore, only a constellation of good friends who are more involved with each other than with me. D. and I had such a tempestuous friendship the year before that we were exhausted: now she’s pursuing M., who’s also being courted by B. No one is striving to be my best friend.

  So I was grateful to leave town that summer for an arts camp in pastoral northwest Michigan. Hormonal confusion and emotional desperation would be subdued by art. And that meant race could be put on hold.

  Interlochen was built on what had once been Ottawa tribal lands, between two lakes, amid towering pines. “Guiding America’s Gifted Youth” was its slogan, and that firm guidance showed in the uniforms we wore: navy corduroy knickers for girls, navy corduroy pants for boys; sky-blue short-sleeved shirts of functional cotton for both. (Even Van Cliburn wore the corduroys and blue when he visited to play for us.) The socks were color-coded according to age and grade division. Mine were red.

  Every hour was accounted for: classes, practice time, rehearsals, physical recreation, meals, free time. Attendance at nightly concerts was required, and we got report cards at the summer’s end.

  I went for three years, and I loved these eight-week reprieves from the year-round toil of adolescence. Working at art, dreaming of art, being passionate and gaily pretentious about art, being competent to good to exceptional at art—all this was a given. You were normal and you were outstanding. If you weren’t outstanding (if you occupied one of the lesser chairs in the orchestra, or the back row of the ballet corps), you suffered, you bore it, you kept working. You aspired, and even if (secretly) you didn’t, you admired those who did.

  It was even normal not to have a boyfriend. The camp rules were strict—clearly it was preferable. No cross-division mixing, and scant opportunity for mixing with boys your own age. High schoolers were occasionally found making out in music practice cabins. And punished. One—a girl, I’m sure—was expelled.

  The camp had been started in the late twenties by Michigan music educator Joseph Maddy, and had expanded to include art, theater, and dance. A midwestern gung-ho and up-with-people ethos remained. And by the early sixties an up-with-people conservative Republican ethos had emerged: in ’62, the Chicago insurance millionaire W. Clement Stone visited and gave a go-forward-and-prosper talk based on his book Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude (co-authored with Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich). Every camper received a copy. We high schoolers mocked him, just as we girls thwarted the dress code by wearing close-fitting sweaters without blouses underneath.

  As I recall, I was one of two Negroes that first year. The other was older and much more outstanding. Darwyn Apple was a truly gifted violinist who grew up to be a member of the St. Louis Symphony (first violin section) and a respected soloist. We didn’t have much to do with each other—he was older, and age divisions were strict. We exchanged the bright smiles and chipper greetings that made each of us popular. Some of my friends wished aloud that we could date.

  I had my own small successes. Accepted for study with the top piano teacher, Dorsey Whittington. A drama class where I played Charlotte Brontë in a radio play. And then a near-ecstatic experience as a black housekeeper when the same drama teacher cast me as Berenice Sadie Brown, the role commandeered by Ethel Waters in The Member of the Wedding. Waters was in her fifties and mistress of the epically folkloric when she played it. I was a sprightly twelve. I saw nothing preposterous in this—or, rather, I refused to acknowledge the preposterousness. The same teacher had cast me as Charlotte Brontë. Maybe he’d had an impulse—ham-handed but well meant—to give me something of my own, a role that had won acclaim for a member of my race. I told myself he saw my range. Theater, I felt, was an arena where I could amend and extend myself by inhabiting not pure sound, but other identities.

  A honey-haired camper named Lauren played Frankie to my Berenice. Her cabin was opposite mine, so we rehearsed frequently and vehemently. I’d seen the movie on television. I’d seen Julie Harris in those lofty Hallmark Hall of Fame productions too, playing Anouilh’s ecstatic Joan of Arc, and playing a sensitive Irish nun whose faith was challenged by death, war, and patriotism versus desire.
Of course I craved all her high-voiced intensities and oddities. But that was impossible. So I grasped for the stoic and epic. I’d seen Ethel Waters in Pinky too. You didn’t think of Faulkner’s “They endured” when Waters was on-screen. She endured, she made everyone notice it, and she made some pay for it. Member of the Wedding’s script had turns and textures never given to those other Negro stalwarts of the screen, Hattie McDaniel and Louise Beavers. But it wasn’t only the script; it was Waters. She did more than watch and react to the white characters; you watched her think about them and about herself. Sometimes revising her responses according to her needs, her mood. I didn’t even mind her weight.

  I was trying to enter a world tied to my history but not my autobiography. It stirred me mightily and it was beyond my ken. In that way I probably wasn’t much different from those white kids my age struggling to play blues for the first time. Did my “deep blues” accent sound any better than theirs? (“Honey, I just don’t understand that,” I said, shaking my head in stoic woe.) I think it’s fair to answer Probably not. I think it’s fair to say No. Paul Butterfield’s accent had sounded better.

  University High: 1960–1964: There’s no help for it, this girl is going to be unhappy for a good three of the next four years. One of so many unhappy high schoolers, each with their own sphere of fact and trouble (a phrase I found years later in William James).

  Those of us who’ve been together since kindergarten, since first, second, third grade, are intimidated by the new arrivals. Jews and Negroes draw the most notice, especially Jews. The newly arrived Jews are Big Ten and Preppy Types: he with trim slacks and button-down shirts, striding through the halls; she with mohair sweaters and matching skirts, well-tended flips and pageboys; all with their fraternities and sororities, not allowed at U-High, but talked about, known about. Both had friends in public schools. Cool, daring friends.

  The newly arrived Negroes are much fewer in number and much less influential overall. The boys cut a style-swath, though, importing snappy black talk. They saunter-swagger, even in their Henry Higgins sweaters, their button-down shirts and straight-legged pants. The girls are much quieter; most girls can’t get away with such street flash. (The one who does is treated like a facsimile boy. She parries the smart guy-talk with no sign of intimidation. Which leads, by senior year, to hints that she’s as fast sexually as she is verbally.)

  What both groups signify—openly, blatantly—is the power of those who are not WASPs to exclude and include. The Jews are better at it, of course. There are more of them and they are white. Still a minority group, though, and—this is what’s so enviable, so alluring—a minority group with the power to set the standard others have to envy, imitate, rebel against, or recede before.

  A FEW SPHERES OF FACT AND TROUBLE

  —Interracial dating, unless you were an out-and-out Beat who listened to Studs Terkel’s radio show; played Mose Allison and Missa Luba; sneaked into blues and jazz clubs.

  —Being designated “creepy.” Small groups of cool boys would gather in the stairwell and let you know what they thought.

  —Wanting to be distinguished—smart and talented—without alienating anyone. Wanting to be ubiquitous and popular.

  I crave the gift of recreational shallowness. The trick of knowing when to be cleverly trivial, lightweight; when to avoid emotional excess.

  —

  What else did this craven, anxious high school “I” want?

  I wanted to make cheerleading again and again. For, miraculously, I had made the squad freshman year, the only freshman to do so. A pure merit decision, it must have been, for I had vivacity but no particular style credibility or prestige.

  Oh, the ashen rewards of merit.

  Those bus rides to games, where I wasn’t pointedly ignored, just easily overlooked.

  Practice sessions with the other cheerleaders, all with sanctified good looks and status, all sophomores or upperclassmen. They were perfectly pleasant, and that perfect pleasantness, void of any cruelty, was just what showed I didn’t belong.

  Everyone was white that year, true, but the active cruelty came from my own: the girl I considered my best friend took me aside to imitate the imitation G. did of me on the gym floor in my thick glasses: waving my hands in rhythm, doing the split victory jump, with one of those head-moving blank smiles Little Stevie Wonder had.

  Which didn’t stop me from trying out the next year. And failing. Trying out the year after that. Failing again, outstripped by classmates who’d never thought they could make it till I did.

  —

  There must be something beyond all this twaddle! An intellectual interlude, for instance.

  —

  We, the students of Audrey Borth’s sophomore English class, are being ardently well educated, studying great and good British and American writers, being readied for initiation into an adult We of critics, scholars, and uncommon common readers. This year we will read essays—comely yet challenging essays—by E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and James Baldwin.

  A smaller We, Baldwin and I, have privileged relations. We are both Negroes; we are both intellectual. He is a serious, famous artist; I long to be seriously artistic and famous. I am at an advantage in this class, as I was not when we read Mark Twain as freshmen.

  My mother has stocked our library with classics. I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in childhood, moved listlessly on to Kidnapped and Treasure Island, then left them, unfinished, to the older sister who proclaimed herself the hero of every adventure and doubled as the smarter villains too. I was a jealous little she-reader; I resented pouring myself into the lives of hero-boys.

  I did my duty in the classroom. I was a good student. But Huck was not of my ilk. Cheeky, scene-stealing, Southern-white-trash antebellum boy. And what was to be done with Nigger Jim, that man-by-stealth slave, discharging his duties as boy-playmate? He was an object lesson in slavery’s wrongs. How could he be an imaginary companion for me, daughter of We, the Negro elite, who never stopped asking aggrieved rhetorical questions like “Why is it always the Nigger Jims who show up in Mark Twain’s fiction? Why couldn’t he base a character on Warner Thornton McGuinn, the first Negro graduate of Yale Law School?” Twain actually met McGuinn and was so impressed he offered him financial aid the same year he published Huckleberry Finn. But he never made it into a novel. We are not what They want to see in their books and movies. Our We is too much like Theirs. Which threatens them, bores them, or both.

  But now here we are, white and black students both, reading the Negro James Baldwin. And here I am at home, upstairs by myself, reading him and preparing for class. What do my white friends think as they read? What will we say in class tomorrow, and what measure of engaged detachment will I bring to our and their discussion?

  I pick up the book and turn to the assigned essay.

  Notes of a Native Son

  By James Baldwin

  “Many Thousands Gone”

  The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty. The Negro in America, gloomily referred to as that shadow which lies athwart our national life, is far more than that. He is a series of shadows, self-created, intertwining, which now we helplessly battle.

  Who is this “We”? It’s you, white readers. But what of We, his smaller band of Negro readers? His Negro in America is the Negro that so many Negroes like me dread having plural relations with.

  One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds.

  “One”: a pronoun even more adroitly insidious than “we.” An “I” made ubiquitous “Our”: say it slowly, voluptuously. Baldwin has coupled and merged us in syntactical miscegenation.

  We Negro readers will pause here and arrange ourselves in attitudes of easy triumph. We are throwing off that “helplessly” which Baldwin initially placed on us. We are anything but helpless now, as he unfurls c
lauses, vaults across semicolons, submits ignorance to rigor and unreason to stringent passion.

  Close the book. (Breathe deeply.) James Baldwin is proclaiming right of entry with every possessive pronoun, integrating America by means of grammar and syntax. No demonstrators hosed into the air and crashing onto pavements, no tear-gassed bodies coughing and twisting, no children your age dressed in exhaustively clean, pressed clothes to walk shielded by armed guards into schools built to deny them.

  The ways in which the Negro has affected the American psychology are betrayed in our popular culture and in our morality; in our estrangement from him is the depth of our estrangement from ourselves…

  The Negro Baldwin has inserted himself into your life, white reader: this “our” claims all you possess. You thought you were just reading him—no, you are living with him and all of his relatives now, and if you flee you will find yourself resettled on a despoiled patch of psychic land, where you will live in severely reduced circumstances. You will be estranged from the only You worth having. You will have no privileges my We is bound to respect.

  I can’t sit still anymore. I move from my desk to the couch in the next room, but curling up with pillows feels childish. I need to be upright and vigilant as I read. I go back to my desk.

  We cannot ask: what do we really feel about him? What we really feel about him is involved with all that we feel about…ourselves.

  And it’s a good thing I’m upright and at the ready. I know all too well what We think of this potent, deviant Negro: he threatens the achievements of My Negroes each time we make another dignified incursion into American life. I want to renounce that shame and contempt now, join Baldwin to construct a complex, compound Negro We.

  When I reach the essay’s end, I feel adventuresome and daring. He is so proud yet vulnerable, so full of longing and righteous hauteur. He has what I want, and I read on, follow as he summers in an obscure Swiss village (“This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again”); scores his own American in Paris, orchestrating Africans, Algerians, and Frenchmen in counterpoint; makes his father a Lear on Harlem’s heath, himself the Edgar who lives to take the measure of a changed world.