Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  Finally I approach the shabby unhallowed ground of the first essay. “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin calls it, and “Everybody” is anybody who has ever written a socially conscious book maimed by shrill outbursts and thin exhortations.

  The Mother of this unseemly brood is Harriet Beecher Stowe. I haven’t read the lady, and I don’t need to—everybody’s educated Negro has been sick and tired of her book since the final years of the preceding century.

  I settle myself on Baldwin’s arm and we sally forth. Together we execute a gleeful double cabriole:

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality…

  I fumble, falter; I can see the words that follow. I straighten up, try to match his gait once more.

  …having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality…

  I stutter-step—for here comes the damning conclusion:

  …having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women.

  Oh no, not that. Must I throw off the Little Women of my girlhood? The Little Women of We Happy Two, my sister and me, with our petticoats and patent leather shoes, our music and dance lessons, our diaries, our parties, our unceasing instruction in manners and morals. Girls whose utterly benign father is often away from home doing good for his people—Captain March: Dr. Jefferson. Girls whose Marmee—our Mother—pours and settles herself into every space of their being.

  Baldwin’s scorn is majestic. Sentimentalists like Louisa May Alcott do not truly feel, he scoffs; they play at feeling with fluttering outbursts that show just how much they fear the stuff of real life, real experience.

  In the end he doesn’t condescend to give them their own pronoun. In the end, the only sentimentalist truly worth his scorn is the one who exposes his fear of death, his arid heart.

  Silly lady novelists. Silly girl readers.

  My future beckons. I can renounce all shallow girl tastes, striving ceaselessly to be a Negro Intellectual like Baldwin, as good as or better than any white He. Or I can become an exemplary Teacher and Mother, one who will pass her love of literature, serious and sentimental, on to the children in her care.

  I close the book, go to the couch, and lie down.

  —

  That summer was my third and last Interlochen respite. I decided to major in drama as well as piano. My reward was being cast in The Taming of the Shrew as Grumio, Petruchio’s punning, silly yet shrewd manservant. Gender freed up; servant status unchanged—and enhanced by race, I now realize: American traditionalism in this piece of nontraditional casting. I did enjoy Grumio’s impertinence toward his master: “Why, give him gold enough and marry him to a puppet or an aglet-baby, or an old trot with ne’er a tooth in her head, though she has as many diseases as two and fifty horses. Why, nothing comes amiss, so money comes withal.”

  I wore tulle and wings to be in the chorus of Iolanthe. (“We are dainty little fairies, ever singing, ever dancing / We indulge in our vagaries in a manner most entrancing.”) I decided to be bold about getting through eight weeks of summer without a beauty shop appointment. I used my straightening comb openly, almost jauntily, and as I’d hoped, several white girls with curly to frizzy hair started using it. In Chicago, we knew which white girls had to get their hair straightened in Negro neighborhoods; we’d see them, and snicker about it behind their backs. But this was cheerful and conspiratorial. Without shame on either side.

  On the last day of camp, prizes were given out, just before we girls went through the ritual of falling into each other’s arms in tears to the finale of Liszt’s Les Préludes. I won Honor Camper to applause and cheers. I had done everything right in front of everyone in sight. I was Interlochen’s Miss Congeniality.

  That was the summer another Negro girl had appeared in navy knickers and the light blue knee socks of the high school division. There’d been a second boy too, a clarinetist, but this was the first Other Girl. We passed each other on a pine-sheltered path, and I assessed her as we stopped to exchange greetings. She wore glasses (I had contact lenses by then), and I thought I heard a slight Southern accent. I knew I wasn’t altogether pleased to see her. Which shamed me. I could hear my parents when they talked dismissively of Negroes who refused to acknowledge other Negroes in public with the polite nod and murmured greeting that conveyed “Good for us both. Good luck to you.” “So insecure,” my parents would mock. “So desperate to be the Only Ones.” My words to her were dutiful and minimal.

  Do you have to be here? I was thinking.

  Parents and families arrived the final weekend to enjoy the concerts and take us home. That’s when someone’s younger sister, a girl no more than seven or eight, approached me at The Well, the camp center where we loitered, chattered, and bought sweets.

  “Excuse me,” she said, clearly excited, “but are you starring in a show on Broadway now?”

  It was 1962. Diahann Carroll was starring in No Strings on Broadway. Something in me went almost mad with excitement at the thought of anyone, even a small, gullible white girl, thinking I looked like Diahann Carroll, saucy, confident, playing a top model in Paris, with her even, rounded features, recognizably Negro, appealingly not intrusively Negro. (So encouraging, that.) Carroll had claimed the dream space once occupied by Lena, Dorothy, and Eartha.

  I smiled graciously. “Why no,” I said, as if speaking to a young fan. “You must mean Diahann Carroll. She’s in No Strings and she’s wonderful.” Then, head high, shoulders back, I strode on. Ludicrous, yes, and what cared I? I’d been a tween Ethel Waters and that was real-time ludicrous. This was the stuff of my dreams.

  That Yeats line, “In dreams begin responsibilities”? At Interlochen dream responsibilities were my respite from real ones.

  —

  And when I come home, my parents have moved us to Hyde Park–Kenwood. “My father was so excited—he said, ‘This shows the neighborhood’s improving,’ ” my white friend J. tells me jubilantly. Are my parents excited? If so, they mute it to pleased and satisfied. For some years now they’ve looked askance at some of our newer, rougher Park Manor neighbors. They’ve wanted a more socially stable neighborhood. They’re touchy, though, about seeming too eager to live among white people, as if that were a good in itself. We have Negro friends there. Those in real estate, whose job is to abet Hyde Park’s strategies for socially stable integration, arranged the move.

  My parents are pleased with the excitement of J.’s father, though. He’s in one of the more liberal organizations that, since the 1940s, have proposed, amended, negotiated, and legislated housing acts and redevelopment plans that will ensure Hyde Park remains the intellectually, economically, socially, and culturally desirable neighborhood it has been since the nineteenth century; that it will reflect the prestige of its overlord, the University of Chicago. Each organization—each committee, board, commission, council, league, corporation—has its particular constituents. Each has its sphere of law and politics, ethics, and expediency.

  With some variations in tone and approach, their de facto and de jure goals have been

  to remove low-income Negroes who lived there;

  to prevent low-income Negroes from moving there;

  to convince large numbers of upper-middle-class whites to remain there;

  to permit small numbers of upper-middle-class Negroes to move there.

  The essential question, as posed by one organization’s president in a private note to a liberal alderman: “How do you tell desirable from undesirable Negroes?”

  The university’s chancellor offered one answer in his address to the desirable Negroes of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity: Hyde Park whites must look for Negroes with “similar tastes and standards.”

  Income. Profession. Manners. With organizations continuing to monitor just which buildings, streets, and enclaves were suitable for these controlled experiments in integration.

  We live in one of two three-floor condominium buildings at 50th and Woo
dlawn. Everyone there is a family friend or acquaintance. Everyone there is a Negro.

  We live across the street from the largely but not wholly white enclave of Madison Park, where J., her sister, and her parents live. In a year I’ll watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan at their house, and burst into tears when Sidney Poitier wins an Oscar for Lilies of the Field.

  —

  The new apartment is one floor instead of two, but it’s capacious. I admire its wood-paneled dining room, its solarium, the Arts and Crafts iron grating on the heavy entrance doors of the building.

  I’m starting my junior year. I can walk home from school now, or take a short bus ride.

  How did I get home before this? How did most of Lab’s non–Hyde Park Negro students get home through the years? When we were old enough to take public transportation, we gathered in small groups and journeyed across the Midway, that expanse of green where our gym classes played soccer, lacrosse, and field hockey; the Midway, whose 220 yards separate the university from the Negro neighborhood of Woodlawn; the Midway, which, in raucous contrast to the neoclassic glories of the White City, housed the faux-ethnographic exotica of the 1893 World’s Fair. There, visitors gaped at the lower stages of civilization on display in a hastily built Streets of Cairo, an Eskimo village, an Algerian, a Dahomean, a Chinese, and a Javanese village, a Hindu and a Santa Fe Indian village, all with imported or facsimile natives, all enhanced by mongrel entertainments—juggling, magic, belly dancing, ragtime—and by the techno-carnival wonder of the Ferris wheel spinning in the sky above.

  —

  So we, Lab’s Negroes, would leave the White City of Lab, cross the Midway, and take one or, usually, two buses to our faux-exotic homes in the ethnographic settlements of Bronzeville, Park Manor, and Chatham.

  Now I belong to Hyde Park with its tasteful polygot past: the upper-class and upper-middle-class residents who built or moved into fine large houses (some with droppable architect names like Burnham, Baldwin, and Wright); charming smaller houses (some of them, too, with prominent architect imprimaturs); its familiar ethnic and religious progression of settler WASPs (and a smattering of Catholics), followed by Jews, followed by Asian, Hispanic, and Negro Others. The wealthy, the prosperous, the respectably struggling; professionals, scholars, artists, and political activists. Students reading, talking, smoking avidly in bookstores and in Steinway’s drugstore; eating Polynesian at the Tropical Hut; lounging in cafés and offbeat design shops; going to the Hyde Park Theater, where I saw my first foreign films.

  Hyde Park has always known how to make its citizens feel that their daring is, at bottom, stable. Reassuring. That they earned it by standing firm against suburban blandishments and choosing the urban way. That they—we—have the bragging rights of pioneers, even as we savor the comforts pioneers always provide their descendants with.

  So here I am, walking home, past Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House, thinking of things both serious and shallow or chatting away with friends. If it’s junior year, I’m still preppy in matching skirts and mohair sweaters. If it’s senior year, I’ve moved toward bohemian-fetching—nylons with my penny loafers instead of Adler socks, a black A-line skirt and top, a Greek bag my sister brought me from Kitty Hass in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  —

  I’m in the zone. Just in time for my senior year I make cheerleading again. At last. I’m voted captain and we practice over the summer, sometimes ferried back and forth in Stefanie’s red MG (her parents’ red MG?—no matter), top down, sunglasses on. At the first pep rally in September we five burst through the open doors of Sunny Gym, maroon skirts swinging, maroon and white pom-poms undulating. The crowd claps and whoops as we begin our choreographed call-and-response:

  Well, hi, gang! (Well, hi, gang!)

  Well, what are we here for? (What are we here for?)

  We’re here to win! (We’re here to win!)

  Well, who says so? (Well, who says so?)

  Well, Ev-ry-bod-y! (Well, Ev-ry-body!)

  —

  Let’s look at this from a third-person perspective. It will impose, or at least suggest, more intellectual and emotional control.

  Senior year she will triumph with straight As—proof, her proud and rather chagrined parents note, that she could have done that all along. When she becomes cheerleading captain, she will join the select ranks of Negro girls so rewarded. (Call the roll: Jean Hancock, sister of Herbie; Candace “Candy” Love; Dorothy “Dottie” Fleming; Nancy Gist; Bonnie Boswell.) She will be asked to play the piano at the senior prom. She will play Debussy’s “La Cathédrale Engloutie,” not very well because she refused to practice enough in advance. She still loves the idea of being an actress, and she does have a role, not a lead, a secondary role, in the senior play. It’s Pygmalion. The drama teacher, who is temperamental and charismatic, will explain production procedures and note that, in casting, he will look for as much physical symmetry as possible. She waits for those fateful seconds a well-timed comic response needs, then she offers the schlep’s quick shrug, hands open, palms out. She gets the group laugh. “That was very good,” says the drama teacher, shaking his head; he looks merry and approving, as if she’d just responded to his direction with the perfect improvised bit. She is cast as Mrs. Pearce, the housekeeper.

  Decades later, when she is a published writer, that drama teacher will leave a message on her answering machine. Is she the same Margo Jefferson, and if so would she call him back? But if not (he sounds a little timid, a little anxious), he’s sorry for the intrusion. She could call back and take her revenge by delivering some calm truths about his fits of temper, which now look like self-important pique, not artistic rigor. She could remind him of that ruthless moment when he made it so very clear that she would not be cast as Henry Higgins’s clever mother. Why say it aloud and expose her in front of everyone? Why not simply cast her as Mrs. Pearce instead? He must have known in his small heart that she deserved to be Mrs. Higgins.

  She doesn’t call back. That’s my revenge, she decides. He’s been reading me; he’s intimidated; his anxious voice gave him away; his need to call gave him away.

  There’s always subtext, though. She deserved to be Mrs. Higgins, but she did not deserve to be Eliza. Not incorrectly, he thought her friend M. the more talented. If she attacked now, would he retaliate with that?

  She still sees herself offering—improvising—that comic gesture, the deflating bit of humor that makes an audience feel “Oh thank you for not making us uncomfortable, for letting us feel we’re better than the truth the joke reveals.” Humor is being ingratiating when you’re afraid to be aggressive.

  —

  Here was her character flaw. (Not a tragic flaw—we’re in the realm of bourgeois drama.) She wanted to belong in too many places: she couldn’t make herself be a rebel, a designated outsider. Is this why she still had no reliable best friend, just pleasing flurries of friendship with girls who were already taken? And were there racial distinctions to be parsed here? With her white friends, there wasn’t all the room for boy talk, and party talk—they weren’t going to the same parties most of the time or seeing boys of the same race. They weren’t going to each other’s houses regularly after school or on weekends. With Negro girls, her style wasn’t top of the line. The deftly held, fully inhaled cigarette at parties; the easy verbal byplay. She was too eager and earnest. She lacked that touch of remoteness, of teasing froideur. She didn’t deliver cutting-edge slang effectively. (Watch her practice “Mellow-spoo—doo” in her room after hearing Angela say it in a bid whist game. It has to be light, almost languid. Try not to overdo the last syllable. Watch her work “You must be on DOPE” into a phone conversation—it conveys mocking disbelief—and feel idiotic when her mother emerges from the kitchen to ask “Do you know what that means?”) When she turns thirteen, friends arrange a party for her birthday. Even as they chant “Surprise!” and she gasps and smiles and gives a girlish squeal, she feels cheated. You didn’t really want to give me a party, she
thinks. You wanted a reason to give a party that your parents would like.

  BOYS

  When she ponders it, the decline begins in sixth grade when she’s voted as having the most personality, being the least good-looking. A decision made by Caucasian boys, with one Negro most likely participating.

  She wasn’t doing particularly well with most of her own in those days, though José Randall did give her a card and a box of candy for Valentine’s Day. (Why couldn’t she hold on to that, use it to enhance her sense of her appeal?)

  At a Christmas party pre-freshman year, even though she’s wearing too childish a dress (her long-sleeved princess-line deep-green velvet with the lace collar, clearly wrong because L. doesn’t compliment her), L. does hear several of the boys in their sisters’ crowd remark that Margo’s going to have a really good figure.

  Why didn’t she hold on to that? Why blame her glasses for everything? True, they provided a few ninth-grade setbacks: P.W., the cool, sexy boy she got a crush on, is calling her “Blind,” amiably, almost fondly, not harshly, so the other boys feel comfortable following his lead.

  But B.G. had a crush on her—they met at a party in August, when she’d come back from her first summer at an arts camp, still wearing her glasses. B.G. was Sullivan’s friend, and they were both public school boys. L. was very excited about Sullivan, and B. G. was coming to U-High in the fall. When a group of them went to Riverview a few weeks later, he kissed her in the Tunnel of Love. She was politely inert.

  L. had explained “grinding” to her: on a slow record, the boy would press his stomach into yours and…grind…and you would grind lightly if you wished in response. (If an unwanted partner got too insistent, you pulled away and left his pelvis to push and circle air.)