Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  “We do at parties what you do on dates,” we’d tell our white friends. (They started dating freshman year; we hadn’t.) But she—that she is still me—did as little as possible. All through high school she would get violent crushes on people but be unable to return their overtures. When handsome R. asked her to go with him sophomore year, she said yes, then returned his ring after a scant week. Senior year G.H. asked her to go with him as they sat in his parents’ car after a Nancy Wilson concert at Ravinia. Her answer (amiable, not harsh): “Why don’t we keep it platonic?” So ended what had begun three years before when he imitated her on the gym floor, cheering in her glasses like Little Stevie Wonder.

  Senior year is the year of J.L., keen-featured and lustrously dark, expert at playing the street boy, the gouster. Expert at toying with three girls in our Negro set, serious girls, each of them, and all the more enthralled for that. This is hopeless, she thought. I can’t trust him to want me for myself. Which self would that be, miss? she might well have asked—but at least G.H., sharp-tongued and a touch jaded, liked her humor. J.L. gave no such sign. Their attraction was fairly generic. She was vivacious and hard to get with a good figure. He was the acme of Negro Male Cool. They’d grown up together. Been in Jack and Jill together. His mother and her father practiced medicine together.

  And they had absolutely no way to grasp each other’s spheres of fact, trouble, and longing.

  —

  The years 1963 and ’64 were years of integration experiments. Earlier a few of us had been invited to bar and bat mitzvahs, even to occasional evening parties. But for non-bohemians, the basic out-of-school parameters were: boys roughhouse and do sports together; girls shop and go to plays, movies, and museums together. There’s a brief plan, rumor has it, to extend limited fraternity membership to three U-High Negroes; give them athletic but not social privileges. The plan is quashed, rumor has it, because fraternity members at public schools raise the possibility (the threat) of recruiting lower-class Negro boys with high athletic skills.

  Girls act with more discretion. Sleepovers are largely out of bounds. Birthday parties are usually fine. We’re most comfortable without our parents. Mine have a cabin cruiser docked on Lake Michigan, and we often visit the boats of our Negro friends. When we see white schoolmates and their parents on the lake, we all wave with scrupulous cheer and move on. Visits are out of the question. Neither set of parents wants the social strain. They’re supposed to be relaxing, not working.

  We do our best to turn that strain into stylish adventure. Major political changes lead to minor social changes. Minor and shallow but still worth noting.

  The time: 1963.

  The place: A meeting of the Etta Quettes, one of my all-Negro girls’ clubs. Two of us asked the other members if we could invite a few (just a few) white friends to the autumn party. They voted yes.

  We chose girls who’d been our friends for years. We trusted their style: they were cute; they were quick-witted; they could dance, even to songs that hadn’t found their way onto white record charts. We knew their parents were progressive. We knew they knew Negroes were cool, that it was daring and flattering to be invited to one of our parties. We knew they’d factor all this in when they chose their dates.

  Every one of them did well. They looked good. They danced nicely and unobtrusively. They didn’t gawk or try to draw attention to themselves.

  And they talked about it for days afterwards. They were thrilled to be there.

  Wherever I was, whatever I did, I wanted to be popular. I was considered talented; I was inclined to be intellectual. I valued both. When they brought me praise, I valued them; when they made me feel too eccentric, I edged away. Being popular in all worlds would steady the course between Exceptional and Irreproachable. Make up for the price talent and brains might ask of me. Banish the specter of being handicapped by race. Twice over: among whites, and among Negroes who found me—let me put it very precisely—socially inept due to an excess of white-derived manners and interests.

  Miscalculation on all fronts. Though I could manage it often enough and well enough, the quest killed brain cells and confidence for years. I didn’t see how paltry it was. But I did know it was tenuous.

  —

  What I would have to do later, starting in college and in the years following, to become a person of inner consequence: break that fawning inner self into pieces.

  Brandeis University, 1964–1968

  THE BOX

  Here is a box, in which I shall place/put the personal material of my college years. Four years, a foursquare box.

  —

  And outside the box, the tumultuous world.

  —

  Within the box, four years of internal hopelessness, a squeezing into my perceived limitations and deficiencies.

  Not talented enough.

  Not brilliant enough.

  Not an exceptional personality.

  Fated to be that contemptible girl thing, a dilettante.

  1964

  Hoping for a kind of extracurricular Advanced Placement, I tried out for cheerleading, made it, and realized almost instantly that I’d attached myself to a perky ethos that wasn’t respected. Intellectuals were respected, bohemians were respected, art was respected, serious angst was respected.

  Modes of Manhattan chic, from Fifth Avenue to Greenwich Village, were respected.

  I tried out for the drama society and won a part in Genet’s The Maids. I played Madame, the shallow, gilded object of the maids’ murderous desire, and I felt shallow, faced with the talent and experience of the other two actresses. I knew cheerleading had been a fateful mistake at an early rehearsal when the older actress said, “Margo, you made cheerleading, congratulations”—it was in the school newspaper—while her tone said, “I won’t be rude about it, but we’re making art here, and you’re a throwback to midwestern Americana.” I dragged my pom-poms and my synchronized cheers through one basketball season and never mentioned the episode again.

  When I showed a flair for fencing in gym (left-handed and sure-footed from all that ballet), the instructor asked me to try out for the team. I wasn’t interested, but I couldn’t say no when teachers or parents asked me to do something flattering and ostensibly reasonable: How could one say no without stirring up disappointment and reproofs I had no answers for?

  I found other ways of preferring not to: in this case I practiced falling down a half flight of stairs in the dorm, and when I inflicted a small bump on one leg, I put a bandage on it, limped to the gym the day of the tryouts, and claimed to have a knee injury.

  1966

  I did get to play a maid onstage, though she lacked all of Genet’s feral glory. I was a warm, loving Negro American maid in a musical based on Suzuki Beane, a bubbly beatnik alternative to Eloise. This was the last thing I wanted to do—no middle-class Negro, brought up to wince and sigh whenever Hattie McDaniel or Louise Beavers appeared on camera, wanted to play this role. We MCNs used to trade “me-and-the-maid” tales from visits to white friends. At times me-and-the-maid gave each other quick looks: I’m proud of you, said hers; we are still one people, said mine. At times the maid avoided my eyes and was more attentive to the white guests, whereupon I displayed my ease among them. Sometimes we were trapped together, as on the night in college when a group of theater students gathered around the host’s piano at a party in Weston, Massachusetts. We were singing show tunes and I was taking a turn as accompanist. As we rolled into the Gershwin songbook, our host stopped suddenly, saying “Wait—you have to hear this,” and rushed into the kitchen. Moments later he returned, followed by the maid, who was still wiping her hands on her apron. He led her to the piano, let her arrange herself, and turned back to me.

  “Play ‘Summertime,’ ” he said. Then, to the now-silent group around the piano, “Listen to this beautiful voice.”

  Did the maid and I exchange a look (my usual claim) or did we avoid each other’s eyes? (More likely, since all eyes were upon us.) Did she
have a beautiful voice? I know it was adequate. And I know she and I did perform “Summertime.” I believe there was uncertain applause. Not everyone was as obtuse as the host, but everyone was trapped by his hospitality.

  —

  It was time I spoke out and spoke up. I told the director I had serious reservations, since Negro maids were generally stereotypes. “No no no,” he said. “Of course they are. This is not that at all. She’s a dignified woman. And you’ll get a good song.” So I gave in to my greed to be onstage again and my eagerness not to appear touchy. And got stuck singing a ballad called “There’s More to Life Than You’ll Ever Know,” cradling a gamine my own age whom the audience justly found adorable.

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

  And then…And THENNNNNNNNNNN, as the Coasters intone, facing mock disaster…

  I failed to get a good role in a British play whose title I now refuse to recall. I was sure I’d get it; I’d been the only Negro in the drama group freshman year and I’d done well in The Maids. But I was a mannered, sardonic actor (all the more reason I should never have been cradling Suzuki Beane), and the part called for edge and emotional attack.

  I was so furious and mortified that I never auditioned for another college production.

  No wonder that when Black Power came along the next year I used it as an excuse to stop talking to various people I felt hadn’t respected or acknowledged me enough. Who said the personal always had to be honorably political?

  I was trying to be honorable in my political reading, my political opinions, my modest actions against the Vietnam War and for Black Power. It wasn’t hard to try—everyone around me was trying.

  Senior year I found my way to a Boston theater group, one of so many experimental groups reading Artaud and Grotowski; following Joseph Chaikin, Richard Schechner, Ellen Stewart, and Joe Papp; trying out techniques and rituals borrowed from Asia, Africa, Latin America. We did a piece called “Riot” in which a panel discussion among three types (an earnest white liberal, a black nationalist, a cautious moderator) was encroached upon by images of street disorder (a rat on a trash can, a mixed couple making love) and finally the images exploded into a full-scale riot—or insurrection—battering the audience with strobe lights, sirens, running bodies (rioters and police) that froze, at intervals, into attitudes of struggle, anger, and terror.

  Civil rights.

  Anti-war.

  Black Power.

  Feminism and gay rights heading our way.

  The luck of being born close enough to a right time in history! However miserable you were personally, whatever the follies and failures of each movement, they made you think about the world. They gave your feelings an objective correlative. They made you try to think beyond the self you took for granted.

  Where was that ingratiating little integrationist in high school who listened quietly, letting only regret cross her face when S. took her aside to explain that she couldn’t be invited to P.’s Sweet Sixteen because P.’s mother was from Georgia and refused to permit it?

  Where was the little snob, en route with her best Negro friend to a Gilbert and Sullivan rehearsal for Utopia, Limited, who stood over a stoop-shouldered ghetto girl just before her bus stop and said, “You need to shave your legs,” and, as the girl looked up and said, “Thank you,” ran down the bus steps giggling.

  It became necessary to take blunt weapons to whole parts of oneself and hack away.

  —

  This is how I talked then, smashing and hacking away.

  Well, of course the ghettos are going up in flames—the last Good Nigger is dead. I did respect Martin Luther King, but his death proves that nonviolence is irrelevant. (I have nothing but contempt for Thurgood Marshall—he supports Johnson on the war. The media wants to call them riots, but they’re uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don’t behave and they get all the rights they want. That’s been our mistake as privileged Negroes. Believing all that “We have to be twice as good to be acknowledged just as good. Everything we do must reflect well on the race.”

  We take on white people’s ridiculous pretensions and they make us look even more ridiculous. Mother said this herself from her position of bourgeois privilege. She told my sister before her senior year in high school, “Now, you can come out next year, or you can go to Europe.” And as soon as Denise’s reservations were booked, she added: “What are Negroes coming out into anyway?”

  Mother used to say, “Most white people want to see us as just more Negroes.”

  That’s exactly what we need to be—Just More Negroes. We need to take strength from that. Give what we have and what we know to the community.

  Who are we? Who do we love? The summer Uncle Archie came North and passed for white so he could work at RR Donnelley and earn money for law school, he missed Negroes so much he would sneak over to the South Side on weekends and go from stand to stand getting his shoes shined. All afternoon getting his shoes shined. Give him a few drinks and he’s telling jokes about a Shreveport Negro so pig-ugly everyone calls him Oink. Then he puts his baseball cap on backwards and says, “Let’s play, ‘Nigger.’ ”

  Mother and her friends loved to joke about our Afros.

  “You know, Margo,” she drawled at one of her afternoon luncheons, “if a fly got caught in there, he would break his little wings trying to get out.”

  They need to re-examine their lives. They have a lot to answer for.

  In Negroland boys learned early how to die. They started in their teens, dying in period rec rooms with wood paneling and pool tables, train sets, golf clubs, liquor cabinets.

  Did Father keep a rifle on the wall there, or did the son find his old army gun in the bedroom closet and sneak it downstairs? There, in the rec room, an amiable, well-mannered doctor’s son shot himself. Motive, unknown; verdict, accidental death; time, not long after his father was arrested for assaulting his second wife.

  A few years later, in another rec room, a sweet-faced doctor’s son with a soft voice did the same. Suspected motive: he feared going the way of his father, sweet-faced, soft-voiced, seductively effusive, and (suspiciously) no longer married.

  Vietnam opened other routes to self-extinction. A Negro boy could drop out of college, enlist, and come home a junkie. He could drink, shoot up, steal for several years, pawn his grandmother’s silver, assault a homeless man, and evade a jail sentence because his parents, both doctors, knew the judge. He could retire to the family homestead in Virginia, decline steadily in health, and die of kidney failure.

  Negroland children were warned by their parents that few Negroes enjoyed their privilege or plenty; that most non-Negro Americans would be glad to see their kind of Negro returned to indigence, deference, and subservience.

  Their parents made sure to supply them with well-appointed homes and apartments, tasteful clothes and plenty of them, handsome cars, generous allowances, sailboats, summer camps, music and dance lessons, flying lessons, private schools, tutors, and an array of clubs where other children exactly like them met for sports and directed play, cultural excursions, and Christmas visits to old people’s homes to sing carols.

  Nevertheless, life in Negroland meant that any conversation could be taken over by the White Man at any moment. He dominated dinner party army stories about the brown-skinned Negro officer who’d had to escort his angry unit to the shabby back cars of a segregated train; the light-skinned Negro officer who’d been given the last seat in the white section of a train until he said he was a Negro, whereupon a porter (another brown-skinned Negro) was sent to find a curtain that could separate him from the Caucasian in front and join him to the Negro behind.

  When he’s not lynching you, he’s humiliating you, said the men at the dinner table. They leaned forward and raised their voices, then subsided into their chairs, shook their heads, let out a hmmnnnn. He keeps you out of his hospitals, his law firms, his universities. Even his damn cemeteries. He never lets you forg
et you’re a second-class citizen.

  Strategic privilege and flagrantly displayed prosperity let you forget. Cocktail parties and dinner dances urged you to forget. Season tickets to the opera, summer trips to the Caribbean and Mexico. The family together watching Ed Sullivan, watching Gunsmoke and Maverick, watching Playhouse 90 and outstanding cultural productions like Peter Pan and The Nutcracker.

  Suavely complicated marriages and urbane extramarital liaisons; hushed quarrels at the breakfast table. Fathers at the office, at the club, coming home late so many nights.

  Mothers picking the children up from school, shopping, planning meals, lunching with friends, working to safeguard their marriages.

  La Vie Bourgeoise.

  Round up the usual Oedipal conflicts and divided loyalties. Fathers, insist that your sons become high-achieving Negroes, prepared, like you, to push their way manfully past every obstacle.

  How are they to do this? Force of will. You did.

  But the boys had started dying.

  —

  Negroland girls couldn’t die outright. We had to plot and circle our way toward death, pretend we were after something else, like being ladylike, being popular, being loved. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Good Negro Girls mastered the rigorous vocabulary of femininity. Gloves, handkerchiefs, pocketbooks for each occasion. Good diction for all occasions; skin care (no ashy knees or elbows); hair cultivation (a ceaseless round of treatments to eradicate the bushy and nappy). Manners to please grandparents and quell the doubts of any white strangers loitering to observe your behavior in schools, stores, and restaurants.

  We were busy being pert, chic, cool—but not fast. Fast meant social extermination by degrees, because the boys who’d sampled a fast girl would tell another girl they’d taken up with (who was desirable but not fast) that the first girl was a slut.