Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  “If there is such a thing as a colored lady, I want you to be one.” Lottie Hawkins turned this matriarchal conditional into a triumphant positive. She proved that there are such things as colored ladies and gentlemen, and that, led by her, this precious class would thrive, and enhance the race.

  For so many of that Talented Tenth generation, manners, like education, proved that one was equal to all and superior to most. Their power was deeply seductive. Like a chivalric code, Negro manners could be seen as having aesthetic, social, and spiritual dimensions. Erotic ones as well: there is (or can be) something highly seductive about the process of mastering and submitting to them. It’s especially exciting if you’ve been told that you and your people are unfit for such things. Putting people in their place is deeply satisfying when they’ve always presumed to put you in yours. Oh, to be a lady of color emboldened to discourage strangers who become “too familiar” on a bus or train: “answer them in such a way as to remain polite but have them know that you do not care to be further engaged.”

  But it all began with the child in thrall to her vision of benevolent white aristocrats. Charlotte Hawkins Brown spent her youth entranced by the ways of cultivated white New Englanders. Her mother, she writes, taught her to be kind, polite, and generous “in her own way” (the italics are mine); that chasm acknowledged, she hails the Anglo-Saxon gentry “who in schools and homes teeming with cultural atmosphere gave me an opportunity to observe the fine art of living.”

  This was her route to freedom. She simply could not see the ethical dangers. The social absurdities. The spiritual confines.

  —

  “The arrangement of one’s hair adds to or detracts from one’s general appearance as it increases or decreases one’s power of personality.

  “Study the contours of your face carefully. What makes Katharine Hepburn or Greta Garbo or Marian Anderson personality plus may make you personality minus”: so wrote Charlotte Hawkins Brown in her chapter on good grooming. But in the pictures of Marian Anderson I grow up seeing, there is none of the personality-plus allure girls of my generation crave. There is correctness, there is severe elegance, there is solemnity. We respect and honor Anderson: she is a pioneering artist for our people. And because her art is high Western art, she too must be a Clubwoman. There is nothing provocative or mysterious about her, there is no air of carefree hauteur. In photographs, the folds of Marian Anderson’s hair are prohibitively exact. It’s as though a doll maker constructed them, then glued them to her strong head to neutralize a face: the face so many would have seen as the stoic one of an African man, with the wide, full lips Caucasians said prevented Negroes from being able to properly perform the classics. We are in the middle of the twentieth century, but the pressed and coiled hair serves her image as the white bonnet served Sojourner Truth’s nearly a hundred years before. Once she had left disreputable plantation life behind and begun speaking of equal rights to audiences of Northern whites and Negroes, a more genteel appearance was required.

  “Ain’t I a woman?” Sojourner thundered at a women’s rights convention in 1851, a woman who “could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well.” See her then, photographed years after in a diminutive white bonnet enhanced by a freshly laundered white collar and white shawl, whose fringe is echoed by a line of yarn, fist now curled around knitting needles and cane.

  Marian Anderson’s “Ain’t I a Woman” moment came on April 9, 1939. Our parents and grandparents hailed the news and heard the radio broadcast with joy:

  MARIAN ANDERSON, REFUSED A CONCERT HALL BY THE DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, SINGS OUTSIDE AT THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL.

  At the Lincoln Memorial

  The finished statue of Abraham Lincoln is nineteen feet tall and carved from twenty-eight blocks of white Georgia marble. The French had special lighting installed to enhance the figure of the man born in a Kentucky log cabin.

  The finished portrait of Marian Anderson is five feet ten inches of brown flesh mounted on white bone, originating in a modest section of Philadelphia and smoothed and polished in the capitals of Europe.

  The president who saved the Union wears a suit, vest, and bow tie. The woman who reaffirms the Union’s highest purpose wears a black mink coat, a hat, and a jeweled scarf of orange and yellow (key tones in the Negro skin palette).

  He sits, legs foursquare and apart, as if he could shelter the whole world between them. The premier contralto of her people stands waiting for her cue to become immortal.

  Above his head are carved the words:

  IN THIS TEMPLE AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER.

  The piano sounds the introduction. She fingers her necklace and arranges her head to look upon the throngs.

  From the lips of “a daughter of the race from which he struck the chains of slavery” come the words “My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty…” and—right then—enshrined forever in our memories is the change she makes. “Of thee I sing” becomes “To thee We sing.” The singular pronoun of a sheltered citizen becomes the plural pronoun of an embattled people who must address (speak to), not possess (speak of), their country.

  She wasn’t allowed a singular identity except when she sang: there you could hear her stroking, savoring tones and syllables, in a private ecstasy.

  So much melancholy, I think, reading these pages. But why choose that word instead of “depression”? “Depression” has gone flat from so much use. I mistrust “depression” because it’s too easy (for me, anyway) to forget the rage, even petulance, inside it. “Melancholy” is prettier than “depression”; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.

  In point of fact, those of us who avoided disaster encountered life’s usual rewards and pleasures, obstacles and limitations. If we still had some longing for death, we had to make it compatible with this new pattern of living.

  All that circumnavigating of race, class, and gender made for comedy too. Comic chagrin, comic relief, comic reversals (at least adjustment) of fortune. Sometimes we felt like postmodern topsy-turvy dolls.

  So call these a set of relativity tales.

  The Seventies

  i

  It’s enter-the-elevator-and-get-to-your-desk-by-10-a.m. rush hour at Newsweek. I place myself amid my white colleagues. We’re all preoccupied—so much to read, write, convert into like-minded prose. We murmur greetings, trade short sentences, sip at our coffee. The elevator door closes; the elevator starts its climb; we fall silent.

  There is one other black in the elevator; a messenger, looking about eighteen or nineteen, there to deliver useful documents to some writer, researcher, or editor’s secretary. As the elevator hits 5, his voice sounds out, sibilant, insistent, insidious.

  “Sis-ter…”

  If anyone was about to talk, they’re not talking now. Into the deepening silence, he flings “Sister BLACK!”

  Five floors later, the door finally opens.

  I exit, trying not to rush.

  Look back at him with narrowed eyes, register the assiduously blank faces of the remaining whites.

  Watch the door close on his gleeful smirk.

  ii

  Peachie is talking to her Italian boyfriend. “In our world, when I grew up it was an advantage to have straight hair,” she tells him. “But even then it made me self-conscious.”

  His brow is genuinely furrowed when he answers.

  “Your hair’s not straight,” he says.

  iii

  Our friend Shawn has taken to wearing a voluminous Afro wig on social occasions, especially in the black community. Many politically conscious black women with light skin and straight hair do the same: it’s the only way to make sure people acknowledge their racial identity.

  On this hot and steamy night at a crowded New Orleans club, the six inches of human hair attached to the synthetic fibers of the wig ca
p gather so much heat and sweat that Shawn excuses herself and goes to the ladies’ room. She is too uncomfortable to notice the other woman there. She bends over the sink, closes her eyes, pulls off the wig, and shakes it hard, trying to dislodge the sweat drops. When she straightens up, she sees the woman removing a wig too, shaking it, trying to dislodge the sweat drops, taking a comb from her purse to run through the wig’s long, straight locks, coaxing its limp ends back into their flip curve, and taking a paper towel to the bangs.

  The mirror invites their eyes to meet. Shawn takes in the short, crisp frizz on her neighbor’s head; the neighbor takes in the dead straight, now crumpled shoulder-length hair of Shawn. Then, slowly, in near unison, they put their wigs back on and leave the bathroom in silence.

  The Eighties

  i

  Peachie, Joan, and I are at a book party. Writers and other artists chat and cluster with friends, lovers, and prospects. We three start a race talk, not a serious one, just a lighthearted trading of insider tales. I’ve found that at white gatherings—parties, concerts—blacks often talk like this for a few minutes. As if to say We know your world and we know ours too. How many of you could say the same?

  And this is especially pleasing tonight, since two of us aren’t obviously black. (And they keep a working list of white people’s race ID gaffes Are you Mediterranean? You look Sephardic. Is one of your parents black? Mixed race?) Peachie jokes that sometimes, to head off the wrong kind of remark—you never know what a white person will say about blacks to White People Only—she begins every available sentence with “As a black woman…,” for instance, “As a black woman who’s ordering a cappuccino…”

  Why are we three talking about this here and now? Do we, as the only blacks present, feel the need to condescend, gain an edge over this roomful of chattering whites?

  “But ‘talking black’ is too simple,” says P. “I used to date a white man from Mississippi and I’d always find myself imitating his accent whenever we were together. Which made me sound more ‘black’ than I ever had.”

  We laugh. And as we do, a young white man joins us. None of us knows him. He’s attractive in a quiet way and his manner isn’t intrusive. But his presence is.

  How to make this clear without being unpleasant? We smile as if he’s welcome. Then P. says: “We were just talking about how seductive black and white Southern accents are. I was saying that when I used to date a white man from Mississippi I’d always end up imitating his accent.”

  He smiles. “I know. I used to date a white man from Mississippi too, and I’d always find myself imitating his accent.” The emphasis on “I” lets us know he’s white. And he’s managed a small stylish coup that gives us all pleasure.

  “Congratulations,” I say. “You’ve just made yourself the most exotic person in our group.”

  ii

  George and I have been friends since the early seventies. He’s gay, and handsome in a manly Western Protestant way, the Gary Cooper way, with a head of healthy chestnut hair that falls lightly over his left brow; craggy yet refined features; a lean body fit for tailored khakis and button-down shirts or tight blue Levis with black bomber jackets. He was my first close gay friend and I was his first close black friend.

  Which has led to confusions we cherish.

  When we go to largely heterosexual parties together, white women drawn to him give me appraising or irritated looks, then move in.

  When we pass gay white men on the street, they cut me and give him smoldering glances.

  When we pass gay black men on the street, they shoot me a Girlfriend, you should know better look, then turn to him with a sly smile or a playful moue.

  And when we pass heterosexual black men on the street, they narrow their eyes at me and mutter or sneer, “What do you need that white man for, sister?”

  The Nineties

  i

  The place is Chez Josephine, the New York restaurant consecrated to the first international female superstar of the Negro race. Her image is on every wall, her creamy brown flesh, oiled, stretched, stroked into feathers, beads, sequins, banana belts; the saucy grin, the dimpled cheeks and knees seducing, mocking, exalting, enticing visitors of every age and hue.

  The time is late January 1993.

  —

  Two black women in their mid-forties sit talking about the two famous people who have died that week and been ceaselessly commemorated. One of the women, she of the voluminous Afro wig, is still pale beige, her naturally straight hair now on view. The other is me, a light-but-definite-brown, with naturally frizzy hair.

  Shawn leans forward, moves her wineglass out of the way. Lowering her voice, she looks around to make sure the people at nearby tables can hear nothing. Then she speaks.

  Softly:

  “You know, in a way, Audrey Hepburn’s death meant more to me than Thurgood Marshall’s.”

  “I know,” I answer, leaning in and quickly looking around again. The neighbors are definitely not listening. (And if the restaurant pianist could provide a sound track at this moment, it would be the histrionic opening notes of Now It Can Be Told.)

  —

  Thurgood Marshall secured our right before the Supreme Court of the United States to attend well-funded white public schools. Thurgood Marshall embodied what our parents had overcome to succeed; he had the social conscience all Negroes who succeed should have. He represented valor and constant struggle.

  Audrey Hepburn gave us the privilege of a fantasy life, grounded in centuries of cherished European girlhood.

  The aristocrat loved by all who see her: Audrey Hepburn, in Roman Holiday. The fair daughter of humble people, loyal to her family, gentle yet proud when scorned by the ignorant and haughty, winning the love of the rich and handsome: Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina.

  Oh, the vehement inner lives of girls snatching at heroines and role models! A maiden emboldened by visions of a destiny beyond herself, willing to suffer martyrdom even as she fights for the poor and helpless: Audrey Hepburn in The Nun’s Story.

  And the longing to suffer nothing at all, to be rewarded, decorated, festooned for one’s charm and looks, one’s piquant daring, one’s winning idiosyncrasies: Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Equality in America for a bourgeois black girl meant equal opportunity to be playful and winsome. Indulged.

  Shawn says: Those Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day movies summed up all your tiny little fantasies about having a career and a glamorous life in New York or Europe.

  And no—Doris Day is not to be expunged from this record of girlhood fancies, though it’s far more embarrassing to admit one’s fondness for her foursquare Ohio pluck. (It so helped that Hepburn was European.) Nevertheless, some of us were not too good for Doris Day. Like her, we were midwesterners, schooled, like her, in the ways of perkiness. We brought smiles to dutiful tasks. Our yearning was sprightly.

  And Doris Day’s singing made Berry Gordy cry. When he was young and still obscure, he wrote a song for her and mailed it (boyishly, reverently) to “Doris Day, Hollywood.” He told this story even after he had founded Motown Records and made Diana Ross his muse. He wasn’t ashamed. Why should we be? Listen to the lyrics of Martha and the Vandellas’ first hit, “Come and Get These Memories.” Friendship rings, love letters, teddy bears and state fairs. Turn it into a waltz.

  Now it’s a Doris Day song.

  ii

  Denise kisses her white boyfriend goodnight and steps into the waiting taxi. With his long stringy hair and mustache, the driver looks like a Doobie Brother. He’s quiet for a few minutes. Then he turns around at a stoplight and smiles. “I saw you and your boyfriend. My girlfriend is black. She says it’s hard for her sometimes. Is it hard for you?” Denise of the burnt sienna skin arranges her face to look haughty. “I wouldn’t know,” she tells him. “Both my parents are white.”

  Here and Now

  I’m reading through 1950s issues of Ebony, paying close attention to the hair and skin cream ads. I have a fla
shback to season three of Mad Men, to the episodes where Pete Campbell, snarky scion of a fine old dysfunctional New York family, the Dartmouth man who’s always known he’s too little and boyish to impress people unless he can shrewdly divert their punitive impulses elsewhere, the aspiring writer chagrined that a colleague of lower-middle-class origin was gifted enough to publish a story in Harper’s—where that Pete Campbell grows acutely interested in the Negro Market and is seen avidly reading Ebony in the privacy of his Madison Avenue office.

  A moment I can enjoy with a manageable frisson of horror because I never had to witness it in my youth. It’s a primal socio-cultural scene, watching a white person discover our secrets for his ends.

  Why did I never notice the Ebony ads for Kongolene Hair Cream when I was growing up? They’re inescapable, irrefutable.

  Kongolene Hair Cream for Men:

  Logo KKK: (KONGO KONGOLENE KHEMICAL)

  First advertised in 1914, as men of color demanded the rights to fight abroad for their country, improve their economic and social lot at home, and wear sumptuously gleaming straight hair brushed back with a middle or side part like Rudy Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks. This demand increased with each decade. The colored Chicago businessman J. D. Murray first advertised his brand of Kongolene in 1925—“You get a waterproof job and your hair stays straight for 20 days. Or more.” (Was that the product George Raft was said to go to Harlem for?) Men acquired ridges and waves that sat up proudly (James Cagney in command) or flung themselves about the head and ears wildly (James Cagney under siege); hair that could divide itself into fine long strands and whip from side to side (Robert Mitchum under duress); hair that could rise calmly into a bed of shiny curls and waves (Dean Martin) or into a domed pompadour with nary a wave in sight (James Dean and Elvis Presley).