“Margo Jefferson’s Negroland—autopsy snapshots of mostly upper-class black ways of being and performing—is a tight-lipped performance of willed, earned, and harshly edited silence. Refusing to construct an erotic black body for white consumption, she desires nothing and challenges everything. Asking if it’s possible or meaningful to be human, she posits etiquette as the interrogator of America’s psyche. She can read a graveyard in a theater, personality in a hairstyle; she lists instead of declaims. Her asperity is elegantly pithy and violent. In the fissures between and among items, she revolts. Her words are ascetic. She doesn’t want me to envy her life, the fullness of which is only hinted at. She wants me to leave her alone to live within this sentence of her mother’s: ‘Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro.’ The book’s last two words, ‘Go on,’ aren’t just a writer walking offstage and getting on with life; they convey the pleasure of taunting future pain that the truth of vision will surely yield.”
—David Shields
“Jefferson sees everything and expresses it with surgical clarity. She is the Tocqueville of race in America. This is a great book, destined to be read for a century.”
—Edmund White
Also by Margo Jefferson
On Michael Jackson
Copyright © 2015 by Margo Jefferson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Alfred Music: “My Heart Belongs To Daddy”(from Leave It To Me!), words and music by Cole Porter, copyright © 1938 by Cole Porter, copyright renewed and assigned to John F. Wharton, Trustee of the Cole Porter Musical & Literary Property Trusts, publication and allied rights assigned to Chappell & Co., Inc.; and “Blow Out the Candle” by Phil Moore, copyright © 1951 by Chappell & Co., copyright renewed. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music. All rights reserved. · Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.: Excerpts from “Sylvia’s Death” from Live or Die by Anne Sexton, copyright © 1966 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1994 by Linda G. Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. All rights reserved. · Penguin Random House and Harold Ober Associates: “Mother to Son” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad with David Roessel, associate editor, copyright © 1994 by The Estate of Langston Hughes. Print rights are controlled by Penguin Random House and electronic rights are controlled by Harold Ober Associates. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC and Harold Ober Associates. All rights reserved. · Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC: “Smooth Operator” written by Clyde Lovern Otis & Murray Stein, copyright © 1958 by Sony/ATV Publishing LLC. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC., 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. Reprinted by permission of Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC. All rights reserved. · Williamson Music (ASCAP): “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, copyright © 1949 by Williamson Music (ASCAP), an Imagem Company, owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world, copyright renewed. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Williamson Music (ASCAP). All rights reserved.
A Cataloging-in-Publication record has been established for this book by the Library of Congress.
ISBN 9780307378453 (hardcover) eBook ISBN 9781101870648
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover photograph courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Oliver Munday
v4.1_r1
a
Contents
Cover
Also by Margo Jefferson
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustrations
In memory of Denise Adele Jefferson, 1944–2010
And for Nancy Gist and Christine Carter Lynch
I was taught to avoid showing off.
I was taught to distinguish myself through presentation, not declaration, to excel through deeds and manners, not showing off.
But isn’t all memoir a form of showing off?
In my Negroland childhood, this was a perilous business.
—
Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference, and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.
Too many Negroes, it was said, showed off the wrong things: their loud voices, their brash and garish ways; their gift for popular music and dance, for sports rather than the humanities and sciences. Most white people were on the lookout, we were told, for what they called these basic racial traits. But most white people were also on the lookout for a too-bold display by us of their kind of accomplishments, their privilege and plenty, what they considered their racial traits. You were never to act undignified in their presence, but neither were you to act flamboyant.
Showing off was permitted, even encouraged, only if the result reflected well on your family, their friends, and your collective ancestors.
So here I am, age four, at a children’s club talent show, in the wings of an auditorium with other excited Jack and Jillers. While we are being gently and firmly shushed, I break away and stride onto the stage. My five-year-old friend is performing her recitation. I step in front of her, turn around, and tell the adult seated at the piano, “Keep playing that music.” He obeys; I turn back to the audience and do my notion of a dance for a few minutes. I hear the adults exclaim and laugh appreciatively. I’ve charmed them because I have a reputation for being bright and spirited; even my friend’s mother is indulgent. I don’t recall my friend’s reaction—why should I? I was out to obliterate her.
I could take adult indulgence too far when my need to shine blurred my sense of the occasion. At a dinner party not long after, where the adults were more interested in each other than in children, I waited for a break in their talk, then announced, “Sometimes I forget to wipe myself.”
The laughter came, but only after a short silence, and I saw the guests looking at each other before they looked at me. I realized I was being more tolerated than appreciated, and it came to me that repeating such a statement—showing off in public what’s done in private—would always bring reproof.
So I grew. And as I grew I learned that in the world beyond family and family friends, your mistakes—bad manners, poor taste, an excess of high spirits—could put
you, your parents, and your people at risk.
All of you could be designated, at a stroke and for life, vulgar, coarse, and inferior.
—
Clever of me to become a critic. We critics scrutinize and show off to a higher end. For a greater good. Our manners, our tastes, our declarations are welcomed.
Superior for life. Except when we’re not. Except when we’re dismissed or denounced as envious and petty; as derivatives and dependents by nature. Second class for life.
—
That’s the generic version of a story. Here’s the specific version: the midwestern, midcentury story of a little girl, one of two born to an attractive couple pleased with their lives and achievements, wanting the best for their children and wanting their children to be among the best.
To be successful, professionally and personally.
And to be happy.
Children always find ways to subvert while they’re busy complying. This child’s method of subversion? She would achieve success, but she would treat it like a concession she’d been forced to make. For unto whomsoever much is given, of her shall be much required. She came to feel that too much had been required of her. She would have her revenge. She would insist on an inner life regulated by despair.
The story she constructs is this: There was a girl, once upon a time and in your time. She embraced her life up to a point, then rejected it, and from that rejection have come all her difficulties. She comes to feel that her life has gone wrong. Some of this is the usual thwarted ambition—she’s good, quite good, at her profession. She should have been outstanding. She is, by some measures, but she’s not phenomenal. She knows she’s privileged to be a writer. She should love what she does. But she doesn’t. Much of the time she convinces herself that she hates writing and therefore feels hate toward it. About love and sex she should have been adventurous, not wary. How does someone like this, so often ashamed of what she is, always ashamed of what she lacks, write about herself?
—
I’m going to change my tone now. I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
I don’t want this kind of indulgence to dominate my memories.
And (I was taught) you don’t tell your secrets to strangers—certainly not secrets that expose error, weakness, failure.
Nothing is just personal. And all readers are strangers. Right now I’m overwhelmed by trying to calculate, imagine, what these readers might expect of me; reject, demand, deny; how this one will insist, as that one resists…
—
So let me turn back, subdue my individual self, and enter history.
I’m a chronicler of Negroland, a participant-observer, an elegist, dissenter and admirer; sometime expatriate, ongoing interlocutor.
I call it Negroland because I still find “Negro” a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures arise to challenge its primacy.
I call it Negroland because “Negro” dominated our history for so long; because I lived with its meanings and intimations for so long; because they were essential to my first discoveries of what race meant, or, as we now say, how race was constructed.
—
For nearly two hundred years we in Negroland have called ourselves all manner of things. Like
the colored aristocracy
the colored elite
the colored 400
the 400
the blue vein society
the big families, the old families, the old settlers, the pioneers
Negro society, black society
the Negro, the black, the African-American upper class or elite.
I was born in 1947, and my generation, like its predecessors, was taught that since our achievements received little notice or credit from white America, we were not to discuss our faults, lapses, or uncertainties in public. (Even now I shy away from the word “failings.”) Even the least of them would be turned against the race. Most white people made no room for the doctrine of “human, all too human”: our imperfections were sub- or provisionally human.
For my generation the motto was still: Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.
Part of me dreads revealing anything in these pages except our drive to excellence. But I dread the constricted expression that comes from that. And we’re prone to being touchy. Self-righteously smug and snobbish. So let me begin in a quiet, clinical way.
I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation’s oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite. But where did they come from to get there? And which clubs and organizations did they join to seal their membership in this world?
A brief vita of the author.
Margo Jefferson:
Ancestors: (In chronological order): slaves and slaveholders in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi; farmers, musicians, butlers, construction crew supervisors, teachers, beauticians and maids, seamstresses and dressmakers, engineers, policewomen, real estate businesswomen, lawyers, judges, doctors and social workers
Father’s fraternity: Kappa Alpha Psi
Mother’s (and sister’s) sorority: Delta Sigma Theta
Parents’ national clubs: the Boulé (father); the Northeasterners (mother)
Sister’s and my national clubs: Jack and Jill; the Co-Ettes
Local clubs, schools, and camps will be named as we go along. Skin color and hair will be described, evaluated too, along with other racialized physical traits. Questions inevitably will arise. Among them: How does one—how do you, how do I—parse class, race, family, and temperament? How many kinds of deprivation are there? What is the compass of privilege? What has made and maimed me?
—
Here are some of this group’s founding categories, the oppositions and distinctions they came to live by.
Northerner / Southerner
house slave / field hand
free black / slave black
free black / free mulatto
skilled worker / unskilled worker (free or slave)
owns property / owns none
reads and writes fluently / reads a little but does not write / reads and writes a little / neither reads nor writes
descends from African and Indian royalty / descends from African obscurities / descends from upper-class whites / descends from lower-class whites / descends from no whites at all
White Americans have always known how to develop aristocracies from local resources, however scant. British grocers arrive on the Mayflower and become founding fathers. German laborers emigrate to Chicago and become slaughterhouse kings. Women of equally modest origins marry these men or their rivals or their betters and become social arbiters.
We did the same. “Colored society” was originally a mélange of
men and women who were given favorable treatment, money, property, and even freedom by well-born Caucasian owners, employers, and parents;
men and women who bought their freedom with hard cash and hard labor;
men, women, and children bought and freed by slavery-hating whites or Negro friends and relatives;
men and women descended from free Negroes, hence born free.
They learned their letters and their manners; they learned skilled trades (barber, caterer, baker, jeweler, machinist, tailor, dressmaker); they were the best-trained servants in the better white homes and hotels; they bought real estate; published newspapers; established schools and churches; formed clubs and mutual aid societ
ies; took care to marry among themselves. Some arrived from Haiti alongside whites fleeing Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black revolution: their ranks included free mulattoes and slaves who, after some pretense of loyalty, found it easy to desert their former masters and go into the business of upward mobility. From New Orleans to New York, men and women of mixed blood insistently established their primacy.
I’ve fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal. There were antebellum founders of Negroland who triumphed through resolve and principled intelligence.
A few examples:
James Forten of Philadelphia, abolitionist and entrepreneur. Born to free Negro parents, he started work in a sail-making firm at age eight, became the foreman at twenty and the owner at twenty-three, running the firm so well that it made him one of the richest men, black or white, in the city. He invented a sail-handling device, refused to sell rigging to slave-trading ships, organized against slavery and colonization, fought attempts to curtail the rights of free blacks, and supplied much-needed funds to help William Lloyd Garrison start The Liberator.
Frances Jackson Coppin, educator. Born in Washington, D.C., she remained a slave until age twelve. Her Negro grandfather bought the freedom of all his children except her mother, who was left enslaved because she’d had Frances by a white man. When an aunt bought her freedom, she worked as a servant in Massachusetts, then Rhode Island; using her salary to employ a tutor, she made her way through high school and then Oberlin College. There she started a school for escaped slaves while successfully completing the men’s course of study in Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics. She became an educator—the first Negro woman to head a high school with a classical curriculum—who burned, as she told Frederick Douglass, “to see my race lifted out of the mire of ignorance, weakness and degradation; no longer to sit in obscure corners and devour the scraps of knowledge which his superiors flung at him.”*
—
Negro exceptionalism had its ugly side: pioneers who advanced through resolve, intelligence, and exploiting their own.
Negroland Page 1
