Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  —

  Here I am in the 1954 photo of the two-to-five-year-olds, wearing a jumper and a white blouse with puffed sleeves. According to the chapter’s report (each chapter submitted a report to Up the Hill), the year began with a Halloween party: “All of the children came masked in very colorful costumes.” In November we each brought a gift (“wooden puzzle, durable books or non-breakable record”) for the pediatrics department at Provident Hospital, and in December our selflessness was rewarded: we brought ornaments to our own Christmas party and got presents from a grab bag. In January we “little ones” learned handicrafts; February brought Valentine’s Day festivities, and March “brought folk dancing lessons to this little group.” Most important, we formed a rhythm band, and rehearsed for spring Jack and Jill Day. That must have been the day that I interrupted my friend onstage with my impromptu dance.

  The mothers dedicated themselves to the insights and enlightened ideals of child psychology. The Parents’ Creed, “Your Child’s Emotional Needs,” is a model of the pedagogy and anxious self-scrutiny expected—demanded—of mothers then. A pledge of allegiance, a loyalty oath sworn to Motherhood.

  Examples: The Need for Belonging (“I will develop in my child a feeling of security by avoiding extreme methods of discipline”); The Need for Achievement (“I will not try to achieve my own ambitions by forcing them on my child”); The Need for Personal Integrity in Sharing (“I will show courtesy and consideration to other people regardless of their age, sex, color, creed, or nationality”).

  In practical, in sociological terms, how do we reward our mothers’ efforts?

  Our goal, in the pledge of the Los Angeles chapter: “At the top of the hill stands COLLEGE GRADUATION and A SUCCESSFUL CAREER.”

  We embody the progress of a people, and not least—definitely not least—the success of its maligned family life. Our mothers advance the ongoing project of validating the Negro Woman, proving her a lady, a responsible member of her community, an exemplary wife rearing exemplary children.

  For those children placed in white schools by the mother and her husband, Jack and Jill becomes a racial enrichment program, a guarantee that our social lives do not depend on the favor of white schoolmates and their parents.

  —

  At times I’m impatient with younger blacks who insist they were or would have been better off in black schools, at least from pre-K through middle school. They had, or would have had, a stronger racial and social identity, an identity cleansed of suspicion, subterfuge, confusion, euphemism, presumption, patronization, and disdain. I have no grounds for comparison. The only schools I ever went to were white schools with small numbers of Negroes.

  I’ve always held on to some vision that at Lab, at least through fifth grade, we were free to do our childhood tasks—learn to work and play, compete, collaborate in a space largely free of race markers. No, not “free”—a space that protected us from the burdens of adult race prejudice and consciousness. To a real extent, we were. But we were not protected from our teachers. Or our parents. We were not protected from the shocks of physical difference.

  “When I came to Lab in second grade, I knew I was in a foreign world,” Denise told me. “The boys had bangs.”

  “Denise,” I told her, “I’ve seen pictures of your Rosenwald nursery school class. More than half the kids look white.”

  “But none of the boys had bangs, Margo. They had curls and waves. They did not have bangs.”

  “Butch Dale’s hair was straight enough for bangs.”

  “But he didn’t have bangs.”

  We were not protected from our own fantasies. How I’d like to deny my first conscious memory of having my hair washed. I was sure, cheerfully sure, it would turn it blonde. “Get me out of this white doll / brown doll scenario!” I want to scream. “I’m better than this!”

  Then I calm myself. No one escapes her time and place. I repeat the words of my therapist: “A fantasy is a construction.” I give myself a Chekhovian moment: The generations that come after will not have to endure these shaming constructions.

  Those ugly stories you overheard or were taught by parents and grandparents—these were part of the curriculum, stories that gave the lie again and again to public declarations that if Negroes would just prove themselves worthy they would be welcome as equals. Parents and grandparents told you some white people would dislike you even more if you were clearly their equal. Here were examples from their own lives and from the lives of friends.

  The University of Chicago professor who so resented a Negro graduate student’s challenge that he told her, “As long as I am in this department, you will never get your master’s degree.” (Aunt Vera transferred to Northwestern.)

  The white Southern medical residents at a University of Chicago hospital who complained about a Negro doctor’s being on a fellowship at all, especially when he was allowed to enter the rooms of white female patients. (“Stay by me when we go on rounds,” the head doctor told my father. He did, and he completed his fellowship.)

  The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. And as a result of these, a sense of perpetual violation.

  But I have to turn my mind to other things.

  Because it’s almost time. Whatever our race, color, or creed, my peers and I are getting ready to

  Sidle

  Slump

  Pout

  Pose

  Sashay and foot-drag

  Into adolescence.

  Devious and careless

  Feverish and slothful

  Living in the moment that’s so often the wrong moment.

  We’ll apply Clearasil to our pimples, start biting our fingernails, learn to use Kotex, then Tampax, say things like “It’s snowing down South” when a girl’s slip is hanging.

  —

  I have a few years to go, but I start to get involved—half conscript, half worshipper—when Denise starts listening to Jam with Sam on WGES weekend nights; when she persuades our mother to drive us both to a weekend showing of The Girl Can’t Help It (“Little Richard is excellent and Jayne Mansfield is a very good actress,” we assure her when she picks us up).

  Denise will whip and twirl through the house, hold on to the broom closet to practice her dance moves, stack her new 45s on the upstairs record player.

  She will cha-cha to “Quiet Village” and “Poinciana,” bop to “She was a foxy little mama with great big hips / Pretty long hair and pretty red lips!” She will croon, “I sit in my room looking out at the rain, / My tears are like crystal, they cover my windowpane.”

  I will read her discarded issues of Polly Pigtails, Calling All Girls, Mademoiselle, and Mad Magazine; likewise her copies of Seventeenth Summer and Mara, Daughter of the Nile.

  She will start going to Stormy’s Beauty Shop on 47th and South Park, near the Regal Theater, to get her hair straightened and styled. Mother’s friends go there or to Mister Paul’s. The beauticians wear pink dresses, and Stormy’s glossy black bob has a cobalt blue tinge. When she complains that the hair straightener stings, she will be told, “Beauty knows no pain, Denise.” The speaker is Marva Louis Spaulding, who’s been married to Joe Louis and featured in Ebony fashion spreads. Whose beauty is beyond our feverish hopes.

  With Denise I will turn away from The Mickey Mouse Club, where she was Doreen, the best dancer with the cutest bangs, and I was Darlene, more chipper than perky, with long braids and lead roles in Disney serials. (When competing with Doreen/Denise was too taxing, I became little Karen, Disney’s version of Flossie Bobbsey. Ringlets on her head, Cubby by her side.)

  I will start watching American Bandstand and parrot Denise’s opinion: Arlene and Kenny are the most plausible teens on this all-white show. Their hair is dark, curly, and almost greasy. They look laconic when they dance. The others don’t dress with any cool, and they can’t keep the beat.

  Alone, I still read poetry, abandoned myself to the rhapsodies of Christina Rosse
tti, Sara Teasdale, and Elinor Wylie; tucked my aggressions into the discursive absurdities of “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” “Father William,” and “The Hunting of the Snark.” Until I stumbled onto a very different poem. It was in my Modern American Poetry. And its first line blasted through me.

  Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room

  Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable…

  Revulsion/compulsion/revulsion/compulsion overcame me like the heavy beats of the broom handles of the fat black bucks who sagged and reeled and pounded on a table in a primordial Congo. From whence Negro Americans had come.

  “Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM,”

  A roaring, epic, rag-time tune

  It was “The Congo,” by Vachel Lindsay, and I could not turn away from it, not that day, not for days after.

  Then along that riverbank

  A thousand miles

  Tattooed cannibals danced in files

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  And “BLOOD” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,

  “BLOOD” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,

  “Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,

  Harry the uplands,

  Steal all the cattle.”

  It was how newspapers and television reporters talked about the Mau Mau in Kenya—a secret society of tribal warriors who murdered whites ruthlessly, then terrorized Africans who refused to join them.

  The poem’s subtitle let me salvage some ironic distance: “A Study of the Negro Race.” Negro scholars like Du Bois and Woodson had done serious studies of our race. And now, in fact just as I encountered the poem, there were two Congos, both with educated young African leaders who were demanding independence from Belgium and from France. And their quest was supported by our own Dr. Ralph Bunche, United Nations leader and Nobel Prize winner.

  In my frenzied readings aloud, I made sure to heap sarcasm on the section titles. “Their Basic Savagery,” I would say with scornful delight.

  “Their Irrepressible High Spirits”! (Here I’d sneer.)

  “The Hope of Their Religion”! (I was wearily disdainful.)

  —

  For the rest, I followed Vachel Lindsay’s directions, written in the margins.

  THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, More deliberate.

  CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. Solemnly chanted.

  “Be careful what you do, All the o sounds

  Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, very golden.

  And all of the other Heavy accents

  Gods of the Congo, very heavy.

  Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Light accents

  Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, very light. Last

  Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” line whispered.

  Thighbone-wielding cannibals, skull-faced witch doctors, widemouthed lowlife Negroes whooping and hollering in the streets, pig-fat Negroes prancing in red coats, doffing red top hats (why can’t more of us learn to curb the love of loud colors that made white people think we’re ridiculous?—how well I knew that lament).

  Compulsion/revulsion / compulsion/revulsion—“BOOM, kill the white men / HOO, HOO, HOO.” All the horrors we Negroes strove to banish from our lives and from the minds of white Americans were here, now, in my room, enfolding me in a delirium of sound and sight.

  Then a confusion of loveliness. A fairyland, an ebony palace, casements of gold and ivory, jasmine-scented maidens with tiny feet and pearls in hair that I made fall to their waists in undulating waves.

  The fairyland appeased me; still I fought the degrading details. Hated Lindsay for sticking elephant bone in the gold and ivory casements, for making the maidens coal-black instead of ebony. Hated him for not capitalizing “Negro.”

  I felt I had the tools for the last section, where “a good old negro in the slums of the town” preached piety, decried sin, beat his Bible, and set the congregation singing and testifying.

  It was condescending but not vicious—not to the part of me that shared Lindsay’s view of florid lower-class religion. It was vicious, though, when “they all repented, a thousand strong / For their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong.” American Negroes were not a stuporous or savage people. That was Vachel Lindsay’s ignorant prejudice, the kind we vanquished daily through struggle, achievement, eloquent indignation. And the spirituals were a great music. I could tell he knew that despite his prejudice. For here were bits of loveliness again, a jubilee as the gray sky opened and our voices rose and pulsed to a singing wind of glory glory glory.

  Then, dying down to a penetrating terrified whisper, the last words dragged me back.

  “Mumbo…Jumbo will hoo-doo you,

  Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.

  Mumbo…Jumbo…will…hoo-doo…you.”

  I whispered it, I chanted it, I read it silently. I read it alone in my room and I never told anyone. My reading was furtive and excited, filled with voluptuous loathing.

  I was eleven. And if pornography lures as it appalls, offers you a debased vision of yourself that some part of you yields to, then “The Congo” was my first pornography.

  Sixth grade gave me proof, for the first time, that there were things I was not going to be able to win, to gleam inside of. Sixth grade offered new opportunities for uncertainty.

  Not about who was smartest. That had been going on since kindergarten; we were used to that. It was the rash of new students who arrived at Lab. Most of them were a good half year older than we Lifers. Most of them came from public schools, where they’d learned worldly social ways.

  They knew just who was giving off pheromones. Who was verbally fleet. Who was cute and who was hopelessly not.

  I found out about the List the day I huddled with three friends for a pre-gym gossip.

  D.: The boys have made a list about us.

  Me: (Singing) “As someday it may happen that a victim must be found, I’ve got a little list. I’ve got a little list.”

  D.: It’s who’s the best looking, who has the best personality, and who’s the best dancer.

  Me: (still singing, failing to get a laugh) “And I don’t think she’ll be missed, I’m sure she’ll not be missed.”

  J.: Who told you?

  B.: Who’s on it?

  D.: Margo, you’re number one in personality and dancing.

  Me: I’m the lord high girl and champion. (Sardonic to keep jealousy at bay) Next week I’ll be executed.

  D.: You’re number six in looks.

  Me: How many are on the list?

  D.: Six.

  B.: Who’s number one?

  D.: J. and I are tied for number one.

  B.: Oh, a twin set.

  D.: You’re number two.

  B.: What about personality?

  D.: (A small pause) J. and I are number two in personality and dancing. You’re number three.

  (J. sings a few measures of “Bird Dog” and does a few dance steps.)

  Me: I don’t want to go swimming today. I’m going to say I have my period.

  I was a good diver. Jackknife. Swan dive. Somersault in the air. I did them all. As Mother and her friends never stopped hunting, gathering, and trading hair palliatives, we’d learned to wrap chamois cloth tightly around our heads before putting our swim caps on. I did it as quickly as possible (oh, it just helps keep my hair dry, I’d say casually when asked in the locker room). Slightly damp hair could be quashed with a brush. You lived in terror of how seriously damp hair would resist as the school day went on, rising and dulling till you got home to quell it with oil, rollers, clips, and hot comb.

  S. got a crush on me that year, and he was very cute, one of the new boys, with light brown hair and a sweet perky smile. Disney boys like Tim Considine had that kind of smile. That put me in the magic circle where you talk about boys and prospects. We were in different homerooms. D. told me S. had a crush on me, and that’s when I noticed he smiled at me a lot in the halls.

&nbs
p; He was still smiling, and I was still basking, the next week when D. said, “You should feel honored that S. likes you. They don’t allow Negroes in his parents’ building.” But it was a building in Hyde Park and Hyde Park was integrated. I lived in an all-Negro neighborhood, but plenty of my Negro friends lived in Hyde Park. I went to their houses for playdates and parties and for Jack and Jill meetings. I’d been to D.’s house too—I’d had no idea certain buildings retained their racial exclusion rights. I desperately wished a Negro friend were telling me this so we could share the exclusion.

  I must have said something. I must have felt ashamed later that I’d said so little, or surely I’d remember what I said? I do know that very soon after, I stopped responding to S.’s smiles. I ignored him. I ignored him until his smiles ceased.

  We were the third race. We cared for our people—we loved our people—but we refused to be held back by the lower element. We did not love white people, we did not care for most of them, but we envied them and sometimes we feared and hated them. Our daily practice was suspicion, caution at the very least. Preemptive disdain.

  “Who’s coming over?” my friend P.’s grandfather would ask, and if he didn’t recognize the name, his face would fall slightly and his voice grow distant. “Oh, one of your little white friends.”

  When I was in sixth grade my mother, facing the perils of puberty on my behalf, sat me down for a talk about my white friends. Your father and I want you to be able to compete everywhere, and we want you to be comfortable wherever you go. That’s why we send you to the schools they are sent to. It’s fine to enjoy the company of your white friends. But do you really think you can trust them?

  Yes, I felt that I could—I was idealistic if not altogether coherent. Yes, I felt that I could and should trust them.

  Margo, wherever the white man goes, there is race prejudice. They haven’t invented a test to measure that. I’m sure they won’t. Maybe it’s just genetic.