Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  The boys knew this because she’d made the mistake of being fast with more than one boy, so they’d talked about her with each other.

  And then her girlfriends talked about her with each other. They were still cordial to her at parties. She wasn’t put out of her clubs. But if she wasn’t already in the Etta Quettes or the Co-Ettes, she wasn’t asked in.

  Occasionally, a daughter who’d been silly enough to get herself pregnant would actually drop out of college, have the child, and marry its father. That meant she had disgraced herself and her family.

  In fact, she had committed matricide: she had destroyed the good reputation her mother, her grandmothers, and her grandmothers’ grandmothers had fought for since slavery.

  Premature sexual activity and pregnancy out of wedlock? She was just another statistic to be held against the race.

  The world had to upend itself before shades of possibility between decorum and disgrace could emerge. Suddenly, people like us were denouncing war and imperialism, discarding the strategic protocol of civil rights for the combat aggression of Black Power. We unmade our straightened hair, remade our pristine diction, renounced our social niceties and snobberies.

  —

  The entitlements of Negroland were no longer relevant.

  We were not the best that had been known and thought in black life and history. We were a corruption of The Race, a wrongful deviation. We’d let ourselves become tools of oppression in the black community. We’d settled for a desiccated white facsimile and abandoned a vital black culture. Striving to prove we could master the rubric of white civilization that had never for a moment thought us the best of anything in their life or history.

  You grilled yourself: Do I still like—love—too many white writers, musicians, artists? Have I immersed myself enough in African history and culture? Do my principles show in my work? And principles notwithstanding, in my heart am I still a snob? At meetings, in political conversations, class—your background, your advantages—weasels its way in. Purge it from your intellectual pronouncements; it pops up in how you expressed them. The preemptory tone that you tell yourself is rigorous. The way of seeming to listen politely when you aren’t listening because you are so sure you know better.

  And even when you didn’t think you knew better, you’d get those looks at community poetry readings or concerts, once a nationalist heard your diction or watched your mannerisms…watched until you felt his gaze and had to return it; then he’d slowly curl his lip.

  And the comments:

  You have to understand: you can’t be trusted. You’ve always insulted people like me.

  Yeah, you Chicago folks’ Scotch budget could fund a year’s research at the Institute of the Black World.

  When the Revolution comes, people like you will be lined up against the wall and shot.

  Are you black enough became essential to style preening and sexual intimidation.

  —

  Good Negro Girls in search of lives their parents hadn’t lived often sought men their parents didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

  Naturally, errors were made. The doctor’s daughter studying architecture married a man with suspected ties to the drug trade: within the year, she was shot in the head from behind and left beside her murdered husband, a large pool of blood widening in what Jet magazine called their “affluent South Side home.”

  The dark-skinned daughter of a socially responsible educator, who left her Paris career as a provocatively keen-featured model with exorbitant long limbs to teach early childhood education at an Illinois community college, was stabbed multiple times in the head and neck by an estranged husband who then drove her body to the police station and turned himself in, telling the officer, “I just went crazy.”

  Average American women were killed like this every day. But we weren’t raised to be average women; we were raised to be better than most women of either race. White women, our mothers reminded us pointedly, could afford more of these casualties. There were more of them, weren’t there?

  There were always more white people. There were so few of us, and it had cost so much to construct us. Why were we dying?

  The first of the dying boys had succumbed to the usual perils of family life—the unkind, philandering father, the kind but closeted father, the absent or insufficient mother. After them came the boys who threw off privilege and lusted for street life, imitating the slipslide walks of the guys who lounged on street corners in caps and leather coats, practicing the raucous five-stage laugh (clap, fold at the waist, run forward, arms in loose boxing position, squat, and return to loose standing position); working as hard as any white boy at a frat party to sound like Bo Diddley and Otis Redding.

  Striving ardently to be what they were and were not. Behold the Race Flaneur: the bourgeois rebel who goes slumming, and finds not just adventure but the objective correlative for his secret despair.

  —

  I won’t absolve the girls. We played ghetto too, rolled and cut our eyes to show disdain, smacked our gum and loud-talked.

  But the boys ruled. We were just aspiring adornments, and how could it be otherwise? The Negro man was at the center of the culture’s race obsessions. The Negro woman was on the shabby fringes. She had moments if she was in show business, of course; we craved the erotic command of Tina Turner, the arch insolence of Diana Ross, the melismatic authenticity of Aretha.

  But in life, when a Good Negro Girl attached herself to a ghetto boy hoping to go street and compensate for her bourgeois privilege, if she didn’t get killed with or by him, she usually lived to become a socially disdained, financially disabled black woman destined to produce at least one baby she would have to care for alone.

  What was the matter with us? Were we plagued by some monstrous need, some vestigial longing to plunge back into the abyss Negroes had been consigned to for centuries?

  Was this some variant of survivor guilt?

  No, that phrase is too generic. I’d call it the guilty confusion of those who were raised to defiantly accept their entitlement. To be more than survivors, to be victors who knew that victory was as much a threat as failure, and could be turned against them at any moment.

  —

  I’m still obsessed with James Weldon Johnson’s 1933 diagnosis of this condition. It deserves repeating.

  Awaiting each colored child are cramping limitations and buttressed obstacles in addition to those that must be met by youth in general. How judicious he is. Yet, implacably, this dilemma approaches suffering, in exact proportion to the parent’s knowledge of these conditions, and the child’s ignorance of them. Some parents try to spare their children this bitter knowledge as long as possible. Less sensitive parents (those maimed by their own bitterness) drive it into the child from infancy on.

  At each turn, Johnson forgoes high rhetorical drama. He chooses “this dilemma” over “our burden,” prefers our “condition” to our “fate,” and comes at last, with stately tread, to this: And no parent may definitely say which is the wiser course, for either of them may lead to spiritual disaster for the child. Tragedy has arrived and is content to wait quietly. In time it may be able to claim both parent and child.

  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.

  —

  In the late 1970s, I began to actively cultivate a desire to kill myself. I was, at that time, a successful professional in my chosen field of journalism. I was also a passionate feminist who refused to admit any contradiction between, on the one hand, her commitment to fighting the oppression of women and, on the other, her belief that feminism would let her draft a death commensurate with social achievement and political awareness.

  A little background is needed here. The women’s movement was controversial in the black community at this time. Many men and all too many women denounced feminism as a white woman�
�s thing, an indulgence, even an assertion of privilege, since she was competing (and stridently) for the limited share of benefits white men had just begun to grant non-whites.

  Black feminists responded that, thanks to sexism, women of color regularly got double blasts of discrimination and oppression. And, anyway, we had our own feminist history. Relations between white and black women had been wary, inequitable, or bluntly exploitative. Alliances between them had been scant and fraught.

  Nevertheless, social and cultural progress through the decades had made interracial cooperation and friendship available to my generation. I’d had white friends since kindergarten. And I was willing to acknowledge this irony: the rituals of bourgeois femininity had given the girls of Negroland certain protections the boys lacked.

  That vision of feral, fascinating black manhood possessed Americans of every race and class. If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and ’60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper-middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic too, as we would learn.

  Still, these rituals allowed girls the latitude to go about their studies while being pert and popular, to stay well-mannered and socially adaptable, even as they joined the protests of the sixties and seventies.

  So, when the black movement and the women’s movement offered new social and cultural opportunities, we were ready to accept them.

  But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior. We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a legacy. We were too strong for that.

  I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair. My first forays in this direction were petty. I conducted my own small battle of the books, purging my library of stalwart, valorous titles by black women and replacing them, wherever possible, with morbid, truculent ones by my sisters. Out with This Child’s Gonna Live, up with There’s Nothing I Own That I Want. Goodbye My Lord, What a Morning by Marian Anderson; hello Everything and Nothing by Dorothy Dandridge. As for Mari Evans’s iconic sixties poem,

  I am a black woman

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  strong

  beyond all definition still

  defying place

  and time

  and circumstance

  assailed

  impervious

  indestructible

  Look

  on me and be

  renewed

  I tore it out of an anthology and set fire to it in the bathroom sink.

  I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who’d dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.

  A Negro girl could never be purely innocent. The vengeful Race Fairy always lurked nearby; your parents’ best hope was that the fairy would show up at someone else’s feast and punish their child. Parents had to protect themselves too, and protect you from knowing how much danger you all were in.

  And so arose one variation on the classic Freudian primal scene in which the child sees or imagines her parents having sex and finds it stirringly violent. Here the child sees and imagines her parents having fraught encounters with white people who invade their conversation and shadow their lives beyond the boundaries of home or neighborhood.

  Work hard, child. Internalize the figures of your mother, your father, your parents (one omnipotent double-gendered personage). Internalize The Race. Internalize both races. Then internalize the contradictions. Teach your psyche to adapt its solo life to a group obbligato. Or else let it abandon any impulse toward independence and hurtle toward a feverishly perfect representation of your people.

  —

  The first unapologetic black female suicide took place in a small Off-Broadway theater in 1964, in a short Gothic play by a fiercely imaginative Negro woman playwright. I wasn’t there, but I understood that Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro was as much a demand for freedom as the Civil Rights Act passed the same year.

  Kennedy’s heroine, Negro-Sarah, is a young middle-class woman, good-looking in a boring way; no glaring Negroid features, medium nose, medium mouth and pale yellow skin. My one defect is that I have a head of frizzy hair, unmistakably Negro kinky hair…She lives alone in an Upper West Side brownstone, longs to be bohemian and distinctive, fears she is merely drab and decorous. She mistrusts her white poet boyfriend: he is very interested in Negroes. She mistrusts her own passion for white culture. Its great works have no place for her; its great figures would deem her an insignificant cultural arriviste. One woman, one room, one anguished, polyphonic consciousness. Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg prowl her psyche, lamenting the awful curse of blackness. Patrice Lumumba and a shadowy black father are there too; they struggle and fail to lift that curse. At the play’s end, the light goes black, then blazes white. “The poor bitch has hung herself,” says the landlady. “She was a funny little liar,” adds the boyfriend.

  Negro-Sarah embodies our Negroland legacy of proscription and privilege, grief and achievement, a mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people’s enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.

  Let me say with care that the blame is not symmetrical: my enemies forced my loved ones to ask too much of me.

  —

  Nella Larsen’s 1920s novels were republished in the late 1960s and early ’70s, part of an exuberant rush of books by women, by gays, by non-whites of every hue, that the culture had contentedly left out of print for years. Some of these books appeared in pleasing well-wrought editions. Larsen’s were among those given the cheapest paper and crudest design publishers could get away with. Her own heroines would have disdained to buy them.

  For they are touchy and proud, these Jazz Age heroines. They read widely, wear soigné frocks, give smart parties, and make clever remarks. They have keen minds, keen features, and fair skin, and can be suitably ironic about “what called itself Negro society.” They cultivate the advantages of being New Negroes and New Women; sometimes they even indulge in being New Negroes who can pass for white. They pursue La Vie Bourgeoise with too much anxiety or too much ambivalence. Their sexual allure trips them up; their sexual reserve holds them back. They are timid where they should be bold, reckless when diplomacy is needed. Secretly, they feel contempt for their own failure to imagine anything more for themselves.

  Each one finds death of some kind: a lethal marriage, a fatal accident. But their longing for death, the drive toward it, is never quite acknowledged. Larsen’s women stumble into suicide by misadventure or miscalculation. They avoid premeditation, just as they avoid stringent self-reflection.

  —

  So, when Ntozake Shange stood on the stage of the Public Theater in 1975 and spoke the words “And this is for colored girls who have considered suicide,” my heart took flight. We were the same age. We were both doctors’ daughters who’d attacked our girlhood gentility with the weapons of Black Power and radical feminism. Now we could consider—toy with, ponder, contemplate—suicide
.

  I tried to quash my envy by seeing the play two, three, and four times, taking friends and paying for their tickets. I told myself, Ntozake is laying the groundwork for all black feminists. She’s taken her stand as an artist, while you hide behind being a journalist. You must rid yourself of jealousy. You hate the secondraters who quibble with the brave ones. I’d always derided Anne Sexton’s suicide competitions with Sylvia Plath. “Thief!” Sexton wrote, “how did you crawl into, / crawl down alone / into the death I wanted so badly and for so long…?” Maybe because Plath had more nerve and wrote better poetry was my answer.

  I channeled my envy into aesthetic dissatisfaction with the words that followed. “For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.” It wasn’t enough. It was “For colored girls who are moving to the end of their personal rainbows.” I found the rainbow overused and trite, even if it was an honored symbol in every culture, a sanctioned trope of lyric poetry. When I’d finished this spiteful formalist critique, I was left alone with my fury. Ntozake said we had found god in ourselves and loved her fiercely. I hadn’t and I didn’t.

  I wrote bleak notebook entries and called them death aphorisms.

  I loathe my kind, which is humankind. We maim and taint whatever we encounter. We might improve but I don’t think so.

  I think more people should kill themselves. What incentives can we offer?

  Freud got so much credit for saying “civilizations have death wishes.” I say individuals have life sentences, and I refuse to be a model prisoner. I shall consider my death an evolutionary advance for the species.

  I wrote to the Hemlock Society for instructions. Thirty aspirins minimum, with a liquid that makes you drowsy. Then tie the plastic bag over your head.

  I studied suicide notes. It’s a primitive genre—they all follow the same basic pattern. “I can’t go on.” “I’m so sorry to do this to you.” “You’ve been so good to me.” “You’ve been as good as anyone who doesn’t have to go through anything like this can be.”