Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  I kept a folder of my drafts. Sample: “Dear _______: I won’t go on. I’ve known everything was hopeless for a long time. Why keep fighting?” This prose is nothing to write home about—but it’s homeward bound, isn’t it? Add your own personal touch. I always put in something about who my jewelry should go to.

  I knew I should have an alternative method, and I chose the oven. I liked its literary pedigree—from Hansel and Gretel to Sylvia Plath. When I actually tried putting my head in it, I realized that the oven opens about a foot from the floor, so you have to twist your body around and put your head on the door at a weird, forced angle.

  I practiced because I did not want to be found in an ugly sprawl or a fetal position. I started at five minutes and worked my way up to fifteen. One of these days, I pledged, I’ll have the courage to turn the oven on.

  I knew that unrequited death is as futile as unrequited love. You must take hold, I told myself. You are suffering the long-term effects of profound fatigue. This is the result of all the work, the years of work required to be wholly normal and wholly exceptional. You must set an example for other Negroland girls who suffer the same way.

  You must give them a death they can live up to.

  Practice, practice, practice. Like playing scales, taking a barre. Do your daily suicide warm-ups.

  —

  There were journal entries, naturally.

  Sample 1

  Listening to Billie Holiday sing “You don’t know what love is / Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues,” I think, You don’t know what unrequited love is till you’ve loved a culture that doesn’t love you back. Call my album Torching with the Token.

  Sample 2

  Dying to be impeccable

  And merely dying instead.

  Why didn’t you respond directly to words that hurt and belittled you?

  By seeming not to mind I’d show I was a good person. They’d feel my goodness and be ashamed. They’d have a conversion experience on the spot and never be prejudiced again.

  I cry your mercy, pity, love—ay love!

  Every day a little death

  Suck it up.

  —

  There were quotes culled from women writers, black and white deliberately juxtaposed.

  —

  A sense of incalculable past loss and injury, and a dread of incalculable future loss and injury…

  (Fanny Kemble, 1852, after conversing with the slaves on her husband’s Georgia plantation)

  —

  I do not approve of swaddling oneself in the griefs of ancestors who suffered infinitely more than we. And yet, I lived like this long before I found these words.

  —

  I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me, for I spend my time now like a spider spinning my own entrails…

  (Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1860, considering her own state of mind on a South Carolina plantation, as she manages home, husband, slaves, and social duties)

  —

  This is a way to show my self-aware double consciousness: I descend from the belittled and despised; I descend from the rewarded too. This begins as a racial division, then becomes a class division, in which a sense of loss, injury, grief, becomes the possession of those with time to articulate it attractively. Unhappiness as an avocation.

  —

  I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privations and small pains. Fate would not be so pacified…

  “But if I feel, may I never express?”

  “Never!” declared Reason.

  I groaned under her bitter sternness….If I have obeyed her it has chiefly been with the obedience of fear, not of love.

  (Charlotte Brontë, Villette)

  Fear, resignation, and then, as respite, Jane Austen’s “desolate tranquility,” lying on your couch for hours, face turned to the wall, listening to music, renouncing ambition, taking long afternoon naps.

  —

  I sometimes wish that I could fall into a Rip Van Winkle sleep and awake with the blest belief of that little Topsy that I never was born…

  (Harriet Jacobs, considering her state of mind, as, having at last won freedom from slavery, she labors over the book that will become Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl)

  Oh to flee consciousness, to be extinguished at last! To stop telling oneself, I do this for my people.

  —

  You are you and you are going to be you forever. It was like coasting downhill, this thought, only much much worse, and it quickly smashed into a tree. Why was I a human being?

  (Elizabeth Bishop, “The Country Mouse”)

  I completely agree, which is why I’ve never had children.

  —

  My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.

  But I lack access to my proper stone.

  (Gwendolyn Brooks, The Womanhood: “The Children of the Poor”)

  Despite being given every advantage. Your despair is self-indulgent.

  —

  Plunge ahead, put one foot in front of the other, straighten your back and your shoulders and everything else that is likely to slump, buck up and go forward, and in this way, every obstacle, be it physical or only imagined, falls face down in obeisance and in absolute defeat, for to plunge ahead and buck up will always conquer adversity: so Mrs. Sweet’s mother had said to her when she was a child…for her child—the young Mrs. Sweet—needed to have drummed into her very being the clichéd words of the victorious.

  (Jamaica Kincaid, See Now Then)

  The meaning beneath her mother’s words is terror—terror and fury at having to be afraid. It’s not that her clichés are false. It’s that they deny, cover up emotions that would tell the child what she truly needed to know.

  —

  I have stories to tell?

  I have cuts and bruises that do not map a course.

  (Wendy Walters, “A Letter from the Hunted in Retrospect”)

  And none of them are justified unless you find a way to make the story worth telling.

  There were bleak little exchanges with like-minded black friends.

  Dialogue 1

  —I’ve been reading Rachel Carson. Lost Woods. Environmentalism contains a vision of human extinction. Let me away from here to spend my days “in the drifting community of the plankton, in the midst of diatoms, dinoflagellates, and other microscopic plants; in the company of minute crustaceans, worms, peteropods, and hosts of other larvae.”

  —I heard a story on NPR this morning. A peacock wandered into a Burger King parking lot. Customers were feeding it Whopper fragments and wilting fries when a Negro man suddenly appeared in their midst and began to beat the peacock. It was a vampire, he shouted, and beat the bird until most of its tail feathers were gone. When the animal rescue people arrived, they had to euthanize the peacock. The police arrived soon after to remove the shouting man. His fate is unknown.

  Dialogue 2

  —The women of our generation weren’t well trained in the narratives of the male workplace. Fucking and fighting, pissing and kissing.

  —We’re learning. I’ve just been in a pissing contest with an associate.

  —Did you win?

  —I will. Now I know it doesn’t have to be bigger, it just has to piss farther.

  Dialogue 3

  —I have no job at the moment. I do have a house with a mortgage payment I can just meet. I quote James Brown to myself: Money won't change you but time will take you on.

  —Do you think those were his wife’s last words before she died on the plastic surgeon’s operating table?

  —Or did she think Why didn’t I marry that nice Ike Turner?

  Parting Monologue

  —I’ve never been so sick of RACE in my life.

  If I have to talk about RACE and its subdivisions—ethnicity, culture, religion—any more, I will do a Rumpelstiltskin. I will stamp my foot and disappear into the earth.

  Every group with its rights
and grievances, its mathematically precise litany of what has been denied, what should have been granted long ago, what must be restored and redressed. Even everyday WASPs compete now. Because their sense of being dispossessed, displaced, bullied, has in an amazingly short time become as acute, as outraged, as righteous as that of the groups they managed and mangled for so long.

  —This is my dream. Eradicate them all. Then fix your hair, and put your hands in your muff as your heels go clip clip clip across the pavement.

  —May I help you, ma’am?

  —Thank you, sir, I’ve just murdered quite a few people and I need a taxi.

  Looking back, I think my mother’s words “Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro” had came back to me in a new and contentious idiom. With external failure out of the question, internal discord seemed the only protest mode. A temper tantrum I could permit myself. My own private register of what had been forbidden.

  Forbidden by the Negro Clubwoman, our foremother, apostle of achievement and discipline. “Be stalwart and virtuous,” she urged. “Use your education and your manners to advance your people’s cause and prove your value to society. To prove that our women deserve the utmost respect. Never let anyone guess you have selfish, wild thoughts. Never show weakness. And remember: you are as honorable as any white woman, and you have had to work much harder for your honor.”

  She founded service organizations, lobbied for social and political rights. She let no one think she lacked a mind of her own. The race and sex couldn’t afford that, she’d say, when men of her race and class objected to her vigorous leadership. Some clubwomen chose to remain unmarried, some married late in life; some acquired husbands who worked with or for them, then departed after a decade or so. Some made marriage their second profession, in which case they were perfect ladies in the home: mistresses of the social and domestic arts. Of perfect comportment.

  Charlotte Hawkins Brown

  “If there be anything like a colored lady, I want you to be one”: such was the destiny conferred on the young girl through her white great-aunt, her colored grandmother, and her colored mother.

  “It was a challenge that burnt its way into my very soul,” said Charlotte Hawkins Brown.

  Lottie Hawkins was born in North Carolina, in 1883, but the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, when she was five. There they opened a laundry and a boardinghouse that catered to Harvard students. Lottie studied art and music and attended the excellent Cambridge English School. She longed to go to Radcliffe. She also longed to wear a silk slip under her organdie high school graduation gown. The other (white) girls are wearing them, she told her mother. I cannot afford that, Mother replied. Organdie, yes, but if you want the silk slip you must earn the money for it.

  So Charlotte Eugenia—she had changed her name, thinking how it would look on her diploma—found a babysitting job. And one day while walking (or sitting) in a Cambridge park, she was observed guiding (or holding) a baby carriage in one hand and a Latin book in the other. The interested observer could see she was reading Virgil in the original and the interested observer was Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer, former (and first female) president of Wellesley College. Mrs. Palmer asked if she was a student, and if so, where; soon after, Mrs. Palmer visited the school principal to inquire about the precocious colored girl. Then Mrs. Palmer turned her attention elsewhere.

  So much for Wellesley or Radcliffe. Charlotte’s mother thought it was high time she stopped attending school and started teaching it. Mother and daughter compromised on the two-year State Normal College in nearby Salem. But the daughter refused to be deprived of a higher destiny. In Salem, when she discovered Mrs. Palmer was on the State Board of Education, “I immediately decided that I would write and tell her that I was the little brown-skinned girl whom she had seen wheeling the baby carriage and reading Virgil.” She asked for a recommendation; Mrs. Palmer replied with an offer of financial aid.

  Five years later Charlotte opened her own two-year school for Negro children in Sedalia, North Carolina. In 1902 it became the Palmer Memorial Institute. From the start Charlotte longed for a liberal arts curriculum. Her white donors, mostly women, felt that beyond basic literacy, the boys should be taught agricultural and industrial skills and the girls domestic arts like sewing, table setting, and millinery. One Northern donor spoke for many when she told Brown that “neither their parents, their possible husbands or they themselves are yet ready to receive” the benefits of higher education. “Your pupils are not like you,” another warned. Rural Southern Negroes had not had her exceptional upbringing; they could not be taught “more than what at present their natures are ready to receive.”

  She never stopped fund-raising and negotiating; she never ceased her quest for self-improvement and enhancement. The Radcliffe dream was replaced with summer courses at Harvard; there she met and married another teacher in 1911. Edmund Brown came with her to Palmer and taught; a year later he’d taken another job, and by 1915 their marriage was done. Proxy motherhood was just beginning; she helped raise and educate her relatives’ children, seven in all.

  And gradually, through the decades, her focus turned away from white donors and toward the growing Negro middle class; from industrial and vocational training to the liberal arts, and to Negro parents eager to send their children to a preparatory and finishing school that taught academics and social graces.

  “What kind of pictures do we select for our homes, for our children to look upon?” she asked in a 1929 speech. “Are there many Negroes to whom a real symphony would be a treat?”

  I can’t not roll my eyes here. “Do we care to listen to Bach, Schubert, Beethoven?” she asks. To which I reply: Are you aware, Mrs. Brown, that the economy has just crashed about “our” heads? But Mrs. Brown’s work survived the Depression and she kept on, presiding over Palmer’s move into the Negro elite, presiding over Negro women’s clubs, with their mission of civil rights and improvement for the race at large.

  By the Second World War, she had become headmistress, patroness, and doyenne of Negro manners. Nineteen forty-one saw the publication of her etiquette book, The Correct Thing: To Do—to Say—to Wear. Amy Vanderbilt wouldn’t publish her national best seller until 1952. Perfect correctness, perfect manners—perfect fluency in the language of etiquette, perfect mastery of comportment’s rituals. It’s more than a tool, it’s a conquest when you’ve been told that, like higher education, or high art, it is beyond your capacities.

  The “Correct Things,” according to Charlotte Hawkins Brown—Buy mother a box of handkerchiefs and father a tie when you get your allowance. They will appreciate it thoroughly. Eat slowly and noiselessly. Don’t “feed.” Excessive movements of the body are very ungraceful. Remember that dancing should be done with the feet, not the torso. Do not use the train or public conveyance for grooming which should be done in private quarters. The inconspicuous use of a powder puff or the smoothing of ruffled hair is all right. A gentleman is never rude. If he can afford servants, his real self can be best judged by his attitude to his inferiors in position—though they render him service of a menial nature—together chart a people’s civil progress and spiritual development.

  “Dear Friend,” she addresses her reader, why another etiquette book when scores exist already? She answers with a missionary passion that drives her to syntactic strain: “Out of the hearts of a humble people has come the desire for recognition of those vital qualities of soul which they feel and cultivate from time to time, but are thwarted in their attempt to express for lack of the knowledge of the best means of expression.”

  “To Do and to Say and to Wear” means nothing less than To Think and to Feel and to Be. No detail can be overlooked—not “At Home,” “At Church,” “At The Concert, Theatre or Movies,” or “At The Telephone.” (No shouting, and be sure to say “Please” and “I thank you” to the operator.) From how the ideal hostess entertains to how the ideal employee behaves at work. From basic cleanliness (“Do not substitute alcohol rubs or t
oilet water swabbings for cold or tepid showers. Perfume will not take the place of good ‘sudsy’ water”) to savoir faire (“ ‘Being agreeable’ is the highest duty of any human being mingling with other people….Practicing good manners should be as natural as displaying the teeth”).

  Clearly there are three intense pedagogical drives here: to uplift the masses, to improve the strivers, and to safeguard the behavior of those who’ve already arrived. And there are implicit or explicit social dramas on almost every page. The sons of laborers are now riding in Pullman cars; they must be taught how to treat the porters and be well treated in return: to ensure they receive good service. “If you go to the dining car, be at home. Display your best taste. The waiters recognize quickly well-bred gentlemen and give them a gentleman’s service.” In certain states and department stores, Negro women are being allowed to try on hats they wish to buy: “Do not go to buy a hat when your hair has been freshly oiled. The clerk cannot risk having several hats spoiled with grease.” Little courtesies make for “a fine and gracious personality,” and a fine and gracious personality makes it possible to meet strangers—and the Negro must meet so many white strangers—without “fear or dread.”

  Ominous words, fear and dread. Mrs. Brown is trying to give her readers a practice and faith that will shield them from the practical and emotional assaults of bigotry. From the slights and threats of white strangers. And she is telling them, sotto voce, that those bigoted strangers they cannot help meeting are people without grace or fineness—people who, in those essential ways, are their inferiors.

  This urgency courses beneath her calm prose demeanor. Poise, she counsels, develops a “calm and undisturbed soul” that can cope with unpleasant situations. Bland and decorous words, but her example of an unpleasant situation is a car accident. The poised individual will notify authorities, find the nearest garage, and supply first aid “without fluttering or excitement.” How did poise encounter danger so quickly? In those days car accidents on Southern roads that left Negroes unattended or ill-attended were notorious. Mrs. Brown and her readers surely knew of at least two famous cases: the 1931 crash that led to the death of Juliette Derricotte, Fisk University’s dean of women, and the 1937 crash that caused the death of Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues.