Negroland

by Margo Jefferson

  What did the KKK initials, so dreaded in another context, signify? The three stages:

  K1, the pre-crème, protectively saturating hair and scalp, preparing it for

  K2, the straightening crème, which assaulted the indigenous kinks with potassium or sodium chloride, followed by

  K3, the black rinse, which erased the residue of crinkly, faded, discolored hair.

  Surely most Negroes seeing the ad in newspapers could not avoid thinking of the Ku Klux Klan? They had to notice the logo letters, tall and stalwart as the white-sheet warriors in Birth of a Nation. Seen how they were sliced through the middle by the banner triumphantly reading “Kongolene.” Does the Kongo meet the KKK and transform it, through the Negro man’s appropriation of the white man’s hair? There’s even a gesture toward race pride: “If your druggist cannot supply you,” the bottom of the ad counsels, “order direct from KONGO CHEMICAL CO., INC.” (New World address: 124th Street, Harlem, U.S.A.)

  The battle had gone on for years. Negroes had fought for white hair in their homes, mixing eggs, potatoes, and toxic, burning lye, applying the potion to every hair follicle, enduring the anguish of hot, singed, even burning scalps, the risk of hair disintegrating under the pressure.

  The manly KKK discourse had none of the anxious beauty coaching and coaxing found in hair ads for women. With Perma-Strate, “Hair is softly straight without that artificial ‘poker-straight’ look…And one creamy applications lasts 3 to 6 months!” There’s little of the longing for desirability and respectability that pervades feminine hair ads. “Even with her hat on…you’d know she uses Vapoil. Because she’s well groomed and smart…” (A sore point, this grooming detail—hair oil regularly stains our hat rims and headbands.) “Is your hair inviting to touch?” queries Dixie Peach. (A hit, a palpable hit.) “Yesterday,” Silky Strate proclaims, “fire engines were pulled by horses and hair was straightened with hot combs. TODAY…you can have naturally-soft, permanently-straight hair the easy MODERN WAY.” Longer-looking hair? “No discoloration—no oils—no damage,” pledges Lustrasilk. And it’s wonderful for your children too.

  Then there’s the blatant abjection of the skin ads, always directed at women, always promising lighter skin and a brighter life—“Make light of dark skin woes”—within days.

  Black and White Bleaching Cream: “Beauty Is Skin Deep. Begin now to have lighter, smoother, softer skin that attracts admirers.”

  Nadinola Bleaching Cream: “Have you noticed that the nicest things happen to girls with lighter, lovelier complexions?” And, as a melancholy woman in a strapless evening dress sits alone, holding a flower and sadly murmuring “He loves me…he loves me not…DON’T DEPEND ON DAISIES! BE SURE WITH A LIGHT, CLEAR COMPLEXION!”

  The Miracle Bleach for Dark Skin invented and developed by Golden Peacock is called “The favorite of Dark Skinned TV Stars.” (There are such things.) And while Dr. Fred Palmer attempts to modulate his message by claiming his formula gets rid of pimples and blemishes (a common gambit), he bluntly names it what he knows his consumers want it to be: a Double Strength Skin Whitener. You will never be the fair sex, but you strive to be an ever-fairer one.

  i

  I’m at Ricky’s in the West Village, buying the products that keep my hair in its state of artificially enhanced naturalness.

  “Hello, how are you today?” The young black man at the counter greets me with well-enunciated courtesy and totals my purchases. “That’ll be $84.90,” he says, and though his face doesn’t react to my furrowed brow, he does add, picking up my credit card and nodding toward the fifty-dollar Devachan Conditioner: “That will last you a long time. It’s just a shock right now. Your hair looks very good. These products are good.”

  “Thank you. It does last,” I say. I’ve regained my assurance. “I have my hair cut and colored at their salon.”

  “Real-ly?” he says, drawing out the word and moving from clerk comfort-chat to genuine curiosity. “I didn’t know they understood our…” He needn’t say it. HAIR is the word. It leaps into the air between us, binding us through centuries of struggle.

  “Their curly hair regimen was invented by an English-woman,” I say. “But they’ve adapted their methods to our hair. They do all kinds of curly hair. There are always other black women there. Black and Latina stylists too.”

  Does he need quite this much information? He still looks politely inquiring, so I go on. I feel I must articulate what we both know to be the chasm that divides “curly hair” as seen by white women vs. black women. And one reason I love going to my salon is that, unlike so many white salons I’ve taken my head to (sometimes finding the one black stylist, sometimes choosing the white one recommended by an informed friend), I feel I bring Old World authority to this New World Order. Who more than I embodies the new ascendancy of Naturally Curly Hair?

  “Ummmmmm,” he registers. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  “Of course not,” I say brightly.

  “What is your ethnic ancestry?”

  Proceed with care, Margo. You’re taken aback.

  “I’m African American,” I tell him. I usually say “black,” since it was my generation’s breakthrough word, and “African American” feels textbook-officious in everyday talk. So why do I use it now? Because he wants an answer that conveys precision. Because I want to provide precision since his skin is black-brown and mine is cream-brown; since he is dressed in monochromatic black that sets off the black-brown gleam of his face and shaved head; since his diction and manner make clear he is a young gay black/African-American man-about-town who lives by making distinctions.

  So I say, “I’m African American.”

  And he says, “Real-ly?” slightly widening his eyes, tilting his head, and tucking his chin a little bit out and forward.

  “Well,” I hedge, reaching for the “We” that will bracket and bind us together once more, “you know, we all—so many of us—if you go back far enough—we’ve all got some white, some Indian ancestry, we’re such a mix…” Yes, he’s nodding, concurring, and I’m stumbling a bit because I’m anxious he might declare (proudly? sternly? mischievously?), “Not me. I have no white or Indian ancestors.” But he doesn’t. He nods, murmurs “Um-hmmm,” and widens his eyes again, saying, “A lot of people must ask you that.”

  I don’t want to correct him; that might make him feel I think it’s a naïve question.

  “I wouldn’t say a lot, but at intervals people do ask, it’s true,” I concede. Then go on to offer: “You know, when people ask I think it’s because there are lots of Latinos who have my general looks, and”—here I give a comic one-beat pause—“I think it’s because I color my hair blonde. If I were still a brunette not so many people would ask.”

  I get the laugh I sought and consider further ingratiating myself by adding, “Of course my natural color is gray now.” No. That cedes too much authority.

  I move back to Our Hair turf.

  “Devachan understands the mechanics of hair that goes from curly to frizzy to”—and here comes my coup de theatre—“nappy.” Ah, nappy. The word seals our bond. He laughs, covering his mouth with one hand.

  “It’s been a while since you thought about that word,” I say, and we give the exultant sotto voce chortle of Negroes sharing a naughty fact of race life in public.

  ii

  When I was told by a friendly acquaintance (white) that he and another acquaintance (white) had been told by a former friend of mine (black), “Oh, Margo thinks she’s a white woman,” I grew irate. There’d been tensions between us. But to humiliate me like that, so deliberately, so gleefully! If he’d said it to friendly black acquaintances, I’d have been irate but not mortified—seen it as a personal attack using predictably handy race rhetoric as a shorthand for other resentments. (He wasn’t wrong to feel I’d been neglecting him lately, returning his calls but not initiating my own.) There was the risk that these black acquaintances would agree, which I would resent. But I felt I could rebut the
charge in my own mind. Over the years I’d built up resistance to those toxins. The situation that pertained here was trickier. I faced the likelihood of the white audience being nonplussed and intimidated. They might reason (without telling me, naturally), “Well, being black, he can see her racially in a way we can’t. Maybe she really does have an identity problem.” Or “This is all very sad. We don’t know exactly what he means, but we’re not going to pursue it because clearly this is racial damage territory and, for all their accomplishments, it shows the racial damage they’ve both suffered.”

  I despised that kind of pity.

  A few months later a white friend was telling me how a nasty remark had made its slow, lethal way to her. “Has anyone ever told you something someone else said about you, something mean, but not, if you looked at it squarely, completely untrue?” asked Laurie.

  “Why, yes,” I said and told my tale. She started to laugh. “That’s all?” she said.

  “Please remember the combustible psychological and political and sociological history of this charge,” I chastised.

  “You’re right,” she answered. “I don’t mean to trivialize it. I know it has a fraught history, and you know the details much better than I.”

  “I do indeed,” I asserted. “A fraught history with many roots. Start with self-hatred and arrogance if you really are trying to be white; start with envy and ignorance if you’re falsely accusing someone of trying to be. Actually, I think he was attacking what he saw as a certain snobbishness in me, a way of distancing myself, and a tendency to cherish my neuroses as a sign of my specialness.”

  “Is that really worse,” she asked, “than being called a predatory narcissist?”

  “Why, no,” I said. “Actually it’s not.”

  And went my way rejoicing.

  Once, maybe ten years ago, I told a lover, “Actually, I’m as white as I am black.” He’d picked up something of mine—a CD, a book—and said, teasingly, “Not a lot of black folk like Elly Ameling.” My retort still felt dangerous to say out loud, despite all the talk of hybridity, creolization, cosmopolitanism, and mulatto consciousness. “Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro,” my mother wrote seventy years ago. It wasn’t a disavowal; it was her claim to a free space. She was talking about her happiness at that moment—how you feel when everything inside and around you is where it belongs. How you feel when your rights in America are self-evident, not to be argued, justified, or brooded on every day. Those seventy years had won me the right to claim any part of any culture without any race-linked restriction. “Claim”? Consider. Study. Toy with. And when I choose, love.

  From the earliest rocking of my cradle I went A. A. Milne–ing and Kenneth Grahame–ing along, amid the Negroisms of family, friends, and neighbors. My father’s sepulchral “Whenwhenwhenwhen,” as he imitated the sermon of a Mississippi preacher. How a man would raise his arm, slap the air, bring the arm down in an arc, and start to turn away, meaning “Man, don’t try that on me.” Grown-up voices running through the tones and syntax of white and black speech. My mother’s “The discussion is closed,” all quick-pace martial consonants, then her “I’m not studying you” (which I heard as “stutting”), high in the throat, pitch descending on “m” and “not,” downbeat on “stutt.”

  How many pieces of journalism have I written where my race might as well have been invisible? Then I’d choose a subject that made it the guiding principle. Or an approach that refused to let a subject be solely white or black.

  There’s not only Du Bois’s warring double consciousness. Or the dual personality James Weldon Johnson described, where we perform in the generic style each race demands. There’s a space in our consciousness where all this racialized material collects, never static, mutating or at least recombining.

  How many times could we write our cultural life stories? How many selves would tell them?

  A Retelling: Little Women

  In 1994, with the third movie version en route to theaters and two new editions of the novel in bookstores, I decide to reread Little Women, putting up with looks I get from teenage girls on the bus or subway who must think I’m emotionally regressed or a very slow reader.

  And it all becomes clear to me: I should have wanted to be Amy.

  Meg is so pretty, so temptingly pretty, and with her native sweetness, her gentle ways—well, that’s why Meg is out of the question. Here you are, smoothly uttering Victorian commonplaces you thought you’d cleansed your stock of forty years ago. Meg does have her vanities, the kind pretty girls are entitled to, the kind plain and pretty readers avidly share—“ ‘It’s so dreadful to be poor!’ sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.” These are all that keep her from insurmountable dullness, even as she guides her young sisters toward the dull ideal of good womanly manners.

  “You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks and to behave better, Josephine…you should remember that you are a young lady.”

  “As for you, Amy, you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you’ll grow up an affected little goose if you don’t take care.”

  Decorum will protect Meg from the twists of fate and plot that impose suffering. She will marry a man as good-looking and good-hearted as she. (Wiser and more good-hearted, that he may teach and guide her.) They will have twins, a boyish boy and a girlish girl. Here is the little New England cottage where they will settle. Imagine a BLESS OUR HOME mat woven by Meg’s own hands in front of the door. Then let the door close. There’s no need to give Meg any more serious thought.

  —

  Hail Jo, wielding the pen of the artist and the sword of the girl who knows she should have been a boy. What girl didn’t want to be Jo at least some of the time, Jo of the restless impulses, the unruly luxuriant hair; shouting, grumbling, flinging retorts instead of answers; thrusting her body into unruly poses. The swashbuckling hero bent on astonishing everyone and being a rich and famous writer.

  Jo gives license to outbursts. Her sulks are theatrically compelling and her indignation is always warranted. Jo’s at the center of every page she strides or saunters onto. She has charisma and that’s what you’ve always craved.

  A functional definition of charisma for ambitious girls of the 1950s: winning the attention, touched with wonder, of significant adults (teachers, relatives, family friends); winning the friendship of gifted, temperamentally interesting, or socially accomplished girls; winning admiration from boys or, under circumstances that don’t turn them against you, winning contests with boys.

  Being “gifted” in a way that can’t go unnoticed. We seek models everywhere—in books and movies, in serious TV dramas and frolicsome sitcoms; in prima ballerinas and leading ladies; in star turns on TV variety shows. (“Ladies and gentlemen, here is the enchanting…Ladies and gentlemen, here is the dynamic…Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome a young woman who’s been making quite a stir on Broadway these days….”)

  Can you be a waif and a powerhouse like Judy Garland? An incandescent eccentric like Tammy Grimes? I’ve learned already that adults are won over by remarks they find precocious but not sassy. I’m very good at that. I’ve learned that personality gets you roles in school plays and report card comments on your ability to lead.

  Where will this take me? All my teachers say I write well. I’ve published a poem in a magazine for young Negro readers, edited by Charlaemae Rollins, the pioneering children’s librarian at Bronzeville’s distinguished and first public library. Still, I don’t scribble away in a happy daze like Jo or play my piano with Beth’s rapture. I’m quick with my words and my wit, but I don’t distinguish myself by winningly unconventional behavior.

  Jo wants to be a rich and famous writer. Does she want to marry? She tosses her head and says no, again no. But marry she must, for Louisa May Alcott, thirty-seven and still unmarried, must tend to the needs of her readers, those marriage-minded young girls who will make her famous and nearly rich, those “dear girls,” she calls them placatingly, who scor
n old maids. The Jo who proclaimed she’d astonish everyone at twenty-two is mightily humbled on the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday.

  “An old maid—that’s what I’m to be,” she muses, laying her body down on an old worn sofa at twilight. “A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps; when, like Johnson I’m too old, and can’t enjoy it—solitary, and can’t share it, independent, and don’t need it.”

  Here Alcott steps anxiously in. Girls like Jo may despair, she counsels; not all blossoming girls will blossom into wives and mothers. Yet and still, “one can get on quite happily if one has something in one’s self to fall back upon.”

  That bleak, immolating phrase: “something…to fall back upon”! Alcott means character, often neglected or underdeveloped in girls; by our day it means a college or graduate degree that will let us teach, or get a just-as-respectable job, if we’re edged off the two-parent-family path by death, divorce, or spinsterhood.

  Of course my peers and I will all have college or graduate degrees to fall back on.

  Was our character in the Alcott sense neglected? When I was overheard gleefully reporting one friend’s secret to another (“I’m not supposed to tell anybody, but…”), my mother sat me down for a talk on being trustworthy. “You have personality, but personality isn’t enough,” she told me. “You have to have character too.”

  I will have something in myself to fall back on.

  I wear thick glasses and I am thrilled by narratives of beautiful women attracting handsome men: sweetly vulnerable maidens needing rescue; heroines who are daring and must be won by still more daring men. Brought down to its basic learning level: fate finds a way to award desirable boys to pretty girls. I worry that I won’t attract boys as pretty girls do, that I’ll be excluded from all these burning glances and kisses, these scenes of enraptured pursuit, followed by a match that makes the family rejoice and the world approve. I have no taste for being excluded from any of this.