Read Negroland: A Memoir Online
Authors: Margo Jefferson
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Cultural Heritage, #History, #United States, #20th Century, #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #African American Studies
Negroland: A Memoir
“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
Cover photograph courtesy Johnson Publishing Company, LLC. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Oliver Munday
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Contents
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.