Negroland: A Memoir (12 page)

We’d walk through the halls to the library, with its childhood classics and its useful learning books. Every one of Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books: crimson, green, red, yellow, olive, gray, brown. Because of my piano lessons I did my duty with biographies of composers. Why do I remember Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart so clearly as they thrilled adults with their piano playing in court after court? Handel’s mother and sisters clustered joyfully around him, celebrating his first major appointment with the chant

George Frideric
Han
-del

Or-ganist and
Choi-r-master
!

—

Are they meant to signal a precocious feminist awareness? (Nannerl’s father made her retire when she turned eighteen and marriageable. Handel’s mother and sisters were just that—Handel’s mother and sisters.)

Maybe they signal my early worship of child stars and my wish to be one.

I found Althea Gibson’s autobiography in the library too:
I Always Wanted to Be Somebody
. Here was blunt ambition, blunt need. Which impressed and slightly embarrassed me. Her tennis triumphs were irrefutable, even though I knew Negroes were usually overpraised for sports and underpraised for art and academics. The one thing I wished she hadn’t done was describe how she straightened her hair with Dixie Peach before and after matches. Why write about that? Especially Dixie Peach. The name was countrified; the oil was heavy and greasy. We used Ultra-Sheen in my family (which didn’t need to be written about either).

Every sixth-grade class put on a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. All the younger grades were invited, and if your older sibling was in one, it gave you status. Denise was Hebe in
H.M.S. Pinafore:
when the First Lord of the Admiralty declared himself “the Monarch of the Sea,” she curtsied and sang, “And we are his sisters and his cousins and his aunts.” Do children today find bliss in Gilbert and Sullivan? They gave us verbal dexterity and gestural finesse. We mimicked adult rituals without forgoing the rules of childhood pleasure: rhythmic certainty, sonic variety, happy endings that succeed parodic threats and dangers.

In the car on the way to school Denise read poems aloud, swashbuckling through Victorian thumpers about carnage and dire suffering.

Stitch Stitch Stitch
,

In poverty, hunger and dirt!

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch—

Would that its sound would reach the rich—

She sang the song of the shirt.

I loved nonsense poetry. Mother read Lewis Carroll aloud with me, and when I was alone in the car with her I’d recite his poems. “Humpty Dumpty,” “Father William,” “Jabberwock,” the cheerful treacheries of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Lewis Carroll let you murder, bully, and impose your will systematically on people, animals, landscapes, and vocabularies. But Edward Lear led you into a strange, sweet world of aliens with mellifluous names and human longings.

Jumblies

Quabbles

The Yonghy Bonghy Bo

Melancholy untainted by realism.

He weeps by the side of the ocean,

He weeps on the top of the hill;

He purchases pancakes and lotion,

And chocolate shrimps from the mill.

—

Mother arrives home from her errands one afternoon to find Denise and me sitting on the stairs, splaying our limbs this way and that, raucous with laughter.

Listen, Mama, listen! we cry, and start to recite a poem we’ve just read.

Well, son, I’ll tell you:

Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

It’s had tacks in it,

And splinters,

And boards torn up,

And places with no carpet on the floor—

Bare.

But all the time

I’se been a-climbin’ on,

And reachin’ landin’s,

And turnin’ corners,

And sometimes goin’ in the dark

Where there ain’t been no light.

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

We declaim the opening lines—“Well, son, I’ll tell you: / Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair”—then start to rush; we want to get quickly to the “I’se” and the dropped
g
s, to that place where “kind of” becomes “kinder”…

We read it like Willie Best would read it on
The Stu Erwin Show
, with wide-open mouths, gruff dips on the “I’se,” and lots of tremolo.

We read it like our favorite characters on
Amos ’n Andy
—Calhoun (Denise), the hyperactive, scheming, bloviating attorney-at-law, and Lightning (me), behind everyone’s physical or mental beat with his hapless limbs, crossing eyes, and high-throated meandering syllables. Neither parent approved of the show and we were discouraged from watching. Forbidding us would only have made it more alluring.

Now we are crouched over the book acting like little picaninnies. We’re surprised by the silence that meets our last, extravagant “Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

Our mother speaks slowly so we have to sit up and pay attention.

“That is a beautiful poem and, girls, you are butchering it. You’re reading it in ignorant dialect. Langston Hughes is one of our leading, best poets. This is how it should be read.”

And she calls on all the resources of Negro life and history, softening the “I’se,” removing the heavy downbeat on the first syllable of every verb (which makes the dropped
g
sound like a clumsy off-pitch note), lowering her voice so everything isn’t mezzo forte, turning dialect to vernacular. What are parents to do, when they’ve taken all steps to ensure that their children flourish in the world at large, to claim their right to culture and education, when suddenly this chasm of ignorance and inferiority opens up to swallow their cultivated little selves? How did these demons of scorn and mockery find their way into your children?

—

When Langston Hughes taught at the Lab School for three months in 1949, he taught writing in the kindergarten, the grade school, and the high school; he taught “The Negro in Poetry” and gave two readings of his own poems.

What had happened?

Did his work leave the premises when he did, in 1949?

Was that famous poem still part of the curriculum, and were we butchering it out of embarrassment? Had we not been exposed enough at home to Negro poets? (How alien “Mother to Son” would have looked lying in the weeds outside
A Child’s Garden of Verses
, which our mother read to and with us.)

In its way segregation was a fortress. Hostile forces threatened and intruded, but life inside could be ordered. Some of our friends went to black or mostly black schools. They learned white culture inside the fortress, surrounded by versions of themselves, taught—at least sometimes—by versions of their parents and neighbors.

That was how Mother had grown up, and now we’d given her cause to brood. “When I was your age we celebrated Negro History Week. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was founded by Carter G. Woodson right here in Chicago. We read
The Crisis
. We were so proud when we sang ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ at assemblies and church programs.”

How were those of us being naturalized into white culture to be protected without the shield of cultural segregation? How was active intellectual pride to be instilled?

From that day forward Mother began her own cultural enrichment course with evening and weekend contributions from Daddy. Though the aim was national, the focus was Chicago, with a special emphasis on friends and acquaintances.

Did you girls know that—

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the case against restrictive covenants in housing argued by our friends Earl Dickerson and Truman Gibson on behalf of Carl Hansberry, an acquaintance and the father of Lorraine Hansberry?

Our own Provident Hospital was the first in this country founded and run by Negroes, and the founder, Daniel Hale Williams, was the first doctor to perform successful open heart surgery?

Ida B. Wells, a civil rights activist who spearheaded campaigns against lynching, lived and worked and organized here in Chicago?

Our friend Allison Davis was the first Negro to be tenured at a major university (the University of Chicago)? He has done groundbreaking work on race and culture and the flaws of IQ testing.

The Chicago Defender
was once the most powerful newspaper in Negro America? It’s run by our friend Robert Sengstacke with the help of his wife, Myrtle.
Ebony, Jet
, and Johnson Publishing were started by our friend Johnny with the help of his wife, Eunice.

Our friend the Reverend Archibald Carey, of Quinn Chapel, has been an alternate delegate to the United Nations and chairman of Eisenhower’s Committee on Government Employment Policy?

Black Metropolis
, a major work of sociology, was written about Chicago by two Negro University of Chicago scholars, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton?

Oscar De Priest, Helen Harvey’s cousin, was the first Negro elected to Congress in this century?

Katherine Dunham grew up here, got her anthropological training at the University of Chicago, and started her dance company here?

The National Association of Negro Musicians began in Chicago?

Our friend Etta Moten starred in the 1943 production of
Porgy and Bess
and sang (with dignity and skill) in
Gold Diggers of 1935
and
Flying Down to Rio
? Her husband, Claude Barnett, also a Chicagoan, founded the Associated Negro Press.

Our friend Ralph Metcalfe Sr. was an gold medalist at the 1936 Olympics?

Do you really want to know as little as your white schoolmates know about where we came from and what we’ve accomplished?

Fifth Grade

Miss Torrance has her hair cut like Doris Day as Babe in
The Pajama Game
. Bangs in the front, short and flat in the back. She casts me as Amahl in our class production of
Amahl and the Night Visitors
. We listen and listen to Menotti’s score; we memorize it. It’s like a fairy tale, with its predictably exciting flurries of drama and prettiness. We lip-synch as if lip-synching were operatic destiny. I feel none of the terror of Not Living Up, have none of the mixed feelings that in later years will make me do things like (1) throw myself down a small flight of stairs in college so I can say I’ve been injured and can’t try out for the fencing team; (2) plunge excitedly into an essay assigned by a magazine long after I was a published writer, then withdraw, convinced that I couldn’t possibly do it.

I want nothing more than to be a boy on a crutch in Bethlehem between the years 7
B.C
. and 3
B.C.
, a boy known to tell fanciful stories, a lying boy, and why not, tending sheep alone all day with no friends, for how could the other lithe-limbed shepherd boys and girls think much of him? A boy whose mother is so poor, she must sell their sheep and send him off begging (beggars lie). A boy who struggles to be the man of the house but wants desperately to be a child whose mother is solicitous and indulgent instead of scared and impatient; a boy who hates being a cripple, who should protect his mother but can’t; a boy who feels he should be exceptional and is not; a boy who tells lies not just to get attention but because he has imagination. A boy rescued by the intervention of myth; a boy recompensed by miracle.

How we work, Sandy Mentschikoff and I! She is Amahl’s anguished, desperate mother, and she is amazingly expressive: a full-bodied, full-hearted parent, acquainted with grief. We’re applauded, acclaimed by our classmates and their parents. It’s thrilling.

I come home from the final performance with a huge blood blister on my foot, which my father takes care of. I sit in the yellow captain’s chair in the den and Daddy brings his medical bag in. He pierces and sterilizes the blister. He is solicitous, impressed. He didn’t leave the office to attend the performance. Still, I can see his pride as he smiles and attends to me. My talent and achievement merit his full attention.

Amahl and the Night Visitors
shows on television every Christmas. We’ve been watching it faithfully since 1951, our pleasure taking on an ecstatic dimension when the Negro dancer Carmen de Lavallade enters as a shepherdess paying tribute to the three kings: first shy, then antic, never less than artful. Denise has first claim on her. I claim Amahl now. Chet Allen’s dark eyes are huge. He has a head of curls that glow in the camera’s light.

Maybe I grow flush with arrogance and pride after my Amahl triumph; maybe that’s why I make a terrible mistake about friendship later that year. M. is my good friend. We take ballet classes together. (She has better feet and more grace, and she is prettier.) We both study music. (Piano for me, violin for her, though I’m considered more outstanding.) She confides to me that when her class was asked to make cutouts of themselves in profile, she had snipped off the tip of her hooked nose. And she had. The hook was gone: her profile rested demurely on the wall amid a line of straight noses.

One morning we quarrel about something and stop speaking. She tries to make it up later that day. As our classes pass in the hall, en route to or from homeroom, she leans toward me, darting out of line to whisper “Margo!” urgently, almost pleadingly. I put my nose in the air, toss my head, and walk on. I was certainly overacting. Had success aroused envy and discontent? Was I getting back at Mary for having better feet and more grace in ballet class? For not wearing thick glasses and for being prettier? Soon after, I make it up with her. But I feel her reserve.