Negroland: A Memoir (13 page)

I have a sick feeling I’ve gone too far.

And I have. Proof will come the next year when she’s courted successfully by a witty and popular new girl. And the year after that, when she accepts the attentions of the girl who’d once been my best friend.

I was good at being popular myself, though I worried about my vivacity being misread, about being thought shallow. I wrote a long piece about this in one of Miss Torrance’s writing sessions (we wrote every day): I wanted it to be understood that I had a quiet, contemplative side; that I savored nature. And I feared that, saying this, I would be mocked. Miss Torrance must have read it out loud, because the class demon, a little boy named Vernon who had bangs and the hint of an English accent, informed me, his voice somber, his eyes sparkling, that he’d heard several of the kids say they planned to tease me. I was furious and mortified. I did a ten-year-old’s version of a sputter. The teases never came and Vernon never looked back. Vernon was so enviably, so confidently disruptive.

—

It was just around this time that my great-uncle Lucious resumed his life as a Negro.

Our Negroland friends looked as if they belonged to every group then classified as Negro, Caucasian, Asian, Latin, or Middle Eastern.

Nearly everyone at my school looked white, but that was because nearly everyone was white. Negro students were mostly varied and distinct shades of brown. My three special friends in first and second grade all looked white. But when our mothers picked us up, Carolyn’s and mine traded first names and comfortable greetings. Greetings with the mothers of J. and A. held neither banter nor first names. I sometimes heard Mother telling Daddy which school mothers were genuinely courteous (A.’s mother was), which ones managed—quietly, since it was a progressive school—to ignore her, and which ones, like J.’s mother, greeted her in a way that implied they wished to ignore her.

A. and J. were definitely white. And once I started meeting Carolyn at family-friend-not-school events—a Jack and Jill party, a charity tea for Provident Hospital, dinner at the Parkway Ballroom—I realized she belonged to Negroland. My euphemisms were becoming a bit tortuous in those days. I don’t remember ever saying “Negro” or “white”; I remember carefully saying “my out-of-school friends” and “my school friends”—but since some of my out-of-school friends were in school with me, this nomenclature did not serve my strategic evasions.

I was clearly maneuvering to control my racial airspace.

—

When Uncle Lucious stopped being white, my parents invited him to dinner. He had worked for decades as a traveling salesman, making periodic contact with his sisters and with cousins who looked white enough to meet him in segregated places when he came to town. Then he retired, and his retirement community was Negroland.

Denise and I were told the basic story, and we greeted him politely. I watched him covertly all evening. He had the long Jefferson face. But I could find no—
no
—physical sign that he was a Negro. His nose was blade-straight, his lips sliver-thin, his skin nearly as white as his hair. I told myself,
We have friends who look as white as Uncle Lucious
. But I had always known them as Negroes. The word had kept its visual fluidity, even as it acquired social obligations and political constraints. Now I was in free fall. Who and what are “we Negroes,” when so many of us could be white people? I sat there and reasoned it out: If I am related to Uncle Lucious and I am visibly Negro and Uncle Lucious is invisibly Negro and visibly white…Suddenly the fact of racial slippage overwhelmed me. I was excited for days after. I knew something none of my white school friends knew. It wasn’t just that some of us were as good as them, even when they didn’t know it. Some of us
were
them.

—

Our cousin Lillian Granberry Thompson looked as if her portrait could hang in the Museum of the Confederacy. (“Lillian,” she said her father always told her, “the best blood of Mississippi runs in your veins.”) She was a few years older than my father and chose to live as a fair-skinned Negro, passing for convenience when she wanted to patronize white-only shops and restaurants; reaping the little rewards (deference here, flattery there) often granted her by brown-skinned Negroes. She was a trusted conduit between the passers and the non-passers in Daddy’s family.

So many in my parents’ world had relatives who’d spent their adult lives as white people of some kind. Avocational passing was lighthearted. Shopping at whites-only stores, getting deferential service at whites-only restaurants. You came home snickering:
What fools these Nordics be!
Passing-for-life stories were melodrama prompts. P. lived as a Negro woman severed from her twin brother, who lived as a white man; N. was the only child in a family of eight to remain a Negro; H.’s brother had spent decades as a white man in a small English town; when his pass-worthy niece and I went to Europe the summer before we were college seniors, she visited him without me. Our mothers had discussed it beforehand.

That was when Daddy told me about our cousin J.E., who’d passed as a successful white business and family man somewhere in the Midwest. I use initials to shield his public identity. His mother, my great-aunt Bessie, lived in Chicago. He would sometimes make contact with Cousin Lil when he came to town (he had risen to the top or near top of an insurance company); then she’d call other Negro relatives to set up visits. In my father’s telling, the conversation was highly elliptical: “A childhood friend’s in town and would like to see you—can we come by your office tonight when you’ve finished work?”

He even lowered his voice as he told the story. As I reconstruct it: Night has fallen. The patients have gone home, the nurse and receptionist have gone home. There’s a knock on the door. Cousin Lil enters first; she and my father kiss each other’s cheeks; she is followed by J.E. Do they hug or shake hands? Shake hands, I imagine, then (maybe a second’s hesitation?) trade upper-arm pats. “How you doing?” “Fine, fine. Good to see you.” If it’s winter, talk of Chicago’s cold will get them past the first awkwardness; if it’s spring or summer, the heat leads to reminiscing about their Southern childhood.

“What did you talk about?” I asked. “We talked about the old days,” my father said, gazing past me. The old days, when they were all Mississippians with parents listed as “mulattoes” on the local census forms.

Why did J.E. choose to visit Daddy? Had they been especially close or was this just one visit? I didn’t ask. It was as if the visit, like J.E.’s life, had to be sealed off, as if further conversation would record what must stay hidden. Daddy told me that J.E.’s white sons had gotten wind of his ancestry when he died. Was that because his wife had known or suspected? Had there been a deathbed confession? Did the boys find incriminating documents when they went through his papers? How did they find a trail that led back to Rust, the Negro college he’d attended in Mississippi before transferring to the University of M—— up north? They were thwarted at Rust, told of a fire that had destroyed a number of school records, including their father’s. Was this true, or were school administrators old hands at putting white relatives off the scent of ex-Negroes? The sons persisted, somehow made their way to Chicago, where they presented themselves at their grandmother’s, only to be rebuffed. How did they introduce themselves? Did they speak timidly, courteously, or gruffly and accusingly? Did they show her a photograph of the son and father who had thrown their patrimony into such doubt? I was told nothing except that she gave the answer her son would have wished. “I’ve never heard of that man,” she said, and closed the door.

Melodrama demands a climactic tableau.

Tableau of Resolve—the Mother, defiant, preternaturally still, her voice a low telltale throb—and of Consternation: let’s have one son rearing back, shocked and confounded; the other turning away, hand to chest, every muscle conveying “Thank God! I’ve been reprieved.”

Melodrama recedes as my cousins resume their old lives or assume new ones. What had J.E. and his wife taught them about the Negro race? What did they know of Negroes before Negroness was thrust upon them? This will affect their decision. Together or apart, they can go on being white men who no longer have the privilege of taking themselves for granted. Or they can take on the touchy, hyperconscious identity of light, bright, damn-near-white Negroes. Either way, no surface will ever be superficial again.

As for Great-Aunt Bessie: she had played her part as sacrificial mother, she whose illicit standing (social, racial, sexual—choose your plot) demanded that she renounce all claims on her child. Traditional interpretations favor grief and stoic grandeur. Let’s work with rage. Whatever she saw in their faces—fear, longing, confusion, disdain—Great-Aunt Bessie’s sentence was her revenge. It meant “None of you can claim or disclaim me now. I don’t know your father anymore and I don’t know you. Whatever you want to know, I will keep hidden. And if you hope that my silence frees you to be white again, it doesn’t. You’ve seen me, glimpsed his face in mine. You will never have a clean white slate again. You will never be able to forget that I may be the Negro grandmother who turned you away. I refused you.”

All speculation. Dramatization. My great-aunt’s Negro grandchildren might know more, but I still don’t have the nerve to ask. I sat with Cousin Lil at Great-Aunt Bessie’s funeral, and brought up the story, hoping that death would loosen her tongue. She shook her head and touched my hand, as one quiets a child about to do something inappropriate. “We’re not supposed to talk about that,” she said, and applied herself to conversation elsewhere.

—

Uncle Lucious didn’t come to our house again. I have a picture of him on my father’s cabin cruiser,
The Bali Ha’i
. He sits next to his sister. He looks content; she looks ebullient. My father told me that once he settled in he began to telephone his Negro relations and accuse them of neglecting him. Psychologically transparent. But he’d been a prickly white man too, said my father, regularly disturbing his own peace by getting into fights when he heard people mock or demean Negroes, as he inevitably did at the white bars and restaurants he invariably went to. “They don’t talk about anything but us. What we do, how we look, how much they hate us,” he told my father. But they must have talked about something else
sometime
. And the ordinary talk of ordinary white men must have been a comfort to Uncle Lucious in those early days. He could handle the nasty turns at first. Till he couldn’t. Then he’d fuss and fight and make himself a target of anger. Of suspicion. So when the time came to retire, he retired, retreated, and resettled among Negroes. But he wasn’t really a Negro anymore. He was a former white man. And my parents looked down on him a little. Not because he’d passed, but because he’d risen no higher than traveling salesman. If you were going to take the trouble to be white, you were supposed to do better than you could have done as a Negro.

—

Jack and Jill is supposed to nurture our development as the kind of Negroes who can achieve more than most white people. Jack and Jill, Majors and Minors, Trees and Twigs: national and local clubs founded by mothers to ensure that their children embody and perpetuate the values of the Negro elite.

Jack and Jill is founded in 1938 by twenty-six Philadelphia mothers, all descendants of Joseph Willson’s Higher Classes of Colored Society. They display the usual Talented Tenth pride that decrees
We will continue to set high standards for the social and cultural life of our families even as white society goes on belittling or ignoring our achievements
. They are galvanized by Negroes’ invigorated campaign for equal opportunities
and
advantages. They are galvanized by the liberal reformist vision of childrearing that tells them that as women they are responsible for bringing educational precision and psychological insight to the rearing of children. The influential book
Babies Are Human Beings
is published that same year.

AIMS OF THE NATIONAL ORGANIZATION

To aid in the development of a fully integrated child along educational, physical, recreational, religious, and social lines.

To aid mothers in learning more about their children by careful study.

To aid in doing something for children less fortunate than ours.

To support all national legislation aimed at bettering the condition of children.

And to display our gifts. At one Jack and Jill Christmas party, little Nicky Roberts, inordinately bright and fetching (thick curly hair, yellow-beige skin, large dark eyes), recites all fourteen verses of “The Night Before Christmas.” He is at most five or six years old. The parents in the audience grow ebullient as his high voice pipes out verse after verse after verse.

—

I’m looking through 1950s issues of
Up the Hill
, the magazine Jack and Jill mothers produced each year. Each cover has an idyllically American drawing. In 1950 a smiling boy pushes a smiling girl in a swing attached to a flowering tree branch. (
We could be Dick and Jane
.) In 1952 a small boy and girl ride a bike together, the sky above them, trees and grass behind. (
We don’t live in slums
.) The children look national-magazine-cover Caucasian.

The next year three teens in Scout uniforms clasp hands on a worthy landscape of Negro civic life: a church, a ranch-style home, and three stalwart-looking buildings present the race-progress front embodied by the NAACP, the YMCA, and the YWCA. Because the magazine cover is midnight blue and gold, there is an aura of sunlit darkness. The family on the 1956 tenth anniversary issue is Anglo-Saxon in look and dress, but dark lines have been sketched in to suggest that they are Negroes. And the 1957 cover has gone United Nations international (Dr. Ralph Bunche, one of ours, is undersecretary of political affairs at the UN, after all): images evoke each continent while youngsters of different ethnicities hold up a globe together. “The World Moves Forward on the Feet of Little Children.”