Negroland: A Memoir (15 page)

Thighbone-wielding cannibals, skull-faced witch doctors, widemouthed lowlife Negroes whooping and hollering in the streets, pig-fat Negroes prancing in red coats, doffing red top hats (why can’t more of us learn to curb the love of loud colors that made white people think we’re ridiculous?—how well I knew that lament).

Compulsion/revulsion / compulsion/revulsion—“
B
OOM
, kill the white men / H
OO
, H
OO
, H
OO
.” All the horrors we Negroes strove to banish from our lives and from the minds of white Americans were here, now, in my room, enfolding me in a delirium of sound and sight.

Then a confusion of loveliness. A fairyland, an ebony palace, casements of gold and ivory, jasmine-scented maidens with tiny feet and pearls in hair that I made fall to their waists in undulating waves.

The fairyland appeased me; still I fought the degrading details. Hated Lindsay for sticking elephant bone in the gold and ivory casements, for making the maidens coal-black instead of ebony. Hated him for not capitalizing “Negro.”

I felt I had the tools for the last section, where “a good old negro in the slums of the town” preached piety, decried sin, beat his Bible, and set the congregation singing and testifying.

It was condescending but not vicious—not to the part of me that shared Lindsay’s view of florid lower-class religion. It
was
vicious, though, when “
they all repented, a thousand strong / For their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong.” American Negroes were not a stuporous or savage people. That was Vachel Lindsay’s ignorant prejudice, the kind we vanquished daily through struggle, achievement, eloquent indignation. And the spirituals were a great music. I could tell he knew that despite his prejudice. For here were bits of loveliness again, a jubilee as the gray sky opened and our voices rose and pulsed to a singing wind of glory glory glory.

Then,
dying down to a penetrating terrified whisper
, the last words dragged me back.

“Mumbo…Jumbo will hoo-doo you,

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.

Mumbo…Jumbo…will…hoo-doo…you.”

I whispered it, I chanted it, I read it silently. I read it alone in my room and I never told anyone. My reading was furtive and excited, filled with voluptuous loathing.

I was eleven. And if pornography lures as it appalls, offers you a debased vision of yourself that some part of you yields to, then “The Congo” was my first pornography.

Sixth grade gave me proof, for the first time, that there were things I was not going to be able to win, to gleam inside of. Sixth grade offered new opportunities for uncertainty.

Not about who was smartest. That had been going on since kindergarten; we were used to that. It was the rash of new students who arrived at Lab. Most of them were a good half year older than we Lifers. Most of them came from public schools, where they’d learned worldly social ways.

They knew just who was giving off pheromones. Who was verbally fleet. Who was cute and who was hopelessly not.

I found out about the List the day I huddled with three friends for a pre-gym gossip.

D.: The boys have made a list about us.

Me: (
Singing
) “As someday it may happen that a victim must be found, I’ve got a little list. I’ve got a little list.”

D.: It’s who’s the best looking, who has the best personality, and who’s the best dancer.

Me: (
still singing, failing to get a laugh
) “And I don’t think she’ll be missed, I’m sure she’ll not be missed.”

J.: Who told you?

B.: Who’s on it?

D.: Margo, you’re number one in personality and dancing.

Me: I’m the lord high girl and champion. (
Sardonic to keep jealousy at bay
) Next week I’ll be executed.

D.: You’re number six in looks.

Me: How many are on the list?

D.: Six.

B.: Who’s number one?

D.: J. and I are tied for number one.

B.: Oh, a twin set.

D.: You’re number two.

B.: What about personality?

D.: (
A small pause
) J. and I are number two in personality and dancing. You’re number three.

(
J. sings a few measures of “Bird Dog” and does a few dance steps
.)

Me: I don’t want to go swimming today. I’m going to say I have my period.

I was a good diver. Jackknife. Swan dive. Somersault in the air. I did them all. As Mother and her friends never stopped hunting, gathering, and trading hair palliatives, we’d learned to wrap chamois cloth tightly around our heads before putting our swim caps on. I did it as quickly as possible (oh, it just helps keep my hair dry, I’d say casually when asked in the locker room). Slightly damp hair could be quashed with a brush. You lived in terror of how seriously damp hair would resist as the school day went on, rising and dulling till you got home to quell it with oil, rollers, clips, and hot comb.

S. got a crush on me that year, and he was very cute, one of the new boys, with light brown hair and a sweet perky smile. Disney boys like Tim Considine had that kind of smile. That put me in the magic circle where you talk about boys and prospects. We were in different homerooms. D. told me S. had a crush on me, and that’s when I noticed he smiled at me a lot in the halls.

He was still smiling, and I was still basking, the next week when D. said, “You should feel honored that S. likes you. They don’t allow Negroes in his parents’ building.” But it was a building in Hyde Park and Hyde Park was integrated. I lived in an all-Negro neighborhood, but plenty of my Negro friends lived in Hyde Park. I went to their houses for playdates and parties and for Jack and Jill meetings. I’d been to D.’s house too—I’d had no idea certain buildings retained their racial exclusion rights. I desperately wished a Negro friend were telling me this so we could share the exclusion.

I must have said something. I must have felt ashamed later that I’d said so little, or surely I’d remember what I said? I do know that very soon after, I stopped responding to S.’s smiles. I ignored him. I ignored him until his smiles ceased.

We were the third race. We cared for our people—we loved our people—but we refused to be held back by the lower element. We did not love white people, we did not care for most of them, but we envied them and sometimes we feared and hated them. Our daily practice was suspicion, caution at the very least. Preemptive disdain.

“Who’s coming over?” my friend P.’s grandfather would ask, and if he didn’t recognize the name, his face would fall slightly and his voice grow distant. “Oh, one of your little white friends.”

When I was in sixth grade my mother, facing the perils of puberty on my behalf, sat me down for a talk about my white friends.
Your father and I want you to be able to compete everywhere, and we want you to be comfortable wherever you go. That’s why we send you to the schools they are sent to. It’s fine to enjoy the company of your white friends. But do you really think you can trust them?

Yes, I felt that I could—I was idealistic if not altogether coherent. Yes, I felt that I could and should trust them.

Margo, wherever the white man goes, there is race prejudice. They haven’t invented a test to measure that. I’m sure they won’t. Maybe it’s just genetic
.

—

The Lab School combines seventh and eighth grade to produce a class of academically precocious eleven- and twelve-year-olds who are profoundly disoriented socially. We are called pre-freshmen.

“You were like little insects buzzing through the halls,” an upperclassman recalled. We were nervous, we were eager, we were stranded between pre- and full-tilt adolescence. Buzz buzz buzz.

That year was, still is, a blur of striving and confusion.

Reading and rereading Agnes de Mille’s
Dance to the Piper
. The need to be special projected desperately, ecstatically, onto icon after icon. Audrey Hepburn (
The Nun’s Story, Funny Face
); Leslie Caron (
The Glass Slipper, An American in Paris
); Tammy Grimes (the television version of
Archy and Mehitabel
).

Watching an actor who’d come from the Goodman Theatre to our English class recite Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister.” Not a day went by when I wasn’t seized by the futile envy of the little Spanish monk.

Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!

Water your damned flower-pots, do!

If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,

God’s blood, would not mine kill you!

What I craved was a landscape on which to enact—on which to exude—the hauteur of the vengeful duke.

—E’en then would be some stooping, and I choose

Never to stoop.

I decide I will be a character actress.

—

At a class entertainment in Sunny Gym, I stand several feet behind M. and B. as they arrange themselves on chairs and sing “When Love Goes Wrong (Nothin’ Goes Right).” It’s the Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell duet from
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. They don’t do the vamp dance; they’re more in
Gidget
mode. Pertly sad, poutily sweet. My task is to help with the last eight bars, which are sung in two-part harmony: my voice is a steadying influence on the lower part. I’m clearly visible, but I act as if I’m behind a curtain.

—

The Voice Speaking Choir is directed by the high school drama teacher, Sheila Belmont. She has a smoky voice and a long lean figure; she has shoulder-length blonde hair and striking hand gestures. She could be in the Beat nightclub scene in
Funny Face
, or she could play the Kay Thompson fashion editor.

She must have taught pre-freshman drama: How else would she have picked Mary and me for this prestigious high school choir?

We rehearse intensely for the concert, which will be given in Mandel Hall. (Mandel Hall isn’t just for student concerts: professional musicians and actors appear there.) Our program includes group dramatic recitations, dramatizations of Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” Sandburg’s “Jazz Fantasia,” and Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” We do the big “River City” number from
The Music Man
. And Paul Butterfield, who’s a senior, plays the kind of blues Muddy Waters and Junior Wells play in clubs not so far from where I live.

My parents go to jazz clubs and buy jazz records, though. My sister and I listen to rock and roll, not blues. Paul Butterfield reminds me that, through these hard-core rough-and-tumble bluesmen, I have access to a new kind of cultural legitimacy. White bohemian legitimacy. Beat legitimacy—Negro, white, and avant-garde.

—

I’m doing badly in both my social lives. My best Negro friend at Lab is a year older and a lot more socially adroit. Is she really my best friend? (Even today I love the confident tone girls use when they say “This is my best friend.” I couldn’t bask in that confidence; I was always competing with others for her attention. I could lose her any minute, rotate out of the light of chosen friend, hover in the shadows with other aspirants. And once there I’d see those other girls, the ones whose friendship I’d passed up for this major prize. Now it was lost to me, and they had new best friends.)

I don’t have a best white friend anymore, only a constellation of good friends who are more involved with each other than with me. D. and I had such a tempestuous friendship the year before that we were exhausted: now she’s pursuing M., who’s also being courted by B. No one is striving to be my best friend.

So I was grateful to leave town that summer for an arts camp in pastoral northwest Michigan. Hormonal confusion and emotional desperation would be subdued by art. And that meant race could be put on hold.

Interlochen was built on what had once been Ottawa tribal lands, between two lakes, amid towering pines. “Guiding America’s Gifted Youth” was its slogan, and that firm guidance showed in the uniforms we wore: navy corduroy knickers for girls, navy corduroy pants for boys; sky-blue short-sleeved shirts of functional cotton for both. (Even Van Cliburn wore the corduroys and blue when he visited to play for us.) The socks were color-coded according to age and grade division. Mine were red.

Every hour was accounted for: classes, practice time, rehearsals, physical recreation, meals, free time. Attendance at nightly concerts was required, and we got report cards at the summer’s end.

I went for three years, and I loved these eight-week reprieves from the year-round toil of adolescence. Working at art, dreaming of art, being passionate and gaily pretentious about art, being competent to good to exceptional at art—all this was a given. You were normal
and
you were outstanding. If you weren’t outstanding (if you occupied one of the lesser chairs in the orchestra, or the back row of the ballet corps), you suffered, you bore it, you kept working. You aspired, and even if (secretly) you didn’t, you admired those who did.

It was even normal not to have a boyfriend. The camp rules were strict—clearly it was preferable. No cross-division mixing, and scant opportunity for mixing with boys your own age. High schoolers were occasionally found making out in music practice cabins. And punished. One—a girl, I’m sure—was expelled.

The camp had been started in the late twenties by Michigan music educator Joseph Maddy, and had expanded to include art, theater, and dance. A midwestern gung-ho and up-with-people ethos remained. And by the early sixties an up-with-people conservative Republican ethos had emerged: in ’62, the Chicago insurance millionaire W. Clement Stone visited and gave a go-forward-and-prosper talk based on his book
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude
(co-authored with Napoleon Hill, author of
Think and Grow Rich
). Every camper received a copy. We high schoolers mocked him, just as we girls thwarted the dress code by wearing close-fitting sweaters without blouses underneath.