Negroland: A Memoir (19 page)

We take on white people’s ridiculous pretensions and they make us look even more ridiculous. Mother said this herself from her position of bourgeois privilege. She told my sister before her senior year in high school, “Now, you can come out next year, or you can go to Europe.” And as soon as Denise’s reservations were booked, she added: “What are Negroes coming out into anyway?
”

Mother used to say, “Most white people want to see us as just more Negroes.”

That’s exactly what we need to be—Just More Negroes. We need to take strength from that. Give what we have and what we know to the community
.

Who are we? Who do we love? The summer Uncle Archie came North and passed for white so he could work at RR Donnelley and earn money for law school, he missed Negroes so much he would sneak over to the South Side on weekends and go from stand to stand getting his shoes shined. All afternoon getting his shoes shined. Give him a few drinks and he’s telling jokes about a Shreveport Negro so pig-ugly everyone calls him Oink. Then he puts his baseball cap on backwards and says, “Let’s play, ‘Nigger.’ ”

Mother and her friends loved to joke about our Afros
.

“You know, Margo,” she drawled at one of her afternoon luncheons, “if a fly got caught in there, he would break his little wings trying to get out.”

They need to re-examine their lives. They have a lot to answer for
.

In Negroland boys learned early how to die. They started in their teens, dying in period rec rooms with wood paneling and pool tables, train sets, golf clubs, liquor cabinets.

Did Father keep a rifle on the wall there, or did the son find his old army gun in the bedroom closet and sneak it downstairs? There, in the rec room, an amiable, well-mannered doctor’s son shot himself. Motive, unknown; verdict, accidental death; time, not long after his father was arrested for assaulting his second wife.

A few years later, in another rec room, a sweet-faced doctor’s son with a soft voice did the same. Suspected motive: he feared going the way of his father, sweet-faced, soft-voiced, seductively effusive, and (suspiciously) no longer married.

Vietnam opened other routes to self-extinction. A Negro boy could drop out of college, enlist, and come home a junkie. He could drink, shoot up, steal for several years, pawn his grandmother’s silver, assault a homeless man, and evade a jail sentence because his parents, both doctors, knew the judge. He could retire to the family homestead in Virginia, decline steadily in health, and die of kidney failure.

Negroland children were warned by their parents that few Negroes enjoyed their privilege or plenty; that most non-Negro Americans would be glad to see their kind of Negro returned to indigence, deference, and subservience.

Their parents made sure to supply them with well-appointed homes and apartments, tasteful clothes and plenty of them, handsome cars, generous allowances, sailboats, summer camps, music and dance lessons, flying lessons, private schools, tutors, and an array of clubs where other children exactly like them met for sports and directed play, cultural excursions, and Christmas visits to old people’s homes to sing carols.

Nevertheless, life in Negroland meant that any conversation could be taken over by the White Man at any moment. He dominated dinner party army stories about the brown-skinned Negro officer who’d had to escort his angry unit to the shabby back cars of a segregated train; the light-skinned Negro officer who’d been given the last seat in the white section of a train until he said he was a Negro, whereupon a porter (another brown-skinned Negro) was sent to find a curtain that could separate him from the Caucasian in front and join him to the Negro behind.

When he’s not lynching you, he’s humiliating you
, said the men at the dinner table. They leaned forward and raised their voices, then subsided into their chairs, shook their heads, let out a
hmmnnnn. He keeps you out of his hospitals, his law firms, his universities. Even his damn cemeteries. He never lets you forget you’re a second-class citizen
.

Strategic privilege and flagrantly displayed prosperity let you forget. Cocktail parties and dinner dances urged you to forget. Season tickets to the opera, summer trips to the Caribbean and Mexico. The family together watchin
g Ed Sullivan
, watching
Gunsmoke
and
Maverick
, watching
Playhouse 90
and outstanding cultural productions like
Peter Pan
and
The Nutcracker
.

Suavely complicated marriages and urbane extramarital liaisons; hushed quarrels at the breakfast table. Fathers at the office, at the club, coming home late so many nights.

Mothers picking the children up from school, shopping, planning meals, lunching with friends, working to safeguard their marriages.

La Vie Bourgeoise.

Round up the usual Oedipal conflicts and divided loyalties. Fathers, insist that your sons become high-achieving Negroes, prepared, like you, to push their way manfully past every obstacle.

How are they to do this? Force of will. You did.

But the boys had started dying.

—

Negroland girls couldn’t die outright. We had to plot and circle our way toward death, pretend we were after something else, like being ladylike, being popular, being loved. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, Good Negro Girls mastered the rigorous vocabulary of femininity. Gloves, handkerchiefs, pocketbooks for each occasion. Good diction for all occasions; skin care (no ashy knees or elbows); hair cultivation (a ceaseless round of treatments to eradicate the bushy and nappy). Manners to please grandparents and quell the doubts of any white strangers loitering to observe your behavior in schools, stores, and restaurants.

We were busy being pert, chic, cool—but not fast. Fast meant social extermination by degrees, because the boys who’d sampled a fast girl would tell another girl they’d taken up with (who was desirable but not fast) that the first girl was a slut.

The boys knew this because she’d made the mistake of being fast with more than one boy, so they’d talked about her with each other.

And then her girlfriends talked about her with each other. They were still cordial to her at parties. She wasn’t put out of her clubs. But if she wasn’t already in the Etta Quettes or the Co-Ettes, she wasn’t asked in.

Occasionally, a daughter who’d been silly enough to get herself pregnant would actually drop out of college, have the child, and marry its father. That meant she had disgraced herself and her family.

In fact, she had committed matricide: she had destroyed the good reputation her mother, her grandmothers, and her grandmothers’ grandmothers had fought for since slavery.

Premature sexual activity and pregnancy out of wedlock? She was just another statistic to be held against the race.

The world had to upend itself before shades of possibility between decorum and disgrace could emerge. Suddenly, people like us were denouncing war and imperialism, discarding the strategic protocol of civil rights for the combat aggression of Black Power. We unmade our straightened hair, remade our pristine diction, renounced our social niceties and snobberies.

—

The entitlements of Negroland were no longer
relevant
.

We were not the best that had been known and thought in black life and history. We were a corruption of The Race, a wrongful deviation. We’d let ourselves become tools of oppression in the black community. We’d settled for a desiccated white facsimile and abandoned a vital black culture. Striving to prove we could master the rubric of white civilization that had never for a moment thought us the best of anything in their life or history.

You grilled yourself: Do I still like—love—too many white writers, musicians, artists? Have I immersed myself enough in African history and culture? Do my principles show in my work? And principles notwithstanding, in my heart am I still a snob? At meetings, in political conversations, class—your
background
, your
advantages
—weasels its way in. Purge it from your intellectual pronouncements; it pops up in how you expressed them. The preemptory tone that you tell yourself is rigorous. The way of seeming to listen politely when you aren’t listening because you are so sure you know better.

And even when you didn’t think you knew better, you’d get those looks at community poetry readings or concerts, once a nationalist heard your diction or watched your mannerisms…watched until you felt his gaze and had to return it; then he’d slowly curl his lip.

And the comments:

You have to understand: you can’t be trusted. You’ve always insulted people like me
.

Yeah, you Chicago folks’ Scotch budget could fund a year’s research at the Institute of the Black World
.

When the Revolution comes, people like you will be lined up against the wall and shot
.

Are you black enough
became essential to style preening and sexual intimidation.

—

Good Negro Girls in search of lives their parents hadn’t lived often sought men their parents didn’t know and didn’t care to know.

Naturally, errors were made. The doctor’s daughter studying architecture married a man with suspected ties to the drug trade: within the year, she was shot in the head from behind and left beside her murdered husband, a large pool of blood widening in what
Jet
magazine called their “affluent South Side home.”

The dark-skinned daughter of a socially responsible educator, who left her Paris career as a provocatively keen-featured model with exorbitant long limbs to teach early childhood education at an Illinois community college, was stabbed multiple times in the head and neck by an estranged husband who then drove her body to the police station and turned himself in, telling the officer, “I just went crazy.”

Average American women were killed like this every day. But we weren’t raised to be average women; we were raised to be better than most women of either race. White women, our mothers reminded us pointedly, could afford more of these casualties. There were more of them, weren’t there?

There were always more white people. There were so few of us, and it had cost so much to construct us. Why were we dying?

The first of the dying boys had succumbed to the usual perils of family life—the unkind, philandering father, the kind but closeted father, the absent or insufficient mother. After them came the boys who threw off privilege and lusted for street life, imitating the slipslide walks of the guys who lounged on street corners in caps and leather coats, practicing the raucous five-stage laugh (clap, fold at the waist, run forward, arms in loose boxing position, squat, and return to loose standing position); working as hard as any white boy at a frat party to sound like Bo Diddley and Otis Redding.

Striving ardently to be what they were and were not. Behold the Race Flaneur: the bourgeois rebel who goes slumming, and finds not just adventure but the objective correlative for his secret despair.

—

I won’t absolve the girls. We played ghetto too, rolled and cut our eyes to show disdain, smacked our gum and loud-talked.

But the boys ruled. We were just aspiring adornments, and how could it be otherwise? The Negro man was at the center of the culture’s race obsessions. The Negro woman was on the shabby fringes. She had moments if she was in show business, of course; we craved the erotic command of Tina Turner, the arch insolence of Diana Ross, the melismatic authenticity of Aretha.

But in life, when a Good Negro Girl attached herself to a ghetto boy hoping to go street and compensate for her bourgeois privilege, if she didn’t get killed with or by him, she usually lived to become a socially disdained, financially disabled black woman destined to produce at least one baby she would have to care for alone.

What was the matter with us? Were we plagued by some monstrous need, some vestigial longing to plunge back into the abyss Negroes had been consigned to for centuries?

Was this some variant of survivor guilt?

No, that phrase is too generic. I’d call it the guilty confusion of those who were raised to defiantly accept their entitlement. To be more than survivors, to be victors who knew that victory was as much a threat as failure, and could be turned against them at any moment.

—

I’m still obsessed with James Weldon Johnson’s 1933 diagnosis of this condition. It deserves repeating.

Awaiting each colored child are cramping limitations and buttressed obstacles in addition to those that must be met by youth in general
. How judicious he is. Yet, implacably, this dilemma approaches suffering,
in exact proportion to the parent’s knowledge of these conditions, and the child’s ignorance of them. Some parents try to spare their children this bitter knowledge as long as possible. Less sensitive parents (those maimed by their own bitterness) drive it into the child from infancy on
.

At each turn, Johnson forgoes high rhetorical drama. He chooses “this dilemma” over “our burden,” prefers our “condition” to our “fate,” and comes at last, with stately tread, to this:
And no parent may definitely say which is the wiser course, for either of them may lead to spiritual disaster for the child
. Tragedy has arrived and is content to wait quietly. In time it may be able to claim both parent and child.

Those of us who avoided disaster encountered life’s usual rewards and pleasures, obstacles and limitations. If we still had some longing for death, we had to make it compatible with this new pattern of living.

—

In the late 1970s, I began to actively cultivate a desire to kill myself. I was, at that time, a successful professional in my chosen field of journalism. I was also a passionate feminist who refused to admit any contradiction between, on the one hand, her commitment to fighting the oppression of women and, on the other, her belief that feminism would let her draft a death commensurate with social achievement and political awareness.