Negroland: A Memoir (2 page)

For my generation the motto was still: Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment.

Part of me dreads revealing anything in these pages except our drive to excellence. But I dread the constricted expression that comes from that. And we’re prone to being touchy. Self-righteously smug and snobbish. So let me begin in a quiet, clinical way.

I was born into the Chicago branch of Negroland. My father was a doctor, a pediatrician, and for some years head of pediatrics at Provident, the nation’s oldest black hospital. My mother was a social worker who left her job when she married, and throughout my childhood she was a full-time wife, mother, and socialite. But where did they come from to get there? And which clubs and organizations did they join to seal their membership in this world?

A brief vita of the author.

Margo Jefferson:

Ancestors:
(In chronological order): slaves and slaveholders in Virginia, Kentucky, and Mississippi; farmers, musicians, butlers, construction crew supervisors, teachers, beauticians and maids, seamstresses and dressmakers, engineers, policewomen, real estate businesswomen, lawyers, judges, doctors and social workers

Father’s fraternity:
Kappa Alpha Psi

Mother’s (and sister’s) sorority:
Delta Sigma Theta

Parents’ national clubs:
the Boulé (father); the Northeasterners (mother)

Sister’s and my national clubs:
Jack and Jill; the Co-Ettes

Local clubs, schools, and camps will be named as we go along. Skin color and hair will be described, evaluated too, along with other racialized physical traits. Questions inevitably will arise. Among them: How does one—how do you, how do I—parse class, race, family, and temperament? How many kinds of deprivation are there? What is the compass of privilege? What has made and maimed me?

—

Here are some of this group’s founding categories, the oppositions and distinctions they came to live by.

Northerner / Southerner

house slave / field hand

free black / slave black

free black / free mulatto

skilled worker / unskilled worker (free or slave)

owns property / owns none

reads and writes fluently / reads a little but does not write / reads and writes a little / neither reads nor writes

descends from African and Indian royalty / descends from African obscurities / descends from upper-class whites / descends from lower-class whites / descends from no whites at all

White Americans have always known how to develop aristocracies from local resources, however scant. British grocers arrive on the
Mayflower
and become founding fathers. German laborers emigrate to Chicago and become slaughterhouse kings. Women of equally modest origins marry these men or their rivals or their betters and become social arbiters.

We did the same. “Colored society” was originally a mélange of

men and women who were given favorable treatment, money, property, and even freedom by well-born Caucasian owners, employers, and parents;

men and women who bought their freedom with hard cash and hard labor;

men, women, and children bought and freed by slavery-hating whites or Negro friends and relatives;

men and women descended from free Negroes, hence born free.

They learned their letters and their manners; they learned skilled trades (barber, caterer, baker, jeweler, machinist, tailor, dressmaker); they were the best-trained servants in the better white homes and hotels; they bought real estate; published newspapers; established schools and churches; formed clubs and mutual aid societies; took care to marry among themselves. Some arrived from Haiti alongside whites fleeing Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black revolution: their ranks included free mulattoes and slaves who, after some pretense of loyalty, found it easy to desert their former masters and go into the business of upward mobility. From New Orleans to New York, men and women of mixed blood insistently established their primacy.

I’ve fallen into a mocking tone that feels prematurely disloyal. There were antebellum founders of Negroland who triumphed through resolve and principled intelligence.

A few examples:

James Forten of Philadelphia, abolitionist and entrepreneur. Born to free Negro parents, he started work in a sail-making firm at age eight, became the foreman at twenty and the owner at twenty-three, running the firm so well that it made him one of the richest men,
black or white
, in the city. He invented a sail-handling device, refused to sell rigging to slave-trading ships, organized against slavery and colonization, fought attempts to curtail the rights of free blacks, and supplied much-needed funds to help William Lloyd Garrison start
The Liberator
.

Frances Jackson Coppin, educator. Born in Washington, D.C., she remained a slave until age twelve. Her Negro grandfather bought the freedom of all his children except her mother, who was left enslaved because she’d had Frances by a white man. When an aunt bought her freedom, she worked as a servant in Massachusetts, then Rhode Island; using her salary to employ a tutor, she made her way through high school and then Oberlin College. There she started a school for escaped slaves while successfully completing the men’s course of study in Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics. She became an educator—the first Negro woman to head a high school with a classical curriculum—who burned, as she told Frederick Douglass, “
to see my race lifted out of the mire of ignorance, weakness and degradation; no longer to sit in obscure corners and devour the scraps of knowledge which his superiors flung at him.”
*

—

Negro exceptionalism had its ugly side: pioneers who advanced through resolve, intelligence, and exploiting their own.

Anthony Johnson was born in Angola and brought to Virginia in 1621; he began plantation life as an indentured servant before slavery was firmly established. Mary, another Negro servant, became his wife. They produced four children and completed their term of service; Johnson bought 250 acres of land in 1640. (The same year, a black indentured servant who’d fled was caught and sentenced to “serve his said master…for the time of his natural life.”) Anthony and Mary increased their 250 acres to 550, and acquired cattle and indentured servants. In 1654, one of those servants, the Negro John Casor, accused Johnson of wanting to enslave him and left, going to work for a white landowner willing to treat him as an indentured servant. Johnson took the white landowner to court, won his case on appeal, and took Casor back into servitude for life, thus becoming one of the first legal slaveholders in the colonies.

Genevieve Belly Ricard of Louisiana belonged to a small band of
gens de couleur libres
who bought and sold large quantities of land, sugar, rice, cotton, livestock, machinery, and slaves. When her husband, Cyprian Ricard, died, she inherited his thriving plantation; thereafter, the widow Ricard, as she was known, successfully managed (with the help but not the supervision of her son), about a thousand acres and close to a hundred slaves, valued at $200,000 on the eve of the Civil War.

—

More modestly, Negroland citizens are ministers, teachers, and skilled artisans. They own property that they rent out; they own inns and modest hotels; they are barbers, carpenters, mechanics, tailors, jewelers, bakers, and dressmakers. The majority are of mixed racial ancestry because that ancestry gives them more access to well-placed white patrons and relatives.

What did it mean to be a privileged free Negro? It meant you were free to earn money; free to marry legally and (sometimes) showily; free to educate your legally free children and pass property on to them; free to travel, to buy a summer home; free to form reading societies, debating societies, mutual aid societies; free, if you were a female, to cultivate “
the lighter accomplishments…to show much taste and skill in painting, instrumental music, singing and the various departments of ornamental needlework &c.”; free to hire a maid and a nanny; free to have your own version of the Social Register.

Free in the North to agitate against slavery and for voting rights while excluding Negroes with fewer accomplishments from your social circles.

Free in the South to lobby for your fluctuating rights while deeming it wise to ignore the claims of poorer, darker free Negroes.

Free to labor for privilege in the hopes that your children would be entitled to it.

—

“
You have seen how a man was made a slave; now you shall see how a slave was made a man,” wrote Frederick Douglass in his autobiography. Let us see how slaves, male and female, become social arbiters and leaders. One Negro elite to declare itself in print and begin publishing its stories in the early nineteenth century was comprised of escaped slaves like Douglass, like William Wells Brown, like Ellen and William Craft.

Even the first author to formally define “the elite of our people” had, in his quiet way, escaped slavery. In 1841 Joseph Willson, dentist, of Philadelphia, published
Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society
. He used the pseudonym “A Southerner.” He was born Joseph Keating in Augusta, Georgia, first son of a wealthy middle-aged slaveholder, John Willson Jr., unmarried, and a teenage slave, Betsy Keating, unmarried and freed by Willson before she bore the first of their five children. The couple had a pedigree of sorts: for many years, Betsy’s slave aunt had served John’s slaveholding uncle. His will declared her, their daughter, and her siblings free, “
on account of her care and attention to my domestic concerns.” Ah, the clinical euphemisms of the law.

Joseph was just five when his father died in 1822. The will provided the Negro family with shares in the Augusta bank Willson had helped found, as well as the protection of a trustworthy executor and a rent-free house in the country, with “
suitable household and Kitchen furniture and an adequate number of male and female Servants to wait upon them.” Were all those servants slaves? Had Betsy known any of them in her youth?

She had begun her life as a slave wench; she became an astute and planful matron. The Keatings lived in discreet comfort for eleven years. As formal education for Negroes was forbidden in Georgia, she sent her sons out of state for schooling and had her daughters tutored at home. Each year the state looked with increasing disfavor on free persons of color and found new ways to limit their actions and opportunities. In 1833, when Joseph was sixteen, Georgia marshaled its resources to pass laws that (1) fined any person who allowed a slave or free Negro access to a printing press or any other labor requiring a knowledge of reading and writing; (2) forbade any person to teach a slave or free Negro to read or write; and (3) allowed a free Negro convicted of “living an idle life” (which could mean walking down the street at a leisurely pace) to be sold into slavery. The family relocated to Philadelphia, long known for its community of achieving Negroes.

—

Betsy Keating was wise in the ways of social discretion. In Philadelphia she became Mrs. Elizabeth Willson, widow. She bought a three-story house in a largely white neighborhood—she knew how to live quietly among white people—then joined the prestigious St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church and set about introducing her family to Negro society. They were attractive, and they formed solid ties in that small, watchful world. Joseph found a mentor in another Southern Negro émigré, Frederick Augustus Hinton, who was a fervent abolitionist as well as a barber and perfumer to the city’s white elite. Hinton arranged for Joseph to learn that once-forbidden printer’s trade—not in Philadelphia, where custom encouraged white printers to deny Negroes training, but in Boston, under the fervent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. When Joseph returned to Philadelphia, he opened a printing business and married a young lady from Georgia of like background. Elizabeth Harnett was the daughter of a Scottish slaveholder and a free woman of color.

What a relief it must have been for this young couple to talk together openly about their parents and their histories!

Willson’s book sets the tone for another 150 years of prose on the subject. The very idea of “Higher Classes” of colored society will “
undoubtedly excite the mirth of a prejudiced community on its annunciation,” he declares; nevertheless, “it is perfectly correct and proper.” He aims to “remove” the unfounded and widespread prejudice of the white reader. He also aims to correct the tonal abuse of English writers like Frederick Marryat, Harriet Martineau, and Frances Trollope, who had skewered American customs and manners to great acclaim. By so doing he demonstrates that he is perfectly capable of passing literary and ethical judgments on the white world. And though he does intend to address certain behavioral “abuses” of colored society, he assures his people that they will “discover none but the best of feelings throughout has had any influence in guiding the pen of their humble servant, The Author.”

He is clearly on the defensive, as generations of future chroniclers will be. “
The prejudiced world has for a long time been in error in judging of what may be termed
the home condition
, or social intercourse, of the higher classes of colored society by the specimens who in the everyday walks of life are presented to their view as ‘the hewers of wood and the drawers of water.’ This rash mode of judgment—the forming of an opinion of the beauty of the landscape by the heavy shading in the fore-ground of the picture—has been the source of many groundless and unjust aspersions against their general character, and one which common justice requires should be removed.”

To establish his intellectual acumen, Willson lists the usual criteria for defining elites—wealth, education, occupation, birth, family connections—then qualifies them. The higher class, according to him, is “
that portion of colored society whose incomes, from their pursuits or otherwise (immoralities or criminalities of course excepted), enables them to maintain the position of house-holders and their families in relative ease and comfort.” Further, their incomes allow them, and their instincts encourage them, to pursue education, acquire culture, and embrace moral causes from temperance to abolitionism. He is determined to avoid boasts, grandiosity. He is determined to set high standards, to question (if a touch rhetorically) the worth of any distinction not founded chiefly on virtue. He respects upward mobility that displays itself as self-improvement. He deplores the petty social feuds and rivalries that hinder the work of racial advancement.