Negroland: A Memoir (20 page)

A little background is needed here. The women’s movement was controversial in the black community at this time. Many men and all too many women denounced feminism as a white woman’s thing, an indulgence, even an assertion of privilege, since she was competing (and stridently) for the limited share of benefits white men had just begun to grant non-whites.

Black feminists responded that, thanks to sexism, women of color regularly got double blasts of discrimination and oppression. And, anyway, we had our own feminist history. Relations between white and black women had been wary, inequitable, or bluntly exploitative. Alliances between them had been scant and fraught.

Nevertheless, social and cultural progress through the decades had made interracial cooperation and friendship available to my generation. I’d had white friends since kindergarten. And I was willing to acknowledge this irony: the rituals of bourgeois femininity had given the girls of Negroland certain protections the boys lacked.

That vision of feral, fascinating black manhood possessed Americans of every race and class. If you were a successful upper-middle-class Negro girl in the 1950s and ’60s, you were, in practice and imagination, a white Protestant upper-middle-class girl. Young, good-looking white women were the most desirable creatures in the world. It was hard not to want to imitate them; it was highly toxic too, as we would learn.

Still, these rituals allowed girls the latitude to go about their studies while being pert and popular, to stay well-mannered and socially adaptable, even as they joined the protests of the sixties and seventies.

So, when the black movement and the women’s movement offered new social and cultural opportunities, we were ready to accept them.

But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior. We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a legacy. We were too strong for that.

I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair. My first forays in this direction were petty. I conducted my own small battle of the books, purging my library of stalwart, valorous titles by black women and replacing them, wherever possible, with morbid, truculent ones by my sisters. Out with
This Child’s Gonna Live
, up with
There’s Nothing I Own That I Want
. Goodbye
My Lord, What a Morning
by Marian Anderson; hello
Everything and Nothing
by Dorothy Dandridge. As for Mari Evans’s iconic sixties poem,

I am a black woman

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

strong

beyond all definition still

defying place

and time

and circumstance

assailed

impervious

indestructible

Look

on me and be

renewed

I tore it out of an anthology and set fire to it in the bathroom sink.

I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who’d dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.

A Negro girl could never be purely innocent. The vengeful Race Fairy always lurked nearby; your parents’ best hope was that the fairy would show up at someone else’s feast and punish
their
child. Parents had to protect themselves too, and protect you from knowing how much danger you all were in.

And so arose one variation on the classic Freudian primal scene in which the child sees or imagines her parents having sex and finds it stirringly violent. Here the child sees and imagines her parents having fraught encounters with white people who invade their conversation and shadow their lives beyond the boundaries of home or neighborhood.

Work hard, child. Internalize the figures of your mother, your father, your parents (one omnipotent double-gendered personage). Internalize The Race. Internalize both races. Then internalize the contradictions. Teach your psyche to adapt its solo life to a group obbligato. Or else let it abandon any impulse toward independence and hurtle toward a feverishly perfect representation of your people.

—

The first unapologetic black female suicide took place in a small Off-Broadway theater in 1964, in a short Gothic play by a fiercely imaginative Negro woman playwright. I wasn’t there, but I understood that Adrienne Kennedy’s
Funnyhouse of a Negro
was as much a demand for freedom as the Civil Rights Act passed the same year.

Kennedy’s heroine, Negro-Sarah, is a young middle-class woman,
good-looking in a boring way; no glaring Negroid features, medium nose, medium mouth and pale yellow skin. My one defect is that I have a head of frizzy hair, unmistakably Negro kinky hair…
She lives alone in an Upper West Side brownstone, longs to be bohemian and distinctive, fears she is merely drab and decorous. She mistrusts her white poet boyfriend:
he is very interested in Negroes
. She mistrusts her own passion for white culture. Its great works have no place for her; its great figures would deem her an insignificant cultural arriviste. One woman, one room, one anguished, polyphonic consciousness. Queen Victoria and the Duchess of Hapsburg prowl her psyche, lamenting the awful curse of blackness. Patrice Lumumba and a shadowy black father are there too; they struggle and fail to lift that curse. At the play’s end, the light goes black, then blazes white. “
The poor bitch has hung herself,” says the landlady. “She was a funny little liar,” adds the boyfriend.

Negro-Sarah embodies our Negroland legacy of proscription and privilege, grief and achievement, a mingled love and shame for our people, a mingled love and terror of white culture. And then (as if the result of these others), despair and a furious will to extinguish the self. My people’s enemies have done this to me. But so have my own loved ones. My enemies took too much. My loved ones asked too much.

Let me say with care that the blame is not symmetrical: my enemies
forced
my loved ones to ask too much of me.

—

Nella Larsen’s 1920s novels were republished in the late 1960s and early ’70s, part of an exuberant rush of books by women, by gays, by non-whites of every hue, that the culture had contentedly left out of print for years. Some of these books appeared in pleasing well-wrought editions. Larsen’s were among those given the cheapest paper and crudest design publishers could get away with. Her own heroines would have disdained to buy them.

For they are touchy and proud, these Jazz Age heroines. They read widely, wear soigné frocks, give smart parties, and make clever remarks. They have keen minds, keen features, and fair skin, and can be suitably ironic about “what called itself Negro society.” They cultivate the advantages of being New Negroes and New Women; sometimes they even indulge in being New Negroes who can pass for white. They pursue La Vie Bourgeoise with too much anxiety or too much ambivalence. Their sexual allure trips them up; their sexual reserve holds them back. They are timid where they should be bold, reckless when diplomacy is needed. Secretly, they feel contempt for their own failure to imagine anything more for themselves.

Each one finds death of some kind: a lethal marriage, a fatal accident. But their longing for death, the drive toward it, is never quite acknowledged. Larsen’s women stumble into suicide by misadventure or miscalculation. They avoid premeditation, just as they avoid stringent self-reflection.

—

So, when Ntozake Shange stood on the stage of the Public Theater in 1975 and spoke the words “And this is for colored girls who have considered suicide,” my heart took flight. We were the same age. We were both doctors’ daughters who’d attacked our girlhood gentility with the weapons of Black Power and radical feminism. Now we could consider—toy with, ponder, contemplate—suicide.

I tried to quash my envy by seeing the play two, three, and four times, taking friends and paying for their tickets. I told myself,
Ntozake is laying the groundwork for all black feminists. She’s taken her stand as an artist, while you hide behind being a journalist. You must rid yourself of jealousy. You hate the secondraters who quibble with the brave ones
. I’d always derided Anne Sexton’s suicide competitions with Sylvia Plath.
“Thief!” Sexton wrote, “how did you crawl into, / crawl down alone / into the death I wanted so badly and for so long…?”
Maybe because Plath had more nerve and wrote better poetry
was my answer.

I channeled my envy into aesthetic dissatisfaction with the words that followed. “For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf.” It wasn’t enough. It was “For colored girls who are moving to the end of their personal rainbows.” I found the rainbow overused and trite, even if it was an honored symbol in every culture, a sanctioned trope of lyric poetry. When I’d finished this spiteful formalist critique, I was left alone with my fury. Ntozake said we had found god in ourselves and loved her fiercely. I hadn’t and I didn’t.

I wrote bleak notebook entries and called them death aphorisms.

I loathe my kind, which is humankind. We maim and taint whatever we encounter. We might improve but I don’t think so
.

I think more people should kill themselves. What incentives can we offer?

Freud got so much credit for saying “civilizations have death wishes.” I say individuals have life sentences, and I refuse to be a model prisoner. I shall consider my death an evolutionary advance for the species
.

I wrote to the Hemlock Society for instructions. Thirty aspirins minimum, with a liquid that makes you drowsy. Then tie the plastic bag over your head.

I studied suicide notes. It’s a primitive genre—they all follow the same basic pattern. “I can’t go on.” “I’m so sorry to do this to you.” “You’ve been so good to me.” “You’ve been as good as anyone who doesn’t have to go through anything like this can be.”

I kept a folder of my drafts. Sample: “Dear _______: I won’t go on. I’ve known everything was hopeless for a long time. Why keep fighting?” This prose is nothing to write home about—but it’s homeward bound, isn’t it? Add your own personal touch. I always put in something about who my jewelry should go to.

I knew I should have an alternative method, and I chose the oven. I liked its literary pedigree—from
Hansel and Gretel
to Sylvia Plath. When I actually tried putting my head in it, I realized that the oven opens about a foot from the floor, so you have to twist your body around and put your head on the door at a weird, forced angle.

I practiced because I did not want to be found in an ugly sprawl or a fetal position. I started at five minutes and worked my way up to fifteen.
One of these days
, I pledged,
I’ll have the courage to turn the oven on
.

I knew that unrequited death is as futile as unrequited love.
You must take hold
, I told myself.
You are suffering the long-term effects of profound fatigue. This is the result of all the work, the years of work required to be wholly normal and wholly exceptional. You must set an example for other Negroland girls who suffer the same way
.

You must give them a death they can live up to
.

Practice, practice, practice. Like playing scales, taking a barre. Do your daily suicide warm-ups.

—

There were journal entries, naturally
.

Sample 1

Listening to Billie Holiday sing “You don’
t know what love is / Until you’ve learned the meaning of the blues,” I think,
You don’t know what unrequited love is till you’ve loved a culture that doesn’t love you back
. Call my album
Torching with the Token
.

Sample 2

Dying to be impeccable

And merely dying instead.

Why didn’t you respond directly to words that hurt and belittled you?

By seeming not to mind I’d show I was a good person. They’d feel my goodness and be ashamed. They’d have a conversion experience on the spot and never be prejudiced again.

I cry your mercy, pity, love—ay love!

Every day a little death

Suck it up.

—

There were quotes culled from women writers, black and white deliberately juxtaposed
.

—

A sense of incalculable past loss and injury, and a dread of incalculable future loss and injury…

(Fanny Kemble, 1852, after conversing with the slaves on her husband’s Georgia plantation)

—

I do not approve of swaddling oneself in the griefs of ancestors who suffered infinitely more than we. And yet, I lived like this long before I found these words
.

—

I think this journal will be disadvantageous for me, for I spend my time now like a spider spinning my own entrails…

(Mary Boykin Chesnut, 1860, considering her own state of mind on a South Carolina plantation, as she manages home, husband, slaves, and social duties)

—

This is a way to show my self-aware double consciousness: I descend from the belittled and despised; I descend from the rewarded too. This begins as a racial division, then becomes a class division, in which a sense of loss, injury, grief, becomes the possession of those with time to articulate it attractively. Unhappiness as an avocation
.