Negroland: A Memoir (22 page)

Ominous words,
fear
and
dread
. Mrs. Brown is trying to give her readers a practice and faith that will shield them from the practical and emotional assaults of bigotry. From the slights and threats of white strangers. And she is telling them, sotto voce, that those bigoted strangers they cannot help meeting are people without grace or fineness—people who, in those essential ways, are their inferiors.

This urgency courses beneath her calm prose demeanor. Poise, she counsels, develops a “
calm and undisturbed soul” that can cope with unpleasant situations. Bland and decorous words, but her example of an unpleasant situation is a car accident. The poised individual will notify authorities, find the nearest garage, and supply first aid “without fluttering or excitement.” How did poise encounter danger so quickly? In those days car accidents on Southern roads that left Negroes unattended or ill-attended were notorious. Mrs. Brown and her readers surely knew of at least two famous cases: the 1931 crash that led to the death of Juliette Derricotte, Fisk University’s dean of women, and the 1937 crash that caused the death of Bessie Smith, Empress of the Blues.

“If there is such a thing as a colored lady, I want you to be one.” Lottie Hawkins turned this matriarchal conditional into a triumphant positive. She proved that there are such things as colored ladies and gentlemen, and that, led by her, this precious class would thrive, and enhance the race.

For so many of that Talented Tenth generation, manners, like education, proved that one was equal to all and superior to most. Their power was deeply seductive. Like a chivalric code, Negro manners could be seen as having aesthetic, social, and spiritual dimensions. Erotic ones as well: there is (or can be) something highly seductive about the process of mastering and submitting to them. It’s especially exciting if you’ve been told that you and your people are unfit for such things. Putting people in their place is deeply satisfying when they’ve always presumed to put you in yours. Oh, to be a lady of color emboldened to discourage strangers who become “
too familiar” on a bus or train: “answer them in such a way as to remain polite but have them know that you do not care to be further engaged.”

But it all began with the child in thrall to her vision of benevolent white aristocrats. Charlotte Hawkins Brown spent her youth entranced by the ways of cultivated white New Englanders. Her mother, she writes, taught her to be kind, polite, and generous
“in her own way”
(the italics are mine); that chasm acknowledged, she hails the Anglo-Saxon gentry “who in schools and homes teeming with cultural atmosphere gave me an opportunity to observe the fine art of living.”

This was her route to freedom. She simply could not see the ethical dangers. The social absurdities. The spiritual confines.

—

“
The arrangement of one’s hair adds to or detracts from one’s general appearance as it increases or decreases one’s power of personality.

“Study the contours of your face carefully. What makes Katharine Hepburn or Greta Garbo or Marian Anderson
personality plus
may make you
personality minus”
: so wrote Charlotte Hawkins Brown in her chapter on good grooming. But in the pictures of Marian Anderson I grow up seeing, there is none of the personality-plus allure girls of my generation crave. There is correctness, there is severe elegance, there is solemnity. We respect and honor Anderson: she is a pioneering artist for our people. And because her art is high Western art, she too must be a Clubwoman. There is nothing provocative or mysterious about her, there is no air of carefree hauteur. In photographs, the folds of Marian Anderson’s hair are prohibitively exact. It’s as though a doll maker constructed them, then glued them to her strong head to neutralize a face: the face so many would have seen as the stoic one of an African man, with the wide, full lips Caucasians said prevented Negroes from being able to properly perform the classics. We are in the middle of the twentieth century, but the pressed and coiled hair serves her image as the white bonnet served Sojourner Truth’s nearly a hundred years before. Once she had left disreputable plantation life behind and begun speaking of equal rights to audiences of Northern whites and Negroes, a more genteel appearance was required.

“
Ain’t I a woman?” Sojourner thundered at a women’s rights convention in 1851, a woman who “could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well.” See her then, photographed years after in a diminutive white bonnet enhanced by a freshly laundered white collar and white shawl, whose fringe is echoed by a line of yarn, fist now curled around knitting needles and cane.

Marian Anderson’s “Ain’t I a Woman” moment came on April 9, 1939. Our parents and grandparents hailed the news and heard the radio broadcast with joy:

MARIAN ANDERSON, REFUSED A CONCERT HALL BY THE DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, SINGS OUTSIDE AT THE LINCOLN MEMORIAL.

At the Lincoln Memorial

The finished statue of Abraham Lincoln is nineteen feet tall and carved from twenty-eight blocks of white Georgia marble. The French had special lighting installed to enhance the figure of the man born in a Kentucky log cabin.

The finished portrait of Marian Anderson is five feet ten inches of brown flesh mounted on white bone, originating in a modest section of Philadelphia and smoothed and polished in the capitals of Europe.

The president who saved the Union wears a suit, vest, and bow tie. The woman who reaffirms the Union’s highest purpose wears a black mink coat, a hat, and a jeweled scarf of orange and yellow (key tones in the Negro skin palette).

He sits, legs foursquare and apart, as if he could shelter the whole world between them. The premier contralto of her people stands waiting for her cue to become immortal.

Above his head are carved the words:

IN THIS TEMPLE AS IN THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE FOR WHOM HE SAVED THE UNION THE MEMORY OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS ENSHRINED FOREVER.

The piano sounds the introduction. She fingers her necklace and arranges her head to look upon the throngs.

From the lips of “a daughter of the race from which he struck the chains of slavery” come the words “My country, ’tis of thee, Sweet land of liberty…” and—right then—enshrined forever in our memories is the change she makes.
“Of thee I sing”
becomes “To
thee
We
sing.”
The singular pronoun of a sheltered citizen becomes the plural pronoun of an embattled people who must address (speak to), not possess (speak of), their country.

She wasn’t allowed a singular identity except when she sang: there you could hear her stroking, savoring tones and syllables, in a private ecstasy.

So much melancholy, I think, reading these pages. But why choose that word instead of “depression”? “Depression” has gone flat from so much use. I mistrust “depression” because it’s too easy (for me, anyway) to forget the rage, even petulance, inside it. “Melancholy” is prettier than “depression”; it connotes a kind of nocturnal grace. Makes one feel more innocently beleaguered.

In point of fact, 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.

All that circumnavigating of race, class, and gender made for comedy too. Comic chagrin, comic relief, comic reversals (at least adjustment) of fortune. Sometimes we felt like postmodern topsy-turvy dolls.

So call these a set of relativity tales.

The Seventies

i

It’s enter-the-elevator-and-get-to-your-desk-by-10-a.m. rush hour at
Newsweek
. I place myself amid my white colleagues. We’re all preoccupied—so much to read, write, convert into like-minded prose. We murmur greetings, trade short sentences, sip at our coffee. The elevator door closes; the elevator starts its climb; we fall silent.

There is one other black in the elevator; a messenger, looking about eighteen or nineteen, there to deliver useful documents to some writer, researcher, or editor’s secretary. As the elevator hits 5, his voice sounds out, sibilant, insistent, insidious.

“
Sis
-ter…”

If anyone was about to talk, they’re not talking now. Into the deepening silence, he flings “Sister BLACK!”

Five floors later, the door finally opens.

I exit, trying not to rush.

Look back at him with narrowed eyes, register the assiduously blank faces of the remaining whites.

Watch the door close on his gleeful smirk.

ii

Peachie is talking to her Italian boyfriend. “In our world, when I grew up it was an advantage to have straight hair,” she tells him. “But even then it made me self-conscious.”

His brow is genuinely furrowed when he answers.

“Your hair’s not straight,” he says.

iii

Our friend Shawn has taken to wearing a voluminous Afro wig on social occasions, especially in the black community. Many politically conscious black women with light skin and straight hair do the same: it’s the only way to make sure people acknowledge their racial identity.

On this hot and steamy night at a crowded New Orleans club, the six inches of human hair attached to the synthetic fibers of the wig cap gather so much heat and sweat that Shawn excuses herself and goes to the ladies’ room. She is too uncomfortable to notice the other woman there. She bends over the sink, closes her eyes, pulls off the wig, and shakes it hard, trying to dislodge the sweat drops. When she straightens up, she sees the woman removing a wig too, shaking it, trying to dislodge the sweat drops, taking a comb from her purse to run through the wig’s long, straight locks, coaxing its limp ends back into their flip curve, and taking a paper towel to the bangs.

The mirror invites their eyes to meet. Shawn takes in the short, crisp frizz on her neighbor’s head; the neighbor takes in the dead straight, now crumpled shoulder-length hair of Shawn. Then, slowly, in near unison, they put their wigs back on and leave the bathroom in silence.

The Eighties

i

Peachie, Joan, and I are at a book party. Writers and other artists chat and cluster with friends, lovers, and prospects. We three start a race talk, not a serious one, just a lighthearted trading of insider tales. I’ve found that at white gatherings—parties, concerts—blacks often talk like this for a few minutes. As if to say
We know your world and we know ours too. How many of you could say the same?

And this is especially pleasing tonight, since two of us aren’t obviously black. (And they keep a working list of white people’s race ID gaffes
Are you Mediterranean? You look Sephardic. Is one of your parents black? Mixed race?
) Peachie jokes that sometimes, to head off the wrong kind of remark—you never know what a white person will say about blacks to White People Only—she begins every available sentence with “As a black woman…,” for instance, “As a black woman who’s ordering a cappuccino…”

Why are we three talking about this here and now? Do we, as the only blacks present, feel the need to condescend, gain an edge over this roomful of chattering whites?

“But ‘talking black’ is too simple,” says P. “I used to date a white man from Mississippi and I’d always find myself imitating his accent whenever we were together. Which made me sound more ‘black’ than I ever had.”

We laugh. And as we do, a young white man joins us. None of us knows him. He’s attractive in a quiet way and his manner isn’t intrusive. But his presence is.

How to make this clear without being unpleasant? We smile as if he’s welcome. Then P. says: “We were just talking about how seductive black and white Southern accents are. I was saying that when I used to date a white man from Mississippi I’d always end up imitating
his
accent.”

He smiles. “I know. I used to date a white man from Mississippi too, and
I’d
always find myself imitating his accent.” The emphasis on “I” lets us know he’s white. And he’s managed a small stylish coup that gives us all pleasure.

“Congratulations,” I say. “You’ve just made yourself the most exotic person in our group.”

ii

George and I have been friends since the early seventies. He’s gay, and handsome in a manly Western Protestant way, the Gary Cooper way, with a head of healthy chestnut hair that falls lightly over his left brow; craggy yet refined features; a lean body fit for tailored khakis and button-down shirts or tight blue Levis with black bomber jackets. He was my first close gay friend and I was his first close black friend.

Which has led to confusions we cherish.

When we go to largely heterosexual parties together, white women drawn to him give me appraising or irritated looks, then move in.

When we pass gay white men on the street, they cut me and give him smoldering glances.

When we pass gay black men on the street, they shoot me a
Girlfriend, you should know better
look, then turn to him with a sly smile or a playful moue.

And when we pass heterosexual black men on the street, they narrow their eyes at me and mutter or sneer, “What do you need that white man for, sister?”

The Nineties

i

The place is Chez Josephine, the New York restaurant consecrated to the first international female superstar of the Negro race. Her image is on every wall, her creamy brown flesh, oiled, stretched, stroked into feathers, beads, sequins, banana belts; the saucy grin, the dimpled cheeks and knees seducing, mocking, exalting, enticing visitors of every age and hue.

The time is late January 1993.

—

Two black women in their mid-forties sit talking about the two famous people who have died that week and been ceaselessly commemorated. One of the women, she of the voluminous Afro wig, is still pale beige, her naturally straight hair now on view. The other is me, a light-but-definite-brown, with naturally frizzy hair.