Negroland: A Memoir (26 page)

Goin’ to Chicago,

Sorry but I can’t take you.

Those proud Chicago department stores where we shopped! Marshall Field and Chas. A. Stevens, designed by the firm of D. H. Burnham, the architect who’d ruled the World’s Fair. Carson, Pirie, Scott, designed by Louis B. Sullivan, master builder of the skyscraper. Mighty structures of granite and terra-cotta; arrogantly eclectic with their escalators and Tiffany lamps, their modernist lines and Renaissance flourishes. They sat in the city’s commercial center, the downtown Loop, flanked by hotels, theaters, and office buildings. Proclaiming the union of exclusivity and accessibility. These late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century department stores were the first to make sensory bombardment a stately art.

Counter after counter of lipsticks, powders, perfumes; cases filled with gloves (wrist-length, mid-arm, lined, unlined, cotton, suede, kid, white, cream, black, tan), leather goods, candies—and we haven’t even reached the escalators. We’re still on the ground floor, which stretches across two city blocks.

For girls like my sister and me, “shopping” was an intricately plotted expedition. Our mother was the guide. She showed us what to look for, as our eyes wandered and wondered. She showed us what to pass by.
She
directed the gaze.

Marshall Field, where our mother took us to sit on Santa’s knee at Christmas in a maze of giant wreaths, candy canes, and glazed whirling ornaments.

Marshall Field, where our mother took us to lunch at the Walnut Room.

Marshall Field’s 28 Shop, where Mother told her mother, “You really shouldn’t smoke here,” and her mother answered, “As much as I pay for these clothes, I’ll do what I want.”

Marshall Field, where my father’s aunt Nancy passed for white to work as a saleswoman in the 1920s.

—

At Saks and Bonwit Teller the exclusivity-accessibility balance shifted. They were smaller, more discreet stores. They were on the posh Near North Side, not in the “come hither all ye consumers” Loop. The rhythm of buying and selling was more decorous, the conversation quieter. And you knew when you entered that fewer people felt they could take the liberty—claim the right—to walk through as tourists. Mother didn’t take us there before 1960. As Negroes we had to secure our place downtown before we ventured north toward the Gold Coast.

—

Every month a coffee-table-sized
Vogue
arrived at our house. Every month I devoured it. The models were starting to be known by name. My favorite was red-haired Suzy Parker: tall and lissome; her face a perfect assemblage of curves (the lips, the eyebrows) and lines (the nose, the cheekbones). The models wore the grand European designs of Dior, Givenchy, Balenciaga, and Madame Grès. They showed off the clothes of Americans with rhythmically neat or alliterative names: Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass, Norman Norell. They were muses and fetish objects, offerings on the altar of feminine glamour.

And I worshipped offerings to feminine glamour, in magazines, in movies, and in life. The clothes; the lingerie; the array of handkerchiefs, some lace-trimmed, some initialed; pocketbooks of leather and alligator, bearing their own mirrors and coin purses; peau de soie clutch bags for evening or small beaded ones with handles that just slipped over your wrist. The perfume and cologne bottles on Mama’s vanity dresser. The earrings, bracelets, necklaces, arranged in the leather jewelry box with its Florentine design.

I learned to accept the verbotens too. One summer day I came downstairs wearing a red blouse and a purple and white flowered skirt; I was sent right back up to change. You don’t wear certain colors together, especially loud colors. Denim is only for weekend play and summer camp. Little girls don’t wear nail polish. Little girls wear
white
socks with their Mary Janes.

I accepted the verbotens because I longed to be a perfect girl, and if a girl lacked perfect prettiness—which I did—then this was a route to compensatory perfection. I accepted the verbotens because they came from my mother, whose appearance and manner I found both authoritative and deeply pleasing. Her crisp Claudette Colbert hairdo; her five-foot-three-inch frame, trim and shapely but not skinny; her smooth beige-brown skin. She was witty, lively, and chic. So were her friends. I loved how they looked in their suits and silk shirtwaists, their furs and smart hats. I loved how they carried themselves at luncheons and parties. I loved the quick comments and judgments they flung out. They were in feminine command.

And they were almost entirely absent from the main stage of feminine glamour, from
Vogue
, from
Harper’s Bazaar
, from
Life
and
Look
, from television, from movies. (Call up the usual exceptions: Lena, Dorothy, Eartha, Diahann.) Race had decreed it so.

How did I register the fact that everyone who mattered in this vast beauty-and-fashion complex was white? Not until the 1960s did models of color start appearing. Headline, 1962: Gordon Parks—a Negro himself, who photographed my mother and her friends at the South Side Community Arts Center in the thirties—shoots a
Life
spread on “exotic” clothes, titled “Swirl of Bright Hues: New Styles Shown by Negro Models—A Band of Beautiful Pioneers.” Headline, 1966: Donyale Luna, who describes herself as Irish, Mexican, and Afro-Egyptian, becomes the first Negro model to make the cover of
Vogue
. Her fingers were long, tapering, distinctly red-brown. Her nails were colored shell-white. Her second and third fingers framed one dark eye in a curved but unmistakable V; that dark orb of an eye, lined Egyptian-cat style, commanded homage.

Who among us could look like that? She was as anomalous as Suzy Parker. But she was our anomaly. She let us feel possessive and vindicated.

The fashion and beauty complex has so many ways to enchant and maim. It invents styles and standards that create impossible longings. If you’re smitten, your cravings start early. You want something—some feature, some body part, some look or aura—you do not have and will not ever have.

Those cheekbones, which make the thought of a skull erotic;

Those rosebud lips, so sweetly small;

That sleek neck, that long torso, those lean, kinetic sculpture legs.

Begin with those biological impossibilities. Then add racial ones:

The delicate whimsy of Audrey Hepburn.

The sultry lushness of Elizabeth Taylor.

The country club sangfroid of Grace Kelly.

No! You cannot ever be white like these idols of feminine perfection. Let that final impossibility reproach and taunt you.

Nevertheless, a separate world of Negro beauty and glamour did exist when
Ebony
arrived. Every month I studied its cream, beige, tan, buff, brown, and sepia models. My favorite was Dorothea Towles. She was just six years younger than our mother, who’d met her. She’d gone to college, as we were to do; she’d married a dentist (we were supposed to marry professionals); she’d decided to follow her sister, a serious concert pianist, to Paris. And once there she’d broken ranks to fulfill our wild secret fantasies of Josephine Baker crossed with Audrey Hepburn: she’d gone to the house of Dior, become a model, and gone from Dior to Schiaparelli and Balmain.

I admired her, I envied her, but I didn’t worship her as I worshipped Suzy Parker. She was in
Ebony
, not
Vogue
. My white friends didn’t know who she was. Diana Vreeland didn’t have to know or care.

When I look at pictures of Dorothea now, I realize just how adorable she was. She had the kinetic sculpture legs, the sleek neck and shoulders.

I say “adorable” because her face was piquant. The high cheekbones were there, but their shape was softly round (like Baker’s). The full lower lip was there, the pouty lip that would be so desirable in the 1960s and ’70s. Her dark eyes had a playful, almost quizzical expression, as if she were amused to watch the world watch her. Her hair was dark too—except when she chose to dye it blonde.

Did she turn her back on her people? She did not. Did she return to bourgeois obscurity as a dentist’s wife? Not that either. She did return to the United States in 1954, and she did leave her husband for good. Then, using her own numerous haute couture clothes, she barnstormed the country, organizing all-black fashion shows for all-black sororities and charities.

Jet
loved to chronicle her flamboyant doings, enhanced by photos. “Model Dorothea Towles created a sensation when she strolled into a white fur shop in Birmingham and asked to rent $10,000 worth of furs for the Alpha Kappa Alpha’s fashion show. The owner sent along three private cops to guard the furs.” This next to a picture of pert, carefree Towles at the beach, perched on a rock in a two-piece strapless bathing suit, high-heeled ankle-strap sandals, and a wide, fringed straw hat.

Dorothea Towles had returned to America the year the Supreme Court decreed segregation illegal in public schools. Separate but equal was being challenged everywhere. And four years later Dorothea’s fashion challenge was taken up by my mother’s friend Eunice Johnson. Her husband, John Johnson, published
Ebony, Jet
, and
Negro Digest
. She’d given
Ebony
its bold, pre–Black Power name; she’d become the company’s secretary-treasurer and aesthetic adviser. Now she launched the Ebony Fashion Fair, a touring fashion show on a grander scale.

She didn’t need to use her own clothes. She’d go to the top shows in Paris and Milan, sit in front-row seats beside white editors, and buy clothes. She’d go to the top shows in New York, sit in front-row seats beside white editors, and buy clothes. She’d go in search of young black designers and buy clothes. Beige, tan, buff, cream, sepia, brown, and (eventually) ebony models strode and sashayed down hotel runways in city after city, wearing these clothes for colored/Negro/black and African-American audiences at white hotels. It was spectacular.

We were still separate, but separate
and
equal was always Negroland’s de facto social motto. We were still not wholly equal, of course. The white world had made the rules that excluded us; now, when it saw fit, it altered those rules to include
a few
of us. Politics was changing the culture and the market: the aesthetics of fashion and glamour were changing too. But we had been there all along. Before they noticed or acknowledged us, we were there.

—

I often look through the clothes my mother has given me through the years. I cherish the Pauline Trigère brushed-wool, funnel-shaped coat, beige with thin stripes of pale mauve, lilac, blue, and white. Such quiet symmetry it could be wallpaper. I feel like a craft object when I close my body into this coat. And I feel vindicated too, because Pauline Trigère was the first top American designer to use a black model regularly. We
always
knew these things;
Ebony, Jet
, or our mothers told us.

Still, the piece I most love wearing is Mother’s gold brocade cocktail dress with matching jacket. It was designed by Malcolm Starr, known for bejeweled sixties evening wear. The dress is sleeveless, with wide straps, a nipped waist, and a wraparound-style skirt. Not a wide skirt, but wide enough for a feminist to walk in without mincing her steps. The waist-length jacket is trimmed in gold braid; so is the skirt’s front panel.

It’s “flip and flirty,” as my mother prescribed. It’s crisp yet splendid. It makes me feel I’ve put on made-to-order armor.

My mother’s armor.

Armor that helped shield me from exclusion.

Armor that helped shield me from inferiority.

I believe it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.

I don’t want this kind of indulgence to dominate my memories. So let me try to describe some varieties of my experience one last time.

When race is simply there and “Negroes” are your familiars, their faces, voices, bodies are the landscape of your everyday life. The shock comes when a person appears from that other, wider world; when an action, a fact, an event suddenly marks you as the oddity, the marred feature of a landscape. You, your people: the singular is turned undesirably plural. You’re ambushed: literally and violently,
taken aback
. That’s unhappiness. That’s outrage. That’s…grief.

Then there are those other kinds of racial shocks: ecstatic recognitions; sudden terror. Race is not simply there; instead, you and your people have a charged destiny. You, the singular made uncannily plural, have been seized and placed in the center of world attention. You and your people don’t share just a past, you share looks and gestures, ways of talking, moving, being, that others everywhere revile, covet, debate.

How do you adapt your singular, willful self to so much history and myth? So much glory, banality, honor, and betrayal?

—

But at least race mattered when I was growing up. At least it enflamed the nation. Gender didn’t. No one who directed the Big Cultural Conversations—political leaders, influential artists, journalists—none of them made that claim for gender. Not blatantly, not commandingly, Equal rights for women tucked itself into those ladylike organizations—the League of Women Voters, the National Council of Negro Women, Planned Parenthood—that did good work in politics, social service, and public health. I should say “good
works
” to convey their aura of worthy, conscientious dullness. If you’d bothered to look at these organizations, you’d have found a vigorous, even contentious feminist past. In our 1950s and ’60s present, they looked like the pious Victorians we had no intention of being.

Society met the idea of women fighting for equality with mockery, contempt, or repressive tolerance. When a senator from Virginia attached to the Voting Rights Act of 1964 a clause prohibiting sex discrimination, liberals were outraged. They (we) accused him of racist manipulation, since most senators could be counted on to defeat any bill with that provision; and they (we) denounced him for ridiculing the bill since women’s rights were so trivial compared to Negroes’. Now the contradictory reasoning is obvious, but then we didn’t notice or care. Few, if any, girls my age knew, and few of our mothers and grandmothers saw, that we’d just been trapped again in that fierce and ugly nineteenth-century quarrel about the Fifteenth Amendment, a quarrel that would soon become a fierce and ugly late-twentieth-century struggle about the relative importance of black rights (dominated by men) and women’s rights (dominated by whites).