Negroland: A Memoir (28 page)

“I will pray that God”
: Ibid., 376.

“full of the shouting spirit”
: Ibid., 402.

“These people have really a great deal”
: Charlotte Forten quoted in
We Are Your Sisters
, pp. 281, 510n.

“that noblest of compensations”
: Ibid., 284.

“to promote social intercourse”
: Willson,
The Elite of Our People
, 68.

“for almost any offense”
: Ida B. Wells-Barnett,
The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States
(Guttenberg eBook, 2005), chapter 1.

“The Southern white man says”
: Ibid.

“linked with that of every agony”
: Anna Julia Cooper,
A Voice from the South
, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 122.

“such new and alluring vistas”
: Ibid., 143–44.

“the lowly, the illiterate”
: Mary Church Terrell quoted in Mary Helen Washington, introduction to Cooper,
A Voice from the South
, xxx.

“Does any race produce more”
: W. E. B. Du Bois quoted in David Levering Lewis,
W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919
(New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 288.

“the only Southern book”
: Henry James quoted ibid., 277.

“a willingness to sacrifice and plan”
: W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth Memorial Address,”
Boulé Journal
(1948), in
W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader
, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 350.

“a group of selfish, self-indulgent”
: Ibid., 349.

“pathological struggle for status”
: E. Franklin Frazier,
Black Bourgeoisie
(New York: Free Press, 1997), 212.

“It appears that middle-class Negroes”
: Ibid., 1.

“I have lived it for over eighty years”
: Gerri Major with Doris Saunders,
Black Society
(Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1976), vii.

“exclusive” and “prestigious” schools:
Lawrence Otis Graham,
Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class
(New York: Harper Perennial, 2000).

“Virtually all Negro field artillery officers”
: Major Welton I. Taylor with Karyn J. Taylor,
Two Steps from Glory: A World War II Liaison Pilot Confronts Jim Crow and the Enemy in the South Pacific
(Winning Strategy Press, 2012), 45.

Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got
:
Langston Hughes, “A Note on Humor,” from
The Book of Negro Humor
, in
The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs
, ed. Christopher C. De Santis (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 525.

“You’ve got to be taught to be afraid”
: Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,”
South Pacific
(1949).

“Blow out the candle”
: Phil Moore, “Blow Out the Candle.”

“While tearing off a game of golf”
: Cole Porter, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”

“I’m here to tell you”
: Clyde Lovern Otis and Murray Stein, “Smooth Operator (Mercy Mister Percy).”

“Sherman Billingsley cooks for me”
: June Carroll and Arthur Siegel, “Monotonous,”
New Faces of 1952
.

“The child, not the lesson”
: John Dewey,
The School and Society
, quoted in William Harms and Ida DePencier,
100 Years of Learning at The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
(1996),
www.ucls.uchicago.edu/about-lab/current-publications/history/index/aspx
.

“The question of the child’s future”
: James Weldon Johnson,
Along This Way
(New York: Penguin, 1990), 56.

“The thousand injuries of Caucasians”
: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado”; my alteration.

“A wrong is unredressed”
: Ibid.

“Stitch Stitch Stitch”
: Thomas Hood, “Song of the Shirt,” in
Adventures in English Literature
, ed. R. B. Inglis et al. (Toronto: W. J. Gage, 1952), 436–37.

“He weeps by the side of the ocean”
: Edward Lear, “How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear,” quoted in John Lehmann,
Edward Lear and His World
(New York: Scribner’s, 1977), 116.

“Well, son, I’ll tell you”
: Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son,” in
The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
, ed. Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 30.

The secret signal:
Virginia Woolf,
Mrs. Dalloway
(New York: Harcourt, 1981), 88.

“Fat black bucks”
: Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo,” in
American Poetry: Twentieth Century
, vol. 1 (New York: Library of America, 2000), 215–77.

“B
OOM
, kill the white men”
: Ibid., 276.

“they all repented”
: Ibid., 278.

“ ‘Mumbo…Jumbo’ ”
: Ibid., 280.

“Gr-r-r—there go”
: Robert Browning, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” in
Victorian Verse
, ed. George MacBeth (New York, Penguin, 1969), 102–4.

“The story of the Negro in America”
: James Baldwin,
Notes of a Native Son
, in
Baldwin: Collected Essays
, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), 19.

“One may say that the Negro in America”
: Ibid.

“The ways in which the Negro”
: Ibid.

“We cannot ask”
: Ibid.

“This world is white no longer”
: Ibid., 129.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is a very bad novel”
: Ibid., 11–12.

Awaiting each colored child:
Johnson,
Along This Way
, 56.

“I am a black woman”
: “Mari Evans,
I Am a Black Woman
(New York: Morrow, 1970), n.p.

good-looking in a boring way:
Adrienne Kennedy,
Funnyhouse of a Negro
, in
The Adrienne Kennedy Reader
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 14–15.

“The poor bitch”
: Ibid., 25.

“Thief!” Sexton wrote: Anne Sexton, “Sylvia’s Death,”
in
The Complete Poems
(New York: Mariner, 1999), 126.

“You don’t know what love is”
: Don Raye and Gene de Paul, “You Don’t Know What Love Is.”

I cry your mercy:
John Keats, “I cry your mercy,” in
The Poems of John Keats
, ed. H. W. Garrod (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 371.

Every day a little death:
Stephen Sondheim, “Every Day a Little Death,” from
A Little Night Music
, 1997.

“A sense of incalculable past loss and injury”
: Frances Anne Kemble,
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839
(1863; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 122.

“I think this journal will be disadvantageous”
: Mary Boykin Chestnut,
A Diary from Dixie
, ed. Ben Ames Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), 22.

“I had wanted to compromise with Fate”
: Charlotte Brontë,
Villette
(New York: Harper Colophon, 1972), 222.

“I sometimes wish that I could fall”
: Harriet A. Jacobs,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 238.

“You are you”
: Elizabeth Bishop, “The Country Mouse,” in
The Collected Prose
(New York: Noonday Press, 1993), 33.

“My hand is stuffed”
: Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Children of the Poor,” in
Selected Poems
(New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 53.

“Plunge ahead”
: Jamaica Kincaid,
See Now Then
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 91–92.

“I have stories to tell?”
: Wendy Walters, “A Letter from the Hunted in Retrospect,” in
Longer I Wait, More You Love Me: Poems
(Berkeley, Calif.: Palm Press, 2009), 30.

“in the drifting community”
: Rachel Carson, “The Edge of the Sea,” in
Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson
, ed. Linda Lear (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 139.

“If there be anything like a colored lady”
: Charlotte Hawkins Brown, quoted in Charles W. Wadlington and Richard F. Knapp,
Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 16.

“What kind of pictures do we select”
: Quoted in Deborah Gray White,
Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894–1994
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 74.

Buy mother a box of handkerchiefs:
Charlotte Hawkins Brown,
“Mammy”: An Appeal to the Heart of the South; The Correct Thing To Do—To Say—To Wear
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1995), 5, 10, 33, 46, 77.

“Dear Friend”
: Ibid., 33.

“To Do and to Say”
: Ibid., 37, 110, 43, 114.

“If you go to the dining car”
: Ibid., 119.

“Do not go to buy a hat”
: Ibid., 95, 33.

“calm and undisturbed soul”
: Ibid., 106.

“too familiar”
on a bus or train: Ibid., 84.

“in her own way”:
Ibid., vii.

“The arrangement of one’s hair”
: Ibid., 43.

“Ain’t I a woman”
: Sojourner Truth, Speech at the Women’s Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, May 28–29, 1851.

“ ‘It’s so dreadful to be poor!’ ”
: Louisa May Alcott,
Little Women
, in
Alcott: Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys
, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Library of America, 2005), 7.

“You are old enough”
: Ibid., 9.

“As for you, Amy”
: Ibid.

“An old maid”
: Ibid., 466.

“one can get on quite happily”
: Ibid.

“Don’t laugh at the spinsters”
: Ibid., 466–67.

“a handsome feature in his face”
: Ibid., 355.

“nearly setting the chimney afire”
: Ibid., 378.

“pity from your heart”
: Ibid.

“wilderness of boys”
: Ibid., 509.

“Christmas won’t be Christmas”
: Ibid., 7.

“We don’t cheat in America”
: Ibid., 135.

“Birds in their little nests”
: Ibid., 9.

“But when I saw you all so well”
: Ibid., 397.

“She could not say”
: Ibid., 398.

“without mispronouncing”
: Ibid., 48.

Edwin L. Jefferson, Ronald Nelson Jefferson, and Ruby Cozette Jefferson, 1908. The family lived in Coffeeville, Mississippi, but the photograph was probably taken in Jackson.

Irma James Armstrong and her mother, Lillian McClendon Armstrong, in Chicago, c. 1920. The photograph was for relatives in St. Louis, who’d sent Irma the handsome but too-big coat.