Negroland: A Memoir (14 page)

What did we do, as tots, as preteens, as “Ten Pre’s and a Teen,” as high schoolers who called ourselves Vogues and Esquires or Shirts and Skirts? We did exactly what white American children did: arts and crafts (dolls and jewelry for girls, airplanes for boys); hayrides and sleigh rides; swim (“splash”) parties, toboggan parties, tennis, horseback riding; trips to the circus, to museums, to theaters and TV studios. There were parties with puppet shows, parties with Western and Mexican themes; There was square dance and ballroom dance; there were buffets and dinner dances where “the social graces were much in evidence as the handsome young men seated the lovely young ladies at the candlelit dinner table.”

I remember the Mexican-theme party because Jose R.’s mother was part Mexican and she taught us the chorus of “Cielito Lindo” in Spanish. The hayride made me feel I belonged in the jaunty Mickey Mouse Club number “Goin’ on a Hayride,” starring Darlene, my favorite Mouseketeer. (I feel a twinge of retaliatory satisfaction whenever I watch Nanette Fabray and an all-white cast do the dialect lines from
The Band Wagon:
“Get goin’, Louisiana hayride, / Get goin’, we all is ready!” they sing rakishly, and at the very end a small Negro boy in a straw hat frolics in the hay. “I is here!” he pipes.) I remember the toboggan party at a suburban ski lodge because white teenagers laughed loudly and danced unchaperoned. Maybe I’d seen previews for movies like
Blackboard Jungle
. It felt dangerously alluring.

What was especially attuned to our needs as Negroes? Social studies units that proved we had a history and cultural heritage. Philadelphia Jack and Jills learned about “the exotic island of Haiti”: they made baskets, drums, and pottery, tutored by a parent who had visited the island and was “an artist in her own right,” their guest speaker a distinguished “native Haitian” named Dr. Bonhomme. This was so successful, they chose to study Africa the next year, learning its history at the Schomburg Library and viewing its art at Lincoln University.

There were even ventures into integration: in 1952 the Columbus, Ohio, chapter studied Israel and Jewish culture. The primary school children learned games and poems “that are favorites of Jewish children”; the junior high group visited a Jewish community center; the “Keen Teens” gave an interracial tea with guests from a Jewish temple.

Professional accomplishments were essential, hence the feature “Daddies in the News.” Charity, too: contributions to the United Negro College Fund; Christmas toys to children in the Virgin Islands; a television set to the Boys’ Club of Washington, D.C.

—

Here I am in the 1954 photo of the two-to-five-year-olds, wearing a jumper and a white blouse with puffed sleeves. According to the chapter’s report (each chapter submitted a report to
Up the Hill
), the year began with a Halloween party: “All of the children came masked in very colorful costumes.” In November we each brought a gift (“wooden puzzle, durable books or non-breakable record”) for the pediatrics department at Provident Hospital, and in December our selflessness was rewarded: we brought ornaments to our own Christmas party and got presents from a grab bag. In January we “little ones” learned handicrafts; February brought Valentine’s Day festivities, and March “brought folk dancing lessons to this little group.” Most important, we formed a rhythm band, and rehearsed for spring Jack and Jill Day. That must have been the day that I interrupted my friend onstage with my impromptu dance.

The mothers dedicated themselves to the insights and enlightened ideals of child psychology. The Parents’ Creed, “Your Child’s Emotional Needs,” is a model of the pedagogy and anxious self-scrutiny expected—demanded—of mothers then. A pledge of allegiance, a loyalty oath sworn to Motherhood.

Examples: The Need for Belonging (“I will develop in my child a feeling of security by avoiding extreme methods of discipline”); The Need for Achievement (“I will not try to achieve my own ambitions by forcing them on my child”); The Need for Personal Integrity in Sharing (“I will show courtesy and consideration to other people regardless of their age, sex, color, creed, or nationality”).

In practical, in sociological terms, how do we reward our mothers’ efforts?

Our goal, in the pledge of the Los Angeles chapter: “At the top of the hill stands COLLEGE GRADUATION and A SUCCESSFUL CAREER.”

We embody the progress of a people, and not least—definitely not least—the success of its maligned family life. Our mothers advance the ongoing project of validating the Negro Woman, proving her a lady, a responsible member of her community, an exemplary wife rearing exemplary children.

For those children placed in white schools by the mother and her husband, Jack and Jill becomes a racial enrichment program, a guarantee that our social lives do not depend on the favor of white schoolmates and their parents.

—

At times I’m impatient with younger blacks who insist they were or would have been better off in black schools, at least from pre-K through middle school. They had, or would have had, a stronger racial and social identity, an identity cleansed of suspicion, subterfuge, confusion, euphemism, presumption, patronization, and disdain. I have no grounds for comparison. The only schools I ever went to were white schools with small numbers of Negroes.

I’ve always held on to some vision that at Lab, at least through fifth grade, we were free to do our childhood tasks—learn to work and play, compete, collaborate in a space largely free of race markers. No, not “free”—a space that protected us from the burdens of adult race prejudice and consciousness. To a real extent, we were. But we were not protected from our teachers. Or our parents. We were not protected from the shocks of physical difference.

“When I came to Lab in second grade, I knew I was in a foreign world,” Denise told me. “The boys had bangs.”

“Denise,” I told her, “I’ve seen pictures of your Rosenwald nursery school class. More than half the kids look white.”

“But none of the boys had bangs, Margo. They had curls and waves. They did not have bangs.”

“Butch Dale’s hair was straight enough for bangs.”

“But he didn’t have bangs.”

We were not protected from our own fantasies. How I’d like to deny my first conscious memory of having my hair washed. I was sure, cheerfully sure, it would turn it blonde. “Get me out of this white doll / brown doll scenario!” I want to scream. “I’m better than this!”

Then I calm myself.
No one escapes her time and place. I repeat the words of my therapist: “A fantasy is a construction.” I give myself a Chekhovian moment: The generations that come after will not have to endure these shaming constructions
.

Those ugly stories you overheard or were taught by parents and grandparents—these were part of the curriculum, stories that gave the lie again and again to public declarations that if Negroes would just prove themselves worthy they would be welcome as equals. Parents and grandparents told you some white people would dislike you even more if you were clearly their equal. Here were examples from their own lives and from the lives of friends.

The University of Chicago professor who so resented a Negro graduate student’s challenge that he told her, “As long as I am in this department, you will never get your master’s degree.” (Aunt Vera transferred to Northwestern.)

The white Southern medical residents at a University of Chicago hospital who complained about a Negro doctor’s being on a fellowship at all, especially when he was allowed to enter the rooms of white female patients. (“Stay by me when we go on rounds,” the head doctor told my father. He did, and he completed his fellowship.)

The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair
. And as a result of these, a sense of perpetual violation.

But I have to turn my mind to other things.

Because it’s almost time. Whatever our race, color, or creed, my peers and I are getting ready to

Sidle

Slump

Pout

Pose

Sashay and foot-drag

Into adolescence.

Devious and careless

Feverish and slothful

Living in the moment that’s so often the wrong moment.

We’ll apply Clearasil to our pimples, start biting our fingernails, learn to use Kotex, then Tampax, say things like “It’s snowing down South” when a girl’s slip is hanging.

—

I have a few years to go, but I start to get involved—half conscript, half worshipper—when Denise starts listening to
Jam with Sam
on WGES weekend nights; when she persuades our mother to drive us both to a weekend showing of
The Girl Can’t Help It
(“Little Richard is excellent and Jayne Mansfield is a very good actress,” we assure her when she picks us up).

Denise will whip and twirl through the house, hold on to the broom closet to practice her dance moves, stack her new 45s on the upstairs record player.

She will cha-cha to “Quiet Village” and “Poinciana,” bop to “She was a foxy little mama with great big hips / Pretty long hair and pretty red lips!” She will croon, “I sit in my room looking out at the rain, / My tears are like crystal, they cover my windowpane.”

I will read her discarded issues of
Polly Pigtails, Calling All Girls, Mademoiselle
, and
Mad Magazine;
likewise her copies of
Seventeenth Summer
and
Mara, Daughter of the Nile
.

She will start going to Stormy’s Beauty Shop on 47th and South Park, near the Regal Theater, to get her hair straightened and styled. Mother’s friends go there or to Mister Paul’s. The beauticians wear pink dresses, and Stormy’s glossy black bob has a cobalt blue tinge. When she complains that the hair straightener stings, she will be told, “Beauty knows no pain, Denise.” The speaker is Marva Louis Spaulding, who’s been married to Joe Louis and featured in
Ebony
fashion spreads. Whose beauty is beyond our feverish hopes.

With Denise I will turn away from
The Mickey Mouse Club
, where she was Doreen, the best dancer with the cutest bangs, and I was Darlene, more chipper than perky, with long braids and lead roles in Disney serials. (When competing with Doreen/Denise was too taxing, I became little Karen, Disney’s version of Flossie Bobbsey. Ringlets on her head, Cubby by her side.)

I will start watching
American Bandstand
and parrot Denise’s opinion: Arlene and Kenny are the most plausible teens on this all-white show. Their hair is dark, curly, and almost greasy. They look laconic when they dance. The others don’t dress with any cool, and they can’t keep the beat.

Alone, I still read poetry, abandoned myself to the rhapsodies of Christina Rossetti, Sara Teasdale, and Elinor Wylie; tucked my aggressions into the discursive absurdities of “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” “Father William,” and “The Hunting of the Snark.” Until I stumbled onto a very different poem. It was in my
Modern American Poetry
. And its first line blasted through me.

Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room

Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable…

Revulsion/compulsion/revulsion/compulsion overcame me like the heavy beats of the broom handles of the fat black bucks who sagged and reeled and pounded on a table in a primordial Congo. From whence Negro Americans had come.

“Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, B
OOM
,”

A roaring, epic, rag-time tune

It was “The Congo,” by Vachel Lindsay, and I could not turn away from it, not that day, not for days after.

Then along that riverbank

A thousand miles

Tattooed cannibals danced in files

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

And “B
LOOD
” screamed the whistles and the fifes of the warriors,

“B
LOOD
” screamed the skull-faced, lean witch-doctors,

“Whirl ye the deadly voo-doo rattle,

Harry the uplands,

Steal all the cattle.”

It was how newspapers and television reporters talked about the Mau Mau in Kenya—a secret society of tribal warriors who murdered whites ruthlessly, then terrorized Africans who refused to join them.

The poem’s subtitle let me salvage some ironic distance: “A Study of the Negro Race.” Negro scholars like Du Bois and Woodson had done serious
studies
of our race. And now, in fact just as I encountered the poem, there were two Congos, both with educated young African leaders who were demanding independence from Belgium and from France. And their quest was supported by our own Dr. Ralph Bunche, United Nations leader and Nobel Prize winner.

In my frenzied readings aloud, I made sure to heap sarcasm on the section titles. “Their Basic Savagery,” I would say with scornful delight.

“Their Irrepressible High Spirits”! (Here I’d sneer.)

“The Hope of Their Religion”! (I was wearily disdainful.)

—

For the rest, I followed Vachel Lindsay’s directions, written in the margins.