Negroland: A Memoir (5 page)

In 1948 Du Bois will offer a stern, stringent critique of the Talented Tenth to a proud organization of its leading professional men. Invoking Marx to the members of the Boulé, he will urge on them “
a willingness to sacrifice and plan for…economic revolution in industry and a just distribution of wealth.” He had always known, he said, that a Talented Tenth might become no more than “
a group of selfish, self-indulgent, well-to-do men whose basic interest in solving the Negro problem was personal; personal freedom and use of the world” with no “arousing care as to what became of the mass of American Negroes.”

Nine years later a black Marxist and sociologist Du Bois has mentored will turn his challenge into verbal cudgels.

—

It is 1957, and Chicago sociologist E. Franklin Frazier has published
Black Bourgeoisie
. The title says it all. Despite its longings, the Talented Tenth is still black, and for all its class pretensions, it is merely bourgeois. Its members have scant financial or political power, so they delude themselves with compensatory boasts and rivalries. They have abandoned their role as responsible race leaders and exemplars; they disdain the masses and avoid them as much as possible.

They are strivers, not aristocrats; arrivistes with no real point of arrival. Their inferiority complex shows itself in a “
pathological struggle for status within the Negro world and craving for recognition in the white world.” Double consciousness has been reduced to imitation and compensation.

Frazier refuses the role of traitor. Instead, his subjects’ shock and anger fuels his confidence. As he will later note with dry satisfaction, “
It appears that middle-class Negroes were able to see themselves for the first time and, as they feared, in the way they appeared to outsiders.”

It wasn’t pretty.

Nevertheless, we of Negroland played our part in the civil rights movement that was unfurling and erupting. We were in the courts, in the press, on the streets and freedom buses; we were leaders, followers, and financial supporters. By the late sixties, leftist politics and cultural nationalism had given the once-shunned nomenclature “black” a deep and lustrous sheen. Black Power, Black Beauty, Black Studies, the Black Man and (as bulwark and adornment) the Black Woman. We adapted, with some internal dissent. And we profited.

—

In the 1970s white society scurries to include us in its ranks. We become mayors and members of Congress; journalists at white periodicals and TV stations; partners or at least entry-level lawyers at white firms; we trade bonds on Wall Street; we work at corporations (usually as directors of human resources).

But now a tide of political conservatism is rising. Likewise a marketable form of ethnic pride is being conceived. One result is a series of up-with-aristocracy books and articles about minority groups. A prolific writer of Anglo-Saxon ancestry named Stephen Birmingham leads the charge with
Our Crowd: The Great Jewish Families of New York
(1967),
Real Lace: America’s Irish Rich
(1973), and
Certain People: America’s Black Elite
(1977, with a mahogany-brown cover, no less). Certain of his subjects find his sources questionable and his tone familiar.

Fortunately, a year before, one of our own, a longtime black society columnist, produces a bicentennial coffee table book celebrating our history from the seventeenth to the late twentieth century. It is a gold-colored book. It is
Black Society
by Gerri Major: “
I have lived it for over eighty years,” she proclaims, “and before me my family lived it.” (For decades she chronicled its doings in black magazines and newspapers.) Her declaration of independence? “The miscegenated family tree has been supplanted by stocks, bonds, bank accounts, real estate and/or high professional standing. All proudly proclaiming their Black identity.” They are not chimerical and they are not anachronistic.

Major’s book is read almost exclusively by the black society she writes of. It is celebratory but not grandiose—a pleasing bicentennial artifact.

The twentieth century has just one year left when an insider’s account of black society finds a mainstream white publisher and attracts white media attention that verges on excitement. If Major was a chatty chronicler, Lawrence Otis Graham is a sprightly gossip in the Clamorgan mode: he writes largely for white magazines and is considered something of an upstart by old-line blacks. His 1999
Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class
is a cross-country social whirl of interviews and personal anecdotes. Graham chronicles our old ways, and makes sure to certify their current value with the status symbols of integration;
“exclusive” and “prestigious” schools and neighborhoods; “impeccable,” even “inspiring” professional credentials; friendships and alliances with “the WASP elite” and “top celebrities.”

—

But I belong to an earlier generation, that of the fifties and sixties: it’s us and our predecessors I want to write of. Most whites knew little about us; only a few cared to know. We were taught that we embodied the best that was known and thought in—and of—Negro life. We were taught to resent the relative lack of attention our achievements garnered. We were taught that we were better than the whites who looked down on us—that we were better than most whites, period. But that this would rarely if ever be acknowledged by white people, with all their entitlement. Not the entitlement a government provides, but the kind history bestows. This is your birthright, says history.

Privilege is provisional. Privilege can be denied, withheld, offered grudgingly and summarily withdrawn. Entitlement is impervious to the kinds of verbs that modify privilege. Our people have had to work, scrape for privilege, gobble it down when those who would snatch it away weren’t looking.

Keep a close watch.

March 6, 1944, Tombstone, Arizona

My mother had joined my father at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where many Negro units were stationed during the war. The army was still segregated, so all facilities, from civilian quarters to hospitals, were built in duplicate. One for white army personnel, one for Negro
.

The base hospital where my father served was the largest Negro hospital in the United States and the only one in the army to be staffed and commanded by Negroes. This relative independence did not hold elsewhere in the military. As Chicagoan Welton Taylor
*
1
writes in his memoir
, Two Steps from Glory: A World War II Liaison Pilot Confronts Jim Crow and the Enemy in the South Pacific:
“Virtually all Negro field artillery officers, including those sent to Fort Huachuca, were forced to serve under white senior officers and battery commanders. The Army kept Negroes ‘in their place’ no matter where they were.”

My father’s rank was captain. The Fort Huachuca hospital staff included friends of his from Provident Hospital in Chicago. On March 6, 1944, my mother was three months pregnant with my sister, Denise. This is what she wrote to Deborah Joseph Raines, her dear friend from Delta and the University of Chicago:

Dearest Debbie,

The process of your domestication sounds wonderful. I don’t half mind mine either. Since I’ve been out here, cooking and fluffing up his pillows, Ronald’s gotten rather Taft-ish
*
2
—and he, as poor as the snake who didn’t have a pit to hiss in! (Did I say something)?

A clerical job is not for his wife. Red Cross would be OK, but I’ve worked hard enough and will have to scuffle again soon enough, so that I should gather ye rosebuds while I may (his remarks). Despite your earlier efforts to send me here, I’m glad I stayed as long as I did or we wouldn’t have a thing to show for being married but love, and we’ve got that anyway. Altho’ I’ve bought nothing for myself, and there’s nothing to spend money for other than just living, that’s so high.

However I’m glad I’m here at this time, which has been the worst time for my little playmate. Surprisingly enough, he is doing very well, for which I flatter myself and my presence…

You know, of course, that this past week we’ve been congratulating three Lt. Col’s and a full Col.—all well deserved. I’m just mad that we didn’t get in on the political-move-gravy train. Nothing for the lower-ranking officers…

We had a letter from Joe Mitchell (P.H., x-ray) in Australia.
*
3
His wife is back in Los Angeles with her family and working in the P.O. Sparky Matthews’ family is visiting him and are temporarily next door.
*
4
It’s a relief to talk with someone who hasn’t been beaten down to the narrowness of most of the gals here. Tombstone now boasts thirteen Negro families. We hear a couple of malcontents have begun to fret over the “Negro Problem of Tombstone,” probably because we’re all obviously used to more than any of them—else they wouldn’t be here.

We play pennyante, rotating houses each Sat. night, and Ronald and I are $12 ahead. In the barracks morale is so low and work so scarce that thousands pass hands in a month. One fellow has made $2500 in poker and blackjack in two months. Of course, there are smaller games in the barracks too. Last I heard, Shaw
*
5
was dealing deuces wild…

Saw
The Uninvited
last night and enjoyed it very much. No suggestion of war, and tho’ the plot is impossible it’s so well done that it keeps you with the tenseness you had at
Rebecca
and
Wuthering Heights
. Saw also
Jane Eyre
and didn’t mind Orson Welles at all as the critics did. Luther Adler, to me, brought the same storminess and moodiness to the role. It’s different in parts from the play tho’. Also, Lena’s latest where she does “Brazilian Boogie,” is nice. Didn’t like one of her outfits, nor Hazel Scott’s…

Did our little girl Frances something make the Pyramid Club? I hear Richardson
*
6
is supposed to be engaged after a fashion. Is it Florence Jace?
*
7
I understand he was rather fond of her.

I hear also in these parts that the Horace Caytons may be divorced, but no one has nerve enough to ask for a statement for the grapevine press. And he’s supposed to be squiring Delores Renfroe and Florence Draper.
*
8

Ole Ronald is 160&½ pounds of fineness now and I am still fighting avoirdupois. I think we’re both quite glad we’re married to each other. Tell Hertha
*
9
I wish her all the happiness I have, ’cause that’s as much as anyone could wish. Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro. That’s something, huh? Love to Taft and your folk.

Fondly,

Irma

P.S. So nice of you to call Mother. She enjoyed your thoughtfulness.

*
1
Welton Taylor is a research microbiologist. He taught at the medical schools of the University of Illinois and Northwestern.

*
2
Taft C. Raines was a surgeon on the staff at Provident Hospital. He was round and full to my father’s thin and bony.

*
3
Joseph Mitchell was a radiologist at Provident.

*
4
Henry “Sparky” Matthews was an internist at Provident. His wife, Harryetta Matthews, became one of my mother’s best friends.

*
5
Maurice Shaw was an ob-gyn at Provident.

*
6
James Richardson was an ophthalmologist on staff at Provident.

*
7
A Delta pledgee, my mother thinks.

*
8
Horace Cayton was a sociologist.
Black Metropolis
, which he co-authored with St. Clair Drake, would be published the next year. His wife—they married and divorced twice—was Irma Jackson, a social worker and WAC officer. The two women he was said to be squiring were lively Chicago “fashionables.”

*
9
Another Delta, my mother thinks.

i

Are we rich?

Mother raises those plucked, deep-toned eyebrows that did such good, expressive work for women in the 1950s. Lift the penciled arch by three to four millimeters and you had bemused doubt, blatant disdain, or disapproval just playful enough to lure the speaker into more error. Mother’s lips form a small, cool smile that mirrors her eyebrow arch. She places a small, emphatic space between each word—“Are We Rich?”—then adds, “Why do you ask?”

I ask because I have been told that day: “Your family must be rich.” A schoolmate told me and I faltered, then stalled—flattered and ashamed to be. We are supposed to eschew petty snobberies at the University of Chicago Laboratory School: intellectual superiority is our task. Other fathers are doctors. Other mothers dress well and drive stylish cars. Wondering what stirred that question has left me anxious and a little queasy.