Negroland: A Memoir (7 page)

•  “Ashy skin.” White sediment on the surface of brown skin that has gone unoiled for too long. Knees and elbows must be attended to. “Elbow grease” is not a metaphor.

SKIN COLOR

Ivory, cream, beige, wheat, tan, moccasin, fawn, café au lait, and the paler shades of honey, amber, and bronze are best. Sienna, chocolate, saddle brown, umber (burnt or raw), and mahogany work best with decent-to-good hair and even-to-keen features. In these cases, the woman’s wardrobe must feature subdued tones. Bright colors suggest that she is flaunting herself. Generally, for women, the dark skin shades like walnut, chocolate brown, black, and black with blue undertones are off-limits. Dark skin often suggests aggressive, indiscriminate sexual readiness. At the very least it calls instant attention to your race and can incite demeaning associations.

GRADES OF HAIR

1.
Dead
straight hair can be grown into thick, lustrous braids that stretch to the middle of the back, even to the waist.

2. Glossy hair with waves and curls: this evokes allusions to Moorish Spain and Mexico.

3. Tighter waves with a less shiny texture: this hair can be brushed almost straight but must be maintained with light hair cream. Humidity can make it rough in the back (the kitchen) and frizzy around the face. Apply quick light strokes with a hot comb.

4. Nappy hair, stage 1. Requires heavy hair cream daily and regular hot comb use. Usually does not grow past the shoulders.

5. Nappy hair, stage 2. Requires heavier and heavier applications of hair cream and constant hot comb use. Usually does not grow beyond the middle of the neck.

NOSES

The ones nobody wants are broad and flat with wide nostrils. Wide nostrils are never good, but a narrow tapering nose that ends in
flared
nostrils is acceptable, even alluring. An aquiline or hooked nose suggests American Indian ancestry. It can also be called Roman. Small, pert, upturned noses are invariably welcome.

THE JEFFERSON GIRLS

Do not have flat behinds, but theirs are cleanly shaped and not unduly full.

Neither Jefferson girl has one of the top three grades of hair.

Their mother works the hot comb and the curling iron through it. She oils it daily; besieged by rain or intense humidity, Negro hair reverts to bushy, nappy, or kinky textures. “Bushy” is the word used most; “nappy” and “kinky” are harsher, coarser words. Denise’s hair is worse than Margo’s by a few grades. On the other hand, when Margo was very young, she was silly enough to believe her hair would turn blonde when her mother washed it. Fortunately, she aired this belief, and it died a clean, brisk death. Hair oil can stain ribbons and headband flowers and the inside rims of pale embellished straw hats worn to church and dress events if your hands aren’t clean when you put them on and take them off.

Mrs. Jefferson has a prominent Roman nose. Denise has a small, trim nose; more decorous than pert. Though Margo’s nostrils flare, they do not flare in a way an unsympathetic observer could fixate on.

Both girls have full but not extravagantly full mouths. They’d prefer smaller, narrower ones, but the basic shape is clean.

No one could justly call them big-lipped.

THE JEFFERSON GIRLS AND BALLET

The elder, Denise, has a more than respectable arch, even by the demanding standards of her Scottish ballet teacher, Edna McRae. Their father’s high curved arch is a thing of beauty, which his daughters study with acquisitive rapture when he stretches out on the bed after a long day at the office. Margo and her mother have flat feet.

We see every dance company that comes to Chicago: the Royal Ballet, the New York City Ballet, the Royal Danish Ballet, the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, American Ballet Theatre. We pore over ballet books:
A Candle for St. Jude, The Classic Ballet: Basic Technique and Terminology
, tales of
les petits rats
, the young Paris Opera Ballet students, profiles and exquisite pictures of major dancers. Alicia Markova, Margot Fonteyn, Alexandra Danilova, Maria Tallchief, Alicia Alonzo…

In the catalogue of physical features rendering Negroes unfit or at least unsuited for ballet, muscled, un-slender bodies figure as prominently as flat feet. There are exceptions, and we repeat their names eagerly, doggedly, dutifully.

Janet Collins, Metropolitan Opera Ballet

Raven Wilkinson, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo

The skin of Raven Wilkinson radiated sufficient pallor to justify her inclusion in a band of twenty-four sylphs haunting the glades of a Europe basking in ethereal melancholy, their bodies mere extensions of luminous white tulle and satin. Janet Collins had an epidermal undertone that ruined visual and narrative consistency onstage. She had been accepted by the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo on condition that she paint her face and limbs white. She refused, packed her leotards and tights, and left the building. Instead she set her feet on the roads that led to race- and myth-driven musicals (
Run, Little Chillun’, The Swing Mikado, Out of This World
) and to modern dance, where small groups of Negroes and Asians performed on the stages of Ys and civic auditoriums, often beside those ethnic Caucasians (Jews and Catholics) less likely to have found their way to ballet.

She was thirty-four years old in 1951, when the Metropolitan Opera Ballet selected her to embody heroines in operatic interludes set among French gypsies, Ethiopian royals, and biblical Semites. It was groundbreaking, though everyone knew the Metropolitan Opera Ballet was not a first-rate company. It was an auxiliary, a subsidiary. (
They always wait till you’re past your prime
, our parents and our Negro journalists complain.
The Metropolitan Opera didn’t invite Marian Anderson to make her debut there till 1954. She was the gypsy fortune-teller in
A Masked Ball
and she was fifty-eight years old
.)

Denise was seven in 1951 when she told our mother she wanted to take ballet lessons. Serious ones. Till then, she spent her time at the Beatrice Betts Ballet School playing with friends and fluffing up her tutu. Mother consulted artistic Negro friends who knew about the best white teachers and who among them was most likely to take a non-white student.

Your daughter has real talent
, says Miss Edna McRae, whose studio was downtown in the Fine Arts Building.
Still, considering onstage convention and offstage prejudice, she will probably have to dance with an all-Negro modern company like Katherine Dunham’s
. We aren’t ashamed of Katherine Dunham, we’re proud; she is a worthy dance pioneer with a university education, and not a minor university either: the University of Chicago, our mother’s school. Her Caribbean and African dances are based on her PhD research into the culture and folklore of those regions. “Folklore” is the word generally used. It suggests tradition, but it’s a few tiers below “civilization.” No matter how much formal training they have, no matter how hard they study and practice, these dancers/performers are enacting rituals many in their audience believe are driven more by biology than by art. Why, then, with some of the best ballet training Chicago possessed, would Denise choose to do what most Americans believed it was her body’s natural inclination to do? Especially since her teacher warned that it was probably her only option?

Denise has a talent and an arch. Her feet curve becomingly in pointe shoes.

THE JEFFERSON GIRLS AND BEAUTY

Denise’s skin is burnt sienna. Margo and her mother are café au lait, and the blue veins in their hands can be seen by anyone. Which, on a timeline stretching back to post-Reconstruction, would secure their membership in the best Negro churches and clubs; ensure their presence at events like the 1930s dinner dance given by a Washington, D.C., men’s club that called itself the What Good Are We’s. “Don’t bring any brown-skinned girls,” his host told their burnt sienna bachelor father, who was doing his internship in Baltimore. And he did not. No ladies browner than Margo and her mother were present that night, and their numbers were scant. Pale beige, cream, and ivory, even alabaster, were on abundant, radiant display.

When they watch the Miss America pageant, her daughters do not find Mrs. Jefferson lacking in any way.

“Mama, you could be a Miss America!” they cry one morning when she picks them up from a rapturous night spent watching the contest at their grandmother’s. Their mother’s laugh deflects them, as does their grandmother’s smile. (
These children know so little about the world. We won’t lecture and disillusion them, but we won’t encourage this line of thinking; we’ll change the subject
.) The two of them know exactly who is beautiful, who is pretty, and who is
attractive
by the national beauty standard. “Attractive” is a word for women who’ve made the most of their assets, but whose assets aren’t enough to make them pretty or beautiful. They know what clothes play up their strengths, what makeup mutes their flaws. Mother considers herself attractive. She and Grandma believe that most Negro women are considered, at best, attractive.

A few years later, still faithfully watching the pageant, Denise and Margo feel acute disappointment when Miss Hawaii, who clearly has native ancestry, does not place among the finalists. She’s named Miss Congeniality instead. And Mother decides it’s high time we know the story of her sorority sister Geraldine.

Geraldine was a beauty by all objective standards. We’d seen her at Mother’s club meetings, her keen symmetrical features, her gleaming hair with waves like Jane Russell’s, her Mexican-brown complexion. Geraldine had won the Cap and Gown beauty contest when she was a student at the University of Chicago. She was a serious young woman, so she hadn’t campaigned for it; she’d been nominated by a male friend who hadn’t asked her permission. Still, she won the most votes.

And then university officials realized that she was one of their Negro students and had her disqualified.

She’d never wanted it, she always said.

And she never forgave them for taking it from her.

Equal opportunity should mean that an audience of Americans would be ready, willing, and eager when you, an unimpeachably outstanding Negro woman, stepped forth to stir, win, command their admiration.

—

Truly heroic women achieved fame by putting the needs of others first, however. This demanded unceasing fortitude and the renunciation of all things lighthearted. This demanded the renunciation of vanity.

Two large elderly women in large antique chairs take up the October 1955 cover of
Ebony
magazine. Their suits have straight, undeviating, and ankle-shielding skirts. Small, inadequate hats sit on their heads. They have no interest in the pink corsages pinned to their shoulders. One is a Negro, and she will never be on the cover of
Life
magazine; the other is a Caucasian who has been there twice: She is making a gracious and noteworthy guest appearance at
Ebony
. Mary McLeod Bethune is the Negro, broad and stout. Lanky, big-boned Eleanor Roosevelt is the Caucasian. When attractive women in suits cross their legs at the knee, we see a shapely column of thigh draped in fabric, then a second, bared column of flesh. These two women seem to have no legs. They have wide laps. Their hands rest there, as do the troubles of the world.

Surely they look like this because they have been working day and night, years, struggling to defeat the forces of prejudice and ignorance. Working to prove that people like us deserve our rights. They have renounced the feminine privileges we are learning at our mothers’ shapely knees. Still, our mothers want us to honor Mrs. Bethune. Without such women, they say, we would not have the opportunity to be nice Negro girls whose mothers are ladies.

Another Negro History Week Lesson

Mary Jane McLeod was born in a small log cabin to hardworking farmers who had been slaves. With the help of their seventeen children, the McLeods of South Carolina farmed their five acres diligently. Some days Mrs. McLeod earned extra money by cooking for the family of her former master. She would often bring little Mary along on these visits, and it happened that one day the nine-year-old, bored perhaps, or lonely, wandered out to the playhouse, where the white children were studying. Her eyes swept over a host of unfamiliar objects—pencils, slates, books, magazines; as her hand reached out to claim one, a voice said, “You can’t read that—put it down,” then added more kindly, “I will show you some pictures over here.” It was too late. The black child had been mortified—into ambition.

Intensely ambitious and smart little girls from humble backgrounds need the protective coloration of cheerful spirits, and religious faith. They must work unceasingly when they win scholarships to Negro seminaries and white Bible colleges; they must make clear that no task is too lowly, no request unwelcome. A plain and cheerful face is useful too: it helps endear such a child to all female schoolteachers (Negro and white) intent on promoting the doctrines of modesty and humility; it can shield her from any male instructors who might be gripped by desires they have been encouraged to act out with colored girls.

Mary made herself a favorite at every school she attended. She would boast, in later years, that she was of pure, undefiled African stock, descended on her mother’s side from a nation of female rulers. In early years she did not boast. She practiced deference, duty, and decorum. And she made sure to excel.

She longed to go to Africa as a missionary. The Baptist Mission Service informed her that they had no place in Africa for a Negro missionary, so she returned to the American South and became a missionary to young black girls threatened by poverty, ignorance, and degradation. She built a matriarchal kingdom from the ramshackle materials of Negro life in Florida.

—

In the year 1904 Mary McLeod Bethune (by then a wife and mother) opened her Daytona Educational and Industrial Training Institute on a former garbage site, in a cabin scrubbed and swept clean for five little girls who would learn reading, writing, cooking, sewing, and health and hygiene; would be converted from indigence to competence and be offered propriety in place of promiscuity. Her husband was not especially supportive; three years later they parted ways.