Negroland: A Memoir (6 page)

Mother says: “We are not rich. And it’s impolite to ask anyone that question. Remember that. If you’re asked again, you should just say ‘we’re comfortable.’ ” I take her words in and push on, because my classmate has asked a second question.

Are we upper class?

Mother’s eyebrows settle now. She sits back in the den chair and pauses for effect. I am about to receive general instruction in the liturgies of race and class.

“We’re considered upper-class Negroes and upper-middle-class Americans,” Mother says. “But most people would like to consider us Just More Negroes.”

ii

“D. and J. asked me if we know their janitor, Mr. Johnson. They think he lives near us.” (They had spoken of him so affectionately that I wished I could say I knew our janitor that well and that he liked me as much as Mr. Johnson seemed to like them. They had rights of intimacy with their janitor that I lacked.)

I have to stop here, though. My policy in these pages is to use initials when I recall the mishaps or misdeeds of my peers. Their words and acts belong to me; their names belong to them. I know initials look silly in dialogue that aims for realism. But I didn’t want to use their names. They were my dear friends—one from sixth grade on, the other from our twenties on—and we grew into talking honestly about these matters. They were twins and now they’re dead, killed by cancer. I didn’t want them to be so starkly flawed here. But for now, they must be. And so:

“Debi and Judi asked me if we know their janitor, Mr. Johnson. They think he lives near us.”

“It’s a big neighborhood,” Mother says. “Why would we know their janitor? White people think Negroes all know each other, and they always want you to know their janitor. Do they want to know our laundryman?”

That would be Wally, a smiling, big-shouldered white man who delivers crisply wrapped shirts and cheerful greetings to our back door every week.

“Good morning, Mrs. Jefferson,” he says. “Good morning, Doctor. Hello, girls.”

“Hello, Wally,” we chime back from the breakfast table. Then, one weekend afternoon, I was in the kitchen with Mother doing something minor and domestic, like helping unpack groceries, when she said slowly, not looking at me: “I saw Wally at Sears today. I was looking at vacuum cleaners. And I looked up and saw him—” (Here she paused for the distancing Rodgers and Hammerstein irony,
“across a crowded room.”
) “He was turning his head away, hoping he wouldn’t have to speak. Wally the laundryman was trying to cut me.” If this had been drama, she would have paused and done something with a telling prop—one of the better brands of an everyday food, or a nice-looking piece of flatware. Then she said, “And I don’t even shop at Sears except for appliances.”

Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it
—the right, in this case, to snub or choose to speak kindly to your laundryman in a store where he must shop for clothes and you shop only for appliances.

Still, Wally went on delivering laundry with cheerful deference, and we responded with cooler—but not intrusively cool—civility.

Was there no Negro laundry to do Daddy’s shirts as well or better? Our milkman was a Negro. So were our janitor, our plumber, our carpenter, our upholsterer, our caterer, and our dressmaker. Though I don’t remember all their names, I know their affect was restful. Comfortable. If a Negro employee did his work in a sloppy or sullen way (and it did happen), Mother and Daddy had two responses. One was your standard folk wisecrack, something like “Well, some of us
are
lazy, quiet as it’s kept.”
Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it:
in this case, a spotless race reputation.

The second response was disquieting. “Some Negroes prefer to work for white people. They don’t resent their status in the same way.”

All right then, let’s say you are a Negro cleaning woman, on your knees at this moment, scrubbing the bathtub with its extremely visible ring of body dirt, because whoever bathed last night thought,
How nice. I don’t have to clean the tub because Cleo / Melba / Mrs. Jenkins comes tomorrow!
Tub done, you check behind the toilet (a washcloth has definitely fallen back there); the towels are scrunched, not hung on the racks, and you’ve just come from the children’s bedroom, where sheets have to be untangled and almost throttled into shape before they can be sorted for the wash.

Would you rather look at the people you do this for and think:
I will never be in their place if the future is like the past
. Or would you rather look at your employers and think:
Well, if I’d been able to get an education like Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson, if I hadn’t had to start doing housework at fifteen to help my family out when we moved up here from Mississippi, then maybe I could be where they are
.

Whose privilege would you find easier to bear?

Who are “you”? How does your sociological vita—race or ethnicity, class, gender, family history—affect your answer?

Whoever you are, reader, please understand that neither my parents, my sister, nor I ever left a dirty bathtub for Mrs. Blake to clean. (My sister and I called her Mrs. Blake. Mother called her Blake.) She was broad, not fat. She had very short, very straightened hair that she patted flat and put behind her ears. When it got humid in the basement, where the washer and dryer were, or in the room where she ironed clothes, short pieces of hair would defy hot comb and oil to stick up and out. We never made direct fun of her hair—we would have been punished. But we regularly mocked Negro hair that blatantly defied rehabilitation. Mrs. B.’s voice was Southern South Side: leisurely and nasal. Now that I’ve given my adult attention to the classic blues singers, I can say she had the weighted country diction of Ma Rainey and the short nasal tones of Sippie Wallace. Vowels rubbed down, endword consonants dropped or muffled.

Mother made it clear that we were never to leave our beds unmade when Mrs. Blake was coming. She was not there to pick up after us. When we were old enough, we stripped our own beds each week and folded the linen before putting it in the hamper for her to remove and wash.

Mother’s paternal grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt had been in service, so she was sensitive to inappropriate childish presumption.

Mrs. Blake ate her lunch (a hot lunch that Mother had made from dinner leftovers) in the kitchen. When her day was done, Mr. Blake and their daughters drove to our house. He sent his daughters to the front door to pick her up. They had the same initials we did. Mildred and Diane. Margo and Denise. Mother brought us to the front door to exchange hellos with them. Sometimes Mrs. Blake left carrying one or two bags of neatly folded clothes. Did Mildred and Diane enjoy unfolding, surveying, and fitting themselves into our used ensembles and separates?

“Do we have Indian blood?” I ask.

“Why are you asking?” Mother answers.

I want to know, after two weeks as a Potawatomi tribe member at the Palos Park summer camp in the Illinois Forest Preserves, being led down foot and bridle paths, sharing space with deer, birds, amphibians, and small mammals.

According to an official history of Palos Park village, Indians “roamed the hills” there in the eighteenth century, along with French explorers, traders, and soldiers, but the first white man to “settle” Palos was James Paddock, in 1834. Now, some 120 years later, Denise and Margo Jefferson have become two of the first Negro girls to attend the Palos Park camp alongside the descendants of white settlers.

And one of those descendants had asked if I had Indian blood. When I said I didn’t know whether I did or not, she scanned my face and said, “You must. Ask your mother when she comes to pick you up.”

On the last day of camp the little descendant stood beside me as Mother emerged from her car. Cotton piqué rose-and-white-striped dress. Light brown skin. A Claudette Colbert cap of dark hair. Beneath her black sunglasses a hooked nose asserted itself. The little descendant turned to me, nodded, and whispered, “I told you, you have Indian blood. Ask your mother on the way home.”

Why should this be information I’m denied? It would be exciting to be something other than just Negro. I wait till we get home, till Denise and I have made our way through talk of cabinmates and counselors, hikes and canoe trips, through the success, achieved once more, by our normality. Then I ask my question and Mother sighs.

“Ye-sss”—drawn out to telegraph reluctance—“we do have
some
Indian blood. But I get so
tired
of Negroes always talking about their Indian blood. And
so
tired of white people always asking about it.” Here’s an unexpected similarity between Negroes and whites: the slightly pathetic need to believe we have Indian blood, or at least, through camp rituals, cultural kinship rights.

The next summer a full-blooded Indian comes to the camp. Denise and I take her up, enjoying her sweet manner and her dark, shining waist-length braids. Mysteriously, on the last day of camp, no one arrives to take her home. We volunteer our mother.

L. gets into the backseat with us and tells Mother where she lives. The three of us grow quiet as Mother drives, drives, and drives. Finally we arrive at a shabby group of apartment buildings. No trees, no trimmed shrubbery. We don’t hug, but we say goodbye till next summer. L. gets out of the car, turns and walks toward one of the big ugly housing project buildings. She has on a rust-colored shirt and the same jeans she’s worn every day at camp. Mother starts the car and speeds away. None of us says anything about L.

The next summer, neither she nor any other recognizable Indian appears at Palos Park. Another Negro does, though. R. arrives a few days after the rest of us. He’s in my age group, he’s a little bit chubby, and he wears glasses, not as thick as mine. He’s definitely browner than I am, by several shades. He’s dark brown. I notice how carefully his blue jean cuffs are rolled—folded up and ironed—and how just-from-the-package his navy and white shirt looks with its crisp, three-button collar. I know he has bad hair because it’s been shaved so close to his scalp.

At the end of the week my counselor takes me aside. Can I help R. fit in better? she wants to know. Can I talk to him? Everyone is still calling him “the new kid.” I’m mortified. I hate it when I’m supposed to be having fun and Race singles me out for special chores and duties. I will, I tell her, making myself sound agreeable. And I do. I can see the two of us even now, me and him, making trite, labored conversation. Neither of us smiling.

He leaves my mind after that. We had no more encounters. But here’s what I want to know. Why wasn’t Phillip asked to talk to R.? Because Phillip was a Negro too, and he was there for those two weeks. (Denise had graduated to the four-week Camp Martin Johnson, an interracial camp where she and a cluster of family friends established their own in-group.) Phillip was a boy, so he should have been asked to talk to Ronnie. Phillip was my friend; our parents were dear friends. Phillip had Negro hair, but it was curly, frizzy hair no one would mind patting. Phillip had pale olive skin and crisp, neatly tailored features.

“Phillip should have been asked to talk to Ronnie!” I exclaim years—decades—later, telling the story to a white friend.

“The counselors didn’t read Phillip as Negro,” Elizabeth says. She’s seen a picture of us standing with our mothers in Washington Park. “Phillip settled into the landscape of whiteness.”

Yes
. We map it out. Maybe the counselors never even debated the matter. But if they did, they must have reasoned that R. would be more comfortable talking to someone who looked more like him.

I feel a surge of grief when I think of him now. And inside that grief is guilt because I looked down on him. And inside that grief is shame. Because “looked down on him” is accurate, but not sufficient.

I dreaded him.

In Negroland we thought of ourselves as the Third Race, poised between the masses of Negroes and all classes of Caucasians. Like the Third Eye, the Third Race possessed a wisdom, intuition, and enlightened knowledge the other two races lacked. Its members had education, ambition, sophistication, and standardized verbal dexterity.

—If, as was said, too many of us ached, longed, strove to be be be be White White White White WHITE…

—If (as was said) many us boasted overmuch of the blood
des blancs
that for centuries had found blatant or surreptitious ways to flow, course, and trickle tepidly through our veins and arteries (cephalic, aortal, renal, femoral, jugular, subclavian, and superior mesenteric)…

—If we placed too high a value on the looks, manners, and morals called the birthright of the Anglo-Saxon…

White people wanted to be white just as much as we did. They worked just as hard at it. They failed just as often. They failed more often. But they could pass, so no one objected.

Denise and Margo wear matching woolen coats with Persian lamb collars. They tuck their hands into Persian lamb muffs. They are in a state of self-enchantment. They rarely wear matching clothes, but these ones make a statement. Denise and Margo are a matching set and a set piece. Their clothes are the rewards of immaculate girlhood: dresses of taffeta and velvet with lace collars, petticoats, ankle straps, pocketbooks and initialed handkerchiefs, seasonal gloves of cotton and kid, matching coats and muffs. Straw hats and headbands with flowers. Not a single flower, corsage style, but an oval row, like a bower.

The bower of girlhood. We don’t talk or laugh loudly in public. We don’t slouch. Our speech is crisp and unaccented. When our aunt Ruby, a primary-school teacher, visits from California, she has me put a penny in a bank each time I say “gee.” I enjoy it. I enjoy being irreproachable.

Beauty standards for girls are stringent in 1950s Negroland. Negro girls must be vigilant about their perceived deficiencies. Be ruthless. Catalogue and compensate.

•  Flat feet instead of high arches.

•  Obtrusive behinds that refuse to slip quietly into sheath dresses, subside, and stay put.