Negroland: A Memoir (11 page)

All third-grade classes take French with Monsieur Pillet. “Do you remember when he took a group of his students downtown to the Hilton to show us off to the MLA?” a Lab friend writes me years later. “My mother drove us.” I don’t remember our being shown off at the Conrad Hilton. I remember my terror as his mother drove me home afterward; at one point I could tell she wasn’t sure how to get to my neighborhood. She didn’t say anything, but I could tell, and I couldn’t give her directions. Finally, somehow, we reached streets I recognized and I could say, “We’re almost there,” and thank her with an air of cheer when I got out of the car. I couldn’t tell my parents I’d been afraid she’d never find our house.

—

Nothing highlighted our privilege more than the menace to it. Inside the race we were the self-designated aristocrats, educated, affluent, accomplished; to Caucasians we were oddities, underdogs and interlopers. White people who, like us, had manners, money, and education…But wait: “Like us” is presumptuous for the 1950s. Liberal whites who saw that we too had manners, money, and education lamented our caste disadvantage. Less liberal or non-liberal whites preferred not to see us in the private schools and public spaces of their choice. They had ready a bevy of slights: from skeptics the surprised glance and spare greeting; from waverers the pleasantry, eyes averted; from disdainers the direct cut. Caucasians with materially less than us were given license by Caucasians with more than them to subvert and attack our privilege.

Caucasian privilege lounged and sauntered, draped itself casually about, turned vigilant and commanding, then cunning and devious. We marveled at its tonal range, its variety, its largesse in letting its humble share the pleasures of caste with its mighty. We knew what was expected of us. Negro privilege had to be circumspect: impeccable but not arrogant; confident yet obliging; dignified, not intrusive.

Early Summer, 1956

Two Negro parents and two Negro daughters stand at a hotel desk in Atlantic City. This is the last stop on their road trip: after Montreal, Quebec City, and New York, the plan is to lounge on the beach and stroll the boardwalk. It’s midday, and guests saunter through the lobby in resort wear. The Caucasian clerk in his brown uniform studies the reservation book, looking puzzled as he traces the list with his finger.

“You said Mr. and Mrs. Jefferson…”

“Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson,” says my father.

The clerk turns the page, studies the list again, running his eyes and his index finger slowly up and down. Just before he turns it back again, he stops. “Oh, here you are, Doc. The hotel is so crowded this week. We had to change your room.”

Trailing their daughters, the father and mother follow the uniformed bellboy into the elevator. It stops a few floors up; they get out; he leads them to the end of a long hall then around a corner, unlocks the door, and puts their suitcases just inside a small room, which leads into another small room. We’re looking out on a parking lot.

When the bellboy leaves, our father goes into the larger small room without saying anything. He stopped talking when the clerk’s finger reached the bottom of the first page. “Unpack your towels and swimsuits,” our mother orders. “Read or play quietly till we go to the beach.” She follows our father into the other room and shuts the door.

We unpack quickly so she won’t be annoyed when she comes back. Just what is going on? All the other hotels had our reservations. Mother has said that a lot of white people don’t like to call Negroes “Doctor.”

At the beach we settle on our new towels and fondle the sand. Our parents, Dr. and Mrs. Jefferson, sit on their own blanket talking in low voices. Mother never swims, but our father loves to. Today, he takes us to the water’s edge and watches us go in and come out.

It’s getting cooler, it’s late afternoon; time to fold the towels neatly, put them in the beach bag, and return to the hotel. “Take your baths,” our mother says, but only after she has taken a hotel facecloth and soap bar to the lines on the bottom of the tub that don’t wash away.

“Where are we going for dinner?” I ask. “What should we wear?”

“We’re eating here,” Mother answers.

“What about the hotel dining room?”

“We’re ordering room service and eating here,” she says in her implacable voice. “And we’re leaving tomorrow.”

Denise speaks up for both of us:

“We just got here. We didn’t get to stay long at the beach. Why can’t we eat in the hotel dining room?”

We resent the bad mood that has come over our parents. We want the beach and we want the boardwalk we’ve been promised since the trip began.

Mother pauses, then addresses herself and us. “This is a prejudiced place. What kind of service would we get in that restaurant? Look at these shabby rooms. Pretending they couldn’t find the reservation. We’re leaving tomorrow. And your father will tell them why.”

Our father has not smiled since the four of us walked into the lobby and stood at the desk as the clerk turned us into Mr. and Mrs. Negro Nobody with their Negro children from somewhere in Niggerland.

The next morning we are told to sit on the lobby couch while our parents check out; we don’t hear what our father says, or if he says anything.

We drive back to Chicago, an American family returning home from the kind of vacation successful American families have. We’d stayed at the Statler Hilton in New York and eaten in their restaurant. We’d pummeled and pounced on the bolsters of the Château Frontenac in Quebec. When Daddy asked strangers in Montreal for directions, their answers were always accurate and polite. Only Atlantic City went wrong. In the car our parents reproach themselves for not doing more research, consulting friends on the East Coast before taking the risk.

—

Such treatment encouraged privileged Negroes to see our privilege as more than justified: It was hard-won and politically righteous, a boon to the race, a source of compensatory pride, an example of what might be achieved. In the privacy of an all-Negro world, Negro privilege could lounge and saunter too, show off its accoutrements and lay down the law. Regularly denounce Caucasians, whose behavior toward us, and all dark-skinned people, proved they did not morally deserve
their
privilege. We had the moral advantage; they had the assault weapons of “great civilization” and “triumphant history.” Ceaselessly, we chronicled our people’s achievements. Ceaselessly, we denounced our people’s failures.

Too many of us just aren’t trying. No ambition. No interest in education. You don’t have to turn your neighborhood into a slum just because you’re poor
. Negroes like that made it hard for the rest of us. They held us back. We got punished for their bad behavior.

1956, a Month After Our Trip

Professionals and small businessmen live on one end of our block. At the other end of the block is Betty Ann, somebody’s daughter, we don’t know whose. She has lots of short braids on her head, fastened with red, yellow, and green plastic barrettes. She wears red nail polish and keeps it on till it’s nothing but tiny chips. I beg to be allowed to wear red nail polish outside, and not just when I dress up in Mother’s old clothes. No, comes the answer; red nail polish on children is cheap.

In the summer Betty Ann saunters up and down the block letting the backs of her shoes flap against her heels. When she finds something ridiculous she folds her arms and goes
Oooo-oooo-OOOo, Uh-un-UNNNh
. When she laughs she bends over at the waist and shuffles her feet. Denise and I start to do this at home. “Where did you pick
that
up?” our mother asks. “Don’t collapse all over yourself when you laugh.”

One afternoon we see Betty Ann playing double Dutch with two girls we’ve never met. They laugh a lot and say
“Girrlll…”
Then they start to turn the ropes.

Betty Ann’s the jumper. She leans in, arms bent, fists balled, gauging her point of entry.
Turn slap turn slap turn slap
and there she goes. Her knees pump, her feet quick-slap the ground, parrying the ropes till, fleet of foot and neat, she jumps out. Rapt and envious, we watch them take turns. Now Betty Ann doesn’t come down to play jacks with us or borrow Denise’s bike. She and her friends laugh and eat candy, and jump double Dutch. After a week of this we stroll down the block hoping they’ll ask us to join. After a few days they do. Denise isn’t good but she’s not bad: she swings the rope correctly and manages a few solid intervals before the ropes catch her. My swinging isn’t fast or steady enough, and the ropes reject my anxious feet in seconds. By the time I clamor for a third try, Betty Ann and her friends say no.

It’s not the no I remember, it’s their snickering scorn. I’m used to being the youngest and clumsiest when I play with Denise’s friends, but if one of them mocks or reproves me, another pets me to make up for it. If they act too badly, their mothers intervene. Or Denise does, and after a short quarrel and apology they resume play.

Not now. Betty Ann’s
Ooo ooh ooooo, Un-un-unhhhh
is definitive. Denise raises her voice:
We have to go home now
. Betty Ann and her friends laugh a little harder. Denise sets a slow pace, as if we’re leaving by choice. My father and uncle are waiting in front of the house: they’ve heard the laughter and looked down the block to see us in shamed, haughty retreat. I bask in their sympathy. Over dinner the adults concur: We will never play with Betty Ann again.
She and her friends are loud and coarse. They envy you girls. We moved to this neighborhood just five years ago. We may need to move again
.

—

I enter fourth grade that fall. Mrs. Pollak has a pleasant, calm manner and she’s our music teacher as well as our homeroom teacher. Once again we sing Stephen Foster songs and once again we sing “Swanee River.” I love that song, with its octave upswing on “Swa-NEE—Riv-EEEER.” One afternoon I march around the living room singing it as loudly as I had in class that day: “All the world is sad and dreary, everywhere I roam / Oh darkies! How my heart grows weary! / Far…”

“Margo,” comes Mother’s voice from the kitchen, followed swiftly by Mother herself. “What did you just sing?”

I repeat myself: “All the world is sad and dreary, everywhere I roam, / Oh dar—” She stops me flat as the
k
approaches.

“Margo, do you know what ‘darkies’ means?”

I do not.

“It’s an ugly word about us. People don’t use it anymore, but when they did, it meant the same thing as ‘nigger.’ ”

As I take that in, Mother fumes. “Mrs. Pollak should know better. When you sang that song last year, Miss Schoff was sensitive. She changed the word to ‘lordy.’ ”

Is it a need for thematic symmetry that makes me think this was the same year Grandma sees me playing a game in her front yard that the little white girl next door had proposed? We bend down, slump our shoulders, lower our heads to the ground, and sling rounded arms back and forth, chanting “I’se from the jungle.” Suddenly my grandmother is at the screen door telling me to come inside. She informs me sternly and solemnly, “That was an ugly game. That little girl was playing it to insult you. To insult Negroes and say we are like monkeys.”

These memories are as much about being humiliated by adult knowledge as about race prejudice. My mother and grandmother exposed errors I’d made. I felt humiliated in front of them. My teacher seemed to like me, but not enough to spare me a humiliating racial slur. I’d been having a fine time with the little white girl next door until we started playing “I’se from the Jungle.” It’s so easy for a child to feel all wrong in the eyes of adults. And when you have no idea that what you were doing is wrong…I hated being caught unawares. It was so dangerous, so shameful not to know what I needed to know.

Q: Why must I know? Tell me again.

A: So you won’t let yourself be insulted and humiliated. So you won’t let your people be insulted and humiliated.

There are so many ways to be ambushed by insult and humiliation.

*
The words that follow read “Crosses were burned and the two houses were stoned.” I couldn’t bear to place them on the same page with all the rest. I’m so sick of that burning cross: I hate that it’s a cliché of bigotry, drama that never loses its real-life power. But how many times can you read about it? The stones are more shocking. More primal and foreign—I can’t protect myself against their shock and power. But there’s something else too. I want to shield my father, even though he’s dead. He and his family fled Mississippi in 1918 and settled in California a few years later. They purchased a home in what he later called “a modest white working-class neighborhood.” A cross was burned on their lawn the day they moved in. My grandfather sat on the porch of his new Los Angeles home all night holding the same gun he’d once pulled on a group of recalcitrant white men in Coffeeville, Mississippi. And then the plot shifted. The family sued, went to court, and won the right to keep their house.

All the bright young faces, generations of them, learning the standard race curriculum of wounds and grievances! The advance or demise of The Race depends on what you do, what you are, what you long to be. That was our fact, that was our fear. Will the generations that come after be at all exempt? Will they show the damage too many of us inherited?

Or acquired.

Or drove ourselves toward.

I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about race. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.

I was happy in the sanctum of that neo-Gothic elementary school. Getting out of Mother’s dark red Oldsmobile each morning, climbing the wide stone steps of Blaine Hall with the other girls and boys, looking up at its spires, then entering one of three vast arched wooden doors; walking through the entrance with its stone benches, a sense of something shaded and towering in the halls our voices drifted through. It never occurred to me till I read Ruskin on Gothic architecture that this pragmatic prairie offshoot might have marked me as he said it should—affirmed that imagination was as valued as fact; appealed to the humble and the refined; celebrated arts and customs that official culture deemed rude.