Negroland: A Memoir (23 page)

Shawn leans forward, moves her wineglass out of the way. Lowering her voice, she looks around to make sure the people at nearby tables can hear nothing. Then she speaks.

Softly:

“You know, in a way, Audrey Hepburn’s death meant more to me than Thurgood Marshall’s.”

“I know,” I answer, leaning in and quickly looking around again. The neighbors are definitely not listening. (And if the restaurant pianist could provide a sound track at this moment, it would be the histrionic opening notes of
Now It Can Be Told
.)

—

Thurgood Marshall secured our right before the Supreme Court of the United States to attend well-funded white public schools. Thurgood Marshall embodied what our parents had overcome to succeed; he had the social conscience all Negroes who succeed should have. He represented valor and constant struggle.

Audrey Hepburn gave us the privilege of a fantasy life, grounded in centuries of cherished European girlhood.

The aristocrat loved by all who see her: Audrey Hepburn, in
Roman Holiday
. The fair daughter of humble people, loyal to her family, gentle yet proud when scorned by the ignorant and haughty, winning the love of the rich and handsome: Audrey Hepburn in
Sabrina
.

Oh, the vehement inner lives of girls snatching at heroines and role models! A maiden emboldened by visions of a destiny beyond herself, willing to suffer martyrdom even as she fights for the poor and helpless: Audrey Hepburn in
The Nun’s Story
.

And the longing to suffer nothing at all, to be rewarded, decorated, festooned for one’s charm and looks, one’s piquant daring, one’s winning idiosyncrasies: Audrey Hepburn in
Funny Face
and
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Equality in America for a bourgeois black girl meant equal opportunity to be playful and winsome. Indulged.

Shawn says:
Those Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day movies summed up all your tiny little fantasies about having a career and a glamorous life in New York or Europe
.

And no—Doris Day is not to be expunged from this record of girlhood fancies, though it’s far more embarrassing to admit one’s fondness for her foursquare Ohio pluck. (It so helped that Hepburn was European.) Nevertheless, some of us were not too good for Doris Day. Like her, we were midwesterners, schooled, like her, in the ways of perkiness. We brought smiles to dutiful tasks. Our yearning was sprightly.

And Doris Day’s singing made Berry Gordy cry. When he was young and still obscure, he wrote a song for her and mailed it (boyishly, reverently) to “Doris Day, Hollywood.” He told this story even after he had founded Motown Records and made Diana Ross his muse. He wasn’t ashamed. Why should we be? Listen to the lyrics of Martha and the Vandellas’ first hit, “Come and Get These Memories.” Friendship rings, love letters, teddy bears and state fairs. Turn it into a waltz.

Now it’s a Doris Day song.

ii

Denise kisses her white boyfriend goodnight and steps into the waiting taxi. With his long stringy hair and mustache, the driver looks like a Doobie Brother. He’s quiet for a few minutes. Then he turns around at a stoplight and smiles. “I saw you and your boyfriend. My girlfriend is black. She says it’s hard for her sometimes. Is it hard for you?” Denise of the burnt sienna skin arranges her face to look haughty. “I wouldn’t know,” she tells him. “Both my parents are white.”

Here and Now

I’m reading through 1950s issues of
Ebony
, paying close attention to the hair and skin cream ads. I have a flashback to season three of
Mad Men
, to the episodes where Pete Campbell, snarky scion of a fine old dysfunctional New York family, the Dartmouth man who’s always known he’s too little and boyish to impress people unless he can shrewdly divert their punitive impulses elsewhere, the aspiring writer chagrined that a colleague of lower-middle-class origin was gifted enough to publish a story in
Harper’s
—where that Pete Campbell grows acutely interested in the Negro Market and is seen avidly reading
Ebony
in the privacy of his Madison Avenue office.

A moment I can enjoy with a manageable frisson of horror because I never had to witness it in my youth. It’s a primal socio-cultural scene, watching a white person discover our secrets for his ends.

Why did I never notice the
Ebony
ads for Kongolene Hair Cream when I was growing up? They’re inescapable, irrefutable.

Kongolene Hair Cream for Men:

Logo KKK: (KONGO KONGOLENE KHEMICAL)

First advertised in 1914, as men of color demanded the rights to fight abroad for their country, improve their economic and social lot at home, and wear sumptuously gleaming straight hair brushed back with a middle or side part like Rudy Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks. This demand increased with each decade. The colored Chicago businessman J. D. Murray first advertised his brand of Kongolene in 1925—“You get a waterproof job and your hair stays straight for 20 days. Or more.” (Was that the product George Raft was said to go to Harlem for?) Men acquired ridges and waves that sat up proudly (James Cagney in command) or flung themselves about the head and ears wildly (James Cagney under siege); hair that could divide itself into fine long strands and whip from side to side (Robert Mitchum under duress); hair that could rise calmly into a bed of shiny curls and waves (Dean Martin) or into a domed pompadour with nary a wave in sight (James Dean and Elvis Presley).

What did the KKK initials, so dreaded in another context, signify? The three stages:

K1, the pre-crème, protectively saturating hair and scalp, preparing it for

K2, the straightening crème, which assaulted the indigenous kinks with potassium or sodium chloride, followed by

K3, the black rinse, which erased the residue of crinkly, faded, discolored hair.

Surely most Negroes seeing the ad in newspapers could not avoid thinking of the Ku Klux Klan? They had to notice the logo letters, tall and stalwart as the white-sheet warriors in
Birth of a Nation
. Seen how they were sliced through the middle by the banner triumphantly reading “Kongolene.” Does the Kongo meet the KKK and transform it, through the Negro man’s appropriation of the white man’s hair? There’s even a gesture toward race pride: “If your druggist cannot supply you,” the bottom of the ad counsels, “order direct from KONGO CHEMICAL CO., INC.” (New World address: 124th Street, Harlem, U.S.A.)

The battle had gone on for years. Negroes had fought for white hair in their homes, mixing eggs, potatoes, and toxic, burning lye, applying the potion to every hair follicle, enduring the anguish of hot, singed, even burning scalps, the risk of hair disintegrating under the pressure.

The manly KKK discourse had none of the anxious beauty coaching and coaxing found in hair ads for women. With Perma-Strate, “Hair is softly straight without that artificial ‘poker-straight’ look…And one creamy applications lasts 3 to 6 months!” There’s little of the longing for desirability and respectability that pervades feminine hair ads. “Even with her hat on…you’d know she uses
Vapoil
. Because she’s well groomed and smart…” (A sore point, this grooming detail—hair oil regularly stains our hat rims and headbands.) “Is your hair inviting to touch?” queries Dixie Peach. (A hit, a palpable hit.) “Yesterday,” Silky Strate proclaims, “fire engines were pulled by horses and hair was straightened with hot combs. TODAY…you can have naturally-soft, permanently-straight hair the easy MODERN WAY.” Longer-looking hair? “No discoloration—no oils—no damage,” pledges Lustrasilk. And it’s wonderful for your children too.

Then there’s the blatant abjection of the skin ads, always directed at women, always promising lighter skin and a brighter life—“Make light of dark skin woes”—within days.

Black and White Bleaching Cream: “Beauty
Is
Skin Deep. Begin now to have lighter, smoother, softer skin that attracts admirers.”

Nadinola Bleaching Cream: “Have you noticed that the nicest things happen to girls with lighter, lovelier complexions?” And, as a melancholy woman in a strapless evening dress sits alone, holding a flower and sadly murmuring “He loves me…he loves me not…DON’T DEPEND ON DAISIES! BE
SURE
WITH A LIGHT, CLEAR COMPLEXION!”

The Miracle Bleach for Dark Skin invented and developed by Golden Peacock is called “The favorite of Dark Skinned TV Stars.” (There are such things.) And while Dr. Fred Palmer attempts to modulate his message by claiming his formula gets rid of pimples and blemishes (a common gambit), he bluntly names it what he knows his consumers want it to be: a Double Strength Skin Whitener. You will never be the fair sex, but you strive to be an ever-fairer one.

i

I’m at Ricky’s in the West Village, buying the products that keep my hair in its state of artificially enhanced naturalness.

“Hello, how are you today?” The young black man at the counter greets me with well-enunciated courtesy and totals my purchases. “That’ll be $84.90,” he says, and though his face doesn’t react to my furrowed brow, he does add, picking up my credit card and nodding toward the fifty-dollar Devachan Conditioner: “That will last you a long time. It’s just a shock right now. Your hair looks very good. These products are good.”

“Thank you. It does last,” I say. I’ve regained my assurance. “I have my hair cut and colored at their salon.”

“Real-ly?” he says, drawing out the word and moving from clerk comfort-chat to genuine curiosity. “I didn’t know they understood our…” He needn’t say it. HAIR is the word. It leaps into the air between us, binding us through centuries of struggle.

“Their curly hair regimen was invented by an English-woman,” I say. “But they’ve adapted their methods to our hair. They do all kinds of curly hair. There are always other black women there. Black and Latina stylists too.”

Does he need quite this much information? He still looks politely inquiring, so I go on. I feel I must articulate what we both know to be the chasm that divides “curly hair” as seen by white women vs. black women. And one reason I love going to my salon is that, unlike so many white salons I’ve taken my head to (sometimes finding the one black stylist, sometimes choosing the white one recommended by an informed friend), I feel I bring Old World authority to this New World Order. Who more than I embodies the new ascendancy of Naturally Curly Hair?

“Ummmmmm,” he registers. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

“Of course not,” I say brightly.

“What is your ethnic ancestry?”

Proceed with care, Margo. You’re taken aback.

“I’m African American,” I tell him. I usually say “black,” since it was my generation’s breakthrough word, and “African American” feels textbook-officious in everyday talk. So why do I use it now? Because he wants an answer that conveys precision. Because I want to provide precision since his skin is black-brown and mine is cream-brown; since he is dressed in monochromatic black that sets off the black-brown gleam of his face and shaved head; since his diction and manner make clear he is a young gay black/African-American man-about-town who lives by making distinctions.

So I say, “I’m African American.”

And he says, “
Real
-ly?” slightly widening his eyes, tilting his head, and tucking his chin a little bit out and forward.

“Well,” I hedge, reaching for the “We” that will bracket and bind us together once more, “you know, we all—so many of us—if you go back far enough—we’ve all got some white, some Indian ancestry, we’re such a mix…” Yes, he’s nodding, concurring, and I’m stumbling a bit because I’m anxious he might declare (proudly? sternly? mischievously?), “Not me. I have no white or Indian ancestors.” But he doesn’t. He nods, murmurs “Um-hmmm,” and widens his eyes again, saying, “A lot of people must ask you that.”

I don’t want to correct him; that might make him feel I think it’s a naïve question.

“I wouldn’t say a lot, but at intervals people do ask, it’s true,” I concede. Then go on to offer: “You know, when people ask I think it’s because there are lots of Latinos who have my general looks, and”—here I give a comic one-beat pause—“I think it’s because I color my hair blonde. If I were still a brunette not so many people would ask.”

I get the laugh I sought and consider further ingratiating myself by adding, “Of course my natural color is gray now.” No. That cedes too much authority.

I move back to Our Hair turf.

“Devachan understands the mechanics of hair that goes from curly to frizzy to”—and here comes my coup de theatre—“nappy.” Ah,
nappy
. The word seals our bond. He laughs, covering his mouth with one hand.

“It’s been a while since you thought about
that
word,” I say, and we give the exultant sotto voce chortle of Negroes sharing a naughty fact of race life in public.

ii

When I was told by a friendly acquaintance (white) that he and another acquaintance (white) had been told by a former friend of mine (black), “Oh, Margo thinks she’s a white woman,” I grew irate. There’d been tensions between us. But to humiliate me like that, so deliberately, so gleefully! If he’d said it to friendly black acquaintances, I’d have been irate but not mortified—seen it as a personal attack using predictably handy race rhetoric as a shorthand for other resentments. (He wasn’t wrong to feel I’d been neglecting him lately, returning his calls but not initiating my own.) There was the risk that these black acquaintances would agree, which I would resent. But I felt I could rebut the charge in my own mind. Over the years I’d built up resistance to those toxins. The situation that pertained here was trickier. I faced the likelihood of the white audience being nonplussed and intimidated. They might reason (without telling me, naturally), “Well, being black, he can see her racially in a way we can’t. Maybe she really does have an identity problem.” Or “This is all very sad. We don’t know exactly what he means, but we’re not going to pursue it because clearly this is racial damage territory and, for all their accomplishments, it shows the racial damage they’ve both suffered.”