Negroland: A Memoir (27 page)

Whatever our race, girls of my generation with economic and cultural security took certain rights for granted. Not rights, no—these were privileges, and they varied according to your family and environment. In mine the privileges were good schooling and cultural enrichment to make you well rounded, develop your taste and charm.

You were to be distinctive and outstanding.

You were
not
to be disruptive.

You were to reflect your world at its ordered best, its gender-ordered best.

Education and cultivation would enhance, hopefully ensure, your ability to attract eligible boys and men. Which meant economic security and social status. Negro mothers did make a point of warning their daughters to “have a career you can fall back on”: economic security was always less secure for Negro husbands and fathers.

But even if your career ambitions far exceeded “something to fall back on,” they were not to be sundered from that generic female future. Every professional woman I knew was a wife, and most were mothers too. Some teachers were exceptions, but they’d better be young and cool if they hoped to avoid the “spinster! lesbian!” tee-hees of students.

And out in the wide wide world, the famous women we gazed upon never stopped reminding us that we must cherish that generic female future. Especially the artistic, glamorous ones. It wasn’t just the movies and plays they starred in or the music they sang. It was the incessant interviews they gave to newspapers, magazines, television reporters. In interview after interview, women celebrities would flaunt their families or their dreams of family. Yes, success was fine, even thrilling, they’d say—or be quoted as saying—but really, nothing mattered more than their children, or the children they hoped to have. What could all their success mean, they’d muse, without the right man to love and come home to? And if they had no children and clearly weren’t going to,
that
became the great regret of their life. So went the cultural trade-off: the few women who’d won acclaim and a certain power were expected to prove their loyalty to the status quo. No doubt some of them believed it. No doubt some of them thought they should believe it and tried to believe it. No doubt all of them knew it was good, even essential for their public image.

In secret, marriage and motherhood felt drab to me (and, we now know, to millions of girls like and not like me). Drab, stomach-churning, and gloom-bringing. Because really, whatever your race or ethnicity, you knew that if your girl skills weren’t up to par, your intelligence/education/talent would become a liability—proof that your proportions were off, that you were excessive or insufficient.

Work. Excel.

But learn to flirt, tease, date. Every boy is good practice.

We weren’t fools. Even in high school girls resented certain dating rituals and assumptions, found little ways to thwart them. But we didn’t treat them as part of a system, a structure, a politics. Not until the women’s movement took hold of us (of me), in 1969 and ’70, and cast its light backwards, on all we’d done and not done, did we see the whole.

—

In my childhood, it seemed to me that my world of mothers and daughters contained everything anyone could need. But of course the strictures and prohibitions were there, cued up, ready to play. “I hate boys or I hate ——” (whoever had beaten you in some game), you’d crow to your mother’s friends, then stand there, feeling silly when they exchanged looks and cooed back: “You’ll grow out of that soon enough.”

Maybe the disparity started with physical competition. I wasn’t a tomboy. But I didn’t like it that boys thought we couldn’t beat them at sports when we beat them at other things. And when puberty hurled its gonadotropins our way, the few girls who’d always played soccer and baseball with boys and sometimes beat them got shut out. Shut out by the boys; looked down on by sports-deriding girls they were supposed to start being friends with.

For me, the worst was trying to master the special effects of boy-girl pursuit. It was grueling. Hint, then declare; confess, prevaricate; have power, yield control—all the while trying to protect your tenuous sense of self. It was maddening, this business of playing shallow, acting giddier than you were. My sister had the strongest will of anyone I knew. But in the company of boys she’d make her voice higher and softer, become more obliging. Then, the boy gone, she’d switch right back into mastery mode. And my brainy, sharp-tongued best friend. “How will I know what to think if I don’t know what he thinks?” she asked her diary after a high school date with a sweet, quiet, and handsome boy. Some years later it struck her that he may have had no thoughts to express.

—

Thenthenthenthen…
lurking or imposing itself, stirring and wearying you: the perpetual question of The Negro Woman. Her history of struggle, degradation, triumph; her exclusion from the rewards of bourgeois femininity;
her duty to strengthen the Negro family
. Not a history one wanted to haul through one’s social life. Not a history one wanted to lumber into the sexual revolution with. Not a history one wanted to have sternly codified by white sociologists and Black Power revolutionaries who found the faults of The Black Woman much the same as those of The Negro Woman. She was bellicose, she was self-centered; she was sexually prudish when not castrating.

The solution: Black Woman, concur, submit, and improve your attitude!

Florynce Kennedy was the first black feminist I saw in public and in action. Lawyer, protester, organizer, she was born in 1916, the same year as my mother—and four years before women of any color got the vote. A whiplash tongue and a cowboy hat; suede and leather pants (am I imagining that she sometimes wore chaps?); dangling earrings and many necklaces (some with women’s rights symbols, some with bright stones and feathers). She was tall and fabulously grandstanding. She’d planted herself and thrived in every movement that counted: civil rights, anti-war, black power, feminism, gay rights. Her principles never swerved; her tactics never staled. She used to say something like this:

When black women tell me feminism is a white woman’s thing, I tell them: you’ve spent all these years, all these centuries, imitating every bad idea white women came up with—about their hair, their makeup, their clothes, their duties to their men. And now, they finally come up with one good idea
—
feminism—and you decide you don’t want anything to do with it!

—

Civil rights. The New Left. Black Power. Feminism. Gay rights. To be remade so many times in one generation is surely a blessing.

So I won’t trap myself into quantifying which matters more, race, or gender, or class. Race, gender, and class are basic elements of one’s living. Basic as utensils and clothing; always in use; always needing repairs and updates. Basic as body and breath, justice and reason, passion and imagination. So the question isn’t “Which matters most?,” it’s “How does each matter?” Gender, race, class; class, race, gender—your three in one and one in three.

Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you. That’s your first education. Then comes the second. Call it your social and intellectual change. The world outside you gets reconfigured, and inside too. Patterns deviate and fracture. Hierarchies disperse. Now you can imagine yourself as central. It feels grand. But don’t stop there. Let that self extend into other narratives and truths.

All of them shifting even as I write.

Don’t let me end in the realm of lilting abstraction. It comes down to this: Am I someone whose character and behavior do not hold the world back in these ways? Have I made a viable life for myself?

An adult life takes shape. You (me) are a writer, a journalist, a critic. You are a woman who grew up as a Negro and usually calls herself black. (“African American” is strictly for official discourse.) Genealogically speaking, you are of African, Irish, English, and Indian descent.

You are a single woman; you intend to remain one. You’ve acquired enough sexual experience to feel you belong to your times. You do not have children; you never intended to. Sustained romantic intensities have not been for you. Your explanation (not an untrue one, though not quite sufficient) is that you have let yourself be shaped by so many conventions, expectations, and requirements (institutions’, people’s), by so much dread of disapproval, that the discipline of solitude—severe solitude—has been required to give you the sense of an independent selfhood. The intensities of friendship suit you better.

Friendship’s choreography is for multiple partners: for varied groups and surprisingly sustained duets.

“The human psyche is pathetic,” I say—I declaim—to my psychopharmacologist.

“It’s what we have, Miss Jefferson,” he replies, “it’s what we have.”

And what I have is what I take to my psychotherapist each week. What I have is what we make together, each supplying the material she knows best.

There are days when I still want to dismantle this constructed self of mine. You did it so badly, I think. You lost so much time. And then I tell myself, so what?

So what?

Go on
.

Acknowledgments

This book would not exist without a much-loved family of friends who spurred me to write, think, and persevere: Lynn Jones Barbour, Alexandra Chasin, Susan Dickler, Ann Douglas, Wendy Gimbel, Sophia Hall, Anthony Heilbut, Laura Karp, Adrienne Kennedy, Jo Lang, Betty Shamieh, Betty Ann Solinger, Laurie Stone, and Wendy Walters. Special thanks to friends Elizabeth Kendall, irreplaceable first reader, and Charlotte Carter, impeccable first copy editor.

Parts of this book were published, in different forms, in
Book-forum, MORE, The Believer, Guernica, The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death
, and
What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most
. I am grateful to the editors.

I was enormously helped by a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and stimulated by the company of colleagues and friends at Columbia University, especially that of Phillip Lopate, guardian of the essay in all its forms.

Many of my family’s Chicago friends are gone. I salute their graceful ghosts and honor those living, particularly Sue Barnett Ish, Wyonella Smith, the Northeasterners, and the Birthday Club members. St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church and its rector, Richard L. Tolliver, were bulwarks for my parents; additional thanks to Father David Stanford and Cheryl A. Harris for their kindness to my mother in her last years. Mary Willis and Jacqueline Blakely were crucial to her well-being and to mine. I will never forget their kindness.

It’s been a pleasure and honor to work again with my editor at Pantheon, Erroll McDonald, and with my agent, Sarah Chalfant. Thanks to Ellen Feldman, my scrupulous production editor; Nicholas Latimer, my ebullient photographer; Josie Kals, whose attention never flagged; and the rest of the Pantheon staff. Oliver Munday’s jacket design was perfection.

Finally, loving gratitude to my niece, Francesca Harper, who shared her memories, her humor, her photographs, and the company of her husband, Eric Cohen, and their daughter, Harper Io Denise Cohen.

Notes

“to see my race lifted”
: Frances Jackson Coppin quoted in
We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century
, ed. Dorothy Sterling (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 205.

“the lighter accomplishments”
: Joseph Willson,
The Elite of Our People: Joseph Willson’s Sketches of Black Upper-Class Life in Antebellum Philadelphia
, ed. Julie Winch (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 89.

“You have seen how a man”
: Frederick Douglass,
The Narrative and Selected Writings
, ed. Michael Meyer (New York: Modern Library College Edmons, 1983), 75.

“on account of her care and attention”
: Willson,
The Elite of Our People
, 52.

“suitable household and Kitchen furniture”
: Ibid., 54.

“undoubtedly excite the mirth”
: Ibid., 79.

“The prejudiced world has for a long time”
: Ibid., 97.

“that portion of colored society”
: Ibid., 87.

“The machinery of the watch”
: Ibid., 88.

“in the manner of suitors”
: Ibid., 103.

In fact, after receiving a small number
: Ibid., 48–49.

“Fred. Douglass and his able compatriots”
: Cyprian Clamorgan,
The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis
, ed. Julie Winch (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 45–46.

“tonsorial profession”
: Ibid., 52.

“separated from the white race”
: Ibid., 45.

“If the reader will accompany me”
: Ibid., 48.

“Mrs. Rutgers is an illiterate woman”
: Ibid., 49.

“and is good for one hundred thousand dollars”
: Ibid., 51.

“Not so bad a speculation”
: Ibid., 55.

“is a good man”
: Ibid., 60.

“They are both no doubt sorry”
: Ibid., 60–61.

“rather dilapidated”
: Ibid., 60.

“can command the cool sum”
: Ibid., 59.

“will startle many of our white friends”
: Ibid., 63.

“the result of the unwearied and combined action”
: Ibid., 47.

“On the wharf was a motley assemblage”
: Charlotte Forten Grimké,
The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké
, ed. Brenda Stevenson, Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 388–89.

“I wonder that every colored person”
: Ibid., 140.