Negroland: A Memoir (24 page)

I despised that kind of pity.

A few months later a white friend was telling me how a nasty remark had made its slow, lethal way to her. “Has anyone ever told you something someone else said about you, something mean, but not, if you looked at it squarely, completely untrue?” asked Laurie.

“Why, yes,” I said and told my tale. She started to laugh. “That’s all?” she said.

“Please remember the combustible psychological and political and sociological history of this charge,” I chastised.

“You’re right,” she answered. “I don’t mean to trivialize it. I know it has a fraught history, and you know the details much better than I.”

“I do indeed,” I asserted. “A fraught history with many roots. Start with self-hatred and arrogance if you really
are
trying to be white; start with envy and ignorance if you’re falsely accusing someone of trying to be. Actually, I think he was attacking what he saw as a certain snobbishness in me, a way of distancing myself, and a tendency to cherish my neuroses as a sign of my specialness.”

“Is that really worse,” she asked, “than being called a predatory narcissist?”

“Why, no,” I said. “Actually it’s not.”

And went my way rejoicing.

Once, maybe ten years ago, I told a lover, “Actually, I’m as white as I am black.” He’d picked up something of mine—a CD, a book—and said, teasingly, “Not a lot of black folk like Elly Ameling.” My retort still felt dangerous to say out loud, despite all the talk of hybridity, creolization, cosmopolitanism, and mulatto consciousness. “Sometimes I almost forget I’m a Negro,” my mother wrote seventy years ago. It wasn’t a disavowal; it was her claim to a free space. She was talking about her happiness at that moment—how you feel when everything inside and around you is where it belongs. How you feel when your rights in America are self-evident, not to be argued, justified, or brooded on every day. Those seventy years had won me the right to claim any part of any culture without any race-linked restriction. “Claim”? Consider. Study. Toy with. And when I choose, love.

From the earliest rocking of my cradle I went A. A. Milne–ing and Kenneth Grahame–ing along, amid the Negroisms of family, friends, and neighbors. My father’s sepulchral “Whenwhenwhenwhen,” as he imitated the sermon of a Mississippi preacher. How a man would raise his arm, slap the air, bring the arm down in an arc, and start to turn away, meaning “Man, don’t try that on me.” Grown-up voices running through the tones and syntax of white and black speech. My mother’s “The discussion is closed,” all quick-pace martial consonants, then her “I’m not studying you” (which I heard as “stutting”), high in the throat, pitch descending on “m” and “not,” downbeat on “stutt.”

How many pieces of journalism have I written where my race might as well have been invisible? Then I’d choose a subject that made it the guiding principle. Or an approach that refused to let a subject be solely white or black.

There’s not only Du Bois’s warring double consciousness. Or the dual personality James Weldon Johnson described, where we perform in the generic style each race demands. There’s a space in our consciousness where all this racialized material collects, never static, mutating or at least recombining.

How many times could we write our cultural life stories? How many selves would tell them?

A Retelling:
Little Women

In 1994, with the third movie version en route to theaters and two new editions of the novel in bookstores, I decide to reread
Little Women
, putting up with looks I get from teenage girls on the bus or subway who must think I’m emotionally regressed or a very slow reader.

And it all becomes clear to me: I should have wanted to be Amy.

Meg is so pretty, so temptingly pretty, and with her native sweetness, her gentle ways—well, that’s why Meg is out of the question. Here you are, smoothly uttering Victorian commonplaces you thought you’d cleansed your stock of forty years ago. Meg does have her vanities, the kind pretty girls are entitled to, the kind plain and pretty readers avidly share
—“ ‘It’s so dreadful to be poor!’ sighed Meg, looking down at her old dress.” These are all that keep her from insurmountable dullness, even as she guides her young sisters toward the dull ideal of good womanly manners.

“
You are old enough to leave off boyish tricks and to behave better, Josephine…you should remember that you are a young lady.”

“
As for you, Amy, you are altogether too particular and prim. Your airs are funny now, but you’ll grow up an affected little goose if you don’t take care.”

Decorum will protect Meg from the twists of fate and plot that impose suffering. She will marry a man as good-looking and good-hearted as she. (Wiser and more good-hearted, that he may teach and guide her.) They will have twins, a boyish boy and a girlish girl. Here is the little New England cottage where they will settle. Imagine a
BLESS OUR HOME
mat woven by Meg’s own hands in front of the door. Then let the door close. There’s no need to give Meg any more serious thought.

—

Hail Jo, wielding the pen of the artist and the sword of the girl who knows she should have been a boy. What girl didn’t want to be Jo at least some of the time, Jo of the restless impulses, the unruly luxuriant hair; shouting, grumbling, flinging retorts instead of answers; thrusting her body into unruly poses. The swashbuckling hero bent on astonishing everyone and being a rich and famous writer.

Jo gives license to outbursts. Her sulks are theatrically compelling and her indignation is always warranted. Jo’s at the center of every page she strides or saunters onto. She has charisma and that’s what you’ve always craved.

A functional definition of charisma for ambitious girls of the 1950s: winning the attention, touched with wonder, of significant adults (teachers, relatives, family friends); winning the friendship of gifted, temperamentally interesting, or socially accomplished girls; winning admiration from boys or, under circumstances that don’t turn them against you, winning contests with boys
.

Being “gifted” in a way that can’t go unnoticed. We seek models everywhere—in books and movies, in serious TV dramas and frolicsome sitcoms; in prima ballerinas and leading ladies; in star turns on TV variety shows. (“Ladies and gentlemen, here is the enchanting…Ladies and gentlemen, here is the dynamic…Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome a young woman who’s been making quite a stir on Broadway these days….”)

Can you be a waif and a powerhouse like Judy Garland? An incandescent eccentric like Tammy Grimes? I’ve learned already that adults are won over by remarks they find precocious but not sassy. I’m very good at that. I’ve learned that personality gets you roles in school plays and report card comments on your ability to lead
.

Where will this take me? All my teachers say I write well. I’ve published a poem in a magazine for young Negro readers, edited by Charlaemae Rollins, the pioneering children’s librarian at Bronzeville’s distinguished and first public library. Still, I don’t scribble away in a happy daze like Jo or play my piano with Beth’s rapture. I’m quick with my words and my wit, but I don’t distinguish myself by winningly unconventional behavior
.

Jo wants to be a rich and famous writer. Does she want to marry? She tosses her head and says no, again no. But marry she must, for Louisa May Alcott, thirty-seven and still unmarried, must tend to the needs of her readers, those marriage-minded young girls who will make her famous and nearly rich, those “dear girls,” she calls them placatingly, who scorn old maids. The Jo who proclaimed she’d astonish everyone at twenty-two is mightily humbled on the eve of her twenty-fifth birthday.

“
An old maid—that’s what I’m to be,” she muses, laying her body down on an old worn sofa at twilight. “A literary spinster, with a pen for a spouse, a family of stories for children, and twenty years hence a morsel of fame, perhaps; when, like Johnson I’m too old, and can’t enjoy it—solitary, and can’t share it, independent, and don’t need it.”

Here Alcott steps anxiously in. Girls like Jo may despair, she counsels; not all blossoming girls will blossom into wives and mothers. Yet and still, “
one can get on quite happily if one has something in one’s self to fall back upon.”

That bleak, immolating phrase: “something…to fall back upon”! Alcott means character, often neglected or underdeveloped in girls; by our day it means a college or graduate degree that will let us teach, or get a just-as-respectable job, if we’re edged off the two-parent-family path by death, divorce, or spinsterhood
.

Of course my peers and I will all have college or graduate degrees to fall back on
.

Was our character in the Alcott sense neglected? When I was overheard gleefully reporting one friend’s secret to another (“I’m not supposed to tell anybody, but…”), my mother sat me down for a talk on being trustworthy. “You have personality, but personality isn’t enough,” she told me. “You have to have character too.”

I will have something in myself to fall back on
.

I wear thick glasses and I am thrilled by narratives of beautiful women attracting handsome men: sweetly vulnerable maidens needing rescue; heroines who are daring and must be won by still more daring men. Brought down to its basic learning level: fate finds a way to award desirable boys to pretty girls. I worry that I won’t attract boys as pretty girls do, that I’ll be excluded from all these burning glances and kisses, these scenes of enraptured pursuit, followed by a match that makes the family rejoice and the world approve. I have no taste for being excluded from any of this
.

“
Don’t laugh at the spinsters,…for often very tender, tragical romances are hidden away in the hearts that beat so quietly under the sober gowns,” Alcott pleads. “Even the sad, sour sisters,” the kind on Old Maid cards, deserve our pity, “because they have missed the sweetest part of life.”

I have no taste for being passed over and pitied
.

—

Alcott has no taste for being pitied, passed over, or married. She wants Jo to be like her, a literary spinster.

No! say her readers; please no! says her publisher. So she works out the assets and deficits of the marriage, as women in life must. She won’t indulge those who want Jo to marry Laurie, still handsome and charming, still willful and idly rich. Is she denying Jo what she denied herself—a lovably erotic companion? Is she negotiating more emotional power and independence for her? The March girls have struggled too long with deprivation; it’s only fair that Laurie suffer as well—be humbled by his love for unwomanly Jo, then by her refusal to love him back. If she loved him, she’d have to feel grateful he chose her. And he would surely hold the power of his looks, his money, his status, over her. Despite his best intentions, he wouldn’t be able to help himself. That’s how the world worked.

These kinds of considerations arose whenever the subject of mixed marriage was discussed. A white husband would always be aware of how his family, friends, and associates saw you, of what marrying you cost him in the world. And you’d always be trying to make it up to him
.

He couldn’t help turning on you at some point
.

Readers will get the appropriate match when Amy and Laurie marry. For Jo they must accept the consolations of philosophy in the form of a stout middle-aged professor with big hands, rusty clothes, and without “
a handsome feature in his face except his beautiful teeth.” He teaches her German, he gives her a volume of Shakespeare, he defends Christianity against agnosticism. When he divines that Jo is publishing “sensational” stories under a pseudonym, his response (grievous sorrow rather than anger) has a New Testament power.

No more lurid adventures, no more illicit passions erupting in foreign/exotic locales. Jo retreats to her room, reads her stories, and stuffs them in the stove, “
nearly setting the chimney afire with the blaze.” Then, like one of her merry wrongdoers, she adds, “I almost wish I hadn’t any conscience, it’s so inconvenient…I can’t help wishing, sometimes, that father and mother hadn’t been so dreadfully particular about such things.”

But, ah Jo, Alcott intervenes, in the voice that drove Baldwin to immolate her without mercy: “
pity from your heart those who have no such guardians to hedge them round with principles which may seem like prison walls to impatient youth, but which will prove sure foundations to build character upon in womanhood.”

There’s no help for it. Jo must marry Professor Bhaer. The End again—and one the most morally dutiful girl reader struggles with. You don’t want to be a pitiful spinster, but must your only choice be a kind and dowdy man who already has two children—orphan nephews—you must start caring for right away?

And not them alone. By the novel’s end, Jo has been dispersed into the bodies and souls of boy after boy: the boys she gives birth to; the boys she brings into her all-boys school; an endless, boundless “
wilderness of boys.”

It was not for me
.

But those discontents belonged to the second volume of
Little Women
, not to the all-consuming Book One. Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: there, in the character and personality of a March girl, you could place a second beguiling self.

Denise had tomboy leanings, and she could stage fiery displays of will. She claimed Jo as soon as we read the book in grade school, and being three years older, she managed to read it first, striding through the house reciting Jo’s lines and enacting Alcott’s directions: “
Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” she’d grumble, then fling herself down on our living room rug. “
We don’t cheat in America; but
you
can, if you choose,” she’d angrily tell Ned, the British twit I was impersonating, then stride past me, and exit.

I was not going to be left with Meg. I had no desire to take on, even in imagination, the caretaking duties of an elder sister. And I had a near-compulsive sense of social order. No, that’s evasive. I had a near-compulsive sense of how biology orders social expectations, and how I should respond. In third grade, taking some kind of school test with the question “Which parent do you love most?,” I (falsely) put my father’s name first, then—compulsively—explained to my mother that I’d done this because fathers were the heads of families, so should be seen as the most loved. “If that’s what you wrote, that’s what they’ll believe,” she said, a little bleakly.