Negroland: A Memoir (25 page)

So even if Meg had tempted me, I couldn’t have made myself violate the birth order of our family. Now, hoping to ease the shame of my conformity, I posit that I was resisting an alter ego who would exacerbate it. An appealing fancy, which evaporates when you consider that

I

chose

Beth.

The sweetest of daughters, the dearest of sisters. “Little Tranquility,” her father calls her. “
Birds in their little nests agree,” she sings when her sisters quarrel, and their quarrels cease. She is loved by all who know her, and she need not struggle to win love; she makes no effort to win love: she is loved because she is loving. Being good brings her pleasure. Nature and nurture are one here. Beth’s only failing is her shyness. It’s acute enough to seem, at times, a form of selfishness. But she struggles with it; she is one of those good people ever ready to find fault with herself. (I didn’t want the burden of painful shyness, but my vivacity sometimes got me into trouble.) Beth loves music. She plays the piano (as did I), and her music brings joy to lonely neighbors. Hers is a quiet, modest gift. (Mine, I hoped, was more vivid and striking.) Still, it gives her some parity with writer Jo and artist Amy. And Beth’s music gives her some release from the expressive confines of goodness; different tempos and dynamics are briefly possible.

Until fatal illness does away with her when she is just eighteen. I must have found it seductive even as a girl: death as the villain who destroys you; death as the savior who ensures your spotless reputation. Is it possible, as an adult, to read the death of Beth without dissolving into self-protective mockery? Actually, yes, with a certain amount of readerly discipline. At last a few human flaws appear. Envy: “
But when I saw you all so well, and strong, and full of happy plans, it was hard to feel that I never could be like you.” Despair: “
She could not say ‘I’m glad to go,’ for life was very sweet to her; she could sob out ‘I’ll try to be willing…’ ” and give in to bitter grief. Dying was a way of giving in to every emotion and remaining beyond criticism.

But what are we to do about Amy? Meg’s soft prettiness takes on the chill of the snow maiden in Amy; Meg’s vanity turns voracious. Jo’s will becomes willfulness; her pride veers into egotism. Not for a moment can Amy be selflessly generous. When she is good, she must boast of being good; when she is sorry for being thoughtless—or greedy or snobbish—she must frame her apology with self-congratulation or self-justification. Amy has a talent: she draws and paints. But not with Beth’s quiet devotion, not with Jo’s gusto. When Amy paints, she pulls our attention to her: we are to admire how attractive she looks doing it.

Older sisters have basked alone in the attention of parents; grappled alone with the power of parents; they hoard precious memories of child-rule; they never forget the moment they were to give space and attention to the new child. (The night I was born my sister drank a bottle of mineral oil.) They have little patience with someone who does all the things they’ve had to grow out of. Yet they’re expected to instruct and help the young intruder, to be little parents
.

They demand our obedience; they enjoy our admiration
.

We crave their approval. We study them, learn their ways. And we hate being shown up by them, making mistakes that are shamefully obvious because the older sibling made them first or claims she was too smart to make them at all. We fight for power with the tricks of the weak
—
tattling, wheedling, acts of sabotage. And we need them in a way they don’t need us. This can feel like your first experience of unrequited love
.

When I was growing up, no girl I knew would admit she wanted to be Amy. Alcott made sure you would not choose Amy unless you were willing to be mocked or reproved on almost every page. The word “little” zaps her again and again—her little airs and graces, her little clay figurines, her little sister tricks and errors. Only her pretensions are grand: an English stuffed with malapropisms; atrocious spelling and “punchtuation”; reading French aloud to her little friends “
without mispronouncing more than two-thirds of the words.” When Amy’s not allowed to tag along to the theater with Jo, Meg, and Laurie, her revenge is stunning. She turns into a twelve-year-old Hedda Gabler and burns Jo’s writings.

But because these little women are pilgrims, and because Alcott is prey to the environmental effects of Christian sentimentality, Amy’s character improves once she is chastened. By the time she wins Laurie’s love and money, she knows that he loved Jo first, and that she must renounce her art because her talent is hopelessly minor.

I had a talent for which I had won praise. My personality, not my looks, won attention. I hated being mocked by my older sister when I made gaffes. I liked to think of myself as a good person. I wanted to be loved unequivocally. I wanted to deserve that love without question. I wanted to be in a position where I was never reproved or corrected by my mother, where I never lost a quarrel—or had to quarrel and risk losing—with my sister, where I felt she adored me every minute of the day, and where I never had to struggle to win the approval of friends and schoolmates. It would be so restful to want no more than you had and to be perfect, in life and in people’s memories
.

At least Amy had appetite. Insistence. She would have given me more aptitude, more tolerance for risk—for willfulness—for wanting and saying I did, even when I made a fool of myself and didn’t get it.

Taking a race line, I could argue that on an Anglo-Saxon dreamscape it was better to choose a brunette than a blue-eyed blonde. But I’d already bonded with dark-haired Margaret O’Brien and feisty, ugly Mary Lennox. I was tainted but relatively intact. It was my temperament that had threatened to do me in.

A Retelling: The Clubwomen

The grandmothers were enthralling. Improvising dowager status for themselves. Mine had both grown up in Mississippi, gone to Rust College, and taught in small country schools. They both worked in dressmaking when they moved North (the Jeffersons to Denver, then Los Angeles; the McClendons to St. Louis and, for my grandmother, Chicago). They planned their children’s educational ascent with vigilance. They plotted their own advancement with equal care.

Women of color born between 1880 and 1905 seized hold of Progress and faced down Peril on all fronts. Encouraged by the example of their own formidable parents, they became teachers and dressmakers and caterers, nurses and stenographers, even doctors and lawyers. They opened beauty shops and Sunday schools. They learned to keep accounts for the men who founded insurance companies and funeral homes. They sometimes married these men; they often outlived them and took over the business. But if they’d married men who had little to leave, they set out to earn doweries for their daughters. They passed for white to sell clothes in white department stores. They took in boarders. They studied property values and bought real estate. (Every week, tenants placed their rent in the courteous, peremptory hand of the dowager.)

My maternal grandmother, Lily McClendon Armstrong, had a two-year-old daughter when she lost her husband to the flu epidemic of 1918. He’d been an engineer, hired by Booker T. Washington and sent by him to Purdue for graduate training. When he died, Lily and baby Irma moved from Holly Springs, Mississippi, where her family had owned land and a general store, to St. Louis, where they’d bought property, and where her husband’s mother and aunt’s sister had respectable jobs in service. She had taught school in Mississippi; she learned dressmaking in St. Louis. She took a second husband, an attractive, well-spoken man from a respectable colored family, and together they moved to Chicago for better jobs and more independence.

The St. Louis dressmaker became a Chicago dressmaker with well-to-do white clients at the posh Edgewater Beach Hotel. (The beach was private and patrons were often flown there by helicopter.)

Lily McClendon Armstrong became
Lillian
McClendon Armstrong in Chicago. The additional syllable was appropriate for worldlier Northern ears. The St. Louis husband was left behind when, after several years, he continued to show insufficient ambition.

All politics are local, and when she turned her attention to politics she entered at a very local level, collecting votes door-to-door for a Negro precinct captain in the Democratic Party. She always delivered a high count, so he made her a playground supervisor, which she found benevolently dull. With the party’s support, she became one of Chicago’s first Negro policewomen. This she enjoyed.

“Lemme go with you, babe,” said a drunken man one night when she was out of uniform and on her way home. “Certainly” came her genial reply, whereupon she asked him into her car and drove him to the police station.

She was courted by a doctor, an older man, whose children, she felt, were possessive and unwelcoming. She stepped out with a dashing aviator who fought with Haile Selassie’s army in World War II. Her third husband was a Pullman porter, a stolid, amiable man who followed her lead as she studied property values, and contributed his earnings to their real estate fund. When he died, she owned two buildings. Every week, tenants placed their rent in the courteous, peremptory hand of Lillian McClendon Armstrong Thompson.

Dowagers of color fitted themselves out in suits and furs, gloves and well-fixed hats—the cloche, toque, beret and turban, the pillbox, the angled brim.

When walking sticks were in fashion, Lillian McClendon Armstrong carried one with an ivory handle.

When she bought her first mink coat some years later, she wore it down to St. Louis to visit family. “Mother,” said her teenage daughter, “it’s too hot for fur.”

“It’s never too hot for fur,” Lillian McClendon Armstrong Thompson answered, and set off on her trip.

I remember my grandmother and her friends in woolen suits and fox pelts with head and feet; pants suits and silk shirtwaists; crisp hats with half veils.

—

When their daughters were in their eighties, they still quoted their mother’s pronouncements.

If you ever get pregnant, don’t bother to stop by the house. Just keep walking east
. (To the lake.)

And:

When I left my husband I left him his easy chair. I knew it was the only piece of furniture he couldn’t do without
.

Dowagers of color saw their daughters through college, even graduate school, and into good marriages with lawyers, doctors, educators, journalists, accountants, post office supervisors, and businessmen. They made sure that their girls had equal access to the responsible ways and winning manners they needed to make a good marriage.

After decades of marital and monetary protection, these daughters took on their mothers’ astringency. Once they were widowed they chose to remain so. One outlived two suave and charming companions, neither of whom she married, both of whom she inherited money from. Another outlived the worldly judge who’d escorted her to prestigious cultural events and parties.

Widowers on the prowl were entertained with watchful efficiency, their movements reported by phone or at club meetings.

Mrs. G.: “One gentleman made his rounds testing their cooking, and testing his welcome. Gloria tolerated him till he started placing orders. Then he came to me. I told him, ‘I’m looking for the same thing you are: a home-cooked meal from somebody else’s home.’ ”

Elderly single men were not randomly encouraged. “That’s a lovely perfume you’re wearing,” said one when Mrs. S. entered the elevator of their building one afternoon. She packed her answer into a nod and a brisk fib. “Thank you, but I don’t wear perfume.”

—

Because my paternal grandmother lived in California, I didn’t know her nearly as well. She taught elementary school in Mississippi and took in laundry and sewed. She was a seamstress and an avid union member in California; in her early years there she worked as a dressmaker’s fitter for at least one Hollywood studio. Her husband was a master carpenter; her four children, she decreed, were to be doctors, lawyers, or—in the case of the daughter—a teacher. Of the three sons, two become lawyers, then judges, and one became a doctor. The daughter then acquired not one, not two, but three master’s degrees. One to match each brother’s achievement.

A Retelling: The Daughter Who Became My Mother

My mother did not have the impressive sewing skills of her mother or her mother-in-law. She could mend a torn hem and sew on buttons. And this had been my ambitious grandmother’s plan. Irma was not allowed to scrub floors (other household duties, yes, but no scrubbing of floors). Irma was to graduate from the University of Chicago. (There wasn’t enough money for four years there, so she transferred in.) Irma was taught to look for quality when she shopped; she could shop more once she’d married well; she could have her own seamstress or dressmaker.

And my mother loved to shop, for herself, and for us: she delighted in her wardrobe. When she turned ninety-two and was getting dressed for her birthday club’s luncheon, I asked what her favorite clothes had been. I expected total recall of millinery triumphs in sisal or felt. (I still remember a Tastee Freez swirl of a hat from the early sixties, cream-colored with a black veil.) But she chose her evening dresses.

“Short or long?”

“Both.”

“What was the difference?”

“The short ones were flip and flirty.”

“And the long ones?”

She laughed and put one hand to her forehead, fingers arranged in a classic heroine-about-to-swoon pose. “Beware, my foolish heart,” she drawled.

The night is like a lovely tune,

Beware, my foolish heart…

That ballad appeared in 1949, when my mother was thirty-three and I was two. I like to imagine my parents moving onto the dance floor as Willie Randall’s orchestra took a sumptuous plunge into its opening notes.

“My Foolish Heart,” “Lush Life,” “Stardust,” “Misty,” “Sophisticated Lady”…I heard these songs over and over on our record player. The flip and flirty numbers too, deft syncopations of wit, lust, and romance. “That Old Black Magic,” “Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me,” “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You?” And of course that urbane salty blues which hailed our city: