Negroland: A Memoir (9 page)

Two years after
The King and I
, Dorothy Dandridge will be playing a Negro slave in
Tamango
and a drug-addled wanton in
Porgy and Bess
, torn between a brute, a pimp, and a crippled beggar. She will marry a white man no one has heard of—referred to in the Negro and white press as a restaurateur or nightclub proprietor. My parents mock husbands of stars with undistinguished résumés; usually they’re described as their wives’ managers. Jack Dennison runs some kind of restaurant in Las Vegas, and will soon be opening one in Los Angeles. What kind of
restaurateuring
did he do before he met Dorothy Dandridge with her money and Hollywood connections? He’d never be able to get a white wife of her stature, would he?

Every month I study the
Ebony
magazines that appear in our den. Chronicles of achievement and admiration, sought, won, thwarted, denied. Wonder Books of sociology.

The most successful Negro celebrities are written up in
Life
and
Look
too. But
Life
and
Look
don’t have these constant debates with themselves and their readers (whom they don’t need to call “their people”).
Life
and
Look
affirm and defend norms they are sure of; in
Ebony
we strive to establish norms and be lauded for those we maintain. Normality. We proclaim it, and fight for it on racial and nonracial grounds. And yet, we proclaim our designated abnormalities at every turn.

—

Racial Believe-It-or-Not:
“ ‘White’ Mother to Negro Twins”; “Fla. Sheriff Calls White Family Black”; “The Secret Life of an Ex-Negro”; “British Foster Mother: London Housewife Has Cared for More Negro Children than Any Other English Woman”; “The Girl Without a Race.”

What manner of man and woman are we? Wherever we go we disrupt order
.

—

Race Social Psychology:
“Problems of Blond Negroes”; “What Africans Think of Us”; “Where Mixed Couples Live”; “Is the Negro Happy?”

Nothing about us is taken for granted by anyone anywhere in the world
.

—

Uplift and Advancement:
“The North’s Biggest Negro Business”; “Virginia’s First Negro Medical Grad”; “Tennis Queen from Harlem”; “Negro Architect Builds Sinatra Home”; “College Calendar Girl: Negro Coed Wins Cover Girl Spot at Southern Illinois U.”

“Negro” is the magic word, the spell. The small grow large, the mundane turns exceptional, and the individual becomes cosmic
.

—

Portents and Losses:
“Are There Too Many Negroes in Baseball?”; “Are Negro Businessmen Through?”; “ ‘Why I Quit My TV Show,’ by Nat King Cole, as told to Lerone Bennett, Jr.” (“For 18 months I was the Jackie Robinson of television…The men who dictate what Americans see and hear didn’t want to play ball”); “Negro Progress in 1959: Still Marked by Massive Resistance.”

Society can turn any success of ours into a setback; permit us to advance, then insist that we fail or, on pain of death, retreat
.

—

Was I correct in remembering that Louis Armstrong wrote a story called “Why I Like Dark Women”? Yes, here it is, the cover story of
Ebony
’s August 1954 issue, in capital letters. Louis’s wife, Lucille, smiles up at him, chipper and chubby and dark of hue, sure of her dimples, sure of herself. Nearly his walnut brown, but with a touch more red. (Twenty years before, Lucille had crossed the color line at New York’s celebrated and segregated Cotton Club to become the first
brown
-skinned dancer in its exclusively “Tall, Tan and Terrific” chorus line.) Three months before her husband tells readers why he likes dark women, the Supreme Court bans segregation in public schools.

This particular article stayed with me because I found the title embarrassing then; it wasn’t the proclaimed taste of the world I knew, and I had more than an inkling of the lewd sneer behind the phrase “dark meat.”

Now when I read the article it’s clear Louis and Lucille are telling Negroes we mustn’t let the darker hues of our life and history be erased by the demands of integration. Just at the time nine Supreme Court justices were explaining to white Americans Why We Must Tolerate Dark Children.

—

December 1954: Again, my recollection is correct. There is a lead story explaining “Why Negroes Don’t Like Eartha Kitt.” I adore Eartha Kitt. I know every word of “Monotonous,” her fancifully, outrageously jaded hit song from Broadway’s
New Faces of 1952
. The article says Miss Kitt doesn’t just do business in the suave, celebrated world of white supper clubs and Broadway openings, she also chooses to socialize there. The Negro reporter is sympathetic: he says she prefers her own kind of integration to the soigné segregation of upper-crust parties in Harlem or Bronzeville. Negroes must learn to respect a woman who “insisted on winning fame as a raceless star rather than a Negro entertainer.” Negroes must learn to accept a woman whose difficult childhood—she was poor and illegitimate, passed from relative to relative in the South, looked down on by whites, and mocked by her own people because she had light brown skin and mixed blood—had made her difficult. Touchy. Those of us going forward in the white world need to understand Eartha Kitt’s complexes.

In the
Ebony
photograph, Eartha Kitt’s brown torso is sheathed in white beads and turned toward the camera. One hand, with its multi-stone ring and triangle-tip nails, nearly caresses her chin; the other holds a beaded fan, white but no whiter than the tips of her teeth that show through parted red lips. When
New Faces
arrives in Chicago, my parents’ friends patronize the show. Led by Kay Davis Wimp, who’d sung with Duke Ellington, they meet its clever producer, Leonard Sillman. And my parents take the unusual step of throwing a party for the cast.

Miss Kitt is the only significant cast member who does not attend.

Her absence stung. She embodied our daydreams about ourselves—the cheeky glamour, the impossibly suave accent, as if she’d been conceived between Mayfair and Casablanca. “Monotonous” slithered through and past social and sexual prohibitions as she languidly declared herself the world’s most desirable woman, utterly bored by all that the world’s most powerful men—including T. S. Eliot, King Farouk, and President Eisenhower—could offer. “
Sherman Billingsley cooks for me / Monotonous,” she crooned, the year after he made world headlines for refusing to seat the still-desirable Josephine Baker at his swanky Stork Club.

We’d been insulted. My parents and their friends said it showed she was insecure about her own humble origins and didn’t want to risk being around Negro professionals. Their accomplishments would remind her that show business glamour did not trump family or education.

But she’d still managed to cut us.

Monotonous.

Sit on the stairs with Denise and me as our parents give one of their parties. The music on the record player might be Ellington (the suave heft of “In a Mellow Tone”). Or Erroll Garner’s “Autumn Leaves.” Rhapsodic, then antic and sly.

Jewelry glistens. So does the ice in cocktail glasses. Women lean in to have their cigarettes lit. Their voices run along the treble scale. And the men: the Arthur Prysock baritone with its undulating Southernness; the Northern leading-man diction of Billy Eckstine; the patter and murmur of Nat King Cole. Standard to blues English and back again, like Joe Williams.

Two of the handsomest men spot us and insist we come to the bottom of the stairs to be kissed on the cheek. Everett White, with his rich brown skin, his dimples, his white hair with its tiny crisp waves. Ed Wimp, ivory-pale with keen features and straight dark hair.

The Basie Band strides through “Corner Pocket.” I settle back on the stairs, just below Denise, pressing my glasses against the banister.

—

Every little girl looks for something to hate about herself, and I hated my glasses.

As my father told it, he was sitting on the back porch when he heard Mother sobbing loudly. She was coming out of the garage with me in her arms. I may have added to the din, not knowing the cause but panicked by our role reversal.

I was two years old and we’d been to the eye doctor. His diagnosis was myopia, astigmatism, and strabismus, which meant I was nearsighted with blurred vision and eyes that crossed. (Maybe that’s why I had recently crashed into a small table and broken several cups of a lovely tea set.) Dr. Richardson prescribed glasses with such a high correction that the lenses jutted out of the frames by a good half inch. My eyes were blurred dots behind them.

I had an operation when I was four. It helped, but I had to wear a black patch in first grade to maintain strength in my lazy eyes. I was not alone: two other girls wore patches. But Millicent had wavy hair, pert features, dimpled cheeks, and reddish-brown skin that made mine look tepid. Mimi had keen features, creamy beige skin that made mine look dark, and hair straight enough for a darling pixie cut. We all wore variations on the same theme: plastic cat’s-eye with a clear bottom and bright top (red was my favorite); plastic cat’s-eye in a solid color or jaunty pattern (candy stripes were popular). Some solid colors had designs—small dots or leaves—on their tips. Everything to make what was not cute cute.

In sixth grade I wore a patch again, on alternate eyes. Patches were flesh-colored by then, an improvement that felt like no improvement at all. No one else wore one.

People still mention my glasses when they catalogue their youthful memories of me. “You wore such thick glasses! I can still see you in those glasses!” I hate their benignly humorous tone. Why can’t they shut up about it?

I got contact lenses the summer after my freshman year in high school. That was my jubilant entrance into Attractiveness. I looked at myself in the mirror with hope and satisfaction. Eyeliner and mascara registered. My good figure was an advantage, not compensation. The small group of boys who’d called me “Blind”—“Hey Blind, what’s happening?” they’d say in easy, jocular tones—grew more respectfully playful.

When I feel sure of myself I sometimes joke that in ancient times, when tribes faced hard survival choices, my eyes would have meant I’d be left on a hilltop to die, along with the wounded, the aged, and the mentally deficient.

I do think (and I regret this as a writer) that part of my sensory equipment has been stunted. Early on, I theorize, I stopped counting on my visual acuity, and that meant I ceased to register certain visual impressions. And despite all the care I like taking with my appearance, despite my love of fashion, despite my vanity, when I’m most at my ease with people, all kinds of people, I catch myself thinking that I’m not physically visible, that whoever I’m talking to is responding to my personality, not my person.

This began, I think, as a way—and not a bad way—for me to feel less self-conscious while marked by an eye patch and thick specs. I always measured myself against my Negro friends, and even when we had the same basic equipment (skin shade, hair grade, feature size and shape), my glasses put me at a disadvantage. With my white friends at the Lab School I managed an illusory respite. Of course I measured myself against the girls; of course I did. But if I wasn’t really being seen, how could I been seen as irreversibly different?

Our parents wanted us to go to first-rate private schools. The two in Chicago that accepted Negroes in those years were Francis Parker and the University of Chicago Laboratory School. (Once conjoined, they’d since become amiable rivals.) Lab was founded by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in 1896, just two years after the university. Along with progressive reformers like Horace Mann and Jane Addams, he wanted education to be a creative, idealistic social enterprise, not a series of lessons absorbed by rote. “
The child, not the lesson, is the center of the teacher’s attention,” he said; a classroom should nurture experimentation and individual talent; feature activities—field trips, nature study, open-ended discussions and activities (if you studied the tomato, you made tomato bisque)—that “reflect the life of the larger society,…permeated throughout with the spirit of art, history, and science.” It was a coeducational mono-racial institution in a pristinely, quietly vigilant white neighborhood.

The University High School was founded in 1904. It too was coeducational and mono-racial: racial reform was launched in the early years of the Second World War. “Democracy in education was an important theme,” write the authors of the school’s official history,
Experiencing Education: 100 Years of Learning at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools
, and one group of parents “used the example of racism in Europe to address racial discrimination at home.”

Two teachers gave an interdisciplinary course on “minority problems,” which included an interracial panel of tenth graders from Lab and the mostly Negro DuSable High School. It was an urban exchange program in a fiercely segregated city, and while it was deemed a success, there were excruciating moments. Before the Negro students arrived, recalled Lab teacher Edith Shepherd, “we suggested that we begin by giving the visitors Cokes or punch. We met with instant shock and opposition from a few students in our group.” Negroes? “It was perfectly all right in their minds to have discussions with these students, but to have a social affair was quite different and we had to use quite a bit of persuasion with a few who couldn’t see partaking of refreshments with them.”

With a majority backing from the Parents Association, four Negro students were admitted in 1942. In 1951 Denise entered Lab’s second-grade class, after a year at the all-Negro Rosenwald Nursery School and first grade at the all-Negro St. Edmund’s Episcopal Day School. The next year, with no prior school experience, I entered Lab’s kindergarten.

—

Each morning, Mother would drive us from our home in Park Manor to our school in Hyde Park.

Most of the Chicago neighborhoods I remember as pristinely Negro were pristinely white when Negroes like my parents moved in. Young men just out of the largely segregated army; young women newly married, ready to become mothers. All with their hard-earned pride and privilege: doctors, lawyers, businessmen, accountants, principals and teachers, social workers and socialites. The South Side’s one integrated neighborhood—Hyde Park–Kenwood—was under strict surveillance by the University of Chicago, which made sure that class likeness compensated for race difference. Integration meant a small number of bourgeois blacks amid bourgeois whites who’d decided their presence was acceptable. A very few Negro families lived nearly alone in a very few tenuously integrated suburbs. They drove into the city for the social events considered basic for their children’s social health.