Free Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson Page A

‘Master’ and sing it standing on an auction block?”
    Everybody knows Dorothy Dandridge wants to marry a white man. She’s never managed to turn a white lover into a loving husband, and she’ll never stop trying . Everyone knows Otto Preminger won’t marry her, though she hoped he would after he directed Carmen Jones and she became the first Negro woman to get an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Carmen was a wanton, which we resent seeing Negro women play since most people think that’s what Negro women are, but at least Carmen started out as a gypsy in a French opera.
    Two years later Dorothy Dandridge was supposed to play Tuptim in The King and I —Tuptim the refined Burmese maiden pledged to the king of Siam by her ambitious father, yet loving the gently handsome Lun Tha, to whom she was first betrothed.
    But Dorothy Dandridge turned the role down: Tuptim was little more than a slave, she declared. And how the Negro establishment lauded her decision. So Dorothy Dandridge denied hundreds of Negro girls the chance to sit rapturously in a movie theater watching a Negro woman pad delicately across palace floors in Oriental silk (turquoise, fuchsia, emerald green, and gold), voice sweetly chanting, eyes faintly slanted, and hair straight and dark as a raven’s wing. Exquisite, chastely arousing; worthy of worship, anguish, sacrifice. Played instead by the Puerto Rican Rita Moreno.
    What misbegotten scruples! The enthrallment of a beautiful Asian woman is not squalid; it is refined through ancient rituals of the Orient that white people must acknowledge despite their racial and cultural misgivings. We Negroes long for such an aura. When my school stages a musical revue that year that includes “The March of the Siamese Children,” I get to be one, in red sateen, with a topknot, rouged cheeks and lipstick, eyes drawn to a wide slant with a teacher’s blunt makeup pencil. A year later, I watch the Japanese Miiko Taka enchant Marlon Brando in Sayonara . He wants to marry her, and in the end he does. It’s profoundly exciting.
    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.
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    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 .
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    Race Social Psychology: “Problems of Blond Negroes”; “What Africans Think of Us”; “Where Mixed Couples Live”; “Is the Negro Happy?”
    Nothing