Free Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson Page B

about us is taken for granted by anyone anywhere in the world .
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    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 .
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    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 .
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    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.
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    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