50 6 august 2018trying to say to them. I always say to people,
‘No, I am not a conservative person advocat-
ing the return of this word.’ It’s a metonym. I
combined it with land because all Negroes, all
African Americans in a certain way, live in our
land of history, of discrimination, of struggle,
of achievement—a world within that world.”
Finding a language to describe the particu-
lar things that had been hidden away in her
Negroland history took time, courage and
writerly ambition. She tells me about coming
upon the work of James Baldwin in college,
and describes his writing as “high eloquence”
(even his scorn is “majestic”). In the intellectu-
ally progressive schools she attended, the writ-
ers they studied were mostly White, mostly
men. Occasionally, they might have been giv-
en a Langston Hughes poem, but to encounter
Baldwin speaking of things that had never
been spoken of in that way was thrilling. She
draws a Bloomsbury parallel: In 1907, Lytton
Strachey enters a room where Virginia Woolf
sits with her sister Vanessa Bell, and pointing
to a mark on Vanessa’s dress, says, “Semen?”,
ushering in an age where all social barriers
are demolished. Jefferson chortles, “Whoever
said that word before? I think I’m making the
association because part of me realises how
universal but also how masculine Baldwin
was. It was always the ‘Negro he’, so it was
revelatory, but yeah...”
There’s a sense of double consciousness
that pervades Negroland, but the experience
for Black women was a double feminine fem-
inist consciousness. “Sounds like a mouthful
and a huge burden,” I say. Jefferson laughs.
“One of the women’s club mottos was ‘Lifting as we Climb!’
That’s a great deal of work!” She talks about the conflicting
messages that Negroland girls were given. On one hand, because
they were part of the bourgeoisie; they were being taught all the
privileges they were to expect as women. At the same time, they
were told Black life is fragile, and it was going to be hard for the
men they would marry, so they’d better have a career to fall back
on. Even while doing something small like setting a table for a
party, you must always be the perfect lady and represent the race
well in every way.
“In my household, there was a double message. You learn
to play certain feminine games, absolutely. That helps you get
married. It helps to sustain the marriage, child-rearing, etcetera,
but you don’t let it go. I’m not saying there weren’t women in my
mother’s world who weren’t bourgeoisie female causalities—
too much drinking, pills, unhappy marriages—but you survive,
you find ways to subvert White femininity in order to survive.”
There’s a cast of impressive relatives who trawl through
Negroland girls couldn’t die
outright. We had to plot and circle
our way towards death, pretend
we were after something else...
Good Negro Girls mastered the
rigorous vocabulary of femininity.
Gloves, handkerchiefs, pocket-
books for each occasion. Good
diction for all occasions; skin care
(no ashy knees or elbows); hair
cultivation. Manners to please
grandparents and quell the
doubts of any white strangers
loitering to observe your behavior
in schools, stores and restaurants.
We were busy being pert, chic,
cool—but not fast. Fast meant
social extermination by degrees,
because the boys who’d sampled
a fast girl would tell
another girl they’d taken up with
(who was desirable but not fast)
that the first girl was a slut.
From NegrolandJefferson’s book, but it’s the women who
really shine—dressmaker grandmothers
who plot their children’s educational ascent
with vigilance, who say things like, “If you
ever get pregnant, don’t bother to stop by the
house. Just keep walking east (to the lake).”
Her mother, Irma, and her friends were in
“feminine command” with their suits and
silk shirtwaists, furs and smart hats. “When
I was growing up, these women were fabu-
lous to me,” she says,. “They were mine, they
were my world.”
Jefferson has always adored fashion and
sees no direct clash with feminism. It was
always something to negotiate. When she
went to feminist conferences, there would
be everything from totally dowdy, to colour,
to mini skirts (no Meghan Markle heels
though). “As long as there’s certain freedom
in rights of representation—style choices
that feel they’re aligned with your tempera-
ment, your ambitions, what you want to
dare rather than hide, why wouldn’t that
be something we would claim as a feminist
right?” She’s glad fashion has emerged as a
site of slightly pretentious academic studies,
that it is taken seriously as a weapon, as a
vehicle, as metaphor, because it’s some-
thing women in every culture are master
interpreters of. “It’s something you keep
experimenting with,” she says. “At every
age. If I move to Oregon, would I wear less
eye makeup? I don’t know. I wouldn’t stop
wearing it, but I might temper it. So all those
navigations are treacherous but interesting.”
One of the most beautiful sentences in
Negroland comes from a letter Jefferson’s mother writes: ‘Some-
times I almost forget I’m a Negro.’ It isn’t a disavowal but a long-
ing for free space. I ask Jefferson whether she thinks identity
politics have been a narrowing down rather than an enlarging
of vision, why there is compartmentalisation in spite of hybrid-
ity, why someone like Michael Jackson wanted to transcend all
binaries and boundaries and become another being. Books in a
small way allow that, don’t they? A free space. Jefferson agrees.
“I think there’s a privacy with books that isn’t quite there
with any other form,” she says. The best books for her work as
music does—quickening her sense of rhythm, tonality and har-
mony. “They give me the safety of taking imaginative, emotion-
al and experimental risks I know I’m not going to take in my
real life. They give you the chance to examine—I’m angry, I’m
ashamed, I’m sacred, I never thought I’d feel this way before—
all of that is available for you to look at and think through...
Even if you go to a book club, there’s always this solitary involve-
ment with this multi-vocal text, and I think that’s special.” nbooks AFTERWORD