Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson Page B

friends laugh and eat candy, and jump double Dutch. After a week of this we stroll down the block hoping they’ll ask us to join. After a few days they do. Denise isn’t good but she’s not bad: she swings the rope correctly and manages a few solid intervals before the ropes catch her. My swinging isn’t fast or steady enough, and the ropes reject my anxious feet in seconds. By the time I clamor for a third try, Betty Ann and her friends say no.
    It’s not the no I remember, it’s their snickering scorn. I’m used to being the youngest and clumsiest when I play with Denise’s friends, but if one of them mocks or reproves me, another pets me to make up for it. If they act too badly, their mothers intervene. Or Denise does, and after a short quarrel and apology they resume play.
    Not now. Betty Ann’s Ooo ooh ooooo, Un-un-unhhhh is definitive. Denise raises her voice: We have to go home now . Betty Ann and her friends laugh a little harder. Denise sets a slow pace, as if we’re leaving by choice. My father and uncle are waiting in front of the house: they’ve heard the laughter and looked down the block to see us in shamed, haughty retreat. I bask in their sympathy. Over dinner the adults concur: We will never play with Betty Ann again. She and her friends are loud and coarse. They envy you girls. We moved to this neighborhood just five years ago. We may need to move again .
    —
    I enter fourth grade that fall. Mrs. Pollak has a pleasant, calm manner and she’s our music teacher as well as our homeroom teacher. Once again we sing Stephen Foster songs and once again we sing “Swanee River.” I love that song, with its octave upswing on “Swa-NEE—Riv-EEEER.” One afternoon I march around the living room singing it as loudly as I had in class that day: “All the world is sad and dreary, everywhere I roam / Oh darkies! How my heart grows weary! / Far…”
    “Margo,” comes Mother’s voice from the kitchen, followed swiftly by Mother herself. “What did you just sing?”
    I repeat myself: “All the world is sad and dreary, everywhere I roam, / Oh dar—” She stops me flat as the k approaches.
    “Margo, do you know what ‘darkies’ means?”
    I do not.
    “It’s an ugly word about us. People don’t use it anymore, but when they did, it meant the same thing as ‘nigger.’ ”
    As I take that in, Mother fumes. “Mrs. Pollak should know better. When you sang that song last year, Miss Schoff was sensitive. She changed the word to ‘lordy.’ ”
    Is it a need for thematic symmetry that makes me think this was the same year Grandma sees me playing a game in her front yard that the little white girl next door had proposed? We bend down, slump our shoulders, lower our heads to the ground, and sling rounded arms back and forth, chanting “I’se from the jungle.” Suddenly my grandmother is at the screen door telling me to come inside. She informs me sternly and solemnly, “That was an ugly game. That little girl was playing it to insult you. To insult Negroes and say we are like monkeys.”
    These memories are as much about being humiliated by adult knowledge as about race prejudice. My mother and grandmother exposed errors I’d made. I felt humiliated in front of them. My teacher seemed to like me, but not enough to spare me a humiliating racial slur. I’d been having a fine time with the little white girl next door until we started playing “I’se from the Jungle.” It’s so easy for a child to feel all wrong in the eyes of adults. And when you have no idea that what you were doing is wrong…I hated being caught unawares. It was so dangerous, so shameful not to know what I needed to know.
Q: Why must I know? Tell me again.
A: So you won’t let yourself be insulted and humiliated. So you won’t let your people be insulted and humiliated.
    There are so many ways to be ambushed by insult and humiliation.
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    * The words that follow read “Crosses were burned and the two houses were