Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson

Author:Margo Jefferson [Jefferson, Margo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780307378453
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-08T04:00:00+00:00

THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, More deliberate.

CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK. Solemnly chanted.

“Be careful what you do, All the o sounds

Or Mumbo-Jumbo, God of the Congo, very golden.

And all of the other Heavy accents

Gods of the Congo, very heavy.

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, Light accents

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you, very light. Last

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.” line whispered.

Thighbone-wielding cannibals, skull-faced witch doctors, widemouthed lowlife Negroes whooping and hollering in the streets, pig-fat Negroes prancing in red coats, doffing red top hats (why can’t more of us learn to curb the love of loud colors that made white people think we’re ridiculous?—how well I knew that lament).

Compulsion/revulsion / compulsion/revulsion—“BOOM, kill the white men / HOO, HOO, HOO.” All the horrors we Negroes strove to banish from our lives and from the minds of white Americans were here, now, in my room, enfolding me in a delirium of sound and sight.

Then a confusion of loveliness. A fairyland, an ebony palace, casements of gold and ivory, jasmine-scented maidens with tiny feet and pearls in hair that I made fall to their waists in undulating waves.

The fairyland appeased me; still I fought the degrading details. Hated Lindsay for sticking elephant bone in the gold and ivory casements, for making the maidens coal-black instead of ebony. Hated him for not capitalizing “Negro.”

I felt I had the tools for the last section, where “a good old negro in the slums of the town” preached piety, decried sin, beat his Bible, and set the congregation singing and testifying.

It was condescending but not vicious—not to the part of me that shared Lindsay’s view of florid lower-class religion. It was vicious, though, when “they all repented, a thousand strong / For their stupor and savagery and sin and wrong.” American Negroes were not a stuporous or savage people. That was Vachel Lindsay’s ignorant prejudice, the kind we vanquished daily through struggle, achievement, eloquent indignation. And the spirituals were a great music. I could tell he knew that despite his prejudice. For here were bits of loveliness again, a jubilee as the gray sky opened and our voices rose and pulsed to a singing wind of glory glory glory.

Then, dying down to a penetrating terrified whisper, the last words dragged me back.

“Mumbo…Jumbo will hoo-doo you,

Mumbo-Jumbo will hoo-doo you.

Mumbo…Jumbo…will…hoo-doo…you.”

I whispered it, I chanted it, I read it silently. I read it alone in my room and I never told anyone. My reading was furtive and excited, filled with voluptuous loathing.

I was eleven. And if pornography lures as it appalls, offers you a debased vision of yourself that some part of you yields to, then “The Congo” was my first pornography.

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