Journal: Donald A. Johnson
I am the only Negro in the creative writing class. It’s a situation that seems strange to me now, since I’ve been working in the South with so many black people around me. I have to be careful again. Everybody will be looking at me to see if I belong.
But I’m tired of being careful. I’m not going to write what white folks want to hear, but I’m not going to hide things from them either. My father is always worried about how colored people behave when white people are looking. It’s like we can be ourselves, with all our faults, only among our own. It seems we go to two extremes. Either we try to be perfect imitation whites, or we do the Big, Black and Bad number, shoving it right up whitey’s ass. Either way, we’re dancing to white people’s tunes, reacting to them. I want to write honestly about who I am, where I come from and what I’ve seen.
Our professor has published three books of short stories. I’ve read some of them, and I think they are very good, very honest. I think I can learn a lot from her. I talked with her the other day, and she said she liked my writing samples a lot. She suggested I think about writing a book about my life. I was sort of stunned, and I said, “I’m only twenty-four years old, isn’t that sort of presumptuous?” But she said I had a wonderful story about growing up Negro in America and taking part in the civil rights movement, something that will be a huge part of our history. That it’s not only the leaders or the elected officials who are history, but people like me, ordinary people, who get swept up into its flow. Our lives are history too.
Our first assignment is about childhood, and I started to think about Growing Up Colored — which is Grandma Johnson’s word, my father doesn’t like it. He thinks Negro sounds more dignified, that colored makes people think of tenant farmers and black folks shufflin’ and jivin’. It’s funny, white people think we are all alike, but we get tied up in knots about what we ought to call ourselves, and we’re incredibly conscious of skin color, all the subtle variants of it. There’s a rhyme that used to go around our neighborhood: “If you’re white, all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, step back.” The closer you got to white, the more pale you were, the more your features seemed like white people’s — thin noses and “good” hair — the more status you had. I’m sort of medium brown, and I have good hair — which is curly but not kinky, I don’t have to put straighteners on it. Grandma Johnson always used to brag about my good hair, but to me, even that wasn’t good enough, not after I saw The Yearling.
That was my very favorite movie of all time, maybe because it was about a life that I could only imagine, in rural white America. Claude Jarman, Jr. was a boy who had a pet deer, and he also had the brightest, most golden hair I ever saw, so pale it was nearly pure white. For many months after I saw that movie I was Claude Jarman Jr. in my imagination. I even made our dog, Thunder, be my deer. I would drag him out in the backyard, and I would talk to him in my Claude Jarman, Jr., voice and pretend he was the yearling, looking up at me with big, beautiful deer eyes. Mainly Thunder just looked at me with stupidity, because in dog IQ, Thunder was somewhere between imbecile and moron. Sometimes he looked up at me and snarled, because he was not only stupid, but mean tempered as well. He always made me wonder if colored people couldn’t even have brave and loyal dogs like white people had, at least in the movies. I think maybe Thunder didn’t like colored folks, that was it, and if he had belonged to a nice family in Silver Spring he would have been Lassie. But he got stuck in Northwest with a bunch of coloreds, and that made him cross.
Everybody I adopted from the movies to be in my imagination was white: Billy the Kid and John Wayne from Flying Leathernecks and Lash LaRue. I especially liked Lash and his way of dealing with bad guys. I cut a big piece off my mother’s clothesline and went around lashing everything, including my sister, Darlene, who went crying to my mother, and Lash LaRue got grounded for three days. After that I only did it to Thunder, who snarled and ran under the porch. I got so into being these heroes that sometimes, when I’d look in the mirror, I was amazed to find this dark face staring back at me, with hair that might have been “good” but would never be Claude Jarman, Jr.’s. I remember one day I hopped on my bike and pedaled furiously, and when I got to the top of the street I looked up and said, “God, how come you didn’t make me white? I’m so smart I deserve to be white.”
There was a lot of talk about “passing” in my neighborhood, and it was hard to figure out what the consensus was. People who passed were sort of looked down on, because they were cheating, but anybody who could pass and didn’t was thought to be a sucker. The girl in our neighborhood who was, everybody agreed, the most beautiful, could have passed in a minute. She looked a lot like the movie star Jeanne Crain. Jeanne was in a movie that everybody in the neighborhood saw and talked about for weeks, called Pinky. I guess it was very daring at the time, because Jeanne Crain played a schoolteacher who was colored but who could pass. She falls in love with a white man, and he wants to take her north to marry him, and no one would ever know she was colored. In the end, she decides not to pass and go north, but to stay at the colored school where she is a teacher.
My sister, Darlene, was outraged. “I think she was stupid. She could go north and have a nice boyfriend and wear lots of nice clothes and be rich and she stayed in school! That’s really dumb.” Darlene missed the racial angle completely, but the idea that anyone would choose school over almost any alternative except lynching was incomprehensible.
But Billy Williams, who was nearly sixteen, much older and more sophisticated than the rest of us, had a reasonable theory about why Jeanne Crain begged off. He said that for white people, passing was the worst crime black people could do besides raping white women and that they had a special jail where colored people who tried to pass were taken. In that jail there was a big courtyard where the “passers” were burned at the stake. We all believed it. Since you hardly ever saw any colored people in the movies, or on television — my dad had the first set on the block with a seven-inch screen — it was clear that it was very important for white people not to have colored people among them who weren’t maids or railroad porters. So white people probably would support such a jail; even the nice, polite ones, like Officer Raymond, who came to our school to explain that policemen were our friends, or Miss Greer, who helped out at the school infirmary, or Mr. Carlson, the mailman who always said hello when he passed by. I thought of them all standing around in the courtyard where Jeanne Crain was tied to a post with straw piled up around her legs, the way Ingrid Bergman was in Joan of Arc. Miss Greer was saying, “It really is a shame, she’s very good looking.”
And Officer Raymond said, “Yes, and a good teacher too, but she tried to pass. Rules are rules.” Mr. Carlson would light the fire and say, crossly, “This is the third one this week, and it’s making me late with the mail,” and they’d toast Jeanne like a marshmallow.
It was no surprise that people wanted to pass into the white world. As far as I knew — and this was true with most people in my neighborhood — the white world was a place where everything was perfect, where nobody ever had a hair out of place, where there were no dust balls (those were cleaned up instantly by the colored maid) and the main problems people had were whether Beaver would pass his test or Lucy would get a job in show business. And all white families were always wonderful, like Ozzie and Harriet. Harriet never got crabby like my mother did sometimes and nagged me to clean up my room and Ozzie never gave Ricky or David a whack, the way my father did now and then with his belt (but only when I really deserved it). And they never argued about money, the way my mother and father sometimes did; my mother wanted to save every dime and my father loved to eat out and go to a show from time to time. Sometimes he’d bark at my mother, in exasperation, “God’s sake, Evie, the Depression is over, we’re not living in a shantytown!” When I was really pissed at him, I imagined walking back into the house looking exactly like Ricky Nelson. They certainly would be surprised, and they’d treat me nicer. My dad would never take his belt to Ricky’s white ass, of that I was sure.
It’s funny, I always thought I’d grown up so insulated from what other black people had to put up with, because my neighborhood was an enclave of privileged colored people. I had thought to myself that I grew up almost white. But as I look back, I see how obsessed we were with color, how important it was to us to be almost white. Even though we lived in a colored neighborhood, and until I went to Gonzaga for high school I hardly ever saw a white face, we were obsessed by the white world and its culture, its standards, its prejudices. It seems that hardly a day went by that the white world didn’t intrude on my life — whether I was pretending to be Claude Jarman, Jr., or being proud of my good hair or wishing I could be Ricky Nelson so I could see the look on my parents’ faces when I walked in the door. (Oh, my God, Evie, look who Donald has turned into! We’d better be nice to him!) My father never called me Donnie, like everybody else, because he thought Donnie sounded like a colored name, but Donald had class. Even my name had to be almost white.
I wonder if I will ever get away from that. Even if we win the struggle in the South, even if we succeed in integrating the schools and getting rid of colored drinking fountains and all-white lunch counters, will I ever know exactly who I am, or will a part of me always be those images created by the white world that I can never weed out of my soul? All my life, no matter how old I get, no matter how much I accomplish, deep down, will I believe it would all have been better if I really was Ricky Nelson?
That is something I am going to have to think about.