Journal: Donald A. Johnson
My parents decided I would go to Gonzaga High School, a Jesuit school in the shadow of the Capitol. I wanted to go to public high school with most of my friends, but my parents thought that the public schools in Washington, by now predominantly Negro, were being allowed to decay. Gonzaga it would be. I reluctantly agreed.
Before I set off to my new school, my father had me in for a talk. Whenever we had a talk, he would get on his serious face, and he would speak slowly and with great dignity. De Lawd again.
“You are from a cultured, educated family,” he said to me. “You must never let white people forget that.”
“Sho ’nuff,” I said. (Why he didn’t kill me I don’t know. I was a terrible wiseass.)
“Don’t be impertinent. You have not been in the white world, and I have, and I have learned a few things. All eyes will be on you. I expect you to behave in a way that will make your mother and me proud.”
“Of course I will, Daddy. You know I will.”
“It will be hard, I understand that. But a lot is expected of you. You have opportunities that many of our people have not had.”
He droned on, and I sort of tuned out as usual. I had heard it all before. But then I perked up my ears. He came to a subject that was utterly new. White women.
“You will now be around white girls and women. At dances. At parties. You must be very careful. When you are introduced to a white woman, do not shake her hand unless she offers it.”
“What, so the black won’t rub off?”
“I know this sounds strange to you, but in the white world, things are — different. Especially when it comes to Negro men and white women. I don’t want you dating white girls. Some Negroes do it, but it isn’t right. Besides, you will find that the kinds of white women who go out with Negro men are not the kinds of decent women you want to associate with.”
I reminded him that I was only starting high school and I hadn’t been out with any women at all, much less indecent ones. I didn’t tell him that I would have loved to find some indecent women, of any color. Real sluts, who would do all the things Frank Yerby wrote about and then some.
Colored women, according to the lore of the white world, were earthy and sensual, abandoned. They obviously didn’t know about middle-class colored girls. They were about as far from abandoned as anyone could be. I once snapped Loretta Washington’s bra strap and she decked me. I mean really decked me; I went smashing into the lockers.
I’d heard stories, though, of how lower-class Negroes didn’t share our lifestyle; they drank and they danced real dirty and they had sex all the time. We were supposed to look down with pity on them and to keep our distance, because none of us wanted to end up as no-account niggers. I certainly didn’t. I was ashamed of them and found their very existence humiliating, at least when white people were around. Once I was walking along North Capitol Street with some of my white friends from Gonzaga when a very drunk Negro man walked by, singing at the top of his lungs. I cringed and hurried past, hoping nobody would notice. I never wondered why white people didn’t get upset by “white trash” the way we did about lower-class Negroes. They never looked at some poor hillbilly up from West Virginia and thought he might befoul the whole white race.
But even as I tried to avoid the lower social orders as if they had the plague, there was a part of me that wondered what it would be like to be no-account. Just for a little while, to be a real jive-ass, hard-drinking, gambling man, with women falling all over me — indecent, no-account women who wore loud, tight dresses and wiggled when they walked. I imagined Loretta Washington, down on her luck, as one of these women. Loretta, through a hazy sequence of events, had decided not to go to college and major in English so she could be a professor at Howard, but had taken to drink and gambling and other lascivious pursuits. Instead of the modest blouses with the Peter Pan collars she wore to eighth grade, when I encountered her she was clad in a lemon yellow dress slit way up the side, and cut so far down in the front that half of her marvelous coffee-colored breasts were exposed. And she said to me, “Oh, lover man, come on and make me feel real good!” which was how I imagined lower-class, no-account, sultry women talked. Sometimes, though, in my fantasies, Loretta slipped into Frank Yerby dialogue and said things like “Plunge into me with your Saracen blade, my master, and I will give you more pleasure than the gardens of Allah.” I don’t think people talked like that a lot down at 7th and U Streets, just as the characters in Frank Yerby didn’t say, ‘Roll with me, lover man,’ as they traipsed around in the fourteenth century.
But of course white women were something else again — the most desirable and the most dangerous of all. In the South, a Negro man could be lynched for even looking at a white woman. In some bizarre way, it did not seem strange that white men would be so protective of their women, because all the standards of beauty we knew about were white. When I went to the movies, I saw Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe. And even when a leading character was supposed to be a light-skinned colored woman, the actress who played her was white — Jeanne Crain or, in Show Boat, Ava Gardner. When I was attracted to girls, it was to those with light skin and slender noses, like Loretta’s. I looked at really black girls and deemed them not worthy of my attention. I felt sorry for them.
Even though Gonzaga was a boys’ school, I was around white girls a lot, at dances and at parties, especially in my senior year. I hung around with a crowd of white kids, both boys and girls. The girls were from Catholic schools in the area, Immaculata, Notre Dame, Holy Names. They were pink and scrubbed and pretty, and they smelled so good, of talcum powder and shampoo and dainty sweat. We were all friends, and if my arm once in a while brushed one of theirs, it was like an electric current going right through my whole body, but of course I couldn’t let it show. In fact, if a white girl had shown any sexual interest in me, I would probably have run like the blazes, since I utterly believed what my father had said about the depravity of any white woman who lusted after a Negro man.
As I had when I was a young kid, I wondered why God hadn’t made me white, so those pink, nice-smelling girls would laugh and tease and smooch with me the way they did with my friends. Sometimes I’d bring a date along, but she never fit in with the group in a comfortable way — even though the white kids did try to be polite.
In college, I dated a lot of Negro women — most of them lovely, smart and savvy. But there was something missing. I guess I had a white goddess in my head, a mixture of Rita and Lana and all those girls who smelled so good and seemed so unattainable. In so many ways, the white world sets standards for us that are so absurd and so impossible. Dark skin has shades and shadows and textures that fair skin never can attain. Why aren’t white people jealous of us, for our marvelous skin tones? Maybe they would be, if we made the movies and produced the TV programs and created the advertisements. Maybe then white people would be buying skin darkeners and getting injections in their lips to make them fuller. Maybe they’d cringe on the street when somebody looked at them with revulsion and said, “My God, he’s so white.”
When I went on my first Freedom Ride, I met Marianne, who was from the University of Wisconsin. She was about as white as white people went — her parents were Norwegian. What bothered a lot of people about the Freedom Rides was that, with all those black and white young men and women, their hormones raging, all in the same bus, wasn’t some kind of hanky-panky going on?
Sure it was. Not on the bus, of course. When people are smashing on the sides of your Greyhound with boards and yelling they plan to have a weenie roast with you as the weenies, you are not thinking much about sex. But we were all conscious of breaking society’s great taboo, and there was something very erotic about that. Marianne and I slept together in a house in Georgia, not quite believing how adventurous we were. I’d sneak glances at her pubic hair, which was so pale it seemed hardly to be there at all. I caught her staring at me too. A brown penis was a novelty, I’m sure, after Thor and Sven or whoever. (I hoped that Sven and Thor did not live up to Viking legend, that they were small and shriveled, and pale.)
It was OK, but I think we were both disappointed. She was just a nice, sweet-smelling white girl, not a pale goddess who could transport me to some rarefied palace of pleasure to which I had never been. I was just a young guy trying to get it right, not a black brute who’d give her sex like she’d never imagined. We were just friends after that, not lovers. And I got over my yearning for white women.
Not that a gorgeous women of any color can’t get my motor running, but it’s not metaphysical anymore, it’s just lust. I have more appreciation for the sisters, now, of any shade. I admire them for their strength, their humor, their courage. When I marry, I think she will be Negro, but I won’t think I’m being shortchanged. I don’t dream about goddesses anymore.
Lately, in fact, I’ve been dating Loretta Washington, who’s getting her master’s in literature at Howard. She doesn’t deck me when I unsnap her bra; she still could, I suspect. Loretta is a lot of woman. I’ve never asked her to wear a lemon-colored dress and say, “Lover man, come on and make me feel good.” She would if I asked her. I won’t ask her to do the Frank Yerby dialogue about the Saracen blade, though. She’s teaching Chaucer. She’d never get through it with a straight face.