Certain People Page 15

  Sacred to the memory of James Churchill Vaughan, Native of Camden, South Carolina, born April 1, 1828. He migrated to Africa in the year 1853, leaving behind a large family, owing to the oppressive laws then in force against colored men in the Southern States.

  His life in Africa was characterized by many vicissitudes in all of which he proved himself equal to the attendant difficulties. He died on the 13th of September, 1893.

  And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God. Job XIX. 26

  In America, Vaughans have not only married Carters and Stradfords, but also MacLaughlins, McDonalds, Robinsons, Rayfords, Moseleys, Jacksons, Mouzons, Gants, and Lees. Through the Lees, the Vaughans are also connected to the Dibbles, another old-line Camden family. Sallie Rebecca Lee, a Scipio granddaughter, married Eugene H. Dibble, and the Dibbles claim to be descended from an African prince. The Dibbles, the family is careful to point out, did not come to the United States as slaves. They came as merchants from Africa, settled in South Carolina, and went into the wholesale grocery business. The first Eugene Dibble’s grocery business became one of the largest in the South, and with his profits he bought acreage in what is today much of downtown Camden. The family still owns this property, and has been renting it for years, peacefully, to white tenants.

  Today’s most prominent Dibble is probably Eugene Dibble III of Chicago, who, though he is not a Black Muslim, has the lucrative position of chief financial consultant to the Nation of Islam, for whom, among other things, he is putting together the financing of a new 500-bed hospital, a $50,000,000 undertaking. Mr. Dibble is also Muhammad Ali’s advisor on money matters. Mr. Dibble’s father was a doctor at Tuskegee Institute and was a friend of George Washington Carver, and his Grandfather Dibble was a friend and neighbor of Bernard Baruch; they had adjoining farms in South Carolina. Eugene Dibble, a tall, powerfully built man who admits that, if he wished to, he could easily “pass” for white (and, when it’s convenient to do so, he does), is as family-proud as his multitudinous relations. “My mother was a Taylor,” he says. “My Grandfather Taylor was a builder, and built all of the buildings at Tuskegee. He was the first black man to graduate from M.I.T. My uncle, Robert R. Taylor, was a prominent Chicago businessman. The Taylors, like the Dibbles, were never slaves. My brother, Robert T. Dibble, is a doctor in Washington, and one of my sisters is on the faculty of Howard, and another is with the University of Chicago.” He can also rattle off genealogical facts about the family of a sort that would be beyond most white families, such as: “Jewel Lafontant’s mother was my grandfather’s first cousin.”

  Equally well versed in genealogy, surprisingly, are the Dibbles’ five children, who range in age from twelve to twenty and whose skin colors range from the light side to the dark. Not long ago, the children drew up an enormous family tree in an attempt to gather all the members of the family on one sheet of paper, those in Africa as well as those in the United States. It took many sheets of paper, Scotch-taped together, and, when spread open, it nearly covers the entire living room floor of the Dibbles’ large Chicago apartment. Proudly looking over the monumental work of Rochon Dibble, twenty; Clyla Dibble, eighteen; Eugene Dibble IV, seventeen; Andrew Dibble, fourteen; and Hilary Dibble, twelve, Eugene Dibble III says, “We have figured out that over the years there have been twenty-three Dibbles at the Mount Hermon and Northfield Schools in Massachusetts. It would be safe to say that there has always been a Dibble at Mount Hermon or Northfield. Eugene the Fourth is headed for Yale. I have a little motto that I’ve passed on to my children: ‘Genealogy determines the eye, and environment creates what the eye can see.’”

  Not to be outdone is Mrs. Eugene Dibble III. She was a Campbell, and Campbells are related to Lees and Reeds (making the Dibbles in some way related to each other), and she points out, “My great uncle, Lee Reed, was a Supreme Court Justice in South Carolina.” She adds, “My family has been traced back to the Tudor Kings of England.” With equal pride, Mrs. Dibble, a Wellesley graduate, also adds, “My maternal grandfather was a servant. But he saved enough money to buy a home in a good neighborhood. I think that’s pretty good for a man who never went beyond the third grade!”

  13

  Passing

  Whether or not it is an attitude implanted within them by generations of a dominant white society, most upper-class blacks have deep feelings of inferiority because of the color of their skin and their general “visibility” as black people. Though most would not admit it, they would really rather be white. To the brave cry of “Black is beautiful” could be added, in an almost inaudible whisper, “but white is still better.” Even in the proudest black families, the little whisper is there, expressing itself in the search for white ancestors or, if none can be found, at least American Indians. Furthermore, black secret self-loathing is no new phenomenon, and was apparent among the black elite over a hundred years ago, as a mulatto black writer named John E. Bruce observed satirically shortly after the Civil War:

  There is another element in this strange heterogeneous conglomeration, which for want of a better name has been styled society and it is this species of African humanity which is forever and ever informing the uninitiated what a narrow escape they had from being born white. They have small hands, aristocratic insteps and wear blue veins, they have auburn hair and finely chiselled features. They are uneducated as a rule (i.e.) the largest number of them, though it would hardly be discovered unless they opened their mouths in the presence of their superiors in intellect, which they are very careful not to do. In personal appearance, they fill the bill precisely so far as importance and pomposity goes—but no farther. They are opposed to manual labor, their physical organization couldn’t stand it, they prefer shuffling cards or dice or “removing the spirits of Frumenta from the gaze of rude men” if somebody else becomes responsible for the damage. Around the festive board, they are unequalled for their verbosity and especially for their aptness in tracing their ancestry. One will carry you away back to the times of William the Silent and bring you up to 18 so and so, to show how illustrious is his lineage and pedigree. His great, great grandfather’s mother-in-law was the Marchioness So and So and his father was ex-Chief Justice Chastity of S.C. or some other southern state with a polygamous record.

  Upper-class black families tend to have fewer children than blacks in the ghetto, partly because, according to middle-class American standards, it is not “nice” to have large families, but also because children are just another daily reminder of the fact of blackness. One woman, light-skinned, tells of her distress and disbelief when she was first shown her baby in the hospital. It was so black. “That’s not my baby!” she cried. (Another woman, also light-skinned, was equally dismayed to see that her baby was, to all appearances, white.) The children of parents of mixed ancestry can, of course, turn out to be of any shade, like the Dibble children, who range from quite light to quite dark, and this in itself can create problems: one little boy may be accepted by his white contemporaries, while his brother may not be. A number of wealthy black families, including the John Johnsons of Chicago, have adopted children just to avoid this situation. At least there will be no question of what color a child’s skin will be.

  Black families often go to elaborate lengths to “protect” their children from finding out that they are black, or “different.” Often, in the home, the terms “black” or “colored” or “Negro” will never be used in front of children, and children’s friends are carefully screened to be sure that they meet only their “own kind,” and do not learn that there are people of any other color in the world outside. One woman recalls, “When I was a little girl and overheard an adult say someone was black, I assumed it meant that that person was dirty.” The word “white” is also often taboo in front of children, and Victoria Sanders, a Chicago stockbroker whose mother and aunts were cleaning women, says, “I knew that my mother cleaned for white people, and so I assumed that this meant white people must be dirty.”


  In much the same way, upper-class Jews who have moved away from the Orthodoxy often keep the fact of their Jewishness a secret from their children—sometimes until they are almost grown. Geoffrey Hellman, the New York writer, tells that he was not told that he was Jewish until it was time for him to go to prep school, when he was taken aside by his father and told the sober facts of life. With blacks, of course, the terrible news comes earlier—usually when they start the first grade at school—and it comes with shattering, almost traumatic effect. In countless households there has been repeated the scene where the child, in tears, comes home from school and says, “Mommy, what’s a nigger, and am I one?” Sometimes, despite the most careful secrecy, the news that a child is different comes earlier. A Cincinnati woman remembers that, as a little girl, she was traveling by bus with her mother to the South. The fact that they were sitting in the back of the bus made no impression on her. She was too young to read the sign printed above the driver’s head, and all the people seated around her were her own color. But when the bus made a refreshment stop along the highway, and she and her mother were refused service at the lunch counter, “I’ll never forget the look on my mother’s face when the waitress said, ‘We don’t serve colored,’” she says. “She looked so desperately sad that I thought she was going to die, and I was so frightened that I began to cry.”

  Such early bruises do not heal easily, if they heal at all. When asked if he felt inferior to white people, one seventeen-year-old boy from a well-to-do black family said, “Offhand, I’d say no, but actually knowing all these things that are thrown up to you about white people being superior—that they look more or less down on all Negroes—that we have to look to them for everything we get—that they’d rather think of us as mice than men—I don’t believe I or any other Negro can help but feel inferior. My father says that it isn’t so—that we feel inferior only to those whom we feel are superior. But I don’t believe we can feel otherwise. Around white people until I know them awhile I feel definitely out of place. Once I played a Ping-Pong match with a white boy whose play I know wasn’t as good as mine, and boys he managed to beat I beat with ease, but I just couldn’t get it out of my mind that I was playing a white boy. Sort of an Indian sign on me, you know.”

  Though young black people insist that they are proud of being of the upper, or at least more privileged, class, they have definite mixed feelings about being black at all, as another young man says: “Knowing that there are difficulties that confront us all as Negroes, if I could be born again and had my choice I’d really want to be a white boy—I mean white or my same color, providing I could occupy the same racial and economic level I now enjoy. I am glad I am this color—I’m frequently taken for a foreigner. I wouldn’t care to be lighter or darker and taken for a Negro. I am the darkest one in the family due to my constant outdoor activities. I realize of course that there are places where I can’t go despite my family or money just because I happen to be a Negro. With my present education, family background, and so forth, if I were only white I could go places in life. A white face holds supreme over a black one despite its economic and social status. Frankly, it leaves me bewildered.”

  Bewildered—it is as good a word as any to describe the way well-educated, well-off black families view themselves in relation to white society. It is with the same ambivalence and uncertainty that blacks view interracial marriages. Black women, for example, are nearly always opposed to black men marrying white women. It is not so much that they hate and resent the whites, nor is it because of the reasons usually given—that when a black man takes a white wife, he becomes subservient to her and, at the same time, usually marries someone beneath his social class. It is more likely to be because black women feel that, since there are so few eligible black males, they should save themselves for black women. At the same time, in a number of upper-class black families, a wife will accept the fact that her husband has a white mistress and even, at heart, be a little proud of it; it does not threaten her position socially, a position she tends to regard as somewhat shaky. Black women see nothing wrong with white men who take black wives, particularly if they are rich white men. This is taken as a tribute to the “secret charms” of black women. But when Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., married New York socialite Beryl Slocum, even though she was rich and social, the black communities of New York and Washington were up in arms.

  Because of their mixed feelings about being black at all, most blacks are not quite sure how they feel about the many light-skinned people who manage to move out of the black world and “pass” as whites. No statistics are available, but it has been estimated that thousands of black people cross over the color line each year, and it is assumed that because men are more mobile, more black men than women are passing as whites, and that they do so for economic reasons. Some black men have left their black wives and children to move upward and outward into the white business world. There is the case, for example, of Harry Murphy of Atlanta. The son of a printer, Harry Murphy, and not James Meredith, was actually the first black person to graduate from “Ole Miss.” Murphy attended the University of Mississippi as a white man, and no one ever knew the difference. He is now living and working in New York. And Robert Johnson, an editor at Ebony (and no kin to John Johnson), remembers that at Great Lakes Naval Training station, a schoolmate, who Johnson knew was black but who had fair skin, approached him and said, “Listen. This is the last time we’ll ever talk about this, but I’m passing. Just don’t blow my cover. Don’t blow my gig.” Johnson insists that he was delighted to hear of his friend’s good fortune. “My theory is,” he says, “that if you can fool the white folks, more power to you!”

  But one wonders whether such sentiments are, in the last analysis, sincere. The word “pass” has two meanings in the black world. When someone says, “He passed,” it does not usually mean that the person referred to has become assimilated with whites. To pass is also to die. Even the best-educated blacks refer to death as “passing,” the way lower-class whites will use the euphemism “passed away.” In other words, it is possible that light-skinned blacks who have disappeared to join the whites are considered as good as dead.

  A number of upper-class blacks have, of course, made noble efforts to come to grips with their black identities, and to rid themselves of their insecurities and feelings of inferiority. One of the most articulate of these is Dr. Margaret Burroughs, an assistant professor at Kennedy King City College in Chicago and the director of Chicago’s DuSable Museum, which is devoted to black art and culture. Dr. Burroughs, a doughty, wirily built lady who looks as though nothing would faze her, has long been concerned about her fellow blacks’ poor self-image, and long ago decided to do something about it. Early in her teaching career, for example, a group of black students came to her office and complained about a white teacher who had asked her pupils to sing “Old Black Joe.” Dr. Burroughs, a woman not without a sense of humor, thought about the problem for a moment, then turned and faced a window and said, “Now listen. I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to this window. I’m not telling you what to do, I’m telling you what I’d do. I’d do as the teacher told me, but whenever I got to the chorus of that song, I’d sing it, ‘Old white Joe.’” The students followed her suggestion and, though the other teacher was not amused, she got the point.

  In 1952, long before the natural or “Afro” style in hair became fashionable among blacks, Dr. Burroughs decided, for no particular reason, to stop “pressing” her hair. “It was expensive, and it was time-consuming,” she says, “and I thought, why should I go to so much fuss just to make my hair look like white people’s hair?” So she let the natural kinks emerge. The reaction among her friends, associates, and students was strong, even hostile. She was criticized and ridiculed and got anonymous letters. In her classroom, a student placed a note on her desk that read, “Maizie’s Beauty Parlor: You go!” She took the note up with the class, and asked them if they could think of any reasons why she might be wearing her hair
as she was. One student suggested, “You’ve got a scalp disease.” Dr. Burroughs explained, “I think I look more beautiful this way. I think all people look more beautiful when they look like themselves.”

  Still, wherever she went she was jeered and mocked. Ironically, for letting one of the traits of her race show, she was called “a disgrace to the race.” The most violent criticism came from her fellow blacks. On her way to a lecture she was giving at a black college in the South, she passed a dormitory window and heard a student say, in a loud voice, “What’s she trying to prove?” And at the lecture she was booed, not for what she had to say but for her choice of coiffure. As a result of this experience, Margaret Burroughs wrote a poem that has become something of a black classic, called “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black”:

  Let it be known to all, the story

  Of the glorious struggle of my people.