Certain People (25 page)

The Beaux Arts Ball is famous for the dazzling spectacle of the costumes people turn up in and, at every ball, the most spectacularly dressed person of all is its chairman. She appears in glittering headpieces of towering tinsel, fur, feathers, jewels, and gowns bedizened with sequins and gold paillettes. At a recent ball, the glamorous chairman was presented to the audience stepping out of a huge mock-up of a champagne bottle, wearing a gown of silver lamé with a jeweled breastplate and a crown of white ostrich plumes.

Some black New Yorkers criticize Mollie Moon and call her a social butterfly. But she has her serious side. Not long ago, for example, she attended an Urban League conference in Atlanta, and a diversion offered to the conferees was a tour of the homes of the many wealthy
blacks in the city. Mollie Moon demurred. “Why should I be interested in going to see the homes of wealthy blacks?” she says. “I said no. I told them I'd rather go to the museums, or visit some of the local historical sights.” She is aware that she has critics, but pays them little heed. Poring through her huge collection of glossy photographs of herself and her famous friends, of her many public appearances in her extraordinary costumes over the years, she says, “My only regret is that I'm not a size twelve anymore.”

17

Taste

White visitors to homes of affluent blacks are often struck by a puzzling, and yet pervasive, “difference” in the appearance of things. Louis Auchincloss, the novelist and Manhattan Brahmin, whose favorite philanthropy is the Museum of the City of New York, has been called on to visit the homes of wealthy blacks in Harlem in the course of fund-raising, and says, “It's very hard to describe. These were gracious, cultivated people, but there were things in their houses and apartments that—while obviously expensive—I just wouldn't want in mine.” Another New York white, a woman, says, “I noticed little things, small details, that just struck me as somehow—well, not wrong, but still not quite right. I remember, for example, noticing a huge Steuben glass bowl in the center of a coffee table. I know the cost of Steuben, and I'm sure that bowl must have cost at least twelve hundred dollars. It was filled with gold-painted walnuts.” Others have noticed other subtle differences, which raise bemused questions among white people. Why, for example, should Bennetta Bullock Washington, the wife of Washington's mayor and a woman of aristocratic background, satisfy herself with plastic plants in her house and settle for brightly colored glass ceiling fixtures that would strike some as garish? And why, though she is a woman with a Ph.D. degree, does she live in a house that seems to contain not a single book? Why (as
Ebony
's success stories never fail to note) has the ownership of a Cadillac automobile become the ultimate black success symbol—to the point where less rich blacks often go heavily into debt simply in order to drive a Cadillac? The Cadillac has become such an
important ornament to black life that blacks themselves make jokes about it. There is the story of the black man who bought a new Cadillac but was careful always to park it across the street—so his house wouldn't topple over on it. Then there is the tale of the wealthy black who directed in his will that he be buried in his Cadillac. As the great car and its departed passenger were being lowered into the grave, a spectator at the funeral murmured, “What a way to go!” Wealthy whites tend not to favor Cadillacs and, instead, would tend to buy an equally expensive, but smaller and less ostentatious, Mercedes. At issue here is the complicated question of black
taste
or, perhaps, lack of it. Or the subtle difference between using wealth and simply spending money.

Should, for instance, a white visitor to the home of a well-to-do black be surprised—or slightly put off—when his hostess asks him politely, “Will you have apple juice, milk, or ginger ale?” At least one New York man found this selection of drinks a trifle odd. Why do so many black cooks add two cups of sugar to the cake recipe when one would do? Do blacks really “like different foods,” and is that why many Southerners still insist that “blacks smell different”? (The theory of black body odor is as difficult to assess as the theory that black males have larger sexual organs than do whites. Body odor is a black obsession, as attested to by the number of deodorant ads carried in
Ebony
, but the answer is probably that some black people have an unpleasant body odor at some times, just as some white people do.) Why is Kool-Aid such a popular drink among blacks? And, for that matter, why do so many black people smoke Kool cigarettes? At least one psychologist, Dr. Edward Lahniers of the University of Cincinnati, feels that the associations of the words
Kool
and
cool
, as in “keeping one's cool” and “playing it cool,” have much to do with this. As for alcoholic beverages, the more expensive brands of Scotches, such as Chivas Regal, are often served in the households of well-to-do blacks. At the same time, liquor distributors have long been aware that whiskies with the word “white” in their brand names are extremely popular in black bars—White Horse Scotch, and Dewar's White Label, for example. A Scotch with an integrationist label—Black & White—is not a popular drink with blacks, nor is expensive Johnnie Walker Black Label. That, of course, is one kind of taste. It has nothing to do with why the Harry Belafontes, in their large New York apartment on West End Avenue, have a living room dominated by a huge, curving, mirrored bar (whereas, in a white home, one
would tend to find a small rolling table for drinks), or why Berry Gordy, Jr., the mogul of Motown Records, has—or had an interior decorator who let him have—a California house draped with gold lamé curtains, or why Mrs. Martin Luther King, Jr., who is certainly a woman of a high degree of sophistication, contributed exactly one dollar to a recent Cancer Crusade in Atlanta, and then demanded to know how much other people were giving. Each to his taste, of course. But the divergence between black tastes and white has certainly been a factor that has contributed to the apartness of the races, and that has made the white, when encountering the black in his home or his world, feel that he is entering alien, puzzling, and not particularly compatible territory.

Many whites feel, along with Professor Frazier, the black sociologist, that blacks, when they become successful, immediately want to flaunt their success—not merely to whites, but also to less fortunate blacks. One white New York woman, who has been involved with various committees involving the black community, made this observation: “The first time I was invited to dinner in a black home, I was a little bit overwhelmed. I knew the family had money, but I was completely unprepared for what I found at the dinner table. The food was delicious, but there was so much of it! Course after course after course. I got the definite feeling that this wasn't the way they usually ate, but was a spread that was put on just for me, because I was white. And the table setting. I've never seen so much silver and china in use at one dinner table. Even though there were all those courses, there was more silver laid out beside my plate than I could possibly use. I had the feeling she was using every piece of silver and every piece of china she owned. A few weeks later, I had this same woman to my house for dinner. I had what I thought was a nice menu, but I could tell that she was somewhat surprised that I wasn't serving as much food as she had. After all, she had served a turkey, a ham,
and
a roast of beef, and all I was offering her was a roast. At one point, she pointed to some dishes that I keep displayed in a dining room china cabinet, and said, ‘That's lovely china. Why don't you use that?' She seemed actually a bit put out that I wasn't using
all
my best things. Oh, and another thing I remember about the dinner at her house. The dining room was quite attractively furnished, but there was a television set in the room. At seven o'clock, even though we were eating dinner, she turned on the news.”

Partly, the difference in taste that white people find odd and
foreign may stem, as Professor Frazier suggested, from the fact that middle-class blacks try desperately hard to “do things” the way white people do, and to conform with what they see as white upper-crust standards (including, perhaps unconsciously, drawing an association with whites from such products as White Horse and White Label whisky). At the same time, even the wealthiest blacks have had only a limited opportunity to observe, at first hand, white upper-class life on a daily basis, and to absorb the small nuances of white social behavior that whites take for granted and therefore practice with ease.

For their ideas of what upper-class white tastes and manners are like, most blacks have had either to rely, as house servants, on occasional backstairs, behind-the-scenes glimpses, or on the heightened version of white life that is presented in films or on television. Understandably, with Hollywood as a model, the black imitation of white high life often seems—to white eyes—garish or even grotesque. A curious loss of communication between blacks and whites is the result. In Cincinnati, for example, a white hostess telephoned a prominent black couple and invited them to her house for cocktails, and was disappointed when the couple did not appear. Later, she learned the reason: the black couple had been offended because the hostess had not mailed out a printed invitation. In the eyes of the black couple, the white hostess had been guilty of a social
gaffe
. The proper black hostess—as the white hostess would have known had she read Charlotte Hawkins Brown's little etiquette book—mails out her invitations. In her section on “Invitations,” Dr. Brown wrote: “A formal invitation is printed or engraved to be elegant, while an informal invitation may be given on the telephone. The receiver of such an invitation is sometimes at a disadvantage because he is not given time to consult his or her calendar.… The telephone is a most convenient substitute for informal invitations [but is] recommended for school boy and girl affairs.”

With the wide gap that exists between black and white society, certain details of behavior, certain “social graces,” that come naturally to upper-class whites either elude the blacks or, when they try to employ them, seem stilted, forced, and—to a white's way of thinking at least—in poor taste. In very much the same manner, Old Guard Christian families regard the habits—in terms of dress, home decorating, and speech—of newly rich Jews as gauche and tasteless. Similarly, old-line German and Sephardic Jewish families who have learned to dress conservatively and live quietly look askance at their
newly rich coreligionists from Eastern Europe who wear clear plastic sling-back shoes, mink stoles, and diamonds on the beach at Miami. As one German Jewish woman put it, “I have diamonds, too, but I've never taken them out of the bank.” Of course Charlotte Hawkins Brown had a word on this too: “Don't make the mistake of trying to be too elegant. It is exceedingly bad taste to overdo at any time. Neatness and simplicity are often preferred to showy elegance.”

But, even more important, black taste may be related to the rather special way blacks regard and interpret social “class.” In a series of interviews with successful black businessmen, each was asked the question, “How do you define class and what, to you, constitutes class?” An overwhelming majority immediately answered that class was a matter of clothes, and how a man dressed. Clothes, the feeling was, definitely made the man. One young man, the first black to be made an executive with a leading white accounting firm in Chicago, went on at length as to how important his clothes were to him. He not only bought his suits at the finest stores—Brooks Brothers, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Marshall Field—and his shoes at Bally and Gucci, but he was also deeply concerned with the care of his clothes. “Dry cleaning ruins a good suit,” he said earnestly, “and so does repeated pressing. I try to take care of my suits in such a way that they never need to be dry cleaned more than once every six months. As for pressing, if a man hangs up his clothes properly every night when he takes them off, making sure that the trousers hang straight from the cuffs in a clamp-type hanger, with the seams matched, and his jacket on a padded hanger, a suit will stay in press. If I have a spot on a necktie, I never have it cleaned. I simply throw it out. The same thing with socks. I've never worn darned socks. When I have a hole in a sock, I throw out the pair. Underwear too, and shirts, and shoes. I spend a dollar a day on shoeshines.”

Blacks have always been extremely fashion-conscious. In fact, blacks have become genuine fashion leaders and any number of styles, later adopted by white people, were first popularized and worn by black men and women, including men's flared trousers and wide-lapeled suits, body shirts, sandwich-soled shoes, women's high boots, mini skirts, dyed furs and pants suits. Both Paris and Seventh Avenue are well aware of blacks' trend-setting role. In terms of decorating and home furnishings, however, they have been much less influential. Perhaps this is because blacks have had less opportunity to display their homes to white people. A mirrored ceiling or a huge
lamp with a pink-ruffled shade would impress another black, but it would not be admired by a white person with “good taste”—nor would it have much chance to. Clothes are another matter. A well-turned-out black man or woman on the street is noticed by everyone, and some status, after all, is determined by how others regard you, which may be related to how you regard yourself—and how well you can keep up your front. How you protect yourself, in any case, will determine how others will regard you and, to a black, fine, stylish clothes are the easiest, most obvious form of protection.

On the white side of the racial divide, there is a tendency to think of “middle-class blacks” as middle-class people with dark skins. This is far from the fact, and class in the black world is determined by other, somewhat different, distinctions. To a white of the middle or upper class, his class is determined by his occupation, income, the quality of his residence, his prestige, life-style, and personal identity. In addition to the way he dresses and the way he presents himself—including the important matter of the way he speaks—black status is conveyed by home ownership and education. Blacks tend to attribute far greater importance to education as a means of maintaining and keeping status than white people do. Most educated whites tend to assume that their friends on their own social level were similarly educated, and give no more thought to it. “Oh, did you go to Yale? So did I” is the common white reaction whenever the subject comes up, which is seldom. Educated blacks, on the other hand, discuss and compare their educations—and their parents' educations, and their children's educations—endlessly. To have a son or daughter who is a college dropout is a sorry disgrace to a black family, while a white family shrugs it off as no more than a minor mishap. A college degree is the goal of every black achiever, and to have a graduate degree beyond that is regarded as a passport to the loftiest social strata in the black community. Black doctors, dentists, lawyers, druggists, teachers, ministers, psychologists, nurses, social workers, and even undertakers stand at the pinnacle of black society because they are, by virtue of their professions, recipients of higher education and special training. These professionals are much more highly regarded in the black community than mere money-makers. A black college professor earning $12,000 a year would be held in higher esteem by other blacks than the unschooled merchant earning $100,000 a year. A woman such as Mrs. Mary Gibson Hundley of Washington, a retired high school teacher who looks forward to her monthly Social
Security check, considers herself of a much more refined cut of cloth than Chicago's John H. Johnson with his $40,000,000-a-year publishing business—partly because she graduated from Radcliffe and Johnson never got to college. Berry Gordy, Jr., might head a record company with $50,000,000 in annual sales, but he, again, never went to college and is an ex-prizefighter to boot. It is doubtful that Mrs. Hundley or others in her class would even care to meet him.