Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter One - THE TRIAD OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

  Chapter Two - IN THE BROWN STUDY

  Chapter Three - THE PRINCE AND I

  Chapter Four - POOR RICHARD

  Chapter Five - HISPANIC

  Chapter Six - THE THIRD MAN

  Chapter Seven - DREAMS OF A TEMPERATE PEOPLE

  Chapter Eight - GONE WEST

  Chapter Nine - PETER’S AVOCADO

  Acknowledgements

  Praise for Brown and Richard Rodriguez

  “Rodriguez is an original thinker, an astute observer and an uncommonly gifted writer.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “As a writer Rodriguez has his own linguistic bravado, which strikes off images with the brio of a Shakespeare and the wicked humor of a political cartoonist.”

  —Buffalo News

  “Challenging, eloquent, witty, and searingly beautiful.”

  —Booklist

  “Brown provides a powerful argument for our need to re-imagine place and race alike as we enter this century.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “This book resonates with beautiful prose and such deep insight that it should be required reading for all those intrigued by our human condition.”

  —New York Sun

  “Rodriguez offers the reader one of the most provocative and compelling descriptions of what he calls the ‘browning of America.’ ” —Accent magazine

  “Beautifully written and well-edited, Brown has matured from the raw juice of observation and become a rather fine wine.” —National Post (Canada)

  “The works in Brown are not neat little patterned exercises pointed toward a conclusion. They’re chewy like Emerson’s; they pop with firecracker insights like D.H. Lawrence’s.”

  —The San Jose Mercury News

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  BROWN

  Richard Rodriguez works as an editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco and is a contributing editor for Harper’s magazine and the Sunday “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times. He appears regularly as an essayist on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He is the author of Hunger of Memory and Days of Obligations.

  ALSO BY RICHARD RODRIGUEZ

  Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez

  Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father

  PENGUIN BOOKS Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

  Published in Penguin Books 2003

  Copyright © Richard Rodriguez, 2002 All rights reserved

  Page 233 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-16150-0

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Jimmy, before the birds cry . . .

  Preface

  BROWN AS IMPURITY.

  I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. I extol impurity.

  I eulogize a literature that is suffused with brown, with allusion, irony, parodox—ha!—pleasure.

  I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

  Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable—the line separating black from white, for example. Brown confuses. Brown forms at the border of contradiction (the ability of language to express two or several things at once, the ability of bodies to experience two or several things at once).

  It is that brown faculty I uphold by attempting to write brownly. And I defy anyone who tries to unblend me or to say what is appropriate to my voice.

  You will often find brown in this book as the cement between leaves of paradox.

  You may not want paradox in a book. In which case, you had better seek a pure author.

  Brown is the color most people in the United States associate with Latin America.

  Apart from stool sample, there is no browner smear in the American imagination than the Rio Grande. No adjective has attached itself more often to the Mexican in America than “dirty”—which I assume gropes toward the simile “dirt-like,” indicating dense concentrations of melanin.

  I am dirty, all right. In Latin America, what makes me brown is that I am made of the conquistador and the Indian. My brown is a reminder of conflict.

  And of reconciliation.

  In my own mind, what makes me brown in the United States is that I am Richard Rodriguez. My baptismal name and my surname marry England and Spain, Renaissance rivals.

  North of the U.S.-Mexico border, brown appears as the color of the future. The adjective accelerates, becomes a verb: “America is browning.” South of the border, brown sinks back into time. Brown is time.

  In middle chapters, I discuss the ways Hispanics brown an America that traditionally has chosen to describe itself as black-and-white. I salute Richard Nixon, the dark father of Hispanicity. But my Hispanic chapters, as I think of them—the chapters I originally supposed were going to appear first in this book—gave way to more elementary considerations. I mean the meeting of the Indian, the African, and the European in colonial America. Red. Black. White. The founding palette.

  Some months ago, a renowned American sociologist predicted to me that Hispanics will become “the new Italians” of the United States. (What the Sicilian had been for nineteenth-century America, the Colombian would become for the twenty-first century.)

  His prediction seems to me insufficient because it does not account for the influence of Hispanics on the geography of the American imagination. Because of Hispanics, Americans are coming to see the United States in terms of a latitudinal vector, in terms of south-north, hot-cold; a new way of placing ourselves in the twenty-first century.

  America has traditionally chosen to describe itself as an east-west country. I grew up on the east-west map of America, facing east. I no longer find myself so easily on that map. In middle age (also brown, its mixture of loss and capture), I end up on the shore where Sir Francis Drake first stepped onto California. I look toward Asia.

  As much as I celebrate the browning of America (and I do), I do not propose an easy optimism. The book’s last chapter was completed before the events of September 11, 2001, and now will never be complete. The chapter describes the combustible dangers of brown; the chapter annotates the tragedies it anticipated.

  I think brown marks a reunion of peoples, an end to ancient wanderings. Rival cultures and creeds conspire with Spring to create children of a beauty, perhaps of a harmony, previously unknown. Or long forgotten. Even so, the terrorist and the skinhead dream in solitude of purity and of the straight line because they fear a future that does not isolate them. In a brown future, the most dangerous actor might likely be the
cosmopolite, conversant in alternate currents, literatures, computer programs. The cosmopolite may come to hate his brownness, his facility, his indistinction, his mixture; the cosmopolite may yearn for a thorough religion, ideology, or tribe.

  Many days, I left my book to wander the city, to discover the city outside my book was comically browning. Walking down Fillmore Street one afternoon, I was enjoying the smell of salt, the brindled pigeons, brindled light, when a conversation overtook me, parted around me, just as I passed the bird-store window: Two girls. Perhaps sixteen. White, Anglo, whatever. Tottering on their silly shoes. Talking of boys. The one girl saying to the other: . . . His complexion is so cool, this sort of light—well, not that light . . .

  I realized my book will never be equal to the play of the young.

  . . . Sort of reddish brown, you know . . . The other girl nodded, readily indicated that she did know. But still Connoisseur Number One sought to bag her simile. . . . Like a Sugar Daddy bar—you know that candy bar?

  Two decades ago, I wrote Hunger of Memory, the autobiography of a scholarship boy. Ten years later, in Days of Obligation, I wrote about the influence of Mexican ethnicity on my American life. This volume completes a trilogy on American public life and my private life. Brown returns me to years I have earlier described. I believe it is possible to describe a single life thrice, if from three isolations: Class. Ethnicity. Race. When I began this book, I knew some readers would take “race” for a tragic noun, a synonym for conflict and isolation. Race is not such a terrible word for me. Maybe because I am skeptical by nature. Maybe because my nature is already mixed. The word race encourages me to remember the influence of eroticism on history. For that is what race memorial izes. Within any discussion of race, there lurks the possibility of romance.

  Chapter One

  THE TRIAD OF ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE

  TWO WOMEN AND A CHILD IN A GLADE BESIDE A SPRING. Beyond them, the varnished wilderness wherein bright birds cry. The child is chalk, Europe’s daughter. Her dusky attendants, a green Indian and a maroon slave.

  The scene, from Democracy in America, is discovered by that most famous European traveler to the New World, Alexis de Tocqueville, aristocratic son of the Enlightenment, liberal, sickly, gray, violet, lacking the vigor of the experiment he has set himself to observe.

  “I remember . . . I was traveling through the forests which still cover the state of Alabama. . . .”

  In a clearing, at some distance, an Indian woman appears first to Monsieur, followed by a “Negress,” holding by the hand “a little white girl of five or six years.”

  The Indian: “A sort of barbarous luxury” set off her costume; “rings of metal were hanging from her nostrils and ears, her hair, which was adorned with glass beads, fell loosely upon her shoulders. . . .” The Negress wore “squalid European garments.”

  Such garments are motifs of de Tocqueville’s pathos. His description intends to show the African and the Indian doomed by history in corresponding but opposing ways. (History is a coat cut only to the European.)

  “The young Indian, taking the child in her arms, lavished upon her such fond caresses as mothers give, while the Negress endeavored, by various little artifices, to attract the [child’s] attention. . . .”

  The white child “displayed in her slightest gestures a consciousness of superiority that formed a strange contrast with her infantine weakness; as if she received the attentions of her companions with a sort of condescension.”

  Thus composed: The Indian. The Negress. The white child.

  “. . . In the picture that I have just been describing there was something peculiarly touching; a bond of affection here united the oppressors with the oppressed, and the effort of Nature to bring them together rendered still more striking the immense distance placed between them by prejudice and the laws.”

  At Monsieur’s approach, this natural colloquy is broken. He becomes the agent of history. Seeing him, the Indian suddenly rises, “push[es] the child roughly away and, giving [Monsieur] an angry look, plunge[s] into the thicket.”

  The Negress rests; awaits de Tocqueville’s approach.

  Neither response satisfies the European. The African, de Tocqueville writes, has lost the memory of ancestors, of custom and tongue; the African has experienced degradation to his very soul, has become a true slave. “Violence made him a slave, and the habit of servitude gives him the thoughts and desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he hates them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of those who oppress him.”

  The bejeweled Indian, alternately, is “condemned . . . to a wandering life, full of inexpressible sufferings,” because European interlopers have unbalanced the provender of Nature.

  And, de Tocqueville remarks (a fondness for fable), whereas the Negro’s response to mistreatment is canine, the Indian’s is feline. “The Negro makes a thousand fruitless efforts to insinuate himself among men who repulse him. . . .” The Indian is filled with diffidence toward the white, “has his imagination inflated with the pretended nobility of his origin, and lives and dies in the midst of these dreams of pride.” The Indian refuses civilization; the African slave is rendered unfit for it.

  But cher Monsieur: You saw the Indian sitting beside the African on a drape of baize. They were easy together. The sight of them together does not lead you to wonder about a history in which you are not the narrator?

  These women are but parables of your interest in yourself. Rather than consider the nature of their intimacy, you are preoccupied alone with the meaning of your intrusion. You in your dusty leather boots, cobbled on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. Your tarnished silver snuffbox, your saddlebag filled with the more ancient dust of books. You in your soiled cambric. Vous-même.

  A boy named Buddy came up beside me in the schoolyard. I don’t remember what passed as prologue, but I do not forget what Buddy divulged to me:If you’re white, you’re all right;

  If you’re brown, stick around;

  If you’re black, stand back.

  It was as though Buddy had taken me to a mountaintop and shown me the way things lay in the city below.

  In Sacramento, my brown was not halfway between black and white. On the leafy streets, on the east side of town, where my family lived, where Asians did not live, where Negroes did not live, my family’s Mexican shades passed as various. We did not pass “for” white; my family passed among white, as in one of those old cartoons where Clarabelle Cow goes shopping downtown and the mercantile class of dogs does not remark her exception. As opposed to Amos and Andy, whose downtown was a parallel universe of no possible admixture. And as I easily pass in these pages between being an American and regarding America from a distance.

  As opposed, also, to the famous photograph of a girl in Little Rock in the pages of Life magazine. A black girl, no older than Alice, must pass alone through the looking glass. I remember wondering what my brown would have meant to Little Rock, how my brown would have withstood Little Rock.

  In the Sacramento of the 1950s, it was as though White simply hadn’t had time enough to figure Brown out. It was a busy white time. Brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides. “You take the rest”—my cue to wander away to the sidelines, to wander away.

  In those years, I recall seeing a movie called The Defiant Ones. Two convicts—Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis—were shackled to each other. The movie did not occur to me racially or politically but erotically. The child’s obvious question concerned privacy. By comparison, the pairing of the Lone Ranger and Tonto on television did occur to me racially. They were twin scourges, upholders of the law of the West. They were of compatible mind and they were of complementary skill—one sneaky, one full-charge. I noticed Tonto had no vocabulary but gravitas. Of more immediate interest to me was that each wore the symbol of his reserved emotion—the mask; the hair in a bun. I didn’t identify with Tonto any more than with Lone, or less. I identified with their pairing.<
br />
  My parents had come from Mexico, a short road in my imagination. I felt myself as coming from a caramelized planet, an upside-down planet, pineapple-cratered. Though I was born here, I came from the other side of the looking glass, as did Alice, though not alone like Alice. Downtown I saw lots of brown people. Old men on benches. Winks from Filipinos. Sikhs who worked in the fields were the most mysterious brown men, their heads wrapped in turbans. They were the rose men. They looked like roses. And the Palestinian communist bookie—entirely hearsay—who ran a tobacco store of pungent brownness (the smell of rum-soaked cigars and cheap, cherry-scented pipe tobacco) was himself as brown as a rolled cigar, but the more mysterious for having been born in Bethlehem.

  And as we passed, we passed very close to the young man, close enough for me to smell him, something anointing his hair. He was the most beautiful man (my first consciousness of the necessity for oxymoron) I remember seeing as a boy. He wore a suit-vest over his naked torso. He wore a woman’s gold locket, with a dark red stone. He was petting a dog in the street. His pant knees were dirty. He smelled of coconut. He smiled brilliantly as we passed.

  The missing tooth.

  Heepsie, my mother whispered, taking me firmly by the hand, refusing his blazing notice with an averted nod.

  I had seen the gypsy’s mother—she must be his mother—dozens of times, sitting on a lawn chair outside her “office” on H Street, near my father’s work. There was a sign in the window beneath which she sat, a blank hand outlined in neon. She never sought or met my gaze. She looked Mexican to me. Not Mexican, my parents assured me. My brother said, Watch out, Ricky, she’s sitting there reading your tombstone.