Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  You know what I’m talking about . . .

  Of course I understand what you’re talking about. Race is the sine qua non among American transactions. Without race, we wouldn’t have music, movies, prisons, politics, history, libraries, colleges, private conversations, motives. Dorothy Dan dridge. Bill Clinton. Race is America’s theme—not freedom, not democracy (as we say in company). What are you? we say. Well, we don’t say anymore, but we mean. And you say black.

  What do you say?

  I don’t.

  Yes you do. You say, queer Indian Catholic—some sidestep bullshit like that.

  I don’t say brown. Anyway, how should I know what race I am, my ancestors go back a long way. I grant you, were it not for America’s preoccupation with distinguishing feathers, I would have to learn a trade other than brown. To be a warbler is not the same as being a brown warbler.

  Speaking of warblers. I saw a blackbird the other day—Avian-American—he was sitting in the sun. Little patch of lawn. In this particular sun—or was it just the Fabergé of the moment?—the blackbird appeared green, green as ink, and with gold tracery upon the nib of his folded wing; the green of the grayest recesses of the swooniest forest of Fragonard.

  Blackbirds are green,

  Violets blue . . . So?

  So, I believe I do not truly understand you, Darrell, your resort to imprecision to color yourself from another’s regard. Maybe because I have never been taken, mistaken, though I do get stopped often enough by cops for jogging in my white-out neighborhood. Do you believe you uphold the one-drop theory by your insistence on black, because that is the way the white cop sees you?

  Too easy, Rodriguez.

  It doesn’t matter if my complexion is lemon or redbone or licorice, I’m black—the word that drips down indelible as India ink through the language because black is incapable of qualification. You can have black and blue. You can have black and white. You can have The Red and the Black. But you can’t have reddish black or light black or blackish, as you have reddish brown. Black is historically dense because it is linguistically dense; it overwhelms any more complicated shading. You can say I’m self-consciously black. You want to say that instead of black? That’s my race. Self-Conscious. I dream about an unself-conscious gesture or moment or thought. Or step. An unself-conscious boulevard. Or fellowship. I won’t find it. Not in Harlem. Not in Paris. Not in Oakland on Easter Sunday morning. There’s always a split-second delay between you and me—a linguistic felt-tip line. I am the line in the color book! Is my fly open? Am I scaring somebody? Is your tone ironic or condescending? Is there a third choice? No, I don’t believe there is a third choice. I can detect the slightest tremor of misgiving faster than Jane Austen. Sensibility, she called her faculty, and that’s what black folk are masters of—sensibility. My eyes are two-way mirrors. My deliberation is reflexive. Because my hue cannot reflect? What do they think of me? And speaking of mirrors: Mirror, mirror on the wall, does this outfit look too spooky? Too out there? Rap stars and kids can get away with an outlaw look, as you call it, but a black man better stick with Lands’ End. When I say I’m black-because-that’s-what-the-white-cop-sees, I mean I’m a man of sensibility. Buck is the thinnest skin there is, babe. Absorbs everything.

  Uphold the one-drop theory? Come on! I don’t make this stuff up, you know. And if you’ll kindly advise the San Francisco Police Department their way of thinking is recherché, I’ll be much obliged and I’ll call myself something else.

  What of white, then? White flesh is reductive. Caucasian is a term of no scientific currency. White is an impulse to remain innocent of history.

  For many generations, the American paint box was predicated upon an unsullied white, an irreducible, an unblushing, a bloodless white—let us say, cadmium—let us say, rather, the white of the powder on George Washington’s head; let us say, rather, the white of the driven snow, for the first white Americans imagined themselves innocent. And white is universally accepted, among white people, as the color of innocence.

  It is impossible to depict or portray white in time—even the white of philosophy, even the white of an hour—without a complex palette. (Though Japanese painting portrays white—the cloud obscuring a mountaintop or the mist in a valley—as an absence of paint.) Fra Angelico’s Transfiguration might serve us here. Christ’s transfigured robes are described in Scripture as whiter than any bleach could make them. In order to paint (rather than to absent) a supernaturally irradiated garment, a garment outside time, Fra Angelico must call upon time—drape and shadow—and, in so doing, must call upon pigment, literally mortal clay, yellow and red and gray and brown and black. Later, we see, Christ used dirt and spit as a healing paste; a mixture to restore sight.

  Brown marks the passage of time.

  After a speech or a panel discussion like the one I here rehearse, someone from the audience will approach me, “someone who is white,” she says. She feels she has no culture. She envies me. She envies what I have been at pains to escape—the Mexican sense of culture.

  The price of entering white America is an acid bath, a bleaching bath—a transfiguration—that burns away memory. I mean the freedom to become; I mean the freedom to imagine oneself free.

  The point of Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White (by distancing themselves from black) may be extended to any number of other European immigrants to America. How the Germans became white. How Sicilian Catholics became white. How Russian Jews became white.

  Extended even to non-Europeans: How my mother and father became white. My Mexican parents were described as White on their citizenship papers by an unimaginative federal agent. (An honorary degree.)

  Who can blame the Irish steward or the Sicilian hatmaker for wanting to be white? White in America was the freedom to disappear from a crowded tenement and to reappear in a Long Island suburb, in an all-electric kitchen, with a set of matching plates.

  I grew up wanting to be white. That is, to the extent of wanting to be colorless and to feel complete freedom of movement. The other night at a neighborhood restaurant the waiter, after mentioning he had read my books, said about himself, “I’m white, I’m nothing.” But that was what I wanted, you see, growing up in America—the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance. And I achieved it.

  Growing up an honorary white—which meant only that I was not black—I never wanted to be black, like the white kids wanted to be black (Elvis Presley wanting to be black), such was their white freedom! White, which began as an idea of no color; which defined itself against black and was therefore always bordered with black; white in America ended up as freedom from color—an idea of no boundary. Call me Ishmael.

  Whereas whites regarded their Americanization as a freedom from culture, black was fated because black was blood. Blood was essence; black was essence. Yo, blood! If you are black, to this day, if you are young, black, you can end up with siblings, classmates, who will challenge you for speaking “white,” thinking “white,” even though every white kid assumes the right to sing black and talk black and move black. So “black,” once a restriction imposed by whites in defiance of obvious history, black now is a culture (in the fated sense) imposed by blacks.

  Within their restriction, using restriction subversively, using whatever was not valued by the ugly stepsisters (using poverty, bruise, prayer), African Americans created the most vibrant culture of America, now the defining culture of America. White Americans would end up feeling themselves bloodless. White Americans would end up hungering for black culture, which they understood curiously as freedom of expression, glamour of transcendence.

  To make black culture, so the American myth goes, one needs to connect to misery; one needs to be bad or battered to sing the blues. How many millions of African Americans today need to rot in jail cells to maintain the culture of partition, to keep black culture outlaw, to keep outlaw black culture at the center of white yearning?

  What I want for African Americans is white freedo
m. The same as I wanted for myself.

  The last white freedom in America will be the freedom of the African American to admit brown. Miscegenation. To speak freely of ancestors, of Indian and Scots and German and plantation owner. To speak the truth of themselves. That is the great advantage I can see for blacks in the rise of the so-called Hispanic.

  What Latin America might give the United States is a playful notion of race. Already the definitive blond in America is Tina Turner.

  What the United States might give Latin America is a more playful notion of culture. Culture as freedom. Culture as invitation. Culture as lure. Already, the definitive blond in Latin America is Ricky Martin. Ricky Martin is so blond he can afford to be brunette.

  Only further confusion can save us. My favorite San Francisco couple is a Chinese-American man and an African-American woman who both have blond hair and wear Hawaiian shirts and ride around town in a vintage red Pontiac convertible with white leather upholstery. The use of vegetable hair dyes is a great boon to American youth, wouldn’t you say? Such wonderfully false colors allow young Americans to be and not to be. Blue or chartreuse or Lucille Ball. And at the same time to proclaim themselves to be just kidding. And contact lenses. My niece has dyed her hair red and thinks she might like to try blue eyes for a change. Nothing permanent. It all washes out. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

  Ding-dong. It’s the UPS man. The Filipino guy in shorts, his hair just beginning to magenta at the temples. Home, as I said, is a Victorian in San Francisco with Indians stomping around on the roof. And I am left (on such a nice day, too) sitting inside, deconstructing the American English word for myself—Hispanic [sic]—by which I celebrate my own deliverance from cultura; the deliverance of the United States of America from race.

  Chapter Seven

  DREAMS OF A TEMPERATE PEOPLE

  WOULD YOU RATHER FREEZE TO DEATH OR DIE IN A DESERT? Not such an odd question if you knew my father, if you understood Mexico. (All abstraction like all humor in Mexico presupposes a corpse.) We were driving that day toward a Mexican market on the Yolo County side of the Sacramento River. The car windows were rolled down to admit the blast of summer heat, which, in conjunction with the approaching minaret of a Foster’s Freeze, occasioned my father’s question.

  I have lived most of my life within a hundred miles of that question. However theatrically I pose myself, I remain a temperate man. I have questioned the torrid zone. I have no experience of it, of a life given over to passion, I mean. The lush, yes. I have experimented with luxe, with hotels that pretend to other centuries (have noticed, lately, how they aspire to naught, to some austerity of boredom or flight).

  Thomas Carew, seventeenth-century English poet, wit, courtier:Give me more love, or more disdain;

  The torrid or the frozen zone

  Bring equal ease unto my pain;

  The temperate affords me none.

  It is only in middle age I deliberate the thermodynamic quatrain. I remember Colette’s first glimpse of the passionate zone. (I remember reading this passage at a laundromat, at approximately the same age at which Colette portrays herself.) Colette as a young woman did not know passion existed outside of books. She had married a middle-aged man. One night she was awakened by her husband, who asked her to accompany him to intervene in a lovers’ quarrel—some acquaintances of his, theatricals. Later, having appeased the passionate couple, and on their way home:“Are you cold? You don’t want to go home on foot, do you?” (The husband.)

  No, I was not cold. Yes, I was cold. All the same, I would have liked to go home on foot. Or not to go home at all. Walking beside him, I looked back in my mind at the room we had just left. I can see something of it still—highlights of pale blue against a dim background . . . the tumbled, white expanse of a lovers’ bed.

  However little contemplation I have given to lovers’ beds, I know something of heat, having been raised in California’s Central Valley. A favorite pastime of valley children was to imagine winter while in the throes of summer. (As easily as children feign sleep or death in games.) There was room for imagination; we were never wedded to the sun, like those men and women who toil over this terrible earth, heads downcast, as in the silvered paintings of Corot. Sitting outside on a summer day, sucking on ice cubes held in paper napkins, my brother and sisters and I would conjure ice and fog and wind; I would place an ice cube at the first vertebra of my sister’s back and demand: Are you cold?

  I became a voracious reader; I was ambitious for an intellectual life I imagined belonging only to towers, gray cities, winter—to monks in cold cells, poets in scarves, women in furs, Edmund Wilson. On warm summer evenings, sitting outside, I read drafty nineteenth-century novels wherein inn signs creaked on their hinges and bare branches tapped against win dowpanes.

  I am even less familiar with cold than with passion. I did not see falling snow until I was twenty-three years old. I was, at the moment of my epiphany, a graduate student at Columbia University; I was sitting beside a tall window, in a lecture hall that resembled a violin; a lecture on Hegel that resembled a violin. The light queered. The sky turned to pewter, “gunmetal gray,” as in books. My mouth opened. Only then, snow.

  For the greater part of my life my address has been within walking distance of the Pacific, within a climate fabled for mildness. Here in San Francisco, outside my window, bright or not, it is usually late March, early spring. Days in August one must wear a sweater of some sort; days in January one walks about in shirtsleeves. As I am writing these words, it is the darling month, and yet a fire burns in the grate.

  Jack London was born on the other side of San Francisco, over on Third Street. South. If there is any sun today, it is there, where pale colonizers of cyberspace work long hours to pare time from a world of theoretically unlimited space, but of no weather. Jack London seems to me a true native son insofar as he, too, grew up preoccupied by extremes of weather; invented animate climates far distant.

  London wrote stories of white men shanghaied off the Em barcadero, drugged in the holds of ships, then awakening to tropical winds in black sails. Or, in London’s famous story of cold, “To Build a Fire,” cold pursues the solitary hero through the dark. The hero stumbles, falls, his clothes freeze to his body. Then cold grips him as an enchantress might: “Freezing was not so bad as people thought . . . the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known.”

  The story seemed to come from the other side of the moon to a boy shivering on his summer porch. The same boy had seen gringos (women or Robert Morley types, fat, effete) crossing the desert in movies at the air-conditioned Tower Theater; they often nodded off on their camels and had to be slapped back to life by savvy brown hands. You muzz not to zleep in ze dezert. So we are to understand that heat is as deadly as ice; perhaps as comfortable.

  Transposed Easterners tell me they will never feel comfortable or “at home” in coastal California because they miss the seasons. They say this as if they are intoning Ecclesiastes. Even without such disapproval, a suspicion has troubled native Californians. That we risk childishness. That we live oblivious to some knowledge of good and evil. That we will never know what Edmund Wilson knew. What did Edmund Wilson know? (A woman from Boston lived for several years in Rio de Janeiro. Her summation: “These are not serious people.”)

  The darkest fiction coastal California has produced is confounded by a cloudless sky. In the California detective novel, the corpse is sprawled upon the linoleum of a weekly hotel, the sun pours aslant onto the floor, lengthens into afternoon, slowly contracts to midnight. Nor does the inn sign creak. It blinks.

  In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez observes Americans “as temperate zone people . . . have long been ill-disposed toward deserts and expanses of tundra and ice.”

  However fierce is America’s history, however notorious we are for the violence of our impulse, the prevailing myth of Americans (among ourselves) is indeed temperate. We prefer plainness in our theology, in our food, in our rhetoric; we mistrust
extremes of allegiance; we mistrust even excessive plainness. Thus, too, did we construct caution into our system of governance—three countervailing powers to keep any one office or person or kind from holding too much. America is strong, we believe, because the majority belongs to the middle class, the temperate class; strangers alike to extremes of wealth and want.

  Foreigners point to our Civil War as evidence of internecine hotness.

  Silently we refer foreigners to cool marble monuments dedicated to young Americans sent to fight in foreign lands where the tyrants of winter held sway.

  Foreigners point to our Wild West.

  But foreigners misunderstand the early American’s sense of his task. The impulse of the Wild West was not wildness but domesticity.

  In cowboy movies at the air-conditioned Tower Theater, the Wild West was a province of lost boys: an assay office and a saloon, presided over by the only suit in town, Blackie—Mister Blackie—who sported a close-clipped mustache and a string tie, who smoked cigars, but not the big kind. Until: One particularly fine morning, the second wave of newcomers arrives—the temperate wave, the civilizers—the schoolteacher and the preacher, Starbucks, Aaron Copeland, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the new sheriff, ardent, book-learned, loose-forelocked.

  Caught in the middle—linking the generation of disorder to incoming good—stands the theatrical moll, the prostitute, saloon singer, a pragmatist who has an “arrangement” with Blackie (she lives upstairs in his saloon), though she reserves a transparently good heart and reveals a foreshadowing bullet-hole-sized beauty mark on her powdered left breast. She comes quickly to more than admire the sheriff, who says to her, “I’ll bet you’d look real pretty without all that war paint.” In the face of such naïveté, she must lower her spidery lashes. We understand she will never live to wear gingham. The schoolmistress, who doesn’t put out, will get the sheriff.