Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  By brown I mean love.

  The brownest rendition of love I can summon is the Sermon on the Mount, that plein-air toss of ambiguous bread. All paradox is brown and divine paradox is browner than which no browner can be conceived.

  The brownest secular essay I know is the one called La Raza Cósmica by José Vasconcelos, a Mexican who wrote in 1925:The days of pure whites, the victors of today, are as numbered as the days of their predecessors. Having fulfilled their destiny of mechanizing the world, they themselves have set, without knowing it, the basis for the new period: The period of the fusion and mixing of all peoples.

  This is not the same as saying “the poor shall inherit the earth” but is possibly related. The poor shall overrun the earth. Or the brown shall.

  Many Americans opt for a centrifugal view of the future, a black-and-white version—I don’t mean skin but cultural intransigence—deduced from history as hatred. A future of real armies ranged on opposing sides of a cultural divide—Muslims and Hindus, say. But in our postmodern, post-everything world, the competing armies—theologies, tribes—I think might as likely assemble within a single breast. The result of love. Can what love has bound together as flesh be reconciled? The traditional task of marriage is to make flesh. The Indian, the ash blond, stir, make flesh.

  Perhaps my parents became one by creating my flesh, but I may have a problem with it: It was the grandson of an observant Jew, a young man who feared he was irrelevant to history; who, on the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday, pulled on a long dark raincoat, in the style of a comic-book avenger, secreted several rifles beneath his long coat, burst into his high school cafeteria; opened fire. He is dead now. His life is over.

  We of the twenty-first century may be headed for a desire for cleansing, of choosing, of being one thing or another. The brown child may grow up to war against himself. To attempt to be singular rather than several. May seek to obliterate a part of himself. May seek to obliterate others.

  (I reopen this book in the terrible dusk of September 11, 2001. On that day, several medieval men in the guise of multicultural America and in the manner of American pop culture, rode dreadnoughts through the sky. These were men from a world of certainty, some hours distant—a world where men presume to divine, to enforce, to protectively wear the will of God; a world where men wage incessant war against the impurity that lies without [puritans!] and so they mistrust, they wither whatever they touch; they have withered the flower within the carpet they have walked upon. These several inauthentic men, of fake I.D., of brutish sentimentality, went missing from U.S. immigration rolls, were presumed lost and assimilated into brown America, these men of certainty refused to be seduced by modernity, postmodernity; by what I have been at pains to describe as brown, as making.)

  The headmaster walking me down a long corridor on that day I spoke at a high school in Los Angeles, admitted, as we drew near the assembly room, that most of his students are bored by talk of “diversity”; are impious toward that word. “It’s the parents who are eager for their kids to learn about multiculturalism.”

  The parent’s complaint: The working-class father purchased his daughter a computer, because (he told me) he wanted to give his daughter the world. (He believed the television commercial.) Whereupon the daughter logged into chatrooms crowded with people only exactly like herself.

  Teachers tell me their students are “beyond race, don’t think about it the way we do.” Other teachers tell me cafeteria tables sort as reliably as ever and according to every conceivable border: color, jock, slut, nerd, born-again, heavy metal, rap. Both descriptions must be true.

  Remember where you came from. Such is not our way. Who can say that anymore in America? As lives meet, chafe, there will be a tendency to retreat. When the line between us is unenforced or seems to disappear, someone will surely be troubled and nostalgic for straight lines and will demand that the future give him the fundamental assurance of a border.

  A thought that haunts many African Americans I know is that they are the same distance from the slave owner as from the slave. Both strains have contributed to their bodies, to their waking spirits. I am the same distance from the conquistador as from the Indian. Righteousness should not come easily to any of us.

  Perhaps she chose a smile.

  Perhaps she kept the appointment for an eye examination. Perhaps the examining technician reached to adjust the overhead lamp. He did this in some way so as to suggest the competence of an athlete or the thinness of a matador’s waist—he somehow surpassed himself in the gesture—a gesture so thorough that she could seem to inhabit it for the eternity of one moment, rather like the Virgin in the painting of the Annunciation; the overwhelming competence of the angel. It was only one of thousands of involuntary responses to any given moment. Except at that moment he smiled.

  She turns from the painting of the Annunciation in tears. Her sinuses have dilated, spoiling the taste of the gum. She locates the rest room. She pauses at the case full of swords. She recoils from her imagination of their sharpness. She looks at her watch. She exits the museum. She needs an abortion. The angel was married.

  It remains for me to tell you the outcome of Franz’s deliberation. He purchased the organic avocado. Of course he did. Finally, it made no difference to him one way or the other. Something that passes into the sewer. It was getting late, getting dark.

  So Peter remains undefiled at his father’s hands. From India, Peter e-mailed his father an account of a recurring dream, a dream of returning to a Tibetan village where he spent a part of last year. A dream of walking up into the mountain—above the tree line—where footprints disappear, where the wind dies, where his dreaming self or spirit seems not to be separate from the white air, the white air not separate from the snow he walks upon. A dream of purification? Franz took it as such. A dream of reconciling.

  They say, people who have had near-death experiences say, who have floated above their bodies prone on gurneys in operating rooms or at the sites of accidents, that reentering their bodies—a drumroll; the steep dive once more into their meat—was painful and repellent to them, to their disembodied selves.

  Thud. My eyes are open. It is four-thirty in the morning, one morning, and my dry eyes click in their sockets, awake before the birds. There is no light. The eye strains for logic, some play of form. I have been dreaming of wind. The tree outside my window stands silent. I listen to the breathing of the man lying beside me. I know where I am. I am awake. I am alive. Am I tethered to earth only by this fragile breath? A strawful of breath at best. Yet this is the breath that patients beg, their hands gripping the edges of mattresses; this is the breath that wrestles trees, that brings down all the leaves in the Third Act. We know where the car is parked. We know, word-for-word, the texts of plays. We have spoken, in proximity to one another, over years, sentences, hundreds of thousands of sentences—bright, grave, fallible, comic, perishable—perhaps eternal? I don’t know. Where does the wind go? When will the light come?

  We will have hotcakes for breakfast.

  How can I protect this . . . ?

  My church teaches me I cannot. And I believe it. I turn the pillow to its cool side. Then rage fills me, against the cubist necessity of having to arrange myself comically against orthodoxy, against having to wonder if I will offend, against theology that devises that my feeling for him, more than for myself, is a vanity. My brown paradox: The church that taught me to understand love, the church that taught me well to believe love breathes—also tells me it is not love I feel, at four in the morning, in the dark, even before the birds cry.

  Of every hue and caste am I.

  Acknowledgments

  THE IDEA FOR A BOOK ABOUT HISPANICS IN AMERICA WAS proposed to me by my literary agent and friend, Georges Borchardt. It was he and Lourdes Lopez at the Borchardt Agency who were the first readers of this book which ventures afield.

  During the years I spent thinking about the color brown, conversations with artists and poets and sociologi
sts and friends helped direct my writing. I remain indebted to more persons than I can remember here, but to these certainly: Nell Altizer, Will Homisak, Joe Loya, Dominic Martello, Mark Scott, David Reid, Michael Goldberg, Charles Eissfeldt, Paul Holdengraber, Franz Schurmann, Paolo Polledri, Seymour Martin Lipset, David Ligare, and Michael Lawson. I owe special gratitude to Sandy Close, the executive editor of the Pacific News Service and my co-conspirator of many years. And I remain indebted to Kathryn Court, my editor at Viking Penguin. Finally, I acknowledge the assistance of the Archive of the Metropolitan Opera and the Public Relations Office of the Stanford University Athletic Department.

  I am also indebted to a book browning on my shelf. I could not have written this book without the precedent of William Gass’s On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry. His blue put me in mind of brown, of isolating brown. Truly, one way to appreciate the beauty of the world is to choose one color and to notice its recurrence in rooms, within landscapes. And upon bookshelves.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted works:

  Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve. Copyright 1945 and renewed 1973 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

  “The Waste Land” from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  “Hello, Young Lovers” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright © 1951 by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright renewed. Williamson Music, owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

  My Apprenticeships by Colette, translated by Helen Beauclerk. Translation copyright © 1957 by Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Twenties and Thirties by Edmund Wilson. Copyright © 1958 by Edmund Wilson. Copyright renewed 1986 by Helen Miranda Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  “Ugly Sister” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 1989 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

  The Cosmic Race/La raza cosmica by Jose Vasconcelos, translated by Didier T. Jaen. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.