Brown: The Last Discovery of America Page 2

  A boy with a face as dark as mine, but several years older, stepped out of the crowd at the state fair to press a warm dime into my hand. Said nothing; wanted nothing, apparently; disappeared. His curious solemnity. But I interpreted—because I remember—the transaction as one of brown eyes.

  A friend of mine, born and raised in Hong Kong, remembers attending British schools in Hong Kong; remembers being constrained to learn about India. My friend learned nothing about China; instead, the Gita and Only connect, Lord Curzon, Mother Ganga, mulligatawny, Mahatma Gandhi. The British obsession with India—as its existential opposite—seemed to my friend an affront to China. But surely there was also a kind of freedom in growing up without the Briton’s attention?

  My uncle from India was several times called “nigger” by strangers downtown in Sacramento. His daughter, Delia, forbade the rhyme I learned at school. Eenie, meenie, mynie, moe. . . . But her eyes softened as she corrected me and her mouth softened.

  Brown is a bit of a cave in my memory. Like Delia’s eyes.

  Lights up, then, on “Theme from a Summer Place,” on blue and gold and electric guitar strings. A decade on. I am staying for a month of summer in Laguna Beach with the family of my best friend, Larry Faherty. I am covered with a cool film of Sea & Ski, as is Larry, though I suspect the insistence on this precaution by Larry’s mother is gratuitous in my case. Larry’s mother is sitting on the deck with a neighbor, a red-faced woman with protuberant pale blue eyes, penciled eyebrows. The bug-eyed woman burbles into her tomato juice cocktail, “some niggers . . .” (ah, ah, ah, I can feel the hairs lift on the back of my neck) “. . . some niggers came onto the beach over the weekend . . .” (she glances at me while she is saying this; her eyes are needles; I am the camel) “. . . we let them know they weren’t welcome.” It is not clear where I fit into her use of the first-person plural. Finally, however, my presence does not disturb her narrative.

  Years later, the same story, a different summer—Columbia, South Carolina. A different storyteller—a lawyer in New York rehearses his famous anecdote, “The Hawaiian Stranger,” in three passages; two tumblers of scotch.

  1. It is summer, 1944; World War II is coming to an end. (There is no tragic coast to this story; the boys in it will not taste the tin can of death.) The lawyer’s mother, gallantly streaming, has decided to invite a bevy of “boys so far from home” from a nearby army base onto her lawn for a Fourth of July picnic. Of course a complement of young ladies has been invited as well, Sallys and Dorothys, women from town and from the college.

  2. The day dawns golden. Syrup and mosquitoes. The hired help arrive first, disinterested capable hands. By and by, the young men arrive. Smiles, sweat rings, aftershave. The young women arrive also, in summer dresses. There will be games to put the gentlemen at ease. The women arrange themselves in wicker chairs, sip cool drinks and appraise the gentlemen from the shade of the porch.

  Volleyball.

  But, “South Carolina in summer . . . ,” the lawyer sighs, five decades later, rattling the ice in his glass.

  3. Scotch #2. Conspicuous among the young recruits is a tall brown man with short-cropped hair. The Hawaiian. “Poor Mama. ‘Another Coca-Cola, Mr. Cooke?’ (She could just about manage that one.) But, during the volleyball game, Mr. Cooke sheds first his shirt, then his T-shirt.” The narrator remembers the sight of brown shoulders, brown nipples, a navel that tempted vertigo—“Why do we remember such things, and not who invented the cotton gin?”—and the sweat streaming down Mr. Cooke’s rib cage; his flared nostrils.

  (Poor Mama.)

  Poor Narrator. Nevertheless, Mama keeps her stride, marching her fruit-bobbling sandals into the house and back out to the yard. More potato salad? Key lime pie. Lemonade. “Each time she’d pass me—I was sitting alone under the shade tree—she’d detour; she’d come around the trunk of the tree, bend down so close I could smell her powder—she pretended to be fixing my collar or working on my cowlick—but her whisper came down furious as a flyswatter: ‘He isn’t either a nigger, you mind yourself, he’s Hawaiian.’ ”

  Stories darken with time, some of them.

  The first book by an African American I read was Carl T. Rowan’s memoir, Go South to Sorrow. I found it on the bookshelf at the back of my fifth-grade classroom, an adult book. I can remember the quality of the morning on which I read. It was a sunlit morning in January, a Saturday morning, cold, high, empty. I sat in a rectangle of sunlight, near the grate of the floor heater in the yellow bedroom. And as I read, I became aware of warmth and comfort and optimism. I was made aware of my comfort by the knowledge that others were not, are not, comforted. Carl Rowan at my age was not comforted. The sensation was pleasurable.

  Only a few weeks ago, in the year in which I write, Carl T. Rowan died. Hearing the news, I felt the sadness one feels when a writer dies, a writer one claims as one’s own—as potent a sense of implication as for the loss of a body one has known. Over the years, I had seen Rowan on TV. He was not, of course he was not, the young man who had been with me by the heater—the photograph on the book jacket, the voice that spoke through my eyes. The muscles of my body must form the words and the chemicals of my comprehension must form the words, the windows, the doors, the Saturdays, the turning pages of another life, a life simultaneous with mine.

  It is a kind of possession, reading. Willing the Other to abide in your present. His voice, mixed with sunlight, mixed with Saturday, mixed with my going to bed and then getting up, with the pattern and texture of the blanket, with the envelope from a telephone bill I used as a bookmark. With going to Mass. With going to the toilet. With my mother in the kitchen, with whatever happened that day and the next; with clouds forming over the Central Valley, with the flannel shirt I wore, with what I liked for dinner, with what was playing at the Alhambra Theater. I remember Carl T. Rowan, in other words, as myself, as I was. Perhaps that is what one mourns.

  In the Clunie Public Library in Sacramento, in those last years of a legally segregated America, there was no segregated shelf for Negro writers. Frederick Douglass on the same casement with Alexis de Tocqueville, Benjamin Franklin. Today, when our habit is willfully to confuse literature with sociology, with sorting, with trading in skins, we imagine the point of a “life” is to address some sort of numerical average, common obstacle or persecution. Here is a book “about” teenaged Chinese-American girls. So it is shelved.

  I found this advice, the other day, in an essay by Joseph Addison, his first essay for the Spectator, the London journal, Thursday, March 1, 1711. “I have observed, that a Reader seldom puruses a Book with Pleasure, ’till he knows whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an Author. To gratifie this Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader. . . .”

  It is one thing to know your author—man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.

  How a society orders its bookshelves is as telling as the books a society writes and reads. American bookshelves of the twenty-first century describe fractiousness, reduction, hurt. Books are isolated from one another, like gardenias or peaches, lest they bruise or become bruised, or, worse, consort, confuse. If a man in a wheelchair writes his life, his book will be parked in a blue-crossed zone: “Self-Help” or “Health.” There is no shelf for bitterness. No shelf for redemption. The professor of Romance languages at Dresden, a convert to Protestantism, was tortured by the Nazis as a Jew—only that—a Jew. His book, published sixty years after the events it recounts, is shelved in my neighborhood bookstore as “Judaica.” There is no shelf for irony.

  Books should confuse. Literature abhors the typical. Literature flows to the particular, the mundane, th
e greasiness of paper, the taste of warm beer, the smell of onion or quince. Auden has a line: “Ports have names they call the sea.” Just so will literature describe life familiarly, regionally, in terms life is accustomed to use—high or low matters not. Literature cannot by this impulse betray the grandeur of its subject—there is only one subject: What it feels like to be alive. Nothing is irrelevant. Nothing is typical.

  It was only from the particular life—a single life, a singular voice named Frederick Douglass, a handsome man, anybody can see that, a tall man, a handsome man, who lived and died in another century, another place, another skin, another light, the light changing every hour, every day, within a room; he did not choose the room or the hour or the skin—that a brown boy in Sacramento could sense the universality of dissimilarity. The offense of slavery (the lure of literature) was that Douglass’s life was precisely different from mine in California, a century later.

  Now I am a writer, and now that my writing so often runs close to the boundaries of social science, I must remember it is the reader alone who decides a book’s universality. One cannot arrange a classic. It is the reader’s life that opens a book. I am dead. Only a reader can testify to the ability of literature to open; sometimes this opening causes pain.

  I mean to put you in company with the young African-American girl who discovers she is like Jane Austen. How so? In temperament, in sensibility, in some way she recognizes and approves. Then this thrilling recognition brings a cloud of shame to her spontaneity—I write of myself, of course—shame for what she intuits, shame for what she cannot share: that a novel from some unenlightened world is not fit for her. She is discouraged. Why it is unfit she cannot completely account for. (Because the sensibility she reads would be cruelly amused at the spectacle of her interest?) She notices her absence. Another girl her age, or a girl from another age, would not notice; would not need to notice.

  The nescience of a book can undermine its clarity, can spoil our pleasure in it. Our age looks for exclusion. And there is a certain gumption missing from our age as a result, and from the literature of our age.

  Helen Keller wrote that dust spoiled the feel of things for her. Simone Weil wrote that the music and the pageantry of a Nazi youth parade were viscerally thrilling to her.

  Already in grammar school there were rooms in my reading life into which I would have been reluctant to admit Frederick Douglass, for I knew in those rooms he was mocked. You must wait here, Mr. Douglass. I made myself the go-between. I must come to the conclusion that the suite of mockery, though refined, though pleasing to me in most ways—a room of Thackeray’s perhaps—retained poisonous vapors of another age, and would not have admitted me. And yet these apartments existed uniquely in my imagination, nowhere else. In books, you say. But books must be reimagined, misunderstood, read. Readers repair to books as men and women to monasteries, none with an identical motive. I was the reader of Thackeray. These rooms, these weathers, these confidences from the dust must burn my ears if they were read out loud. But in my privacy I could regret they could not be revised. I strained to restore them to the conditional. Clouds that might pass. The authors could not know what Frederick Douglass would have taught them. Were they damned? Was the crudeness of their imaginations commensurate with the way they made toast? Were books a sort of limbo, characterized by unchangeability? Books! They were damned, authors, not to know that what they dropped could not be revised.

  I did not know until this year that Keats spoke with a cockney accent.

  My reading was a thicket, a blind, from which I observed. (Addison: “Thus I live in the world, rather as a spectator of mankind than as one of the species. . . .”)

  A scholarship boy, and sexually secretive, I was deaf to the rock-n-roll blaring from the radio. I did not know that the great drama of integration—White with Black—was playing itself out under the guise of the Top 40. I did not realize, as my younger sister did—she watched Dick Clark’s American Bandstand each afternoon—that whites were emancipating themselves by dancing to Little Richard. I do remember that song called “The Name Game”—my sister could do it, I never could—in which an African-American voice (Come on now, you try it . . .) cheerfully played havoc with the American tongue. I remember laughing, dizzied by the freedom of the voice to play.

  The Indian plunges into the thicket. The Negress awaits the white man’s approach.

  That part of America where I felt least certain about the meaning of my brown skin was also the part of the country I came to know best in my reading.

  While my sister danced, I sat on shellacked benches on the Colored side of the Memphis bus station, felt underneath with my hand for dried gum. I drank from the Colored fountain. The fountain tasted of rust, and rust stained the basin and made it unpleasant. I could see where the White fountain was. There was no one about. I was human. I was thirsty. I was quick. As I bent my head to the fount, a hand grabbed me from behind, pulled back my head by its hair, my arms flaying for a purchase on my tormentor. I felt the knuckle—Oh my Jesus, I felt the gold ring boring into my scalp. I knew the ring from a thousand observations. I had seen it setting down coin, raising a glass, grasping the reins of that red-eyed bay. I had seen it, often enough, raised in anger. I said his name out loud, Please, mister. . . . (All I know of life is this: Hair is amazingly strong, and I went with my hair, backward. If I had parted from my hair, I might have saved my life.)

  While my sister danced, I watched Malcolm X interviewed on KCRA-TV, Sacramento. I noticed a fierceness in him and a criticism of White that made no distinction between good readers and bad. Something in his manner, something I recognized, rhymed with the scholarship boy I was.

  I went alone. My evenings out in Sacramento were secretive. Insofar as they were experiments with adulthood, I wouldn’t have considered bringing anyone else along. I went to hear Malcolm X alone, as I went alone to hear Marian Anderson. (Her red velvet gown. A baby’s little blue cry pierced the golden disk she had spun. Silence. Shame for Sacramento! A nod to her pianist to resume.) When I went to hear Malcolm X, I felt as invisible, as anonymous, as safe as I have ever felt. The audience was overwhelmingly male. It was a busy black time. No one seemed to notice my brown in the crowd.

  Malcolm X stood in a circle of light. He was not possessed of a theatrical power to transfigure himself. His voice was nothing at all like what I expected. I expected the near-singing of ministers I had heard broadcast from the South. His voice was high, nasal, a scold’s voice. A hickory stick. But for all his thin stricture, there was something generous about this man, something of Benjamin Franklin—his call to brothers to better themselves. In his black mortician’s suit, Malcolm X spoke of his early life, his years as a con, a hustler; cruel toward women because false to himself. His glasses flared in the spotlight.

  What about that summer night was so thrilling to me?

  There is shattered glass in the street. I am transported by James Baldwin to Harlem in the aftermath of a race riot. (“On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.”) Among Baldwin’s plays, I knew only The Amen Corner (Beah Richards played it in San Francisco). Among the novels, I favored Go Tell It on the Mountain. Most, I loved Baldwin’s essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid. In Baldwin I found a readiness to rise to prophetic wrath, something like those ministers, and yet, once more, to bend down in tenderness, to call grown men and women “baby” (a whiff of the theater). Watching Baldwin on television—I will always consider the fifties to have been a sophisticated time—fixed for me what being a writer must mean. Arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude.

  The Freedom March of 1965, from Selma to Montgomery, marked the turning point for the Civil Rights movement in the South. It became clear to America that the spiritual momentum of the march would carry the day; the South would bend.
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  Then the Negro Civil Rights movement, the slow sad movement of moral example, veered north, cooled, hardened as it climbed, to a secular anger. The Watts riots in Los Angeles of 1965 were the worst U.S. riots in twenty years. Young Negroes with no time to waste, no patience for eternal justice, renamed themselves “black.” Their proclamation began a project of re-definition, not only of themselves and of their political movement, but of power, of glamour. The Name Game was at once fierce and dazzling. Black America led white America through the changes. The equation of desire was going to be reversed.

  Within the new insistence on blackness was a determination on the part of blacks to transform into boast all that whites had, for generations, made jest: curly hair, orange polyester, complexion, dialect, spiritual ecstasy.

  When I was in high school, white boys inhaled black voices like helium. The Christian Brothers’ Gaels drove off to a football game in the big yellow bus, windows lowered, the crew-cuts singing a Little Stevie Wonder song in falsetto for the pure pleasure and novelty of squeezing their thighs to the highest pitch.

  But the necessity, for a new black generation, of transposing shame into pride led to a dangerous romanticism. Segregation, de facto and legal, was transformed into self-willed exclusion—also a point of pride. Perhaps it was that the Negro Civil Rights movement of the South had been governed by a Protestant faith in conversion, whereas the northern black movement cared nothing for conversion.

  Despite laws prohibiting black literacy in the nineteenth century, the African in America took the paper-white English and remade it (as the Irish and the Welsh also took their English), wadded it up, rigmarolled it, rewound it into a llareggub rap, making English theirs, making it idiosyncratically glamorous (Come on now, you try it), making it impossible for any American to use English henceforward without remembering them; making English so cool, so jet, so festival, that children want it only that way.