Brown: The Last Discovery of America Page 3

  The only voices as blatant as black voices, as contentious, as alive in American air and literature, are those first-generation Jewish voices, skeptical, playful, dicing every assertion. The black-Jewish conversation was inevitable, for reasons of rhetoric, of history, of soul. As the American Indian had also been drawn, the Jew must have felt drawn to the African American from some recognition of exclusion, expectation of exclusion. Unlike the Indian, however, the Jew had been shaped by a theology of the Word—a schooling that became, like the African’s, a strategy for survival. And for a time, theirs was a brilliant alliance, the Black with the Jew. But the genius for verbal survival uniting Black and Jew would undermine their alliance.

  “You cannot imagine how many times I need to squirt my eyes with Visine just to get through Othello. (So rage won’t dry them out.)” An African-American graduate student addressed a roomful of English professors and graduate students at Berkeley. (This was late in the 1970s.) A Jewish professor immediately joined with “You can’t imagine how difficult it is for me to read The Merchant of Venice” (assuming the alliance).

  “Well, goddamn!” snarled the black woman in a stage whisper, her topknot vibrating, her eyes lashed to the notebook on her desk, “Jews always have to feel exactly what we are feeling, only more so.”

  Did you ever cross over to Snedens . . . ?

  Snedens Landing is a pre-revolutionary town upriver. I was fifty before I heard a recording of Mabel Mercer singing that brittle song. I don’t care for the song. I like Mabel Mercer. She was a black Englishwoman who grew up in a theatrical family. She went to Paris at nineteen; she sang in bars, mainly for expatriate audiences, James Baldwin and others. From Paris, Mabel Mercer came to New York, became a fixture of the supper clubs there. She sat in a straight-backed chair, in a spotlight, her hands folded in her lap. She leaned slightly forward, as if imparting a confidence to her audience. The confidence she imparted was that hers was the most refined lyric sensibility in Manhattan of the 1950s.

  Mabel Mercer performed the songs of Porter and Coward and such with a perfect mid-Atlantic pronunciation, which is to say, without a trace of melanin in her voice. This was not ventriloquism or minstrelsy or parody—I was disappointed to learn it wasn’t—but the voice was authentic to Mercer because she had been educated by British nuns who insisted upon public-school elocution. Another cabaret singer of that time, Anita O’Day, quoted in a book I can’t find, described Mabel Mercer thus: “That chick has the weirdest fucking act in show business.”

  I would like my act to be as weird. An old brown man walking the beach, singing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I have, throughout my writing life, pondered what a brown voice should sound like.

  I have pondered what a black voice should sound like.

  On September 16, 1966—contemporary newspaper accounts reported a cool evening—the new Metropolitan Opera House opened in New York City. President Johnson and Mrs. Johnson were in attendance, as were President and Mrs. Marcos of the Philippines, as was U Thant, Secretary-General of the United Nations. The opera house, designed by Wallace K. Harrison, was a modernist pavilion with an arched façade, retractable chandeliers, murals by Marc Chagall.

  The opera commissioned for the opening was Antony and Cleopatra by American composer Samuel Barber. Leontyne Price sang the role of Cleopatra. The Franco Zeffirelli production fused disparate motifs of colonial adventure in the manner of a seventeenth-century print. Zeffirelli’s Egyptians were Elizabethan-Floridian. Leontyne Price wore an enormous feathered, beribboned headdress reminiscent of Amazonia, and a gown of Renaissance cut. She was costumed to appear bare-breasted, a caryatid of continental allegory—at once the African and the Indian of Alexis de Tocqueville’s notice. At least that is how I remember the photograph of Leontyne Price in Time magazine; that is the image that comes to mind as I reread de Tocqueville.

  You are probably too young to remember or perhaps you have forgotten what a pride for America that evening was—the most modern opera house in the world to prolong the heartbeat of the nineteenth century, and with Leontyne Price, the reigning dramatic soprano of her day, enshrined at the center. And yet, the Metropolitan Opera seemed at that moment—eight o’clock, September 16, 1966—to mark the very crossroads of American history, the division of the old era and the new. Leontyne Price seemed the apotheosis of African America, of new America, as if uncountable degradations inflicted upon African Americans might be ransomed by a single, soaring human voice.

  That same year, 1966, there were thirty-eight race riots in American cities. And thirty-five years later, Lincoln Center looks irrelevant; there is talk in the papers about pulling it down.

  That same year, 1966, I was in college. I typed, on erasable onionskin paper: “White southern writers had earlier preoccupied themselves with the deconstruction of the South along Grecian lines, a lament for pride brought low and a contrition for the sins of the Fathers, all the while insisting upon kinship—the black maid’s sigh, the white child’s ‘Why?’ ”

  Black maid’s sigh? White child’s Why?

  My forehead began to pain me remarkably, to throb; a sort of mockery seized upon my temples, then billowed from my ears, like black smoke from a stovepipe. A figment stood before me:Naw.

  Listen, Hiawatha, honey, sittin by yo heatah,

  Cradlin’ little ninny books, playin’ Little Eva—

  Doodah mantchuns fulla haunted crackahs,

  Long-face mens pullin’ sacks a ’baccas,

  Clean white aprons wid dese fairytale patchas!

  The sky is the skin o’ yo eye, Hiawatha!

  Peel that skin off yo eye!

  The figment was clothed with a red calico shirt and a voluminous apron with many pockets and colored patches sewn on, like the patches on jerkins and pinafores in a child’s picture book. It wore a sort of turban on its head. The head was a tablespoonful of black wax, the size of a chunk of coal. It had eyes—large, lidless sclera with black balls painted in. But no mouth.

  With one hand—a glob of glue stuck to its sleeve—it extended a tambourine which it brandished menacingly (ah, ah, ah).

  Ol’ man Faulkner make me sigh,

  Meek as Ella Cinder. Sigh?

  Black maid’s sigh?

  Naw. Black maid’s thighs was blackberry pies,

  ’Sall it was,

  Coolin’ on the winder.

  No mouth, and yet it spoke. The voice had lips and tongue and breath and also a kind of history—each utterance was accompanied by a hissing, sparkling, ambient air, like that of an old recording with a gold tooth. The voice was parody, the only voice the figment owned, and as patented as wild rice.

  Listen, Little Elbow Grease,

  Peckin’ on your pica,

  Readin’ Mod’n Library’s

  Bad as breathin’ ether.

  Ol’ man Faulkner make you nod?

  (Drunk in his mimesis.)

  But don’t you goddamn dare to try

  Amanuensis me!

  Reproach. This was Denial of Imagination. Copyright Infringement. Fear of Offending. Appropriation of Voice. Objection Sustained. Willful Misunderstanding. Preclusion. Scandal. Minstrelsy. Ah, I knew exactly what it was. This was a New Orleans doll manufactured in wax, in 1922, by Madame Granger, a Creole; this was Luther’s doll, a figure of speech; my friend Luther’s phrase, the phrase that elicited nervous laughter from me when I heard him use it in public: You want I should pull nigger out the bag? (As he addressed a recalcitrant store clerk.)

  I bent once more to my typewriter. I wrote: “Faulkner strained to find the cadence of black patience and faith, creating his own forgiveness in the person of Dilsey—Dilsey hovering over her lost white charges.”

  Here he come, ol’ skinny whey,

  Sobbin’ in his ’kerchief—

  Whiney, piney, woe is me—

  “The South, the South,” he constant say;

  He longin’ for de dear ol’ days.

  And you as bad as he is. Why?

/>   White child’s Why?

  You confusin’ grief with biscuits.

  —Why ain’t there biscuits?—

  ’Sall it was.

  Ain’t enough I’m bought and sold,

  Ain’t enough I’m weak and old,

  Still you goin’ make me up—

  Say I smell like copper-gold;

  Pour me in some nigger mold—

  Some malaprop, some black tar soap,

  Some hangin’ rope, some ’bacca smoke—

  You make me up, you make me up,

  I don’t exist, goddamn you.

  ’Cept

  Some ’Mimah flapjack mix,

  Some Cream o’ Wheat steam

  Risin’ swift to ol’ whey’s

  Quiv’rin’ nostril.

  Soon

  I free the slaves that lick my pots

  And bubble the swill that fill you—

  Slave as plain as buttercup,

  Slave as hot as forget-me-not,

  Slave as shrill as daffodil—

  Slaves wear them yella jackets.

  “Faulkner strained to reproduce the cadence of Negro patience.”

  . . . Shoulda noticed the fire. Fiah. FIAH!

  As a young man, I was more a white liberal than I ever tried to put on black. For all that, I ended up a “minority,” the beneficiary of affirmative action programs to redress black exclusion. And, harder to say, my brown advantage became a kind of embarrassment. For I never had an adversarial relationship to American culture. I was never at war with the tongue.

  Brown was no longer invisible by the time I got to college. In the white appraisal, brown skin became a coat of disadvantage, which was my advantage. Acknowledgment came at a price, then as now. (Three decades later, the price of being a published brown author is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved. The price is segregation.)

  I remain at best ambivalent about those Hispanic anthologies where I end up; about those anthologies where I end up the Hispanic; about shelves at the bookstore where I look for myself and find myself. The fact that my books are published at all is the result of the slaphappy strategy of the northern black Civil Rights movement.

  Late in the 1960s, the university complied with segregation—the notion that each can only describe and understand her own, that education is a deeper solipsism, that pride is the point of education, that I would prefer to live among my kind at a separate theme-house dormitory; that I would prefer to eat with my kind at the exclusive cafeteria table where all conversation conforms to the implicit: You Can’t Know What I’m Feeling Unless You Are Me.

  In college, I revisited James Baldwin, seeking to forestall what I feared was the disintegration of my reading life, which had been an unquestioned faith in Signet Classics. My rereading of “Stranger in a Village” discovered a heavy hand. In the Swiss Alps, humorless frauen with crackled eyes go in and out their humorous houses, while on the twisting streets of the village, towheaded children point to Baldwin and shout after him Neger! Neger! (“From all available evidence no black man had ever set foot in this tiny Swiss village before I came.”) So what is the point of the essay? It seemed to me Baldwin had traveled rather far to get himself pointed at; to arrange such an outlandish contrast; to describe himself as an outsider. And, too, the Alps seemed to represent Baldwin’s obsession, an obsession that now seemed to stand between us.

  This was not a generous assessment on my part, not a generous moment in my life. As a young reader, I would never have noticed or objected to Baldwin’s preoccupation with White to the exclusion of all other kind. In the 1950s it would have seemed to me that a Negro writer was writing about the nation in which I was a part, regardless of whether my tribe was singled out for mention. But when the American university began to approve, then to enforce fracture, and when blood became the authority to speak, I felt myself rejected by black literature and felt myself rejecting black literature as “theirs.”

  Neither did I seek brown literature or any other kind. I sought Literature—the deathless impulse to explain and describe. I trusted white literature, because I was able to attribute universality to white literature, because it did not seem to be written for me.

  William Makepeace Thackeray mocks my mother’s complexion. And mine. My smell. My fingers. My hair. Cunning little savage. Little Jew. Little milkmaid. Little Cockney. Really, how can I laugh?

  The gym I attend in San Francisco is the whitest, the most expensive. Men and women read the Wall Street Journal, climb perpetual stairs pursued by grimacing voices.

  Thump, thump, thump, thump. Stanzas, paragraphs, pages, hours, days, days, nights, days, thump, thump, thump.

  Only Bach is as relentless, as monotonous, as cat’s-cradled as hip-hop. Hip-hop is not music, in my estimation. (If music resolves.) Hip-hop does not progress, it revolves, replicates, sticks to the floor. It is not approximate emotion. It is approximate obsession. The “voice,” the bard, the oracle, the messenger, the minister of propaganda intricately, saucily rhymes, chugs, foreshortens, sneers, insinuates, retreats. The voice betrays no emotion; has none; this is not rage, but cleverness. Too wise. Too sly. A dictatorship of rhyme. There is a message; the message is masonic; the conveyance too dense; deep as a trance. The voice is preoccupied and always in the present. It is the voice of schizophrenia. It is bad advice. It is the voice of battle—Beowolf, Edda, the madder psalms—the voice justifies endlessly. What is going to happen if you don’t stop this! On and on and on. Slamming the table. It is the post-lude to music. Long after emotion has been flung from the bone, the beat remains. The beat plows through the rubble of music, turning under the broken arches of melody, stabbing about for rhyming shards—raising them, rubbing them together rhythmically—trying to ignite.

  And what of the gym? They of the gym, we of the gym? Where is our allegiance? Is it to Queen Latifah or Gertrude Himmelfarb? And if we of the gym are somehow, unconsciously, and in thrall to madder music, arming ourselves, it is for a battle against what?

  A few weeks ago, in the newspaper (another day in the multicultural nation), a small item: Riot in a Southern California high school. Hispanic students protest, then smash windows, because African-American students get four weeks for Black History month, whereas Hispanics get one. The more interesting protest would be for Hispanic students to demand to be included in Black History month. The more interesting remedy would be for Hispanic History week to include African history.

  Hispanic students I meet on my speaking rounds complain of African-American students in their high schools or colleges. The complaint is that Black is preoccupied only with White; neither Black nor White will be dissuaded from a mutual vanity. I pretend not to understand the complaint. I play the adult. I answer the question with a question: Why should they? And then I turn around to write an op-ed about how the New York Times compiles a series on “race in America” that is preoccupied with Black and White.

  I have not previously taken a part in the argument, the black-white argument, but I have listened to it with diminishing interest for forty years. It is like listening to a bad marriage through a thin partition, a civil war replete with violence, recrimination, mimicry, slamming doors.

  I am not who I was. All the cells of my body have changed since I cradled Carl T. Rowan’s book in my lap. I remain too much a cultural xenophobe, but also too convinced a mestizo to permit myself to claim any simple kinship with Black, with partition America. African Americans remain at the center of the moral imagination of America, which, I agree, is a very spooky place to be. Nobody else wants to be there, except by analogy. For it was there Africans were enslaved. It was there African Americans hung by their throats from trees. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis. And what has emerged from the cocoon of African-American suffering, cut down from the tree, buried for half a century?

  The boom. The boom. Superfly. Ropes of gold surround his resurrected neck. The glamour of the dead-eyed man.

  I dislike to hear hip-hop a
t my gym. I am unfair. Do I object to the restriction of the form—as strict as a villanelle? Do I object to an outlaw romanticism? Do I object to the cadence of the pulpit given over to quixotism? Do I object to the immoral lyric chugging along a rhythm track, only concerned with finding the rhyme for muthafucka?

  But then I admit I’ve never wanted to bite the tongue. I may have mastered the tongue, but I have never felt the need—or the love, incidentally—to invent a new one.

  . . . Shoulda noticed the fiah!

  Yes, I should have. But shut up for a minute. A few years ago, on a book tour, I found myself in a radio booth, the disappointed author (having just read a dismissive review of my second book in the Washington Post). I put the review aside. Played eager-to-please. Thank you for having me.

  You didn’t have me. And you didn’t want me. Not that it matters; it was a whorish transaction, I knew that. The movie director Spike Lee had preceeded me onto the program in the previous hour, promoting his movie about Malcolm X. The African-American radio host suffered from time warp—esprit d’escalier—something he had said or left unsaid, I don’t know.

  So we remained shadows to each other, the interviewer and I. Departed Spike Lee was the only substance. At every break in the program, the interviewer would rise to pace the tiny studio, his body jerking with involuntary darns and double-damns—if only he’d thought to ask this or that.