Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read online

  They don’t.

  They were appalled by him. When I was in graduate school, I spent a fall weekend in Sharon, Connecticut, with the wealthy parents of a school friend. These were people who knew several Nixon cabinet members socially, but disdained Nixon. One afternoon during that weekend, we drove to a cocktail party in a neighboring village. On our way, Chris’s mother suggested we stop by to see Hotchkiss—“where Chris went to school.” She had one of those Rosalind Russell accents. Such an accent should be trimmed with Indiana wit, and hers was. (She called her husband “Pa.”) We turned through the gate. A vast lawn, strewn leaves, conformed to every novel of New England prep school life I had ever read. On cue, two golden boys dressed for lacrosse began to cross the green. I watched them with such concentration I feared my tongue might dart from my mouth.

  Chris’s mother in the front seat turned slightly: “Would you like to have come here?” she asked.

  That is how they talk.

  No.

  No, I replied, and no I meant. No, I wouldn’t be taunted so. (No, Ma.) Of course, I would like to have come here. Me and my black suit! And that is how we talk, Dickie. We say no too vehemently, admitting all.

  The black suit? Oh, the spade, I think, rather than the club, rejoined the Duchess of Omnium, who had taken a pretty, well-proportioned drawing room in my novel-reading memory.

  Josiah Franklin broke his son’s heart because he could not purchase for his boy the finish of a good beginning. There were too many children in the family to afford Ben’s education. I felt young Ben’s disappointment as keenly as I’d felt Charles Dickens’s horror of the blacking factory into which he’d been apprenticed by his family. Franklin’s story, in my reading, confirmed the American faith in hard work. Not so Dickens’s. The Dickensian hero was tossed by fate, must rely on a benefactor, some long-lost uncle, who steps from the crowd when our hero is most distressed and rescues him. In Dickens, fortune is the achievement of domestic bliss, a circumstance denied him personally. Dickens, like Nixon, became a national figure, and, of course, Dickens was beloved of the reading public of his time and since. But to the clubmen of his day, he remained a bit of a Cockney. Some called him that behind his back. The vest too elaborate, you see.

  Myself as a child of fortune? Lyndon Johnson might do for the Victorian benefactor; was mine, in any case. During Johnson’s administration I became eligible for affirming moneys. I did not initially question this diversion of my novel, and Richard Rodriguez, the child of fortune (by virtue of a cheap black suit), who thought his American entitlement came as a descendant of Benjamin Franklin—“our forefathers,” he had been taught to say, and he believed it!—Richard progressed in a direction more British than American.

  Ben Franklin would never have qualified for affirmative action; would never have, thus, been ransomed from the candle shop. Possibly, as a poor white skinhead, Franklin would have joined a seditious citizens’ militia or become an Internet pamphleteer. None of them would have qualified—Franklin, Johnson, Nixon.

  My election saw me through the last years of graduate school—and beyond, to this very page.

  Where I am invited to speak at high schools and colleges. I hear myself dispensing Franklinian advice. Make yourself a goal. Don’t let the neighborhood define you. Find out what lies on the other side of town. Read! Change! My Franklinian optimism cloaks years of Nixonian observation.

  The most important thing I learned in college about the rich is that they pursue hobbies.

  The best advice I ever got about America didn’t come from Richard Nixon or Benjamin Franklin or from any college lecture or book. It came from a Southern California divorcée who had fallen off her high heels. “Never, never ask the rich for anything. If you are invited onto the private jet, okay. Just don’t ask for cab fare to the airport.”

  The Nixon library at Yorba Linda, California, is sentimental, amoral, collects everything, but assigns no value. The ephemeral, the vulgar, the embarrassing, even the criminal: a couple of surprisingly good paintings, the presidential limousine, the inaugural Bible; the Refusal to Be Deposed. I suppose you would say it is tasteless. A bad architecture. Employees dressed in red, white, and blue. Box lunches. A First Lady’s Rose Garden.

  Even so, I find in middle age I prefer the plain precepts of Whittier College to the noblesse oblige of Harvard. I hate it when Harvard wins. The winners win.

  A young man who works in the gift shop has a pierced ear. The ring has been removed. There is one example of conscious camp that results in a potent nostalgia: All documentary films are shown on vintage television sets. The single concession to postmodern California is some landscaper’s impulse to plant borders of lavender. But someone else has come along to Re publicanize the lavender impulse; has sidewalled it and topped it like privet. The guards are spooky, their walkie-talkie vigilance suggests only crackpots visit this tomb.

  The only other tourists this day are Taiwanese. They came in a bus. They are interested in the house—“the Birthplace” (something oddly Maoist in the signage). The Birthplace enshrines “the piano.” Nixon played the piano slavishly because music is good for one. Hard to believe arch-criminality ascribed to a man whose imagination was so perfunctorily furnished. Here are the three instruments he “mastered”—according to the docent—clarinet, violin, piano.

  The boy who dreamed his escape on a train whistle floating east, ended up in a gated New Jersey suburb redrawing the map of the world. The world was his last invention. Odd that this self-made man who spent so much time with his long nose to the grindstone would evolve into the global seer, scholar of the world, statesman, not least a politician who wrote his own books.

  In a late interview, Frank Gannon asked Nixon if he believed he had lived a “good life.” Nixon replied, “I don’t get into that kind of crap.” But what did he truly think in the end? His fall was as precipitous as any in American history. Did he suppose he had fallen too low to recover? Or did he allow himself to imagine a day when his fortunes might yet be reversed? With perseverance. With pluck. With a library.

  The Resting Place is not far from the Birthplace, across a small pathway. No eternal flame here. None of that love stuff. Two flat markers. Grass. Richard Nixon. Patricia Nixon. Some precept or quote upon each. Hers is something inane, desperate, trustworthy, from a speech she once gave in a dark country. “Even when people can’t speak your language, they can tell if you have love in your heart.”

  His reads like a fortune cookie. “The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker.”

  One can imagine a version of Richard Nixon here in Yorba Linda. Young. Awkward. Self-effacing. Embarrassed. Friendly. But one cannot imagine the man who became great and dark-minded. For it was in his mind the suit lodged.

  The end of the day. Philadelphia in the young nation. Lamps lit and the sound of an old horse pulling a cart over cobblestones. Evening. Put things in their places. Supper. Music or diversion, or conversation. Examination of the day.

  Sleep.

  Chapter Five

  HISPANIC

  Hi.spa’.nick. 1. Spanish, adjective. 2. Latin American, adjective. 3. Hispano, noun. An American citizen or resident of Spanish descent. 4. Ducking under the cyclone fence, noun. 5. Seen running from the scene of the crime, adjective. Clinging to a raft off the Florida coast. Elected mayor in New Jersey. Elevated to bishop or traded to the San Diego Padres. Awarded the golden pomegranate by the U.S. Census Bureau: “most fertile.” Soon, an oxymoron: America’s largest minority. An utter absurdity: “destined to outnumber blacks.” A synonym for the future (salsa having replaced catsup on most American kitchen tables). Madonna’s daughter. Sammy Sosa’s son. Little Elián and his Great Big Family. A jillarioso novel about ten sisters, their sorrows and joys and intrauterine devices. The new face of American Protestantism: Evangelical minister, tats on his arms; wouldn’t buy a used car from. Highest high school dropout rate; magical realism.

  The question remains: Do Hispanics exist
?

  I tell myself, on mornings like this—the fog has burned off early—that I am really going to give it up. Hispanicism cannot interest me anymore. My desk a jumble of newspaper clippings. Look at all this! Folders. It looks like a set for The Makropolous Case. I will turn instead to the death agony of a moth, the gigantic shuddering of lantern-paper wings. Or I will count the wrinkles on Walden Pond. I will write some of those constipated, low-paying, fin de siècle essays about the difficulty of saying anything in this, our age. Visi d’arte, from now on, as Susan Sontag sang so memorably from the chapel of Sant’ Andrea della Valle.

  For years now I have pursued Hispanicism, as a solitary, self-appointed inspector in an old Hitchcock will dog some great hoax; amassing data; abstractedly setting down his coffee cup at a precarious angle to its saucer, to the stack of papers and books and maps on which it rests, because he is drawn to some flash-lit, spyglassed item in the morning paper. I am catching them up, slowly, inexorably, confident of the day—soon—when I shall publish my findings.

  Soon. I take my collapsible double-irony on tour to hotel ballroom conferences and C-SPAN-televised luncheons and “Diversity Week” lectures at universities. For a fee, I rise to say I am not Latin American, because I am Hispanic. I am Hispanic because I live in the United States. Thank you. (For a larger fee, I will add there is no such thing as a Hispanic. Thank you.)

  But this morning I have decided, after all, to join the hoax.

  Hispanic has had its way with me. I suspect also with you. The years have convinced me that Hispanic is a noun that can’t lose. An adjective with legs. There is money in it.

  Hispanic (the noun, the adjective) has encouraged the Americanization of millions of Hispanics. But at the same time, Hispanic—the ascending tally announced by the U.S. Census Bureau—has encouraged the Latinization of non-Hispanics.

  As a Hispanic, as a middle-aged noun, like Oscar Wilde descending to gaol, I now take my place in the booth provided within that unglamorous American fair devised by the Richard Nixon administration in 1973 (O.M.B. Statistical Directive 15). Within the Nixonian fair are five exposition halls:BLACK;

  WHITE;

  ASIAN/PACIFIC ISLANDER;

  NATIVE AMERICAN/ESKIMO;

  HISPANIC.

  They aren’t much, these drafty rooms—about what you’d expect of government issue. Nixon’s fair attempted to describe the world that exists by portraying a world that doesn’t. Statisticians in overalls moved India—ouffff—that heavy, spooled and whirligigged piece of Victorian mahogany, over beneath the green silk tent of Asia. Mayan Indians from the Yucatán were directed to the Hispanic pavilion (Spanish colonial), which they must share with Argentine tangoistas, Colombian drug dealers, and Russian Jews who remember Cuba from the viewpoint of Miami. Of the five ports, Hispanic has the least reference to blood. There is no such thing as Hispanic blood. (Do I not bleed?) Though I meet young Hispanics who imagine they descend from it.

  Nixon’s fair does at least succeed in portraying the United States in relation to the world. One can infer a globe from a pentagram.

  Over my head, as I write these words, a New World Indian is singing in the language of the conquistador. (A Korean contractor, hired by my landlord, has enlisted a tribe of blue jumpered Mexican Indians to reroof the apartment building where I live.) In trustworthy falsetto, the young man lodges a complaint against an intangible mistress unfond, as high above him as the stars, and as cold. Yesterday, as he was about to hoist a roll of tar paper, this same young man told me the choir of roofers, excepting “el patron,” originate from a single village in a far state of Mexico. And a few minutes ago, I overheard them all—the Mexicans and the Korean contractor—negotiating their business in pidgin (Spanish, curiously; I would have expected English). Then my ceiling shook with their footfalls. And with bolts of tar paper flung upon it. My library leapt in its shelves—those ladies and gentlemen, so unaccustomed.

  Tomorrow, having secured my abstractions against the rainy season, the Mexican Indians will fly away to some other rooftop in the city, while I must remain at this desk.

  Why must I? Because my literary agent has encouraged from me a book that answers a simple question: What do Hispanics mean to the life of America? He asked me that question several years ago in a French restaurant on East Fifty-seventh Street, as I watched a waiter approach our table holding before him a shimmering îles flottantes.

  But those were palmier days. Before there were Hispanics in America, there was another fictitious, inclusive genus: the Latin Lover. The Latin Lover was male counterpart to the vamp. He specialized in the inarticulate—“dark”—passions; perhaps a little cruel. He was mascaraed, mute, prepotent. Phantom, sheikh, or matador, he was of no philosophy but appetite. His appetite was blond.

  White America’s wettest perdition fantasy has always been consanguinity with some plum-colored thigh. The Latin Lover was a way of meeting the fantasy halfway. This was not a complicated scenario. Nor was Hollywood fussy about casting it. Ramon Navarro, Rudolph Valentino, Ezio Pinza, Rossano Brazzi, Ricardo Montalban, Prince Rainier, George Chakiris, all descended from the dusky isles of Cha-Cha.

  Probably the last unironic Latin Lover conscripted into American fantasy was Omar Sharif, hired to seduce Peter O’Toole.

  But, by then, Lucille Ball had undermined the fantasy by domesticating the Latin Lover. In the 1950s, Lucille Ball insisted upon casting her real-life husband as her fictional husband, against the advice of CBS Television executives. Desi Arnaz was not mute, nor were his looks smoldering. In fact his eyes bulged with incredulity at la vida loca with Lucy. Curiously, Lucy was the madcap for having married a Cuban bandleader in the first place. Curiously, Desi was the solid American citizen (though he did wear a smoking jacket at home). Soon, millions of Americans began a Monday night vigil, awaiting the birth of Little Ricky, the first Hispanic.

  By the time I Love Lucy went to divorce court, Desi Arnaz had been replaced on our television screens by Fidel Castro. Castro was a perverted hotblood—he was a cold warrior—as was his Byronic sidekick, Ché. Our fantasy toyed for a time with what lay beneath the beards. When we eventually got a translation, we took fright. Bad wolf! Rhetoric too red for our fantasy.

  The red wolf ripped away the Copacabana curtain—all the nightclub gaity of Latin America in old black-and-white movies—to reveal a land of desperate want.

  In the early 1960s, Mexican Americans were described by American liberals as an “invisible minority.” Americans nevertheless saw farmworkers in the Central Valley of California singing and praying in Spanish. Americans later saw angry Chicanos on TV imitating the style of black militancy.

  By the 1970s, even as millions of Latin Americans came north, seeking their future as capitalists, the Latin Lover faded from America’s imagination.

  Surviving Chicanos (one still meets them) scorn the term Hispanic, in part because it was Richard Nixon who drafted the noun and who made the adjective uniform. Chicanos resist the term, as well, because it reduces the many and complicated stories of the Mexican in America to a mere chapter of a much larger saga that now includes Hondurans and Peruvians and Cubans. Chicanos resent having to share mythic space with parvenus and numerically lesser immigrant Latin American populations. After all, Mexican Americans number more than seventy percent of the nation’s total Hispanics. And, Chicanos say, borrowing a tabula rasa from American Indians, we are not just another “immigrant” population in the United States. We were here before the Mayflower. Which is true enough, though “we” and “here” are blurred by imprecision. California was once Mexico, as were other parts of the Southwestern United States. So we were here when here was there. In truth, however, the majority of Mexican Americans, or our ancestors, crossed a border.

  One meets Hispanics who refuse Hispanic because of its colonial tooling. Hispanic, they say, places Latin America (once more) under the rubric of Spain. An alternate noun the disaffected prefer is “Latino,” because they imagine the term locates them
in the Americas, which the term now does in all revised American dictionaries, because Latinos insist that it does. (What is language other than an agreement, like Greenwich Mean Time?) In fact, Latino commits Latin America to Iberian memory as surely as does Hispanic. And Latino is a Spanish word, thus also paying linguistic obeisance to Spain. For what, after all, does “Latin” refer to, if not the imperial root system?

  Hispanicus sui.

  My private argument with Latino is no more complicated than my dislike for a dictation of terms. I am Latino against my will: I write for several newspapers—the Los Angeles Times most often—papers that have chosen to warrant “Latino” over “Hispanic” as correct usage. The newspaper’s computer becomes sensitive, not to say jumpy, as regards correct political usage. Every Hispanic the computer busts is digitally repatriated to Latino. As I therefore also become.

  In fact, I do have a preference for Hispanic over Latino. To call oneself Hispanic is to admit a relationship to Latin America in English. Soy Hispanic is a brown assertion.

  Hispanic nativists who, of course, would never call themselves Hispanic, nonetheless have a telling name for their next-door neighbors who are not Hispanic. The word is “Anglo.” Do Irish Americans become Anglos? And do you suppose a Chinese American or an African American is an Anglo? Does the term define a group of Americans by virtue of a linguistic tie to England or by the lack of a tie to Spain? (Come now, think. Did no one in your family take a Spanish course? In high school?) In which case, the more interesting question becomes whether Hispanics who call Anglos Anglo are themselves Anglo?

  Nevertheless, in a Texas high school, according to the Dallas Morning News, a gang of “Anglos” and a gang of “Hispanics” shed real blood in a nonfictional cafeteria, in imitation of a sixteenth-century sea battle the students doubtlessly never heard of. Who could have guessed that a European rivalry would play itself out several hundred years after Philip’s Armada was sunk by Elizabeth’s navie? And here? No other country in the world has been so confident of its freedom from memory. Yet Americans comically (because unknowingly) assume proxy roles within a centuries-old quarrel of tongues.