Brown: The Last Discovery of America (5 page)

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?

I dislike to hear hip-hop at 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.

 

 

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.

He hadn’t read my book. I watched the second hand of the clock on the wall. I didn’t expect him to have read my book. I don’t listen to his program.

I have been pondering what a black voice should sound like. A Baptist minister? An opera singer? A café artiste? Only to come to the conclusion a black voice should sound like parody? A brown voice should sound like rue?

No, that is not my conclusion. My conclusion is a measure of thankfulness: I cannot imagine myself a writer, I cannot imagine myself writing these words, without the example of African slaves stealing the English language, learning to read against the law, then transforming the English language into the American tongue, transforming me, rescuing me, with a coruscating nonchalance.

IN THE BROWN STUDY

OR, AS A BROWN MAN, I THINK.

But do we really think that color colors thought? Sherlock Holmes occasionally retired into a “brown study”—a kind of moribund funk; I used to imagine a room with brown wallpaper. I think, too, of the process—the plunger method—by which coffee sometimes is brewed. The grounds commingle with water for a time and then are pressed to the bottom of the carafe by a disk or plunger. The liquid, cleared of sediment, is nevertheless colored; substantially coffee. (And coffee-colored has come to mean coffee-and-cream-colored; and coffee with the admixture of cream used to be called “blond.” And vanilla has come to mean white, bland, even though vanilla extract, to the amazement of children, is brown as iodine and “vanilla-colored,” as in Edith Sitwell’s
where vanilla-coloured ladies ride
refers to Manila and to brown skin.) In the case of brown thought, though, I suppose experience becomes the pigment, the grounds, the
mise-en-scène,
the medium of refraction, the impeded passage of otherwise pure thought.

In a fluorescent-lit jury room, attached to a superior court in San Francisco, two jurors were unconvinced and unmoving. I was unconvinced because of the gold tooth two bank tellers had noticed and of which the defendant had none. The other juror was a man late in his twenties, rather preppy I thought on first meeting, who prefaced his remarks with, “As a black man I think . . .”

I have wondered, ever since, if that were possible. If I do have brown thoughts.

Not brown enough. I was once taken to task—rather, I was made an example of—by that woman from the
Threepenny Review
as the sort of writer, the callow, who parades his education. I use literary allusion as a way of showing off, proof that I have mastered a white idiom, but do not have the confidence of it; whereas the true threepenny intellectual assumes everybody knows everything, or doesn’t, or can’t, or shouldn’t, or needn’t, and there you are. Which makes me a sort of monkey-do.