Brown: The Last Discovery of America (13 page)

Throughout the Johnson administration, domestic consideration of race remained black and white. Baptist hymns were converted to statistics. And since race, not social class, was the nation’s most important metaphor for social division, Americans of every description were advancing their claims to government redress by analogy to Negro disadvantage.

Statistics were transposed back into hues and distributed along a black and white spectrum. In college, because of Lyndon Johnson, I became a “minority student.” But it was not until Richard Nixon’s administration that I became brown. A government document of dulling prose, Statistical Directive 15, would redefine America as an idea in five colors: White. Black. Yellow. Red. Brown.

To a generation of Americans—the first generation of affirmative action—these five categories became alternatives for any more subjective self-description. Cloaked in my official objective description—the black suit—I pursued the subjective.

Before Richard Nixon moved to the White House, I saw him, one very cold morning, departing his Fifth Avenue co-op (where the Rockefellers were also in residence); his head down, his mind on matters far from the shops and restaurants of Madison Avenue, his coat, his suit perfectly black, but I wish to put the emphasis on “perfectly” black, as black and as rich as a pelt. He looked a rich man that day. He seemed a lonely man. His body moved like a shadow, rather fantastically. Poor Richard, scrupulous Richard, pausing to look both ways before he crossed the one-way street, easily dismissed now as a petty criminal and thug, the dastardly black-caped villain of the penny melodrama, which he resembled—his finger to his lips as Americans hissed.

The dirty rassler.

In
Six Crises,
Nixon recalls that his mother, Hannah, prayed he might become a Quaker missionary to Central America. In a secular transposition of that vocation, Nixon ended up my godfather. Because of Nixon, several million Americans were baptized Hispanic.

After all that Richard Nixon had written about how hard work wins the day in America, finally it was Nixon who arranged for me to bypass the old rules. Through the agency of affirmative action, akin to those pivotal narrative devices in Victorian fictions, I had, suddenly, a powerful father in America, like Old Man Kennedy. I had, in short, found a way to cheat.

The saddest part of the story is that Nixon was willing to disown his own myth for political expediency. It would be the working-class white kid—the sort he had been—who would end up paying the price of affirmative action, not Kennedys. Affirmative action defined a “minority” in a numerical rather than a cultural sense. And since white males were already numerically “represented” in the boardroom, as at Harvard, the Appalachian white kid could not qualify as a minority. And since brown and black faces were “underrepresented,” those least disadvantaged brown and black Americans, like me, were able to claim the prize of admission and no one questioned our progress.

Having betrayed his own memory of himself, it was at least dramatically appropriate that Nixon should betray his public annals. He taped himself for posterity; he taped every slander and bark.

You can overhear the unguarded Nixon, through earphones, through dense aural atmospheres, at “the Richard Nixon Birthplace and Library” in Yorba Linda, California. The tapes seem to me the least authentic version of Nixon extant. Is it my disappointment? From expressions Nixon used in public, like “all that love stuff ” (describing rhetoric he shunned), one doesn’t expect a fine conversation in the Nixon Oval Office. Still, from his books, I am convinced Nixon was not a coarse-grained man. Perhaps he was even delicate. Hannah Nixon used to joke that she had wanted a daughter. And she said about Nixon, her famous son, long after he had boarded the train and made something of himself in the world, “He was no child prodigy.” But Hannah also remembered the way young Nixon needed her, as none of her other children did: “As a schoolboy, he used to like to have me sit with him when he studied. . . .”

Poor Richard. It is as though the Nixon on the tapes is talking the way he thinks “they” talk.

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.

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.

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.