Brown: The Last Discovery of America (17 page)

No one in the United States has ever matched the confidence of that gentleman’s insult. I believe it would not occur to the deepest-dyed racist in the United States to question whether I am a writer. The racist might say I look like a monkey, but he would not say I don’t look like a writer.

The dream of Mexico is an apotheosis of bleach. Nevertheless, Mexico has for centuries compiled a ravishing lexicon of brown because in Mexico race is capricious as history is capricious. From the colonial era, the verbal glamour of Mexico has been to entertain a spectrum of brown—of impurity—as rich and as wet as a Hollander palette:
mestizo, castizo, alvina, chino, negro torno atras, morisco, canbujo, albarrasado, tente en el aire, canpa mulato, coyote, vorsino, lobo . . .

By contrast, white and black discussions of race in America are Victorian; leave out the obvious part. In light of postmodern America’s obsession with sex, it is remarkable how reluctant we are to sexualize American history. In an American conversation, where there is no admission of brown, the full meaning of the phrase “New World” lies always out of sight.

In eighteenth-century Mexico there was a popular genre of paintings on the subject of
las castas
—descriptive not of social caste, but of racial admixture. The paintings were illustrations of racial equations: If mama is
negra
and papa is
indio,
then baby is . . . An auxiliary convention of these paintings is that they catalog and display fruits and fauna of the New World—dogs, lizards, parrots, as well as costume, fabric. Both words and paintings describe domestic bliss or comic discord. In one panel,
la negra
is about to brain her Spanish spouse with an indigenous frying pan—à la Maggie and Jiggs—and the entire adventure and preoccupation of the New World is seen as genetic. But comically so. This, despite Latin America’s fame for a tragic disposition. This, despite the fame of the United States for optimism.

In American English, mulatto traces the distance from a contaminant. In eighteenth-century Latin America, mulatto was only one pinion on a carnival wheel. In the United States of the eighteenth century, the condition of being a mulatto was an offense when it was thought to issue from black male desire. When mulatto was the issue of white male desire, mulatto was unspoken, invisible, impossible.

Brown made Americans mindful of tunnels within their bodies, about which they did not speak; about their ties to nature, about which they did not speak; about their ties to one another, about which they did not speak.

This undermining brown motif, this erotic tunnel, was the private history and making of America. Brown was the light of day. Brown, the plain evidence. Fugue and funk. Brown, the color of consort; brown, the color of illicit passion—not blue—brown, the shade of love and drawn shades and of love children, so-called, with straight hair and gothic noses; secret cousins; brown, the stench of rape and of shame, sin, slippage, birth.

After several brown centuries, I sit on a dais, in a hotel ballroom, brown. I do not hesitate to say into a microphone what everyone knows, what no one says.
Most American blacks are not black.
The erotic history of America kept pace with segregation. From the inception of America, interracial desire proceeded apace with segregated history. (The biological impulse of creatures is stronger than any cultural impulse, apparently.) Desire and sympathy, as well as cruelty and revulsion, undermined and propelled America’s New World experiment from the beginning. In spite of dire social prohibitions, white slave owners placed their ancestors in the bodies of their slaves.

We know from the gossip outside books that generations before Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, black female and white male pairings existed, some lasting from youth till death did them part. But the issue of such white-black eroticism was not recognized as being brown, or both. Mulattos, quadroons, octoroons, tracing distance from the contaminant, were ultimately an irrelevance under the dictum of the American racial theory called the “one-drop” theory.

In the American musical
Showboat,
a backwater sheriff boards the
Cotton Blossom,
or whatever that showboat was called, to declaim, in cadences of Racine (and to make himself plain to the second balcony),
One drop o’ nigger blood ’sall it takes . . .

To make a nigger. Here was an anthropology, a biology, indeed an alchemy, that allowed plantation owners to protect their investment, to preserve the assumption of racial superiority, to accommodate, as well, their sexual curiosity and to redouble their chattel.

A child of black-and-white eroticism remained “black” in the light of day, no matter how light her skin, straight his hair, gothic her nose; she was black as midnight, black as tar, black as the ace of spades, black as your hat. Under the one-drop theorem, it was possible for a white mother to give birth to a black child in America, but no black mother ever gave birth to a white child. A New World paradox.

One of the first lessons in America, the color-book lesson, instructs that color should stay within the lines. The river should not flood its banks. The tree should not smear the sky.

It is interesting to note the two American fictions of the nineteenth century that continue to romance us were about interracial relationships, exclusively male. I mean
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and
Moby-Dick
—both dreams of escape from convention and family. At a time when America was preoccupied with land and settlement, with cultivating the land, Twain and Melville wrote of water, of suspension, of being carried outward. The river cares nothing for its bank, the ocean cares nothing for the shore, each consorts with the sky. In the first, a white boy and a runaway slave abandon town and the constriction of the shore for the freedom of the river. In the latter, a crew of men from every corner of the world board a ship in search of a ghostly whale. In both stories there are only undomesticated men or boys. And the male pairings are odd, interracial, even homoerotic; violations of the town’s conventions.

After the Civil War, in American places where water seduced or penetrated the landscape, the promiscuity of the horizon encouraged African Americans who lived near those places to speak the truth about themselves. In New Orleans and Charleston, African Americans often described themselves as “Creoles” or “mulattos”—washes, watercolors—some Latin influence, perhaps. But the landlocked places kept to the shackle of blood-as-fate; color within the lines.

The notion that a brown is black—a paucity of choice—created segregated drinking fountains and schoolrooms and colored platoons in the Second World War. But that same notion—the one-drop notion—also undermined segregation in America by forging a solidarity among African Americans over and above any extenuations such as occupation or age or income or complexion.

My friend Darrell. Darrell says he is black. Darrell says he is black because
that is what the white cop sees when he looks at me.

If it is fair for me to notice that the white Latina at Yale is not objectively a person of color, is it fair to notice you are not exactly black? Darrell?

Of course I understand what you’re talking about. Race is the sine qua non among American transactions. Without race, we wouldn’t have music, movies, prisons, politics, history, libraries, colleges, private conversations, motives. Dorothy Dan dridge. Bill Clinton. Race is America’s theme—not freedom, not democracy (as we say in company). What are you? we say. Well, we don’t say anymore, but we mean. And you say black.

I don’t.

I don’t say brown. Anyway, how should I know what race I am, my ancestors go back a long way. I grant you, were it not for America’s preoccupation with distinguishing feathers, I would have to learn a trade other than brown. To be a warbler is not the same as being a brown warbler.

Speaking of warblers. I saw a blackbird the other day—Avian-American—he was sitting in the sun. Little patch of lawn. In this particular sun—or was it just the Fabergé of the moment?—the blackbird appeared green, green as ink, and with gold tracery upon the nib of his folded wing; the green of the grayest recesses of the swooniest forest of Fragonard.

 

 

So, I believe I do not truly understand you, Darrell, your resort to imprecision to color yourself from another’s regard. Maybe because I have never been taken, mistaken, though I do get stopped often enough by cops for jogging in my white-out neighborhood. Do you believe you uphold the one-drop theory by your insistence on black, because that is the way the white cop sees you?

It doesn’t matter if my complexion is lemon or redbone or licorice, I’m black—the word that drips down indelible as India ink through the language because black is incapable of qualification. You can have black and blue. You can have black and white. You can have
The Red and the Black.
But you can’t have reddish black or light black or blackish, as you have reddish brown. Black is historically dense because it is linguistically dense; it overwhelms any more complicated shading. You can say I’m self-consciously black. You want to say that instead of black? That’s my race. Self-Conscious. I dream about an unself-conscious gesture or moment or thought. Or step. An unself-conscious boulevard. Or fellowship. I won’t find it. Not in Harlem. Not in Paris. Not in Oakland on Easter Sunday morning. There’s always a split-second delay between you and me—a linguistic felt-tip line. I am the line in the color book! Is my fly open? Am I scaring somebody? Is your tone ironic or condescending? Is there a third choice? No, I don’t believe there is a third choice. I can detect the slightest tremor of misgiving faster than Jane Austen. Sensibility, she called her faculty, and that’s what black folk are masters of—sensibility. My eyes are two-way mirrors. My deliberation is reflexive. Because my hue cannot reflect? What do they think of me? And speaking of mirrors: Mirror, mirror on the wall, does this outfit look too spooky? Too out there? Rap stars and kids can get away with an outlaw look, as you call it, but a black man better stick with Lands’ End. When I say I’m black-because-that’s-what-the-white-cop-sees, I mean I’m a man of sensibility. Buck is the thinnest skin there is, babe. Absorbs everything.

What of white, then? White flesh is reductive. Caucasian is a term of no scientific currency. White is an impulse to remain innocent of history.

For many generations, the American paint box was predicated upon an unsullied white, an irreducible, an unblushing, a bloodless white—let us say, cadmium—let us say, rather, the white of the powder on George Washington’s head; let us say, rather, the white of the driven snow, for the first white Americans imagined themselves innocent. And white is universally accepted, among white people, as the color of innocence.

It is impossible to depict or portray white in time—even the white of philosophy, even the white of an hour—without a complex palette. (Though Japanese painting portrays white—the cloud obscuring a mountaintop or the mist in a valley—as an absence of paint.) Fra Angelico’s
Transfiguration
might serve us here. Christ’s transfigured robes are described in Scripture as whiter than any bleach could make them. In order to paint (rather than to absent) a supernaturally irradiated garment, a garment outside time, Fra Angelico must call upon time—drape and shadow—and, in so doing, must call upon pigment, literally mortal clay, yellow and red and gray and brown and black. Later, we see, Christ used dirt and spit as a healing paste; a mixture to restore sight.