Brown: The Last Discovery of America (18 page)

Brown marks the passage of time.

After a speech or a panel discussion like the one I here rehearse, someone from the audience will approach me, “someone who is white,” she says. She feels she has no culture. She envies me. She envies what I have been at pains to escape—the Mexican sense of culture.

The price of entering white America is an acid bath, a bleaching bath—a transfiguration—that burns away memory. I mean the freedom to become; I mean the freedom to imagine oneself free.

The point of Noel Ignatiev’s
How the Irish Became White
(by distancing themselves from black) may be extended to any number of other European immigrants to America.
How the Germans became white. How Sicilian Catholics became white. How Russian Jews became white.

Extended even to non-Europeans:
How my mother and father became white.
My Mexican parents were described as White on their citizenship papers by an unimaginative federal agent. (An honorary degree.)

Who can blame the Irish steward or the Sicilian hatmaker for wanting to be white? White in America was the freedom to disappear from a crowded tenement and to reappear in a Long Island suburb, in an all-electric kitchen, with a set of matching plates.

I grew up wanting to be white. That is, to the extent of wanting to be colorless and to feel complete freedom of movement. The other night at a neighborhood restaurant the waiter, after mentioning he had read my books, said about himself, “I’m white, I’m nothing.” But that was what I wanted, you see, growing up in America—the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance. And I achieved it.

Growing up an honorary white—which meant only that I was not black—I never wanted to be black, like the white kids wanted to be black (Elvis Presley wanting to be black), such was their white freedom! White, which began as an idea of no color; which defined itself against black and was therefore always bordered with black; white in America ended up as freedom from color—an idea of no boundary. Call me Ishmael.

Whereas whites regarded their Americanization as a freedom from culture, black was fated because black was blood. Blood was essence; black was essence.
Yo, blood!
If you are black, to this day, if you are young, black, you can end up with siblings, classmates, who will challenge you for speaking “white,” thinking “white,” even though every white kid assumes the right to sing black and talk black and move black. So “black,” once a restriction imposed by whites in defiance of obvious history, black now is a culture (in the fated sense) imposed by blacks.

Within their restriction, using restriction subversively, using whatever was not valued by the ugly stepsisters (using poverty, bruise, prayer), African Americans created the most vibrant culture of America, now the defining culture of America. White Americans would end up feeling themselves bloodless. White Americans would end up hungering for black culture, which they understood curiously as freedom of expression, glamour of transcendence.

To make black culture, so the American myth goes, one needs to connect to misery; one needs to be bad or battered to sing the blues. How many millions of African Americans today need to rot in jail cells to maintain the culture of partition, to keep black culture outlaw, to keep outlaw black culture at the center of white yearning?

What I want for African Americans is white freedom. The same as I wanted for myself.

The last white freedom in America will be the freedom of the African American to admit brown. Miscegenation. To speak freely of ancestors, of Indian and Scots and German and plantation owner. To speak the truth of themselves. That is the great advantage I can see for blacks in the rise of the so-called Hispanic.

What Latin America might give the United States is a playful notion of race. Already the definitive blond in America is Tina Turner.

What the United States might give Latin America is a more playful notion of culture. Culture as freedom. Culture as invitation. Culture as lure. Already, the definitive blond in Latin America is Ricky Martin. Ricky Martin is so blond he can afford to be brunette.

Only further confusion can save us. My favorite San Francisco couple is a Chinese-American man and an African-American woman who both have blond hair and wear Hawaiian shirts and ride around town in a vintage red Pontiac convertible with white leather upholstery. The use of vegetable hair dyes is a great boon to American youth, wouldn’t you say? Such wonderfully false colors allow young Americans to be and not to be. Blue or chartreuse or Lucille Ball. And at the same time to proclaim themselves to be just kidding. And contact lenses. My niece has dyed her hair red and thinks she might like to try blue eyes for a change. Nothing permanent. It all washes out. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Ding-dong. It’s the UPS man. The Filipino guy in shorts, his hair just beginning to magenta at the temples. Home, as I said, is a Victorian in San Francisco with Indians stomping around on the roof. And I am left (on such a nice day, too) sitting inside, deconstructing the American English word for myself—Hispanic [
sic
]—by which I celebrate my own deliverance from
cultura;
the deliverance of the United States of America from race.

DREAMS OF A TEMPERATE PEOPLE

WOULD YOU RATHER FREEZE TO DEATH OR DIE IN A DESERT? Not such an odd question if you knew my father, if you understood Mexico. (All abstraction like all humor in Mexico presupposes a corpse.) We were driving that day toward a Mexican market on the Yolo County side of the Sacramento River. The car windows were rolled down to admit the blast of summer heat, which, in conjunction with the approaching minaret of a Foster’s Freeze, occasioned my father’s question.

I have lived most of my life within a hundred miles of that question. However theatrically I pose myself, I remain a temperate man. I have questioned the torrid zone. I have no experience of it, of a life given over to passion, I mean. The lush, yes. I have experimented with luxe, with hotels that pretend to other centuries (have noticed, lately, how they aspire to naught, to some austerity of boredom or flight).

Thomas Carew, seventeenth-century English poet, wit, courtier:

It is only in middle age I deliberate the thermodynamic quatrain. I remember Colette’s first glimpse of the passionate zone. (I remember reading this passage at a laundromat, at approximately the same age at which Colette portrays herself.) Colette as a young woman did not know passion existed outside of books. She had married a middle-aged man. One night she was awakened by her husband, who asked her to accompany him to intervene in a lovers’ quarrel—some acquaintances of his, theatricals. Later, having appeased the passionate couple, and on their way home:

However little contemplation I have given to lovers’ beds, I know something of heat, having been raised in California’s Central Valley. A favorite pastime of valley children was to imagine winter while in the throes of summer. (As easily as children feign sleep or death in games.) There was room for imagination; we were never wedded to the sun, like those men and women who toil over this terrible earth, heads downcast, as in the silvered paintings of Corot. Sitting outside on a summer day, sucking on ice cubes held in paper napkins, my brother and sisters and I would conjure ice and fog and wind; I would place an ice cube at the first vertebra of my sister’s back and demand:
Are you cold?

I became a voracious reader; I was ambitious for an intellectual life I imagined belonging only to towers, gray cities, winter—to monks in cold cells, poets in scarves, women in furs, Edmund Wilson. On warm summer evenings, sitting outside, I read drafty nineteenth-century novels wherein inn signs creaked on their hinges and bare branches tapped against win dowpanes.

I am even less familiar with cold than with passion. I did not see falling snow until I was twenty-three years old. I was, at the moment of my epiphany, a graduate student at Columbia University; I was sitting beside a tall window, in a lecture hall that resembled a violin; a lecture on Hegel that resembled a violin. The light queered. The sky turned to pewter, “gunmetal gray,” as in books. My mouth opened. Only then, snow.

For the greater part of my life my address has been within walking distance of the Pacific, within a climate fabled for mildness. Here in San Francisco, outside my window, bright or not, it is usually late March, early spring. Days in August one must wear a sweater of some sort; days in January one walks about in shirtsleeves. As I am writing these words, it is the darling month, and yet a fire burns in the grate.

Jack London was born on the other side of San Francisco, over on Third Street. South. If there is any sun today, it is there, where pale colonizers of cyberspace work long hours to pare time from a world of theoretically unlimited space, but of no weather. Jack London seems to me a true native son insofar as he, too, grew up preoccupied by extremes of weather; invented animate climates far distant.

London wrote stories of white men shanghaied off the Em barcadero, drugged in the holds of ships, then awakening to tropical winds in black sails. Or, in London’s famous story of cold, “To Build a Fire,” cold pursues the solitary hero through the dark. The hero stumbles, falls, his clothes freeze to his body. Then cold grips him as an enchantress might: “Freezing was not so bad as people thought . . . the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known.”

The story seemed to come from the other side of the moon to a boy shivering on his summer porch. The same boy had seen gringos (women or Robert Morley types, fat, effete) crossing the desert in movies at the air-conditioned Tower Theater; they often nodded off on their camels and had to be slapped back to life by savvy brown hands.
You muzz not to zleep in ze dezert.
So we are to understand that heat is as deadly as ice; perhaps as comfortable.

Transposed Easterners tell me they will never feel comfortable or “at home” in coastal California because they miss the seasons. They say this as if they are intoning Ecclesiastes. Even without such disapproval, a suspicion has troubled native Californians. That we risk childishness. That we live oblivious to some knowledge of good and evil. That we will never know what Edmund Wilson knew.
What did Edmund Wilson know?
(A woman from Boston lived for several years in Rio de Janeiro. Her summation: “These are not serious people.”)

The darkest fiction coastal California has produced is confounded by a cloudless sky. In the California detective novel, the corpse is sprawled upon the linoleum of a weekly hotel, the sun pours aslant onto the floor, lengthens into afternoon, slowly contracts to midnight. Nor does the inn sign creak. It blinks.