The Joker: A Memoir (20 page)

Slowly growling out the hard
g
s and
r
of the word, savoring them, Buddy said it: “Nigger.”

The only racial slur I remember coming from the lips of children my own age before we moved to Alabama was in fourth grade, when some kids in the neighborhood, for a week or two, called me Nigger Lips. I was disturbed, not because of the racial epithet, but because I was sensitive about my thick lips. I was more stung when they called me Pudgins, even though I knew I wasn’t pudgy.

Not until we were on our way to New York to catch a plane to Dad’s new posting at an army post outside Paris did I hear a racist joke from a kid my own age, thirteen or fourteen. My folks had stopped to visit some old friends in D.C. and their son, a military brat like me, pulled my brother and me into his room and asked, furtively, if we had heard about the first black astronaut. His eyes were wide and eager. Manned space flights were big news in the sixties, and I, like many kids, had learned to count backward from ten to one so I could chant along with the launch countdowns.

“No,” I said. “There’s a black astronaut?”

“Yeah, this black astronaut is sitting in the capsule, waiting for the countdown, when . . .”

“Oh, it’s a joke.”

“Yeah, it’s a joke. What’d you think it was?”

“Never mind. Tell me what happens.” Since his dad was stationed at the Pentagon, I’d hoped, for a moment, he had some inside scoop that wasn’t in the newspapers. Instead, I was alarmed to find myself being told a dicey joke by someone I’d just met, a stranger whose intentions, as the joke began, were inscrutable. Were we going to be racists or were we going to be making fun of racists? I couldn’t tell.

“Well, the sergeant who pushes the ignition button starts counting down, but he gets excited before he gets to one: ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two—shoot the coon to the moon!’ ”

Beyond the blatant racism here, I’ve usually found rhyming jokes too dumb to enjoy. In elementary school, boys asked, “What did Hitler say when another recruit joined the party?” “Hotsy-totsy, another Nazi!” Sometimes they goose-stepped across the playground,
sieg heil
ing with their right hands, their left index fingers curled under their noses to represent Hitler’s mustache, while they chanted, “Hotsy-totsy, another Nazi!” They loved the sound of it—three double rhymes in four words!—and the disjunction of jamming the slangy
hotsy
-
totsy
up against the sinister
Nazi
. I just watched, unable to participate in their pleasure. Now this boy I didn’t know, his face shining with amusement, was staring at me, expecting me to delight in “Shoot the coon to the moon,” and I saw for the first time how demanding we jokers are in our neediness, asking others to share our pleasure, to please make pleasure with us. We are aggressively negotiating an intimacy that is often unwanted. When it came to racist jokes, I was old enough to want
a joke teller who would signal that we were going to enjoy a game with words, not revel in ugliness. I wanted irony.

“Huh,” I said.

That was all the encouragement he needed. “ ‘Stop!’ yells the general in charge. He glares at the sergeant, and tells him to start the countdown over and this time he’d better not say ‘coon.’

“The sergeant starts the countdown again: ‘Five, four, three, two—trigger the nigger!’

“ ‘Stop!’ yells the general. ‘Sergeant, this kind of talk will stop right now, or I’ll have you court-martialed. You understand me?’

“ ‘Yes sir. Sorry, sir. Won’t happen again, sir.’

“Again the countdown begins. The general watches the sergeant closely as he counts, ‘Five, four, three, two, one,’ and punches the button.

“ ‘Now that wasn’t so hard, was it, Sergeant?’

“ ‘No sir,’ says the sergeant. “ ‘The jig’s up.’ ”

I knew I was a bad guest when, instead of laughing, I wrinkled my face. The sniggered and insinuating way the joke was told—as if this were something I would both want to know and agree with—reminded me of the sleazy sex jokes I was just beginning to hear. The joke wanted me to agree with the cleverness of the sergeant who persists in his juvenile racist jokes despite all the efforts to stop him. I grasped the class conflict in the enlisted man’s outsmarting the general (and demeaning the black astronaut, who’d have to be an officer too), and I saw that the boy who told me the joke identified with the subversive enlisted man being ordered around by an officer, as he himself was probably ordered around by his father, also an officer. The racism might have been attractive because it was forbidden by his father, something I assumed from the way he’d moved us away from the closed door and spoke in a low tone. The final pun almost works: the enlisted man is saying, “My game has been exposed and I’ve stopped” while persisting in it via the double
meaning of
jig
. But the unvarying and unalleviated bigotry of the enlisted man’s purported wit outweighs what little levity the joke musters. The racist meaning of
jig
sprawls so heavily over the other meaning it can’t rise off the ground.

The boy savored either the racism or the insubordination of the sergeant—I couldn’t tell which—and expected me to join him. I hadn’t known him more than twenty minutes, and most of that time we’d slouched awkwardly on his family’s living room couch while our parents got reacquainted. He was proffering friendship, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Was he trying to pull me into his racist assumptions? Did he really find the joke funny enough to overcome its nastiness? Did he see something in it I missed? Did he see something in
me
? He was oblivious to how my distaste for the joke became dislike of him—an unhappy judgment that I, already an inveterate joker, knew well. As we jokers will, he launched into a farrago of jokes—flat and unfunny racist jokes that I don’t remember, though if you told me the setups, I’m sure I could tell you the punch lines.

That was it for the next year. In France we lived in integrated military housing. I didn’t hear another racist joke till we moved to Alabama.

In the fall of 1966, I plunged into tenth grade at Sidney Lanier High School, which was named after the nineteenth-century poet who’d lived briefly in the Exchange Hotel, which his brother managed in downtown Montgomery after the Civil War. Our football team was named the Sidney Lanier Poets, and at pep rallies our cheerleaders screamed out, “Who ARE the POets?”

“WE are the POets!” we shrieked back.

“What KIND of POets?” shouted the cheerleaders.

“FIGHTing POets!” we screamed back, a thousand teenagers shouting in frenzied unison through the last years of the activist sixties. Our frenzy reminded me, melodramatically, of the footage
of the crowds Hitler incited to a unified hysteria in Nuremberg. After my freshman year I usually stayed in my homeroom and read books. I had a few friends who also found the cheer to be hilarious, but we were the outsiders. The locals had grown up with it. Besides, the whole idea of “school spirit” seemed moronic to most of us military brats. We are assigned to our schools by the state according to where we lived and our race, and I was at Lanier because the Pentagon had sent my father to Montgomery. To me, school spirit was a celebration of impersonal but powerful winds that had deposited me someplace I’d never have chosen.

My tenth-grade homeroom was held in the gym, and the coach, who was right out of college, didn’t give a crap if the non-athletes dressed out for exercise as long as we didn’t bother him while he shot baskets with the junior-varsity team, which shared the class period with us. Still wearing our street clothes, my friends and I lounged on the bleachers, studied, rushed through late homework, or told jokes. I hadn’t been in school for more than a few months when a kid in the class asked me if I knew what
mung
was.

I’d heard sniggering about
smegma
and
mung
. I assumed the mystery words had something to do with sex and I was eager to learn.

Smegma
, I found out from the unabridged dictionary in the school library, is the shed skin that forms under the foreskin of uncircumcised men—a mystery to us circumcised Baptists who had never seen a foreskin. As boys, we were more intrigued by the esoteric grotesquery of smegma—toe cheese of the penis—than I can now imagine.

Mung
, I’ve since learned, has a long history. The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines
munge
as a verb meaning “to wipe (a person’s nose).” Closer to our time,
mung
was World War II slang for chipped beef on toast, the famed SOS—
shit on a shingle
—that servicemen groused about. My mother also called chipped beef SOS,
and when, staring at the budget extender on the plate in front of us, we asked what SOS meant, she laughed and said, “Save Our Souls.” When pressed, she inched closer to the truth: “Stuff on a shingle.”

We boys used
mung
as a generic gross-out word for nasty liquids or bodily oozing. But now, a kid I barely knew was offering a real definition. Of course I wanted to hear it.

“No, I don’t know what it is. Tell me,” I said.

“Naw, you don’t really want to know,” he said.

“Yeah, I do. Come on, tell me.”

“Beg.”

“Please tell me what mung is. I really, really want to know.”

“If you’re sure you really want to know . . . ?”

He made me nod before he continued.

“Okay, this is what mung is. You take a pregnant nigger bitch. . . .”

He stopped, looked at me and a couple of other boys who’d gathered to listen, and then continued in a rote tone. I could tell he was repeating a spiel he’d heard from older boys or a young uncle.

“There ain’t no such thing as ‘nigger lady’ or ‘nigger woman,’ it’s ‘nigger bitch.’ You take a pregnant
nigger bitch
, and hang her upside down from a tree. Then you beat her big black belly with a baseball bat till something brown oozes out her nose—and the stuff that drips out her nose, that’s mung.”

Someone guffawed, maybe in shock. I said, “That’s disgusting,” and turned away, a fastidious rebuff that gratified the joke teller. Maybe the one of us who laughed could divorce fiction—pray to God it was fiction—from reality enough to enjoy the imaginative perversity of the revolting image. I couldn’t. Baseball bats were a preferred weapon of the Klan. The year before, during the march from Selma to Montgomery, James Reeb had been beaten by a mob armed with baseball bats. Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot. Sheriff Jim Clark unleashed attack dogs on the civil rights workers, and the
picture of Amelia Boynton Robinson, beaten unconscious, sprawled on the Pettus Bridge in her dress and gloves, her head lolling back as if she were dead, had been printed in almost every national news publication. Twenty miles from where we were defining
mung
, Viola Liuzzo had been gunned down by the Ku Klux Klan on the day after the march, and the trial of one of her killers had gone to the jury in September, right after school started. Despite overwhelming evidence against him, Collie Wilkins was acquitted by a jury that fully understood he had participated in the murder but refused to convict a white man for killing a nigger-loving outside agitator. The federal government was now retrying him in Montgomery for violating Mrs. Liuzzo’s rights by shooting her in the head. The story was constantly on the front page of the
Montgomery Advertiser
the first semester I was a Sidney Lanier Poet.

The boy who knew about mung had assured us that Viola Liuzzo was nobody to worry about. She was a just a Yankee whore who had left her five children behind to come down to Alabama and fuck niggers. He proclaimed it with such vehemence that it took me years to flush the lie out of my head, a lie he didn’t know was a lie. The ultimate source of the defamatory falsehood about Mrs. Liuzzo, who died singing “We Shall Overcome,” turned out to be local law enforcement agencies.

For several days, my classmate’s definition of
mung
came back to me powerfully, and I twitched with visceral empathy with the fictional lynched woman. My imagination kept forcing the ball bat in my hands, trying to test both sides of the horror—myself as murderer, as murdered—but I always stopped before I swung. I hated the joke for tempting my suggestible imagination toward this abomination. Awake at night, the image seared into my brain, I tried to imagine who’d think up such a thing, and why. If the joker’s goal was to disgust his listeners, he’d succeeded. But why did he think it was funny? It had no wit, no lightness of language, no depth of
dreadful self-understanding, or even any clammy pleasure in trying to disguise hatred as humor. The joke was just sodden misogyny and bigotry exulting in its power to create a nauseating image.

Jokes like this make people hate jokes. Once the forces of unrestrained imagination and our ugly subconscious come together there’s no telling how wrong they will go. Propelled by fear, they can rocket out of the gravitational pull of decency, wit, and rough fun, and zoom into the deep-space darkness of airless viciousness. People are right to fear what this union might create.
Mein Kampf
is as much a product of the human imagination as Goethe’s
Faust
.

Despite my revulsion at the joke’s racism, I think I’d have reacted almost as strongly if he’d begun the joke, “You take a woman, hang her up by her feet. . . .” Our innate sense of the inviolability of pregnant women and the near sanctity of infants, combined with most people’s instinctive wince at the thought of being clobbered in the belly with a bat, is ghastly enough. But the joke brings in the historical horror of slavery, lynching, and the dehumanization of African-Americans for an extra dose of nastiness. At fifteen, I pondered over why I was so repulsed by this joke while loving the gross-out joke I talked about earlier: How do you unload a truckload of dead babies? With a pitchfork.

I found many reasons. Imagining an anonymous mass doesn’t engage the emotions the way imagining one person does. In the mung joke, I had to imagine being a torturer and a murderer. (“
You
,” he said to me, “
you
take a woman,
you
hang her,
you
beat her.”) The joke had no point except the racist and sexist pleasure of utterly dehumanizing a pregnant African-American. I was probably too young to see the dead-baby joke’s point is that corpses, despite our intrinsic reverence for them, are no longer persons, while this joke meant me to feel the ugliness of its murderous punch line. These reasons are all true, but now I think the fundamental difference between the two jokes is I didn’t believe the truckload of dead babies was anything
but a conceit, a fictional construct built to be played with, one that let me toy with larger issues of death and bodily integrity without thinking about actual people. But in the mung joke, I believed the atrocity could happen—might
have
happened—and the fifteen-year-old boy telling the joke might have been happy if it did.