The Joker: A Memoir (22 page)

My friend saw everything I saw, but from the other side. Though he was aware of his father’s cruelty and wanted to distance himself from it, he seemed to believe that his father was basically right in his ideas, if crudely mechanical in enforcing them. The critic Henri Bergson, one of the most important humor theorists, says that we laugh when someone turns himself into a thing by acting mechanically: “The laughable element . . . consists of a certain
mechanical inelasticity
, just where one would expect to find the wide-awake adaptability and the living pliableness of a human being.” I laughed at my friend’s story because his father had made himself into an automated bigot. Whatever complexities of sociology, temperament, and economics lay behind it, he was now just a racist being a racist.

Only once have I actually seen such remorseless disregard for
a black man’s humanity that I felt as though I were living in a racist joke. My first year at Huntingdon College I worked as a sample clerk in a dry goods wholesaler, Solomon Brothers, in downtown Montgomery. Every day at noon, I rushed out of class and drove downtown, where I sat at a table, cut cloth into small pinked rectangles, and glued them into books for the salesmen to show to buyers for retail stores. I sullenly mused that, as a beginning college student living at home, I was doing exactly what I’d done in kindergarten: cutting and pasting, though now I was doing it for a buck sixty an hour.

The firm’s scrawny black janitor, Jerome, was bald, over seventy, and down to his last couple of teeth, which, when he laughed, you could observe standing like lonely sentinels stationed far apart in his gums. The first rumor I heard at Solomon Brothers was that Jerome, who was married, had a girlfriend and every day at lunch he hustled off to her place for a nooner.

For four hours a day, five days a week, we part-timers cut cloth, using the pinking machine, a yard-wide, lever-operated guillotine with a notched blade. As we separated out the pinked rectangles and pasted them on heavy, glossy paper in color-coordinated flaps, we had plenty of time to listen to local talk radio and hypothesize on Jerome’s sexual capacity.

“Naw, that can’t be right,” protested Maury, one of the other two sample clerks.

“That’s what folks say,” said Ken, the boss of our little department.

“Aw man, look how old he is! It’s all he can do to push that broom from one side of the warehouse to the other.”

“I’m just telling you what I hear. Got a little tucked away on the side.”

“Idn’t he a drinker too? Keeps a pint in his overhauls?”

“Yeah, that’s true. I’ve seen it,” Ken said.

“I don’t know, man. Don’t sound right to me.”

Like Maury, I was skeptical, not just because of Jerome’s age, infirmity, and drinking. I assumed the talk was just racist speculation about a black man’s sexual voracity.

Ken, though, assured us we were wrong. We simply didn’t understand that black men have to have it.

One afternoon, as Jerome pushed his broom desultorily through our work area on his way to the stairs, Ken yelled out, in a loud voice aimed toward his three workers more than to the janitor, “Hey, Jerome, I hear you get some lunchtime pussy every day. That’s true, ain’t it?”

I was as mortified as I’ve ever been in my life. The racist superiority that allowed one man to address another with such egregiously false bonhomie left me stunned into silent shame. Also I’d never heard an adult talk to another about a woman so openly and vulgarly. From what little I knew of southern chivalry, Jerome, if he were white, would be within his rights to kill Ken, and maybe me too for being there.

After a long moment, Jerome chuckled and nodded. Because I’d faded into my own shocked humiliation, I do not recall exactly what Jerome said or how Ken responded. It must have been something about the size and stamina of Jerome’s penis because Jerome hefted the broom, stuck the handle between his legs from behind, and waggled it in front of him at a forty-five-degree angle, lurching and staggering behind it as if it were dragging him across the room.

With a wide grin, he said, “Yessuh, when de big hog talk, I gots to listen.”

Ken, Maury, and the other clerk burst out laughing. I didn’t. I was still trying frantically to understand the confluence of mortifications running through me like a hot river—racial shame, sexual fear, shock at seeing an elderly man debase himself and yet aware that he was, like a jester sporting a colossal deforming codpiece, asserting
his manhood through humor, the only way he could. After I sat for a moment perplexed, embarrassed, wanting to apologize, wondering if I were morally obligated to quit my job, I laughed too, though weakly, because . . . because . . . because if Jerome was laughing, I had to also. Jerome had seen my hesitation. In the middle of his minstrel act, in a moment that somehow slipped outside of time, visible to no one but him and me, he looked seriously into my face to see if I was laughing too. And I realized the complicity of laughter. If I didn’t laugh at his antics, I was rebuking him and whatever compromises he had made to make his life workable, and I had no right to do that.

In the South, sports leads where religion, intellect, decency, and the United States Constitution have failed to take us. Sitting on my future in-laws’ couch, I watched the all-white 1970 University of Alabama football team begin the season with a loss to the University of Southern California. The Crimson Tide was slaughtered at home in Tuscaloosa, 41–21, and Sam “Bam” Cunningham, a black fullback for USC, ran for 135 yards and two touchdowns on just twelve carries. We stared at the TV, thunderstruck, as a team from Los Angeles manhandled our Tide. How could a football team from the land of the lotus-eaters be good enough to beat us? Beat us? Hell, they kicked the living, breathing crap out of us. And those of us in my future mother-in-law’s den were not the only viewers staring at their console TV slack-jawed in disbelief.

The defeat shocked the entire state. How could surfers, hippies, suntanned rich boys—and African-Americans—so thoroughly
manhandle an Alabama football team? No one outside the South, where football and personal identity are more deeply entwined than anyplace else, can quite conceive the magnitude of this loss.

But Bear Bryant, Alabama’s legendary coach, understood the implications. In a widely published story, one that seems too good to be true, he invited Cunningham into the Alabama locker room after the game, pointed to the black man, and told his defeated players, “Men, this is what a football player looks like.” Bryant later commented that Sam Cunningham had done more in sixty minutes for civil rights in Alabama than Martin Luther King Jr. had done in twenty years. And some observers fantasize that Bryant may have engineered the pivotal moment behind the scenes, scheduling the game with his good friend Coach John McKay of USC. Bryant knew that Alabama’s inability or unwillingness to put black men in crimson jerseys had left them incapable of beating the best teams in the country. He certainly knew that he had invited to Legion Field in Birmingham the first fully integrated team to play in the state—an achievement in itself. USC was one-third African-American and frequently played with an all-black backfield at a time when Alabama, because of pressure from the state government, had avoided playing integrated teams when it could. Frustrated at losing talented black players to northern schools, Bryant was setting up his team to get clobbered by the deeply talented Southern Cal Trojans.

That’s the way the story is usually told. But as Samuel Johnson observes of the tale about why John Milton was not executed after the restoration of the English monarchy, “The objection to the anecdote is its neatness. No good story is quite true.” Sam Cunningham recalls that, though Bryant did take the unusual step of going into the visitors’ locker room to congratulate him and other Trojan players, “It wasn’t anything earth-shattering.” Likewise, the famous assessment comparing Cunningham to Martin Luther King Jr. has been attributed to two different Alabama assistant coaches. When
the
Wall Street Journal
asked the curator of the Bryant Museum, the poshest building on the Alabama campus, who really said it, Taylor Watson replied, “I’ve been here twenty years, and I’ve never been able to figure it out.”

To complicate the story yet further, Bryant had offered scholarships to three black athletes as early as 1968, but because he did not pursue them vigorously, they went to other schools, including Auburn, Alabama’s cross-state rival. Even earlier, in the spring of 1967, five black walk-on students participated in spring training. Two of them made it onto the fall squad, but never dressed out for games and were never listed in programs or media guides. Taylor Watson sums up the story this way: “The idea that the Southern Cal game meant they could integrate at Alabama is the greatest myth in college sports.”

But Bryant still seized the opportunity presented by the lost game; the next fall, the university that eight years before had been integrated only with the assistance of federal troops, had three black players on its beloved football team.

A joke I heard in high school in 1966 had predicted the eventual integration of the Crimson Tide. In the joke, an Alabama talent scout approaches Bryant on the sidelines of a Crimson Tide practice. He points to a young black man and yells, “I know you’re not going to like it, Coach, but way out in Pickens County, I found this running back here. He’s blazing fast, he’s got great hands, and he just runs over people. You gotta see him to believe it.”

Bryant looks over at the potential recruit, a big raw-boned country boy, and, without speaking to him, bellows through his megaphone for the first-string defense to take the field. They line up on the twenty-yard line. Bryant flips the ball to the black kid and says, “Let’s see you score a touchdown.”

From the goal line, the kid races up the middle of the field, jukes one All-American, stiff-arms another, blasts right over a third,
and, as he’s bulling into the end zone with five defenders clinging to him, Bryant says, almost to himself, “Look at that Puerto Rican boy run!”

The joke is close enough to reality that I’ve seen it cited as fact on blogs. It suggests that Bryant knew he had the power and prestige to declare an African-American a Puerto Rican and make Alabamians accept the lie for the sake of the football team. In truth, when Bryant finally did put black men into games in Denney Stadium, most Alabamians, loving football more than bigotry, didn’t even swallow hard.

One of the three African-Americans recruited by Bryant in 1970 was Wilbur Jackson, who became an all-SEC halfback. My future mother-in-law, my future ex-wife, and I cheered for him mightily game after game. “Wil-bur! Wil-bur!” we chanted when Jackson broke free on a long, sweet run. Then we chanted it again on the replay. After one of Jackson’s touchdowns my mother-in-law crowed with pleasure, “He may be a nigger, but he’s our nigger.” Then she looked over her shoulder quickly to see my reaction.

I’m translating. What she said was more like, “ ’Ee muh be a nigwa, bu ’ee’s owuh nigwa.”

My mother-in-law had a cleft palate that left her with a very pronounced speech impediment. She had been born into a wealthy and, I was always told, pedigreed family with a cotton plantation in a rural county west of Montgomery, and her father, an old-fashioned martinet, wanted one of his daughters to stay home and take care of him, so he had refused to have the cleft palate repaired, figuring the deformity would leave her dependent on him. Though the surgery is fairly easy for children, it becomes much more difficult with age and the speech impediment is likely to become irreversible. By the time she could pay for the surgery herself, it was too late to do any good.

When, as a freshman in college, I first began to go over to Mrs.
Ruby’s house to pick up her daughter, Mrs. Ruby sat with me in the living room and made conversation while Kathleen finished getting ready for our date.

“Ow ah oo, ahwoo?”

“I’m fine. I hope you are doing well too, Mrs. Ruby.”

Once the obvious conversation paths had been trod, I was lost in a dark wood, and, for the first several months I knew her, my answer to everything else was simply, “Yes, ma’am.” After Kathleen and I were married, my mother-in-law regularly invited my widowed father for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and when I passed on the invitation I could see anticipatory discomfort on his face. The dinners were a misery to him as she graciously tried to pull the reticent man into the family conversation and he tried gallantly to meet her halfway.

“Ih ure ih uh pur-ee ay, inuni? Ow oo bih oohing?” she asked, and my father would agree that indeed it sure was a pretty day and he’d been doing fine, and she was well?—though he did not entirely know what he was agreeing with. I felt sorry for him because I had long stopped hearing her impediment.

Unwilling to be her father’s deformed helper for the rest of her life, Mrs. Ruby had left home, worked her way through the University of North Alabama, married, had a child, and steadily moved up to better and better, but always clerical, jobs in the Alabama State Highway Department. Like a lot of people who have overcome difficulties with dogged, routine courage and compromised aspirations, Mrs. Ruby did not exude immediate empathy for complainers, a category that to her encompassed much of the civil rights movement.

Later, when my first book came out, five or six years after my divorce, she made a point of coming to a bookstore signing I did in Montgomery. Afterward, she hugged me, chatted briefly, and when it was time to go, she took my hand, and with tears in her
eyes said, “You were always my baby too.” I have never stopped loving her.

•  •  •

When Bryant died in 1983, the principal at my friend Juliana Gray’s elementary school in Anniston, Alabama, announced the death over the loudspeaker, and her teacher, sitting at her desk, cried. Students were impressed with her grief because she was known to be an Auburn fan, and Auburn and Alabama have always been bitter interstate rivals. Some state legislators proposed to rename the University of Alabama, changing it to Bryant University. The proposals had enough support that both the Montgomery and Birmingham papers felt the need to editorialize, gently, against it. One joke that’s a bit too close to the truth: How many Alabama fans does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, but the rest will spend the next month talking about how the Bear would have done it.