Brown: The Last Discovery of America Read Online Free Page A

no time to waste, no patience for eternal justice, renamed themselves “black.” Their proclamation began a project of re-definition, not only of themselves and of their political movement, but of power, of glamour. The Name Game was at once fierce and dazzling. Black America led white America through the changes. The equation of desire was going to be reversed.
    Within the new insistence on blackness was a determination on the part of blacks to transform into boast all that whites had, for generations, made jest: curly hair, orange polyester, complexion, dialect, spiritual ecstasy.
    When I was in high school, white boys inhaled black voices like helium. The Christian Brothers’ Gaels drove off to a football game in the big yellow bus, windows lowered, the crew-cuts singing a Little Stevie Wonder song in falsetto for the pure pleasure and novelty of squeezing their thighs to the highest pitch.
    But the necessity, for a new black generation, of transposing shame into pride led to a dangerous romanticism. Segregation, de facto and legal, was transformed into self-willed exclusion—also a point of pride. Perhaps it was that the Negro Civil Rights movement of the South had been governed by a Protestant faith in conversion, whereas the northern black movement cared nothing for conversion.

    Despite laws prohibiting black literacy in the nineteenth century, the African in America took the paper-white English and remade it (as the Irish and the Welsh also took their English), wadded it up, rigmarolled it, rewound it into a llareggub rap, making English theirs, making it idiosyncratically glamorous ( Come on now, you try it ), making it impossible for any American to use English henceforward without remembering them; making English so cool, so jet, so festival, that children want it only that way.
    The only voices as blatant as black voices, as contentious, as alive in American air and literature, are those first-generation Jewish voices, skeptical, playful, dicing every assertion. The black-Jewish conversation was inevitable, for reasons of rhetoric, of history, of soul. As the American Indian had also been drawn, the Jew must have felt drawn to the African American from some recognition of exclusion, expectation of exclusion. Unlike the Indian, however, the Jew had been shaped by a theology of the Word—a schooling that became, like the African’s, a strategy for survival. And for a time, theirs was a brilliant alliance, the Black with the Jew. But the genius for verbal survival uniting Black and Jew would undermine their alliance.
    “You cannot imagine how many times I need to squirt my eyes with Visine just to get through Othello . (So rage won’t dry them out.)” An African-American graduate student addressed a roomful of English professors and graduate students at Berkeley. (This was late in the 1970s.) A Jewish professor immediately joined with “You can’t imagine how difficult it is for me to read The Merchant of Venice ” (assuming the alliance).
    “Well, goddamn!” snarled the black woman in a stage whisper, her topknot vibrating, her eyes lashed to the notebook on her desk, “Jews always have to feel exactly what we are feeling, only more so.”

    Did you ever cross over to Snedens . . . ?
    Snedens Landing is a pre-revolutionary town upriver. I was fifty before I heard a recording of Mabel Mercer singing that brittle song. I don’t care for the song. I like Mabel Mercer. She was a black Englishwoman who grew up in a theatrical family. She went to Paris at nineteen; she sang in bars, mainly for expatriate audiences, James Baldwin and others. From Paris, Mabel Mercer came to New York, became a fixture of the supper clubs there. She sat in a straight-backed chair, in a spotlight, her hands folded in her lap. She leaned slightly forward, as if imparting a confidence to her audience. The confidence she imparted was that hers was the most refined lyric sensibility in Manhattan of the 1950s.
    Mabel Mercer