The Joker: A Memoir Read online

  During the last commercial, we selected the winner, and we never disagreed. If the audience selected the hard-luck case we had selected, we knew there was justice in the world. If they did not, we poured our contempt on them, fools who were taken in by a lie or a pretty face—fools who couldn’t see that a better parent would have kept her son out of reform school in the first durn place. Why, they were just rewarding some woman for raising a criminal.

  As much as we agreed about Queen for a Day, I was prissy—“nice-nasty,” was my mother’s amused epithet—about Grandmomma’s snuff. With a dexterity that seemed impossible, she kept a dip of Bruton’s Snuff lodged between her right cheek and gums, while back on the molars on the left side of her mouth she worked a wad of gum. Overnight and during meals, the gum, used and reused, sat on the top of the red-and-white snuff tin by the sink. When, while exploring the crawl space beneath her house, I was stung by a couple of yellow jackets, Grandmomma grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the kitchen. Holding my arm out straight, she opened the tin with her free hand and scooped out a big dip of tobacco. While I struggled, trying to break her tight grip, she reached into her mouth and slapped the wad of snuff on my forearm. The pain of the yellow jacket bites vanished as I watched the brown juice stream down my raised arm. I gagged and pleaded, bucked and fought, but she didn’t let go until she was satisfied that the snuff had drawn out the poison.

  On bus trips or in the car, she carried her spit jar, a quart Mason jar stuffed loosely with Kleenex to keep the spit from sloshing. Sitting next to Grandmomma in the car, I tried not to look at the brown slop saturating the pink tissue. I was afraid I’d retch. But as I sat there and tried not to think about it, my eyes kept slipping back to it. I had to test my persnickety gag reflex against what I knew was her pleasure, and I wanted to train myself not to be so judgmental. I was ashamed that I could not accept her in her entirety.

  My mother laughed at her mother’s snuff habit and made jokes about it when Grandmomma wasn’t around, but I doubt anybody ever had the temerity to suggest that she quit. It would have been a waste of breath, and an affront. Like a lot of mill workers, she got hooked on snuff because, unlike cigarettes, it left her hands free to work the looms. Once, her voice swelling with old triumph and more than a trace of lingering outrage, she asked my mother, “Sister, you remember when they tried to take the spittoons out of the mill and everybody just pulled the thread aside and spat through it onto the floor? When the foreman finally noticed the dried-up tobacco under the looms, they couldn’t get them spittoons back in there fast enough.” Thinking about the bosses and their stupidity, she gave an angry grunt. Mom laughed. Like me, like Dad, like all my family, she honored cussedness.

  As I said, I loved her.

  At the University of Alabama, I read, in a linguistics textbook of all things, the assertion, “Nobody can love a racist.” Immediately I thought of my grandmother. Though I was sometimes afraid of her, I never doubted my love. At times, I wondered whether it was wrong—whether it was a sin—to love a woman who was often angry, bigoted, and mean. But I knew such wondering was merely forced moralizing. Grandmomma had always loved me, loved me with a hot, furious love, which frightened me almost as much as it comforted me. As I pondered the textbook’s magisterial claim, all I could finally say to myself was that life is more complex than absolutists and some linguists find it to be. Love is not love that can only love those already flawless. That kind of love requires no enlargement of the self: It requires no love.

  My Grandmomma’s racism was the pigheaded racism of the old school—staunch, unrepentant, and all the more ferocious as it saw history turning against it. Against such racism, I saw my mother as racially enlightened. When I was about twelve my mother carried back to Grandmomma’s house a pile of worn-out quilts that Grandmomma had made for her long ago. My grandmother was not sentimental about her quilts. They were quickly and sloppily pieced together, backed with cheap muslin, and quilted with long loose stitches. When they wore through or pulled apart, she didn’t patch them. She simply tacked a new piece of muslin to each side and quilted the cloth sandwich together—or, as she did this time, found a black woman who lived out in the country so poor that she agreed to do the work for next to nothing.

  After the quilter sent word that she was done, Mom asked Grandmomma how much she owed. “Five dollars a quilt,” Gradmomma said.

  “That’s not enough,” Mom said. “That’s too much work for five dollars.” I didn’t know much about quilting, but I knew that if my mother wanted to pay more, something vastly unfair was happening. She was proud to call herself “tight as a tick.”

  “That nigger agreed to five dollars and I’m going to pay her five dollars.”

  “I’m going to pay her ten. Just tell me where she lives, and I’ll get the quilts myself.”

  “Roberta, I am not going to do it. We gave her the cloth to do the work with. All she had to do was stitch it down. And I’m not going to have you spoil that nigger. She’s perfectly happy to get five.”

  “Just tell me where she lives and I’ll go get them.”

  “No you won’t, because I’m the one who knows and I’m not going to tell you.”

  The fight sputtered on for a few days and ended only when Mom found someone who knew where the woman lived. She drove deep out into the country, got lost, finally found the woman’s house down an unmarked dirt road, picked up the quilts, and paid ten dollars apiece for them.

  Because of incidents like this, I assumed that when my mother told racist jokes she was making fun of my grandmother and racists like her. Only slowly did I come to understand that though that was true, or partly true, my mother was not immune to racism; hers was simply a more evolved species. I never saw her do a deliberately mean thing to anyone, black or white, but from time to time she surprised me with what she said. Once when I came home from high school right after it had been integrated, I mentioned to my mother that I had found myself in one of the crowded stairwells before class jammed against a girl who reeked of perfume and I had smelled it on myself the rest of the day. I mentioned this only because I had never been close enough to a girl my own age to smell her perfume and, though I didn’t say so, I was disturbed to smell her musky scent later in the day on my own skin, as my own scent.

  “Was she black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then be thankful she smelled like perfume,” Mom said and laughed. At sixteen, and sheltered from a great deal of racism by the very woman who had just made that remark, I didn’t know what to think. This racial stereotype was a new one to me. I hadn’t yet heard the joke that asks, “Why do black people stink?” “So blind people can hate them too.”

  My mother occasionally went out of her way to speak to blacks and working-class whites with a naturalness and ease that were beyond me, distressed as I was by my developing sense of historical guilt. Original sin had merged seamlessly with the inherited sin I learned about from reading Manchild in the Promised Land, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Black Like Me. At fourteen, I couldn’t walk past black people on the street without assuming they automatically disliked me because I was a member of the race that had imposed slavery on their ancestors and Jim Crow laws on them. By sixteen, I was even more self-conscious and mortified to realize that my way of thinking reduced every African-American to an undifferentiated representative of the race—and that made me a racist too, if a polite and abjectly deferential one.

  Several times Mom told me she wouldn’t mind in the least if I brought home a black woman and announced I wanted to marry her, as long as I “really, truly loved her.” She was working hard not to be overtly prejudiced, so I’ve wondered if the qualification hinged on believing true love conquered all or that white men were incapable of truly loving black women. Twice, though, she added that she would have a problem if I brought home a Filipina. They started out young and attractive, sure, but they turned hard in just a couple of years, she said. They saw white men as a way out of the Philippi
nes and into the land of the big PX. (The PX, the Post Exchange, was the army’s retail store for soldiers and their families; the air force called it the BX, or Base Exchange.) This prejudice was the eccentric and unabashed distaste of a service wife who had seen a couple of friends marry Filipinas only to be dumped as soon as the wives’ U.S. citizenship came through. Since I first received this warning when I was fourteen, and had only seen Filipino women at the PX or base commissary with their husbands, the proscription always tickled me. I couldn’t take Mom seriously because I’ve never heard anyone else say anything derogatory about Filipinos, before or since.

  “What about an Indian, Mom? Can I marry an Indian?”

  “I don’t care. Just no Filipinos.”

  “What about Japanese?”

  “Japanese, Negroes, I told you I don’t care.”

  “What about Mexicans? They’re brown—do they get hard-looking as they get older, just like Filipinos?”

  “This isn’t funny anymore. I told you what I think and I mean it. Don’t you bring home a Filipino girl.”

  “There goes my Saturday night.”

  “That’s enough, young man.”

  Mom may not have cared for Filipinos, but the word Filipino itself had no sting to it. Grandmomma used the word nigger like a lash on herself as well as others. My mother softened it: “Look at this house! Clothes scattered everywhere! It looks like a bunch of Okies live here.” Or “Get your bikes and toys out of the driveway. The neighbors will think we’re a bunch of hillbillies.” There was real despair in her voice, and something that I couldn’t place. Later I came to understand it was fear. As soon as she had proclaimed us Okies or hillbillies, she pitched herself into cleaning the house, tidying the yard, polishing the silver, and I was soon on my knees washing the baseboard with a stiff-bristled brush and then scrubbing around the bathroom faucets with an old toothbrush. Only much later did I come to see that Okies and hillbillies were socially acceptable substitutions for the unacceptable word she’d grown up with. But she still needed the concept. Long before I knew what one was, I knew I didn’t want to be a nigger, Okie, hillbilly, or white trash. When I was a young man, poor, angry, and depressed, I too used these words to sting myself into action. The taboo power of the words hurt and, when I used them on myself, I wanted it to.

  Maybe the rage behind Grandmomma’s words came from poverty, a hard life laboring at the looms of the Dundee Mills, and a fear that African-Americans, whom she had always assumed were below her, might grab the next rung of the ladder and vault past. Maybe it came from raising three children and losing a fourth during the Great Depression in rural Georgia while married to an ineffectual and self-effacing husband who drank his way through the first years of their marriage. Maybe. Even my teetotaler father once allowed that he considered drinking to be a reasonable response to being married to Daisy Mae Rodgers. Many people in her time and place suffered as much as she had, or more without becoming as fierce. Mom told me later that when she was a girl, Grandmomma would, for little or no reason, grab a razor strop or churn handle—whatever came to hand—and beat her and her brother and sister to the floor.

  Grandmomma used words as she used the churn handle. For the last several years of her life, my Aunt Joyce moved into Grandmomma’s house to care for her. When I visited, Grandmomma, sitting at her kitchen table and talking affectionately to me, her elbows propped on red-and-white-checked oil cloth, would suddenly turn to Joyce and snarl, “How long you gonna let that dirty skillet sit on the stove? Heavens to Betsy, Joyce, it’s two o’clock and you’re still slopping around in your housecoat like a nigger.” Nigger cracked like a whip. And Joyce grumbled back, “Now, Momma, don’t start on me.” Or worse: “Don’t start on me, old woman.”

  A dirty house and dirty clothes were the first step toward the abyss, toward slovenliness, laziness, and despair, which would lead to being fired and to drunkenness and to living hand-to-mouth, like “white trash.” Grandmomma knew full well that some people would call her that—white trash—though she wasn’t. She was a worker, a church woman, a woman who kept a clean house, never took a nickel of welfare, and raised three children, all of whom had jobs or husbands and not one of whom had spent so much as one night in jail. “No matter how poor you are, you can always be clean,” both she and my mother said, with more intensity and certitude than any religious sentiment I heard them utter. So Grandmomma, too disabled to clean her house, bullied Joyce into doing it: “Joyce, sweep this floor! I hate the feel of grit under my feet, I just purely hate it. There’s niggers live better than we do.”

  There was little Grandmomma could do except ride Joyce—ride Joyce and wash the dishes. She clumped across the kitchen on her walker, jerked a cane-bottom chair up to the sink and angled it so she could wash the dishes and still be part of the conversation that was going on at the table. Sitting, she slowly washed a sinkful of dishes, a two-hour job, and she wouldn’t accept help. She scraped a dirty plate, dipped it in hot soapy water, and scrubbed it over a worn bath towel folded double on her lap. She dipped the plate again, scrubbed it once more, inspected it, perhaps washed it a third time, then dried it before moving on to the next one. She was a harsh, determined, wrathful woman, whom I loved because, like God, she loved me first.

  I have never heard my father say nigger or tolerate the word in his presence, a rare attainment for a white man born in rural Georgia in 1922. As an officer in the United States Air Force and a Christian, he despised the word and everything associated with it. Though he is not much given to talk and even less to praise, he went out of his way, especially when I was young, to compliment black officers he’d worked with. Out of the blue, he found ways to indicate that so-and-so was black, and a fine man and a fine officer, and he—my father—was proud to have served under him. He made a point to say “under.” Every situation was a teaching situation, and no opportunity for a sermon on race ever went unfulfilled.

  When a particularly perfervid black leader in Montgomery ranted about police violence or discrimination, most of the white folks I knew got riled up, angry, and defensive. But my father often simply said, “I’d like to think that if I were him, I’d do just what he’s doing,” a statement that I could only take as pedagogical since I’ve known few people who abhor extravagant rhetoric as much as he does. Another sermon, I thought at the time, but now I wonder if Dad was weighing himself in the balances—“I’d like to think”—and finding himself wanting.

  In Sunday school in Montgomery, Dad took pointed enjoyment in telling the other men in his class that my high school football team, the Sidney Lanier Poets, couldn’t reasonably be considered the best team in the state, despite their undefeated record, because they hadn’t played a single black team.

  “What’d they say?” I asked.

  “They explained that the blacks had their own league and Lanier couldn’t be expected to play teams outside their league.” He grinned and snorted, to let me know what he thought of that excuse.

  In 1970, my first year in college, Daniel “Chappie” James was promoted to major general, an air force “first” for an African-American and one that received a lot of press. “Did you ever meet him, Dad?” I asked as we watched the news after supper, and my father waxed unusually enthusiastic. He had in fact met General James, he said, and he considered him to be a superb general and everyone who had worked with him thought the same thing. Keeping a straight face, I closed my eyelids and rolled my eyes as far back in my head as I could. Even honorable sermons remain sermons.

  To Dad, sermons were the entire point of life. My mother and father had grown up only a few miles apart in rural Georgia, in red-clay poverty, and my father’s family was if anything poorer than my mother’s. My father, his two brothers, and one sister were raised by a widow whose husband died as a delayed result of mustard gas he’d inhaled in Europe during the First World War. Still, despite the hardship, my father and his brothers went to college, and their sister, my Aunt Margie, married a man who began as a li
neman for Southern Bell and worked his way into management. Both of my father’s brothers became ministers, while my father was for a number of years a deacon in his Southern Baptist church. Their education and thoughtful commitment to their faiths made racist joking repulsive to them—but not to everyone on their side of the family. When my father’s uncle died, a man I knew only distantly as Uncle Cisco, his children found a Ku Klux Klan robe they’d never seen before hidden in the back of his closet.

  I admired the humane morality of my father’s family. It made me feel safe, if bored and occasionally bullied. But humane is a bit abstract, more affectionate than passionate—and I was claimed by the hot-blooded love of my mother’s family, a love that I was all the more aware of because it could so quickly turn to anger. The same ferocity that drove their racism and raucous squabbling with one another also seemed to drive their love, including their love for me. Their laughter was volatile with fear and love, rage and attachment, and I treasured the warmth of it while dreading the flames that often flared. I was drawn to the laughter even if it was bad laughter.

  I felt I could separate the ugly, racist laughter from the misplaced rage that fueled it. But it troubled me as I sat at my grandmother’s table, morally conflicted because I knew my uncle took my fitful laughter at his hair-raisingly racist jokes as complicity. When one of his jokes surprised me and I laughed before I could stop myself—“What’s the difference between a snow tire and a black man?” “A tire doesn’t sing when you put on the chains”—Buddy must have thought, Andrew agrees with me because he’s laughing. But in the harmony of our voices blended in laughter, wherever that harmony came from and whatever it meant, I felt the anger ease, though not disappear. We were family. We had to find ways of living with each other.