The Joker: A Memoir Read online

  “It is,” the doctor says. “You were a quart low.”

  The joke startled me. Not only wasn’t it funny, I was having trouble seeing how she could find it funny. It was a kids’ joke, a poop joke. Why in the world was my mother telling me a poop joke? Despite its easy and ugly punch line, I laughed shallowly. I didn’t want to discourage Mom from telling me jokes.

  At first, I thought the joke was about a racist doctor who dupes a not-very-bright King into drinking a bucket of shit—“bull poop” in my mother’s version but not, I’m sure, in my uncle’s. I’m sure Buddy was the source of the joke. I also tried to laugh at the famous preacher, already perceived as a saint and a prophet in the larger world, being taken down a peg. Was that how Mom meant the joke? Only after thinking about it for a couple of days did I realize with a jolt that she thought Martin Luther King Jr. was full of shit. That understanding, which mildly embarrassed me, led to another understanding, the more embarrassing and frightening one that I was pretty sure my uncle meant to convey: niggers are made of shit and the essence of negritude is shit. From that perspective, the only pleasure the joke offers is the grim and soulless pleasure of animosity.

  Later, as I continued to hear the joke, I saw it also implies that Martin Luther King Jr. was essentially a white man. Only the civil-rights rhetoric (“bullshit”) that discomfited whites made him black. If King didn’t keep renewing his racial identity with racial causes and rhetoric, he’d turn into a white man. My mother would have agreed that blacks and whites are essentially the same. It was my Uncle Buddy who saw African-Americans as intrinsically inferior to whites, and a deeply held rage at their attempting to change the natural order ran through many of his jokes: What’s the difference between a nigger and a bucket of shit? The bucket. Why don’t niggers let their babies play in the sandbox? The cat’ll bury them. And this twofer: What do you get when you cross a nigger and a Mexican? Someone too lazy to steal.

  The jokes my mother told, even if they came to her from Buddy, were usually more storylike and ambiguous. They were also my mother’s and my hidden, homeopathic rebellion against my father, who was right to proscribe them but typically counterproductive in his heavy-handedness. Mom and I shared, I thought at first, an understanding: While others believed the jokes denigrated blacks, we recognized the joke wasn’t on the victim but on the perpetrator, the racist and not the victim of racism. But the truth is more complicated.

  Once or twice Mom mentioned “Martin Luther Coon” and chuckled. I was disappointed in her, I admit, and troubled that fear had led to anger and the anger to leaden ugliness—and then I was ashamed for feeling superior to my mother. I didn’t sense in her the hatred I felt when my uncle and grandmother spat out the witless epithet, not even pretending to find it funny, just relishing the old racial insult’s attempt to reduce the famous man from a king to a coon. What was Mom hearing? I wondered. What was making her laugh? I think it was the phrase’s bullheaded resistance—the sheer unreconstructed ugliness of it—that pleased her.

  I’d long understood my uncle’s jokes grew out of his loathing of black people, but I began to understand my mother’s goodwill was sometimes shaded and even overshadowed by racial fear. These dreary dull-edged jokes were a church that I didn’t want to join, a congregation I couldn’t comfortably laugh with, a community that valued the anger of its point more than the humor in its telling. Yet adults who fiercely loved me and whom I loved, and who understood the complexities of the world better than I did, as they were quick to point out, were confirmed racists who found the jokes funny and even comforting. I didn’t respect my elders’ fear but I absorbed it—and sometimes I laughed at their jokes.

  I assumed that my mother’s racial jokes were aimed at people like her mother and brother—that she was distancing herself from their rural racism by making fun of them, and that her voice was full of a strange affection when she told these jokes because she could not separate her love for her family from their bigotry. Her rich chuckle usually seemed rueful, an acknowledgment that “Yes, people do think that way.” Yet in that chuckle there was also a stubborn appreciation of the culture that fostered the racism, an understanding of it that went to acceptance and forgiveness too easily. She didn’t give full weight to their malice because she loved them. I also have been guilty of that blindness. I have a hard time crediting racial malice—and I attribute this innocence to my parents’ care in trying to shield me from it. And so my understanding of racism is probably a quart low.

  Because they are almost the only jokes I remember my mother telling, I cherish these jokes with guilty affection. Though Mom sympathized with the plight of individual blacks, the idea that African-Americans had organized and were no longer asking for, but demanding, their rights pushed her further than her basic sympathy could extend. In retrospect that later understanding of my mother changed my reaction to this next joke, one I loved when I first heard it.

  A sheriff is called to the scene when the body of a black man is pulled out of the Mississippi River. Standing on the bank, he looks down at the body wrapped head to foot in heavy chains, shakes his head sorrowfully, and says, “Ain’t it just like a nigger to steal all those chains and then try to swim the river with them?”

  When Mom told it, I laughed wholeheartedly, enjoying what I took to be our shared understanding that, yeah, that’s just exactly what a redneck sheriff might say and even half believe. Not only was I sure that Buddy had told her the joke, but I also imagined him as the sheriff. I heard his voice in the sheriff’s lascivious and vicious pleasure in refusing to acknowledge an obvious murder.

  In any moral world the joke is about the inhumanity of the sheriff, and thus southern lawmen’s complicity in lawlessness. But the segregated South was a world of skewed morals. If, like Buddy, you don’t recognize the civil rights of African-Americans, then you identify with the sheriff’s inhumane protection of his fellow racists—and your laughter at the joke celebrates the arbitrary power of white society to turn a blind eye to lynching.

  My mother would not have gone nearly that far. But she appreciated the cussedness of the sheriff, his recalcitrant exhilaration in being in the wrong, and enforcing his wrongness. Mom savored the subversion of the racists in her jokes even when she disapproved of their practices in life. She liked the joke because it embodied her struggle with her own racial fears and contradictions and because she knew that the rich and educated scorned her fears, which is one of the reasons I love jokes, even some of these.

  Self-defeating southern cussedness has a long cultural history. We oppose evils whose very perversity we go ahead and gloat over because they seem like the epitome of human nature at its worst. To Calvinists sin is often funny because it confirms our low opinion of ourselves. My college history professor, Dr. Chappell, said he had never voted for George Corley Wallace Jr., and he never would. He hated the man and everything he stood for, but, said Chappell, clenching his incisors, he couldn’t help relishing Wallace’s electoral successes anyway just because they so flummoxed and inflamed the Yankees, driving the national commentators to paroxysms of sanctimony aimed wholesale at the South and Alabama, including those of us who resolutely opposed the governor.

  While shaking our heads in honest sorrow, we also found perverse humor in the sheer mad brass of George Wallace. When a rival politician tried to use against Wallace the fact that he had been mustered out of the air force with a ten percent mental disability, the governor turned the political assault to his advantage by declaring that, unlike his opponent, he could prove he was ninety percent sane. Late in life, Wallace tried to put his racist legacy behind him, going around the state and begging the forgiveness of any African-American organization that would permit him to address them, and we laughed out loud when he earnestly told a black audience, “Sure, I look like a white man. But my heart is as black as anyone’s here.” It’s hard not to wish the self-judgment was deliberate wit.

  When I conjure in my head the sheriff in racist jokes, he is alway
s some combination of my Uncle Buddy, as I said, and George Wallace. And therefore the sheriff who finds a thief in the river instead of a murder victim is the same one in another joke that made my mother laugh. A black man wearing an expensively tailored suit and a silk tie shows up to register to vote in rural Mississippi. Or Alabama. Or Arkansas. At the polling booth—this was when literacy tests were still common—the sheriff asks the man about his education. Wounded comic dignity filling her voice, my mother acted out, with sonorous bombast, the black man’s outrage.

  “I have an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a PhD from Yale, and for two years I was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford before I returned to Harvard as a professor of Greek and Roman literature.”

  “Now, that’s all well and good,” sneered my mother in the voice of the redneck sheriff, “But tell me, boy, can ya read?”

  Mom drew out the word read, enjoying the hick accent she gave it, the obtuseness of it, and the malicious pleasure the imagined sheriff takes in his willful abuse of authority.

  At the time I was sure the butt of the joke was the redneck sheriff, who could not accept the superior attainments of a black man, and who was going to flagrantly misuse his power to frustrate the man’s right to vote. In Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, Randall Kennedy recounts pretty much the same joke and says it’s told by African-Americans “to satirize ‘legal’ disenfranchisement.” That’s how I wanted to understand it too.

  Yet now I hear in my mother’s voice something I didn’t hear then. Along with her mockery of the sheriff and his redneck racism, I hear a touch of gratification at the sheriff’s staunch refusal to admit the educated, successful, and apparently wealthy black man is his equal, much less his superior. My father’s suits were not tailored and his ties were acetate.

  Randall Kennedy tells another joke that he says black activists told to emphasize “the depth of white racism all across the United States: ‘What is a negro with a PhD?’ Their response? ‘Doctor Nigger.’ ” The subtle shifts of stance and presentation are everything in jokes, aren’t they? My uncle told me the exact same joke, but his point was not to satirize white racism. Buddy was educating me. I may think I knew how the world was supposed to be, he was saying, but he knew how it really was.

  And then he told me a joke that went one step further, one that demonstrated that whatever African-Americans accomplished, they’d always be first and foremost niggers, not just in Buddy’s eyes but as an unalterable ontological state.

  “What do you called a Negro with a PhD, an MD, and a law degree from Harvard?” he asked.

  Immediately, I was wary. I knew it had to be a joke because in normal conversation he never used the word Negro, and of course in Griffin, Georgia, in the 1960s there wasn’t much chance he had actually met anyone, white or black, with those credentials. And if he had, he was not someone who’d agonize over how to address the distinguished personage.

  All these thoughts plodded through my head as I pondered how to react and then took the path of least resistance. “I don’t know,” I said. “What?”

  My uncle took a moment to look at me. He knew I wasn’t going to like the answer and that meant he was going to enjoy telling it to me all the more. Within the next two years, I read the same joke in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Malcolm X savored with rage the same point my uncle savored with triumph.

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

  Seven

  Where’s the Edge?

  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 heiling 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 clo
sed 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.