Free Brown: The Last Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez Page B

childhood, wild game was often marinated in cow’s milk—the symbol of American domesticity—in order to “soak the wildness out of it.”

    And how to explain the different place accorded the Indian and the African in the white imagination? The Indian refuses to accomplish the European’s will on the land (it is his religion he will not have violated). It becomes the African slave’s task to till the soil, to plant and to reap. By sowing, the African enters into American history. However unwillingly, he consorts with Europeans. The African becomes the enslaved proxy in the white domination of Nature. From this arrangement, the White assumes that the African wants to become like his master (because he already is like his master, he is doing his master’s will).
    From this arrangement, the African learns parody, first in earnest, for self-preservation, then in loathing.
    From this arrangement, the white man learns parody, first in loathing, then in earnest.
    From this point in American history, the African takes over the narrative; the Indian remains the odd man out, sticks to his reserve, embitters himself, while the white man makes him up. The Indian, as much a puritan as any Puritan, as regards identity, never gets a handle on parody or, indeed, on self-parody.

    After the Civil War, white Southerners felt themselves bereft. Their way of life was judged by their victors to have been an abomination. After black emancipation, whites, in their loneliness, invented happy Negroes, a happy Babylon of singing and dancing. They invented the American musical. These were the minstrel shows.
    It is conventional in America now to view the minstrel shows as only mockery—blackened faces and transvestism (white men also played black women in minstrel shows). The greater mockery was in daring to attribute nostalgia for captivity to black folk. The nostalgia was entirely a white invention, all that mammy stuff, uncle stuff; familial parody. The most famous purveyor of white “ethiopian airs,” as minstrel songs were called, was Stephen Foster. Most of his songs were written in Pennsylvania; Foster hadn’t much knowledge of the South and was forever consulting gazetteers for the names of rivers. Foster’s songs masqueraded as songs overheard on an old plantation. But they were pathetic love songs sung by white people to black people in the guise of mockery.
    Black people, of course, have steadfastly refused all pathetic suits. I never loved you. You are deluded.
    By the 1920s, Al Jolson broke the immigrant son’s silence—and he did so in blackface. Here again we gather the puritan theme of America to the parodist’s theme: Jolson’s father was a cantor in a synagogue who disapproved of theater-singing as inappropriate to a Jew. The only way for a young Jewish man to sing from his heart on a stage, to be authentic to his private yearning, was to do so in blackface—a protective masquerade, also an emulation of the supposed freedom of black people.
    Shortly after Al Jolson broke the sound barrier, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s creation of Tarzan—in print, comics, and later on the screen—moved many American boys toward the game of naked Africans or “natives.” Tarzan is not an African, but a peer of the realm, an accidental Indian, an inauthentic savage, an innate gentleman, a natural puritan, an ecologist. (It is a very confusing parable.) But the main point taken by American boys is that, while Tarzan is white, he finds his meaning in darkest Africa.
    Only decades after Jolson and Tarzan, Norman Mailer wrote an intriguing essay, “The White Negro,” which comes very close to telling the truth about greasepaint and footlights and finding the company of one’s desire. The white hipster went uptown, as to wilderness, to listen to jazz in the forbidden playhouse. A generation later, if white Americans were still not willing to admit to an envy of blacks, they were at least willing to applaud Elvis Presley for daring to play