Paul Beatty: The White Boy Shuffle

“Maw.”

“What, Gunnar?”

“Your feet stank.”

“Shut up before I make you fill out that application to military school.”

The advanced course in Kaufman genealogy didn’t start until Mom returned home from earning our livings by testing the unlucky poor for VD at a free clinic in East Los Angeles. I remember she enjoyed bringing the sharp stainless-steel tools of her trade and glossy Polaroids of the most advanced cases to the dinner table. Spit-shining the speculums and catheters, she’d tell her awful jokes about “pricking the pricks and hunting the cunts.” I swear somewhere in her unknown past traveling minstrels cakewalked across candlelit theater stages.

The seven o’clock suppers were carnival sideshows, featuring Mom the Amazing Crazy Lady. She’d wipe our greasy lips, lecturing us about the horrors of sexually transmitted disease while passing mashed potatoes and photos of pussy lesions around the table. For the coup de grâce she’d open a prophylactic package, remove and unroll a blue sheath, and stuff the receptacle end into a nostril. Then she’d sit there lecturing us about the joys of safe sex with a crumpled condom swinging from her nose and bouncing off her chin with each syllable. Suddenly she’d press the open nostril closed with her finger and with a snort snake the unlubricated rubber up her nose. She’d open her mouth and produce a soggy piece of latex, holding it up for all to see with a gloating “Ta-dah. Let’s eat.”

The festivities continued throughout the meal. Though her designation as world’s loudest griot cannot be substantiated, the Guinness Book of World Records lists her as having the world’s loudest swallow.

SWALLOW. Ms. Brenda W. Kaufman (b. 1955) of Los Angeles recorded unamplified swallows at 47 db (busy street = 70 db, jet engine = 130) while guesting on the David Letterman show drinking New York City tap water on May 3, 1985.

On her birthdays I watch the videotape of her performance. A man with an English accent holds a microphone to her throat while she enthusiastically drinks a clear glass of water. In the bottom righthand corner of the screen is a VU meter with a needle that jumps wildly with every booming swallow. My sisters and I yelled our heads off every time the needle moved into the red zone.

When she returned, we proudly took turns placing our fingers on her bobbing Adam’s apple as she drank her milk. Between swallows Mom would ask about our schoolwork and bemoan our miseducations. Slamming down an empty glass of milk, she’d run her tongue over her top lip and bellow, “See, there isn’t anything a Kaufman can’t do. Those history books say anything about your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on your father’s side, Euripides Kaufman? Betcha they don’t. Pass the fucking dinner buns and let Mama tell you about a colonial Negro who would’ve pulled himself up by the bootstraps had he had boots. The first of a legacy of colored men who forged their own way in the world. Gunnar, you listenin’?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Mom could tell a motherfucking story. She’d start in with Euripides Kaufman, the youngest slave in history to buy his freedom. I heard the chains shackled to the spirits of Kaufman Negroes past slink and rattle up to the dining room windows. Dead niggers who smacked their arid lips and held their rumbling vacuous stomachs while they stared at the fried chicken, waiting for Mom to tell their tales.

Too small to smelt and work iron in his master’s Boston blacksmith shop, Euripides spent his bondage doing donkey work. After running barefoot errands over the downtown cobblestones, he’d look for ways to fill his idle time. Sitting on the grassy banks of the Charles River, he’d watch the jongleurs woo money from the pockets of sentimental passersby. At age seven Euripides saw a means of income. The baby entrepreneur ran home, spread globs of lamp oil over sooty black skin, and parked himself outside the busiest entrance to the Boston Common. Every promenading Bostonian who passed him by answered Euripides’s toothy obsequious grin and gleaming complexion with a concerned “Can I help you, son?” To which Euripides replied, “Would you like to rub me head for good luck? Cost a sixpence.”

Soon Euripides had a steady clientele of Brahmins and Tories, redcoats and militiamen paying to pass their palms over his bristly head for luck and a guaranteed afterlife. Six months later he decided to shave his skull to heighten the tactile pleasure, and business boomed. Word quickly got back to his owner and eponym Chauncy Kaufman about the little tar baby’s ingenuity in bringing a small measure of fame to his shop. Soon customers came into the shop to have their horses shod and to pat the “l’il black bastard’s” head. Customers rode up, tied their horses to the hitching post, and proclaimed, “Four new shoes, Chauncy. Where’s Euripides? Last week I forgot to palm his stubbly skull and the missus caught me buggering the Negro lass in the attic. Come ’ere, you baldheaded good-luck charm, you.”

One mild spring day the nine-year-old Euripides puzzled out how much to charge for a “He’s so cute” grab ’n’ twist of the cheek. He looked up to see a black boy about his age auctioned off next to a fruit stand for fifteen pounds. “Snookums, on your way back from getting the wig powdered at the coiffeur’s, would you please pick up some tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and a little nigger child?” Ever the shrewd businesskid and eager to appraise his own worth, Euripides asked his sweaty coal-faced owner if he was worth fifteen pounds on the open market. Master Kaufman assured Euripides that a clever pickaninny such as himself was worth twice that amount. Euripides then reached into his satchel and plonked down thirty pounds in savings from his head-rubbing business on the anvil. Euripides Kaufman walked out of the shop a nine-year-old freeman, never giving a second thought to buying a hat. He went on to become a merchant sailor who attained unheralded fame for being, in Mama’s words, “the brains behind the Boston Massacre.”

Familial legend has it that on March 5, 1770, Euripides Kaufman artfully dodged a redcoat’s musket shot with his name on it and Crispus Attucks woke up in nigger heaven a martyr. That historic afternoon Euripides and Crispus, his ace boon coon since childhood, sat in a Boston pub drinking drafts of Samuel Adam’s pale ale. Oh to be free, black, and twenty-one, drunk on home-brewed hops and the mascot-like acceptance of his fellow white merchant seafarers. The only drawback to Euripides’s freedom was that he couldn’t charge when the locals rubbed his head with vigorous patronization. “Euripides, you dusky halyard-knot — headed black bloke, how old were you when you started to shed your monkey fur? Maybe you still sleep in it to keep warm at night?”

What’re a few nigger jokes among friends? We Kaufmans have always been the type of niggers who can take a joke. I used to visit my father, the sketch artist at the Wilshire LAPD precinct. His fellow officers would stand around cluttered desks breaking themselves up by telling how-many-niggers-does-it-take jokes, pounding each other on the back and looking over their broad shoulders to see if me and Daddy were laughing. Dad always was. The epaulets on his shoulders raising up like inchworms as he giggled. I never laughed until my father slapped me hard between the shoulder blades. The heavy-handed blow bringing my weight to my tiptoes, raising my chin from my chest, and I’d burp out a couple of titters of self-defilement. Even if I didn’t get the joke. “What they mean, ‘Lick their lips and stick ’em to the wall’?” Later I’d watch my father draw composite sketches for victimized citizens who used his face as reference point. “He was thick-lipped, nose a tad bigger than yours, with your nostril flare though.” Daddy would bring some felon to still life and without looking up from his measured strokes admonish me that my face better not appear on any police officer’s sketchpad. He’d send me home in a patrol car, black charcoal smudged all over my face and his patriotic wisdom ringing in my ears: “Remember, Gunnar, God, country, and laughter, the world’s best medicine. Did your mother get the check?”