Paul Beatty: The White Boy Shuffle

Lost in Chicago’s South Side, the dapper Ludwig Kaufman stumbled into Mosque 27 looking for directions to a club that had booked his sequined law enforcement officers. Playing the rear in a metal folding chair, Uncle Kaufman was fascinated with the temple’s rhythmical rhetoric and style, and the potential in a group called the Blond Muhammadettes intrigued him. He quickly asked how he could join and where he could get some of those bow ties and shiny shoes. Knowing a mark when they saw one, the Black Muslims and the FBI trained Ludwig to be the Judas to black nationalism’s Jesus. It was Cousin Ludwig who on February 21, 1965, stood up in the middle of the Audubon Ballroom moments before Malcolm X was to give his last speech and shouted, “Hey man! Get your hands out of my pocket.” Eight months later the police found him in Tin Pan Alley, dead and sans shiny shoes.

After school I held court near the kickball diamond, leaning against the metal backstop, rambling on about my cousin Solveig Kaufman. Newsweek magazine assigned Cousin Solveig to report on the press conference announcing the results of the reinvestigation of Martin Luther King’s assassination. The panel opened up the questioning by choosing an affirmative action baby who’d benefited from King’s movement. On national television Solveig repaid the civil rights movement. He stood up, pen and pad in hand, and said, “Never mind James Earl Ray and FBI intervention, inquiring minds want to know who’s fucking Coretta Scott King?” The aging eternal widow’s next public appearance was her funeral four months later. Some say natural causes, some say suicide, some death by public embarrassment.

These schoolyard chronicles never included my father’s misdeeds. I could distance myself from the fuckups of the previous generations, but his weakness shadowed my shame from sun to sun. His history was my history. A reprobate ancestry that snuggled up to me and tucked me in at night. In the morning it kissed me on the back of the neck, plopped its dick in my hands, and asked me to blow reveille. Front and center, nigger.

The racist campestral doctrine of Yeehaw, Mississippi, raised Mr. Rölf Kaufman, a.k.a. Daddy. Instead of pumping property taxes into neighborhood schools, the town stuck its tongue out at Brown v. Board of Education and satisfied the Supreme Court’s integrationist stipulations by busing the dark-skinned niggers and the light-skinned niggers to Dred Scott High. Living in the only black household within walking distance of exclusively white and predominantly redneck Jefferson Davis High, my father didn’t even know about the colored bus. He showed up for the first day of high school dressed in cuffed Levis, a flannel shirt, a Daniel Boone coonskin hat, and a Captain Midnight decoder ring. He was such a docile and meek nonthreat that the principal let him register for classes.

My father fondly recalled the laughs and cold celebratory summer vacation Dixie beers he shared with the good ol’ boy senior class after their macabre reenactment of the Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney murders. Rölf played Chaney, two Down syndrome kids from the special-ed class reprised the roles of the hapless miscreant Jews, and three carloads of football players acted as the vigilante sheriffs. My father and the two “Jewish” boys drove down Route 17 toward Meridian with the ersatz peace officers right behind them. After a few miles of horn-blaring, bumper-to-bumper tailgating and beer cans sounding off the windows like tin hailstones, Yeehaw’s phony finest grew bored and forced my father’s car to a stop. My father smiled weakly as the starting quarterback, Plessy “Go Deep” Ferguson, purposefully approached the driver’s side. The strong-armed wishbone navigator par excellence opened the door with his scholarship hands and asked my father, “What are you SNCCering about? Get it, fellas? SNCC — snickering?” The rest of the team burst out in laughter and proceeded to pull the scared “student activists” out of the car, taking turns cuffing my dad and the retarded kids about the face, swinging them by the ankles into the muddy bog that ran alongside the highway. Later that night all the players in the living theater met in the glade behind the courthouse for a few wrap-party beers. A campfire’s glowing flames lit up a keg placed next to a thick-trunked Southern pine known as a swing-low tree. Shadows of the strong-limbed branches flickered across soused contemplative faces. My father drank so much he passed out. He came to naked, his entire body spray-painted white, his face drool-glued against the trunk of the swing-low tree. He ran home under the sinking Mississippi moon, his white skin tingling with assimilation.

Three hours after graduating from high school in 1968, Dad joined the army. He served two tours in Vietnam. His commanding officer, elated with my father’s patriotism, placed him in charge of a crazy Black Is Beautiful platoon of citified troublemakers. He led them on search-and-destroy missions through the sharpened thickets, eyes out for snipers, listening to his men gripe about the precipitation, the white man this and the white man that. After he joined the Los Angeles Police Department, he’d complain that he’d left the Indonesian jungle for the Iznocohesion jungle — “gone from fighting Viet Cong to King Kong.” I remember one day he came home drunk from the LAPD’s unofficial legal defense fundraiser for officers accused of brutality. (Dad later told me they showed Birth of a Nation followed by two straight hours of Watts riot highlights.) He sat me on his lap and slurred war stories. How his all-black platoon used to ditch him in the middle of patrols, leaving him alone in some rice paddy having to face the entire Communist threat by his lonesome. Once he stumbled on his men behind the DMZ, cooling with the enemy. The sight of the slant-eyed niggers and nigger niggers sharing K-rations and rice, enjoying a crackling fire and the quiet Southeast Asian night, flipped Pops the fuck out. He berated his rebellious troops, shouting, “Ain’t this a bitch, the gorillas snacking with the guerrillas. Hello! Don’t you fucking baboons know that this is the goddamn enemy? The fucking yellow peril and you fucking Benedict Leroy Robinson Jefferson Arnolds are traitors to the democracy that weaned you apes from primitivism. You know, you’re probably eating dog.” The VC saw the disconcerted looks on the faces of the black American men, and a good colored boy from Detroit raised his rifle and put an M-16 slug inches from my pop’s crotch. My father’s men just sat there waiting for him to bleed to death. The Vietnamese had to beg them to take my dad back to the base. My father ended this confessional with the non sequitur wisdom that ended all our conversations: “Son, don’t ever mess with no white women.”

To my knowledge no male Kaufman had ever slept with a white woman, not out of lack of jungle hunger or for preservation of racial purity but out of fear. I’d watch my dad talk to white women, drowning them with “Yes, ma’ams,” his darting eyes looking just past their ears. If the First Lady were to walk past my father naked with the original Constitution taped to her back like a “Kick Me” sign, my dad wouldn’t even crane his neck. The last thing he’d want to see was some flabby butt and a hooded mob chasing him back to Niggertown.

On our custody outings to the drag races in Pomona, my father would tell me how he came back from the war and met my mother at a stock car race. They fell immediately in love — the only two black folks in the world who knew the past five winners of the Daytona 500 and would recognize Big Daddy Don Garlits in the street. Then he’d put his arm around me and say, “Don’t you think black women are exotic?”

Kaufman lore plays out like an autogamous self-pollinating men’s club. There are no comely Kaufman superwomen. No poetic heroines caped in Kinte cloth stretching welfare checks from here to the moon. No nubile black women who could set a wayward Negro straight with a snap of the head and a stinging “Nigger, puh-leeze.” The women who allied themselves to the Kaufman legacy are invisible. Their existence and contributions cut off like the Sphinx’s broad nose, subsumed by the mystic of an astronomical impotency. Every once in a while a woman’s name tangentially floated from my mother’s lips as a footnote to some fool’s parable, only to dissipate with the vegetable steam. Aunt Joni’s mean banana daiquiri. Meredith’s game-winning touchdown run vs. Madame C. J. Walker High. Giuseppe’s second wife Amy’s Perry Como record collection. Cousin Madge, who was the complexion of pound cake dipped in milk. These historical cameos were always followed by my mother’s teeth-sucking disclaimers, “But that’s not important” or “Let’s not go there.” I wondered, where did my male predecessors find black women with names like Joni, Meredith, and Amy? Who were these women? Were they weaker than their men, or were they proverbial black family linchpins? I spent hours thumbing through photo albums, fearful that I was destined to marry a black Mormon Brigham Young University graduate named Mary Jo and become the spokesperson for the Coors Brewing Company. They say the fruit never falls far from the tree, but I’ve tried to roll down the hill at least a little bit.