The Joker: A Memoir (18 page)

Quickly, before the scraps of paper got waterlogged, Buddy shook black pepper over the water and said, “And when the niggers get in, it just ruins it for everybody.” He slipped his finger into the edge of the water, and the paper bits and flecks of pepper fled to opposite sides of the bowl. “It’s ‘Everybody outta the pool!’ ” He laughed a scornful laugh. The pleasure of cutting off your nose to spite your face is well known to us southerners. You think you can make us do what you want? Ha, we’ll shut down the pool and stop
everybody
, including me and mine, from swimming. How yuh like them apples, Mr. Federal Judge?

Buddy had smeared soap on his finger, and when he touched the water, the soap disrupted the surface tension, causing the paper and pepper to separate. I was intrigued by how the trick worked, but couldn’t stop myself from pitching into the old and useless arguments about how black people were taxpayers too, were fully equal to whites, deserved equal rights, and on and on, splashing in the warm lard-bath of self-delighting sanctimony. We ended up where we always ended up. With what I thought of as withering disdain, I would say, “They didn’t just line up and buy tickets for that scenic voyage across the Atlantic, you know. We kidnapped them and brought them here.” And Buddy always answered that he knew that. That was all in the past. Wadn’t nothing could be done about it now. But the situation we were in now was that we had a bunch of apes living alongside us and only idiots would try to treat
apes as their equals. The whole country would fall apart. The arguments got nastier the tighter the circles spun.

So I made rules for myself. If the joke jolts an honest laugh out of me, I would, no matter how ugly it is, relax and enjoy the laugh, but I wouldn’t fake a laugh out of politeness. It is hard, I found, to withhold the polite, wooden “heh, heh” that signals that, while you don’t think the joke is funny, you are fulfilling your obligation to acknowledge that a joke has been told. Another rule was that I wouldn’t criticize racist jokes. Maybe I’d say “ouch.” Mostly I let the joke pass in silence. Sometimes I’d walk away. If I criticized, I’d just end up in another pointless argument, or I’d hear the defense I retreated to when challenged, “It’s just a joke. I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

Around the same time that I made up these rules I made up another, larger rule: Never argue with people more than ten years older than yourself about race. You are never going to change their minds. They’ll dig in harder. And you’ll just piss everyone off, including yourself. As I said before, we were family. We had to find ways to live with both one another and ourselves.

“Don’t tell your father,” Mom said whenever she told me a racist joke. She didn’t need to warn me. With this kind of humor, my mother wavered somewhere between my father’s irascible probity and her brother’s nasty delight. When she repeated them, I often heard my Uncle Buddy’s voice in the background, as well as her own guilt at setting a bad example for her son. The human need to pass on something she found funny, compelling, or perplexing overrode her guilt and became part of the joke’s power—and part of its pleasure.

I loved her warning me to silence. It made explicit the grown-upness of our forbidden disreputable laughter, which was an adult intoxicant like her Pall Malls or the scotch she sometimes allowed herself at night while watching Johnny Carson’s opening monologue on
The Tonight Show
. When she drank, she invariably sipped cheap scotch—Clan MacGregor—out of a thick glass that once held a
frozen shrimp cocktail. With that bit of watered scotch and Johnny Carson cracking wise on the TV, she occasionally shared a joke she’d been mulling over till she had to tell it.

“A colored man suddenly finds himself in front of St. Peter at the pearly gates,” she said, when I was thirteen.

This was an interesting beginning. We were Baptists, and we didn’t believe in saints. In the radical Protestant democracy of faith, the apostle Peter had no more of a special standing with Jesus than each one of us did. From hearing hundreds of sermons and Sunday school lessons, I knew this doctrinal verity before I knew the multiplication tables. By repeating the joke, she accepted, for the purposes of the story, a premise she considered Catholic mumbo jumbo.

St. Peter asks the colored man how he died.

“I don’t remember,” the man tells him.

“We have to know. We have to fill out these forms and decide if you’re going to heaven or the hot place,” St. Peter says. He thinks for a few moments and then asks, “What’s the last thing you do remember?”

“Well, I was attending this white Baptist Church. Everybody was real friendly. The preacher preached up a storm, and when he invited those who wanted to be baptized and join the church to walk down the aisle, I did.

“They was real nice about it. They dressed me in a purdy green satin robe, led me to the baptismal font, and sang a glorious hymn.”

“That’s all you remember?” St. Peter says. “Try harder. Something else must’ve happened.”

“Let me see,” says the black man. “Oh, yeah, just as I was being dunked in the water, the preacher said, ‘Bye-bye, nigger, bye-bye.’ ”

My mother chanted the punch line triumphantly, her voice rising as she sang out “bye-bye,” falling as she sneered “nigger,” and then soaring joyously as she repeated “bye-bye” before she gave herself over to laughter.

Did I laugh? I did. We were laughing, weren’t we, at hypocritical Christians who demonstrated, with homicidal glee, their lack of true Christianity? The joke pointed out the conflict between how we acted and how we were supposed to act. “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they should be,” says William Hazlitt.

The joke could not possibly
really
imply that killing African-American converts to keep the church segregated was a good idea, could it? There wasn’t enough wit in the joke to disguise its ugliness, if that’s what it meant. Anyway, didn’t our suburban church in Montgomery, like almost all Southern Baptist churches, prohibit, by a vote of the congregation, blacks from joining? Even today, the old lament of that time remains true: Eleven to noon on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the American week.

As a young teenager, in the last years of such earnest innocence, I wondered why African-Americans would care to worship in a church that purposely excluded them.
How could you force your way into fellowship?
I asked myself, though I knew my church was wrong, cowardly, and un-Christian to turn anyone away. I was confused, but my mother was adamant. She herself would rather die, she said, than join a church that didn’t want her, and she didn’t understand why the coloreds, unless they were just troublemakers, didn’t feel the same way. They had their own churches and they should go where they were wanted. Her anger came through in the exuberance with which she told the joke. She seemed to identify just a bit too much with the homicidal preacher, and she took a bit too much delight in “the colored man” getting his comeuppance for his uppity desire to join a church that didn’t want him. I was right to understand the joke as a joke about entrenched and murderous racists, but, because I loved her and didn’t want to think badly of her, I didn’t see that she also identified with racists like her brother.
I was too young to see how someone could in good faith believe two contradictory things at the same time, especially since I knew Mom had often sat in military chapels with black worshippers and, when we were overseas, she and my father had sent me to a Sunday school class taught by a black man.

Before we moved back to the States, to Montgomery, my father was stationed at a NATO base outside Paris, and my Sunday school class at the base chapel was taught by a handsome young black NCO whom I’ll call William. When William talked, softly but intently, about Jesus and the Bible, I felt as though I were in the presence of an apostle. The small storeroom where we met behind the chapel became a direct extension of Galilee. We were walking with Jesus. William possessed an otherworldly charisma, in both the theological and the popular meanings of the word, and when he taught the class his faith and passion enlarged him. My troubled questions—I was fourteen then—about evil, doubt, God’s will, and God’s essence never irked him as they did my father and most other adults who, when boxed into a theological corner, said with a rhetorical shrug, “Some things we just have to take on faith,” an aggravating and complacent evasion. They were uncomfortable—afraid or unable to venture into the dark emotional and spiritual places where logic broke down. Those were the places I spent much of my time, and William, leaning over the table, eyes locked on mine, intent but not so intent as to make me turn away, was at ease in those intellectual dead ends.

Even when William had to resort to the take-it-on-faith line, which is an almost inevitable redoubt in theology, he was articulate and thoughtful about it. Though he didn’t, as far as I remember, ever let a ray of doubt escape his orbit, he was the most (and I’m tempted to say the only) thoughtful person I’d ever met in Sunday school. The teachers were often eccentric about what aspects of the faith they emphasized. When I was eight, a honey-blond college
girl told my Vacation Bible School class, with blissful longing, how much she looked forward to dying.

“Really, you want to die?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine it. From as early as I can remember I’ve been terrified of death. Yes, she assured us third graders, she wanted very much to die. She couldn’t wait to free herself of this world of strife and go to heaven, where she would be at peace in the love of God. From the overemphatic way she said “love,” I wondered if she had just broken up with her boyfriend. But her longing for death, which brought tears to her eyes, was clearly real.

Seeing she had disturbed me, she later came down and bent over me while I was studying a picture on the wall of Jesus knocking on a heavy wooden door (“Behold, I stand at the door and knock”). Her hair swung against my face. She let it lie against my cheek for an uncomfortably long time, and inside the joy she was trying to radiate, I felt the unhappiness behind her proclaimed bliss. Even at eight, I thought, pleased with my own callousness, that if she were so eager to die she could, with minimal effort, fulfill her own wish. A steak knife or plastic dry-cleaning bag would do the trick. I was a boy. I knew these things.

•  •  •

In the hall outside the church classroom in Paris or talking to my parents in the aisle after Sunday school and before services began, William was oddly diminished, transformed into simply a trim, polite man in a blue blazer, and I was startled to notice he was shorter than my father. In our small classroom, freed from the presence of men who outranked him, he was imposing and magnetic while being enormously calm. I have never before or since desired so much to sit in someone’s presence and learn from him. I would have liked to be him.

I loved William’s deep pastoral interest in Gloria, the one other regular student in his class, and the callow white officer’s son I knew
myself to be. My father liked everything about the arrangement: my interest in religion, the sergeant’s persuasive faith, and my studying with a black man. My mother didn’t seem to care one way or the other, though I sensed she was slightly apprehensive about my becoming too swept up in religion. I’d never had such sustained serious attention from an adult as I had from William, though I wondered how much we were Gloria and Andrew to him and how much we were indistinct souls, impersonal obligations, he was leading to the narrow path and the strait gate.

When I told my father that William had mentioned he was planning to leave the air force and go into the ministry in the States, Dad said, almost blandly, “That’s not going to be easy for him.”

“How come?”

“His wife is French and they have a baby,” Dad said. I’d known William lived “on the economy”—which meant off base, outside of military housing. Few people chose to do that because French real estate was expensive and complex to negotiate. By saying
French
, Dad expected me to hear
white
, which I did, and to understand that William’s interracial marriage and mixed-race child would present difficulties in the States in the mid-sixties. I did understand, but I did not feel sorry for William. He was too strong in the Lord to warrant my concern, much less my pity. I never saw William’s wife, though I looked for her, glancing over his shoulder as he came down the church aisle, trying to see if she was walking behind him. When he sat, I kept darting looks in his direction to see if she had come late and slipped into the pew beside him. He was always alone. I was curious about William’s personal life, especially about his wife because I’d never seen a white woman with a black man. But I was also dying to see a French evangelical. Didn’t William’s wife have to be an evangelical too? A French evangelical fundamentalist—it was a concept so exotic I had trouble grasping it. I still do.

My un-nuanced admiration for William acquired nuance with a jolt the Sunday he brought his two-year-old daughter to class. Sarah was the first mixed race child I’d ever seen, so I’m sure I studied her with more open curiosity than was polite. She had much lighter skin than her father, his face was longer, and her brownish hair curled loosely around her head. A few minutes into class, Sarah began to squirm in her father’s lap, bored and restless as William expounded biblical texts just above her head. A sharp jerk settled her for a moment, and then another jerk settled her again briefly before she started to sniffle and then cry. The sergeant, who had always been vastly patient with Gloria and me, held the child up, legs dangling in the air, glared at her, shook her, and snarled, “
Ça va, Sarah! Ça va
?”

“
Ça va, Sarah! Ça va
?” he repeated into the girl’s face, and waited with savage expectancy as if the stunned child could answer. The ferocity of his voice rocked me back in my folding chair. Was William exasperated that taking care of the girl had impinged on the serious business of soul-saving? Was he simply a stern father, embarrassed that his daughter was disturbing our Bible study? Why so harsh? Was William annoyed because he’d wanted to present a model of black good behavior to us white kids? I couldn’t tell and I was unhappy at letting race enter my thinking at all, but I was disturbed at a personal level and disillusioned theologically to see the messenger of God’s love turn wrathful with such small provocation. I was used to this kind of transformation at home. But I believed I’d seen in William a different way for men to be men and maybe, given his patience with me, a different way for Christians to be fathers. And I’d been wrong. Or maybe only partly wrong. Anyone can lose his temper and I only saw William lose his this one memorable time. I still admired my vibrant teacher, but more guardedly, anxious now about my boyish desire to idealize people. If nothing else, the Old Testament teaches that prophets aren’t distinguished by even
temperaments and sensitive natures, not even when their preaching is being heeded.