White Girls (18 page)

Stupid Americans define their epoch and defend their privilege through one or two words. These words generally connote the sublime in order to bear the truth of what is being said. Americans distrust
knowledge if it is presented as empirical—a fear of the “European.” Since the root function of language is to control the world through describing it and most Americans are embarrassed by their will to do so, language is made palpable by being nice. Americans defend this niceness by declaring it makes language more social. Language, no matter how stupid, always leaves someone out. That is because an idea belongs first to an individual and not a public.

The word
marvelous
was popular in the nineteen thirties through the early seventies, not least because of Diana Vreeland and Delmore Schwartz, and not least because Diana Vreeland and Delmore Schwartz were connected to two powerful industries that propagated the idea of the marvelous and “genius”—the fashion industry and the university. For Schwartz, an author who delineated manners in a book—say Proust—was marvelous, or one should marvel at the author’s ability to represent manners, regardless of class, as a way of describing a moral code in either decline or ascendance. For Vreeland the thought was the same but as it was expressed on the body, its look. Since Malcolm was lauded in
Vogue
for telling people not of a color that their faces and bodies were ugly, and since Malcolm was a treasured speaker at universities where he said he and others like himself would one day blow privilege out from between their student ears, he was taken by the marvelous, just as those people in fashion and at universities were taken by Malcolm’s not tolerating their difference. They applauded and supported his “rage” because it reinforced their privilege.

As Malcolm became more famous, Mrs. Little was diminished by the loving glare of his publicity. That publicity—did it love him more than any mother could? In the
Autobiography
, he describes this love in
great detail and more fervor than he ever describes Mrs. Little:

Life, Look, Newsweek
and
Time
reported us [the Nation of Islam]. Some newspaper chains began to run not one story but a series of three, four, or five “exposures” of the Nation of Islam.
The Reader’s Digest
, with its worldwide circulation of twenty-four million copies in thirteen languages, carries an article titled “Mr. Muhammad Speaks,”...and that led off other major monthly magazines’ coverage of us.

Us against them
. The
them
to whom Malcolm refers—that was Mrs. Little. She exists not at all during this period. Malcolm visited her from “time to time” in the state mental hospital at Kalamazoo, where she was committed—by whom?—for twenty-six years. She existed there, Malcolm says, in “a pitiful state” as her son became more and more famous. What was her bed like in that institution? What did Malcolm speak of to this woman? Did other inmates call her Madame X or Mrs. Little? When he saw her face did he see his own? Did she slap him? “She didn’t recognize me at all...Her mind, when I tried to talk, to reach her, was somewhere else...She sat, staring, ‘All the people have gone.’” Gone where? Malcolm did not ask. Did he attempt to convert her? Was it too late? Had she become a Jehovah’s Witness? She could not speak. Did anyone place a sheet of paper before her? A pencil? She did not write the book we need. This book—it is already forgotten. Mrs. Little survived her son—insane, by all accounts, but she survived him. Did she read his book? Did she find herself missing? Did she consider writing her own? Presumably, writers of a color have one story—the mask of piety, Mom, and what have
you. Did Mrs. Little believe her son’s book could not be surpassed? Did she ever possess the confidence to believe she could smash that piety by writing it down? She was a mother, and therefore responsible for the life of her children, one of whom did write her life down but for himself, not her, and in scraps, and incorrectly.

The
Autobiography
has everything very stupid people embrace—the mother driven mad by her husband’s murder, the dust of patriarchy, religious conversion into the sublime—and yet it has nothing. The
Autobiography
—how can it be rewritten? This question—it must not be mistaken as a deconstructionist ploy, oh no. We mean to create an autobiography rich in emotional fiber, with a love of God and children and Mrs. Little and so forth.

As a model, the
Autobiography
can be used. Mrs. Little’s autobiography has some potential for success if we use her son’s book as a model. Think of
Manchild in the Promised Land
. That is the
Autobiography
of the streets, but without the religious conversion. If
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
were written by Mrs. Little, it is certain it would not be the same book; Louise Little would not be capable of writing nothing. She was a mother. Consider Louise Little’s story inside the model of the
Autobiography
, the book we need. In her son’s book, the beginning is written this way:

Chapter One: Nightmare

When my mother was pregnant with me, she told me later, a party of hooded Ku Klux Klan riders galloped up one night. Surrounding the house, brandishing their shotguns and rifles, they shouted for my father to come out. My mother went to the front door and opened
it. Standing where they could see her pregnant condition, she told them that she was alone with her three small children, and that my father was away...

If Louise were to speak this, how would it be written? Must one remember one’s own mother to reconstruct Louise Little’s Chapter One: Nightmare, point by point? Would Louise Little write: Can you see me from a description? Was I fat? When I opened the door to those men, did it appear to them that I ate empty food? In a fat body—did I appear self-sufficient to some, a mountain of solace to my husband and children as they took and took? Did I require nothing? Will I go mad requiring nothing still?

To construct Mrs. Little point by point—would an “honest” approach be to transplant my mother’s emotional history in her story? Speak for herself—that is what I mean Mrs. Little to do. Speaking for myself—that is what I can do. And in doing so, say: I am writing of Mrs. Little. What will this make of me? A boy who speaks—badly—for silent women—a too-familiar story? There is Mrs. Little in the British West Indies. There she is in the hot sun. There she is before she became a mother driven partially mad with love for her children. There she is as a young girl with broad feet curled in gray or yellow sand. There she is in America with feet curled in bad shoes too small for her broad feet. There she is dead, lying upon the verbal catafalques created by her son Malcolm and me. There are Mrs. Little’s sons, including me, with their experience, wearing masks of piety as they sit in their mother’s death, resembling every inch of her face, speaking loudly, hating everything, writing nothing.

WHITE NOISE

IT
’
S OUTRAGEOUS, THIS
white boy not a white boy, this nasal sounding harridan hurling words at Church and State backed by a 4/4 beat. “Fuck you Ms. Cheney, / fuck you Tipper Gore. / Fuck you with the freest speech this Divided States of Embarrassment will allow me to have,” declares the recording artist and producer Eminem in “White America,” one of the nineteen tracks on his 2002 release,
The Eminem Show
. What can be done with this trickster whose phallus is made limp by a nation whose standards of beauty—“Britney’s garbage. / What’s this bitch, retarded? / Gimme back my sixteen dollars”—are as ridiculous to him as the popular custodians of his country’s musical culture, those paragons of respectability who cast a wary eye on his mouth, his mind, his body?

There’s a certain redundancy of tone to many, if not most, of the public discussions Marshall Mathers III has engendered in his by-now seventeen-year career. On one side stand Mathers’s apologists—rock critics, academics, “wiggers” and the like—who cite the rapper as an
officer in the war against at least one political fiction: “liberty and justice for all, now and forever.” As a way of explaining his “rage,” Mathers’s supporters turn to his biography. They describe him as a lower-class id joyfully eviscerating Mom, faggots, Vicodin, and everything else he can wrap his bitter, white-trash tongue around, everything else Americans hold dear—or love to hate—but America could never hold him or anyone like him dearly: he will not be categorized. “I ain’t Back Street and Ricky Martin,” he opines on “Marshall Mathers,” one of eighteen tracks making up his 2000 release,
The Marshall Mathers LP
. “With instincts to kill N’Sync, don’t get me started.”

Mathers was born in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1973. His mother, Debbie Mathers-Briggs, described giving birth to her eldest child as a “living hell.” Certainly the mother gave birth to the son when it came to the drama of his language as well. Mrs. Mathers-Briggs—a second marriage would end in divorce, too—was barely out of her teens when she separated from Mathers’s father. Thus unencumbered, she hit the road with her young son in tow, staying first with relatives in various parts of the Midwest—North Dakota, Missouri—before making a provisional home for herself and her boy in Warren, Michigan.

Warren: a blue-collar suburb of Detroit populated by white laborers from the South who so longed for the “old country” and the old ways that they referred to their small community as “Warrentucky.” Confederate flags in the windows, beer for breakfast, and watery hominy grits ladled onto chipped enamel plates by women whose time was split between being a waitress and Mom, if there is a distinction to be made.

In any case, as Marshall was growing up, the ghosts and artifacts
of the “old country” were everywhere, especially its language, “the enduring speech of ain’ts and hain’ts and hit’s down yonder, elevated by friendly philologists to an honorable heritage from old England or Scotland,” as the Lexington, Kentucky native Elizabeth Hardwick tells us in an essay about the famous racehorse Seabiscuit. England, Scotland, or no, the “ain’ts” and “hain’ts” of Hardwick’s generation were carried over into that of Mrs. Mathers-Briggs. In her son’s head, the sounds of the hills commingled with their urban equivalent—the “Yo’s” and “What what whats” punctuating urban Negro speech, which, though speeded up, carried the same possibility for expression as “hit’s down yonder.”

Every poet begins with the word. But every epic poet begins with the word as it shapes and reflects his or her world and thus the world. At home, or homes—when Mathers was nine years old, Mrs. Mathers-Briggs and her son moved to Roseville, another “white trash” dumping ground surrounded by Detroit’s black underclass—there was a certain insistence on Mathers’s mother’s self, her “I,” and her drama queen fantasies about her physical and mental abuse as she wiped her hangover vomit off the Formica countertop in the efficiency, and her son developed his imagination.

Mrs. Mathers-Briggs’s identification with Marshall was, from the first, complete, and, as they say, “inappropriate.” This is not an uncommon phenomenon if one has given birth to a child while still a child. For women like Mrs. Mathers-Briggs, parenting doesn’t begin or end with providing food, shelter, the odd scrap of affection or worry, as you send
your child into the world. For the male child of a single mother, Mother quickly becomes synonymous with Wife, and the child is thought of as Husband. Or, at least, the kind of husband she can identify with, since he is small and defenseless and feminized by the tyranny of poverty and Daddy need, too. Just like Mommy.

But the relationship shifts. The child, the tiny husband, may grow up and speak out about the drama of his upbringing, his marriage, to this wife that was his by birth, not choice. And in language not too far, in tone at least, from Mrs. Mom’s. “Put yourself in my position,” Mathers raps on “Cleaning Out My Closet,” one of the strongest tracks on
The Eminem Show
. “Just try to envision witnessin’ / your mama poppin’ prescription pills in the kitchen, bitchin’ that / someone’s always goin’ / through her purse and shit’s missin’. / Going through public housing systems, / victim of Munchausen’s syndrome, my whole life I was made to believe I was sick when I wasn’t.”

As autobiography, this is interesting. Mathers’s “I” doesn’t declare itself until the fifth verse. By that time, we’ve seen the pills, the kitchen, the public housing system; we’ve understood the symbolism of Munchausen’s syndrome. And we’ve gleaned Mathers’s sorrow and anger over feeling practically nonexistent amidst his mother’s (at times) overwhelming demands and addictions. These narrative steps and the kind of emotional leaps and connections they allow the listener to make are typical of Mathers’s work and account for the force and universality of his poetry.

Had Mathers merely relegated himself to the small, secular world he and his mom shared, he would be yet another poet of domestic calamity talking about “viciousness in the kitchen!,” as Sylvia Plath
wrote once. To widen the scope of his work and give it a novelistic sweep that has generally been the province of folk music, not rap, Mathers had to marry something other than his mom, as it were. He had to connect the petty grievances that crowded his small kitchen at home to other, bigger grievances—namely those of whites against blacks in Detroit, Michigan, where he still lives.

During World War II, nearly thirty years before Mathers’s birth, Detroit was known as the “arsenal of democracy.” Instruments of war such as guns and jeeps were produced there at a higher rate than anywhere else in the U.S., which meant that factory manpower was always in demand. Southern blacks made their way north in search of better jobs; they assumed that by moving to cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York, they would be escaping the lash of racism. And there was the hope that in the North blacks would be able to foster and keep close what had always been threatened in the South: the black family.