'Membering

by Clarke, Austin;

  To taste this discomfiture caused by social integration, I offer my feelings of unease the first time I entered the Yale Faculty Club, in the company of Robert Penn Warren, who invited me to lunch, irrigated with Wild Turkey Bourbon “and branch water.” Yale had recently opened its doors to a significant number of black students; and the history of Yale as we all knew, the names of colleges reflecting the names of Southern segregationists, like Calhoun College, of which I was a Fellow, and the presence of black men and black women, most of whom were in manual jobs, kitchen help, janitors, workers in the Yale post office, all these reminders of a segregationist past were not too distant ’memberings to make this sudden social and academic entry into the ivied halls of Yale, the same as going to a Baptist church in New Haven, for the same time. We have already heard of the racist taunts and harassment of black players on the Boston team, by Boston fans.

  Joyce Carol Oates says that “Jack London, at that time the most celebrated of American novelists and an ostensibly passionate socialist, covered the fight for the New York Herald in the most race-baiting terms … transforming a sporting event into a ‘one-sided racial drubbing that cried out for revenge.’”

  Jack London had this to say: “It had not been a boxing match but an ‘Armenian massacre’ … a ‘hopeless slaughter’ in which a playful giant Ethiopian had toyed with Burns as if he’d been a naughty child. It had matched thunderbolt blows against butterfly flutterings.”

  Jack London “was disturbed not so much by the new champion’s victory, as by the evident glee with which he had imposed his will upon the hapless white man.… A golden smile tells the story, and that golden smile was Johnson’s.”

  Unforgivable Blackness is a title pregnant with symbol, metaphor, and the truth of racial sentiment. And what was unforgivable in the title, is, according to Joyce Carol Oates, “in Johnson’s boxing wasn’t simply that he so decisively beat his white opponents but that he publicly humiliated them, demonstrating his smiling, seemingly cordial contempt. Like Ali, at least more astonishing than Ali, since he had no predecessors, Johnson transformed formerly capable, formidable opponents into stumbling yokels.”

  Joyce Carol Oates sees the “trickster” in Jack Johnson, as she saw the “trickster” in Ali, both of whom “believed in allowing their opponents to wear themselves out throwing useless punches.”

  “To step into the ring with a Trickster is to risk not only your fight but your dignity.”

  So, my wanting the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods to always win might be regarded not really as vindictiveness, but merely a non-violent respectable expression of a disposition crystallized over many years of racial disaffection in other functions of a system that has nothing to do with tennis and golf. It is the “historicity.” So, the vindictiveness that might be perceived in the desire for the Williams sisters and Tiger Woods to win each time they compete against white competitors, is merely the respectable expression of a state of mind of “getting even” that has crystallized over years of racial disaffection.

  Underlying this expression of racial solidarity, of this wish, rests the unspeakable and unrealistic hope that Tiger’s victory on the links could be transferred to a larger victory of black success in the wider society, in the wider world of business, government, and science. Success not only at golf, and at tennis, but success in everyday endeavours: in the workplace; on public transportation; at university; and during all aspects of social intercourse. This attitude relates to a wish, a simple wish to be a man amongst men. And this wish becomes an obsession because of the nature of the society in which we live.

  Back in Barbados, it was only the expertise, the professional brilliance of the sportsman that prompted our admiration and adoring. He was a brilliant batsman. Whether he was white or black; whether he played for the team we cheered for, our home team; or for a visiting team from Trinidad, or England, we applauded his brilliance. And it is an aspect of the game of cricket, played first by the English, our colonizers, and later learned by us; and at which we superseded our former masters and instructors. It is the natural characteristic of playing the game of cricket, that you are bound, “as a gentleman,” to applaud the ability of your opponent. And you never ever ridicule the shortcomings of your opponent.

  “Well played, old chap!” you say, in as civilized and sincere a manner, albeit a borrowed sophistication.

  The English had taught you manners: not to imitate the vulgar shouts and screams and fights of persons who watch hockey, or baseball, basket-

  ball, or football. You were taught to applaud in a proper English — ah-hem! — understated civilized manner. “Old chap” had just dispatched your best fast bowler through the covers for another boundary, four runs — similar to a grand slam in baseball — and the game is in great danger of being lost by your home team; and still you applaud, because a good shot is a good shot, and this after all, is cricket, a word that conveys special irony and symbol and declared standards.

  With Tiger Woods, however, you watch with clenched fist, or with your hand tight round the bottle of beer, certainly in clenched emotion and anxiety, silent teeth covering your nervousness, writhing with each extension of his arms, feeling and living through this young black man’s concentration, vicariously, at his tension as he addresses the small, white ball, not much larger than a freshly laid egg from a Leghorn hen. And you hope and pray that every other golfer would make a bogey and open the door for Tiger Woods. Because he is black. And you never applaud this white player, and imitate the enthusiasm of the commentator who says, “Now, that’s a very good shot!” when this opponent sinks a birdie. Only Tiger Woods is supposed to make that good shot.

  In the same way, only Venus Williams, or her sister, Serena — when they are not playing against each other — is deserving of this racial “hero worship” in the serving of aces, serving with the speed of lightning, keeping the opponent at six-love. And every ball, whether it is “in” or “out” — in spite of the machine that checks its accuracy — must be called “fair,” otherwise you accuse the umpire of being biased — well, at least, a little racist.

  Not that this allegiance to the Williams sisters and to Tiger Woods, is based upon dishonesty, so much as it represents our acknowledgement of the change in the fortunes of black people, their emerging more frequent and greater presence in occupations and avocations, on national television, and the sight of one of them beating a white opponent, who might not personally have regarded the particular sport, tennis or golf, as their natural-racial province, but who, whether he knows it or merely accepts it as privilege, still does stand for the former attitude of black people playing tennis and golf. So, that by extension, when the black players defeat the white player in a game that distributes rewards inappropriately according to talent, and disproportionately according to disadvantage, this enthusiastic and natural-racial applause is therefore explained.

  Such a win is a catharsis of the “historicity” that cannot be vented and is not experienced in the world of everyday social intercourse and interaction of white and black Canadians.

  But why this almost absolutist obsession on the part of the black person watching sports on television to desire and hope for total black victory, at every competition, against the white opponent? Or, in other words, a victory over the white society? The answer is simple: it is because the white society, a society such as Canada’s is perceived to be by most black people, reflects a system that does not reward professional sports ability, impartially and fairly. “All I want,” the dislocated black man says, “is to be a man among other men.”

  The symbolism that lies in this kind of victory, therefore, is the thing, is the point. For a game of sport represents a basic cultural microcosm of the way the entire society is structured. This slice of Sunday afternoon leisure becomes, in its symbolism, much more than “making sport,” or “watching sports.” It takes on an importance similar to panem et circenses in the time of the Romans, when games were institutional and were made to
represent an institutional, deliberate echo of the cultural and ethnic structure of Roman society, and sports became a symbol of Roman cruelty, and of its bravery; and a reflection of Roman obsession with valour and cruelty.

  When the slave in that Roman society entered the garlanded and heralded arena, on a Sunday afternoon, and managed somehow to defeat the best fighter that Roman aristocratic society could throw against him; when that slave killed the mightiest Roman centurion, one of those giants chosen for his cruelty and his ability to inflict deadly wounds; when that slave managed to outfox the most ferocious lion let loose against him in the arena, the blow that dealt death to the centurion or to the lion, was a blow intended to be landed against the entire Roman state, a blow for freedom, if you will. And the blow executed by the single, frightened slave in the vast arena, that blow was delivered in the behalf of all the other slaves waiting their turn to be decapitated or devoured for the entertainment of the dignitaries in the arena.

  And so it is, with black people in Canada, sitting down on a Sunday afternoon, watching Tiger Woods play golf, and the Williams sisters play tennis, in a golf course, in a court, that is similar in its meaning, to the Roman arena. Performance is expected of them. Performance and the expectation of blood and violence.

  Now, what are the reasons for this way of watching sports, through eyes that see race and colour first, and athletic prowess, secondly? I can find only one convincing explanation for this “loyalty of negritude.” And it comes from Frantz Fanon.

  “As long as the black man is among his own,” Fanon writes, “he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others.” This sentiment was written in 1952 in the French edition of Black Skin, White Masks, and published in the English edition in 1967; and it applies today to the spectator in Barbados, or in Toronto, watching a cricket game in which the players are both black and white — but who are all Barbadians, or Trinidadians, or Jamaicans.

  Fanon is talking about the self-assurance that racial homogeneity provides. This black Barbadian spectator can therefore cheer for any member of the two opposing teams without taking a racial stance, as I would do were I watching Tiger Woods; and this absence of the “loyalty of negritude” is the case, even although one team, the home team, might be, in fact, his team. No assault to his “crushing objecthood,” his being seen by the other as an “object” and not a Barbadian, is possible. Certainly, no attention given to him by the other spectators is able to detract from his “personhood,” so long as he is “among his own.”

  In the case of the black spectator watching Venus Williams, or Tiger Woods, at a bar, in the presence of white fans, the black man’s real feelings of racial identification with Williams and Woods remain stifled, held obsessively within his wishes, and are never voiced.

  Fanon says that, “The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other,” that is to say, through the white man. It is therefore reasonable for the black spectator watching tennis or golf to ward off this assault of inferiority through the other, by leaving his seat and inhabiting the body, the political psyche, and spirit of the black player, and living, by inhabiting, more than vicariously, inside the body of that black player, and becoming that player, for a period longer even than the duration of the match.

  The black sports fan relates to the play and to the outcome, replaying it in his mind to savour its brilliant shots, and drawing a lesson from them — even to teach his children the meaning of aces and birdies — and to experience and exult in his own personal vindication of the “inferiority that comes into being through the other.” And he does this not only for the sake of historical reference, but as a catharsis, a purge from his system of the sense of “inferiority” imposed upon him by the attitude of the white man. This history of tennis and of golf gouge out in the mind of the black spectator the relationship he has, and will have, with the white man. “For not only must the black man,” whether he is spectator or as citizen, Fanon says, “be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.”

  In spite of the criticism that might be levelled against Fanon’s proposition, he maintains his position on the ground that “the black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”

  This obsessive “colourization” or “loyalty of negritude” that comes into play when a black spectator is watching blacks compete against white athletes, particularly in tennis and golf, two bastions of racial segregation presumed years ago to be sacrosanct, is “based upon the black spectator’s knowledge of legends, stories, and history that defines him; and above all, historicity,” Fanon adds. It is the “historicity” in the act of viewing that cleanses it of any propensity to violence; or even to oral vindictiveness, even in spite of the violence that prevails in the other stands.

  Venus Williams and Serena Williams, like Tiger Woods, become heroes, models of excellence that transcend the games of tennis and golf, and they become instead role models. The lamentable sadness might very well be that they themselves do not know, or care, if they are to be role models. And to whom? Blacks, only? But this is something much bigger than their individual achievement. We shall be reasonable and leave them to the playing of tennis: and we shall ascribe the status of role model as we watch their continued brilliance.

  In the case of another kind of black hero, the gang leader, hero worship tends to take on a more short-lived course; and tends also to be restricted to a younger age group. But this kind of hero worship is neither so pervasive throughout the black community, nor is it sanctioned as adulation like that given to sports heroes. Nevertheless, the member of a gang would himself be impressed by the excellence of the Williams sisters and of Tiger Woods; and he would identify with them. Venus and Serena and Tiger would be held to his chest puffed in pride, because the three of them “fucked up the motherfuckin’ system, Jack!”

  We know then, that with the help of Frantz Fanon’s examination, written in 1967 at the height of segregation and lynching, which also corresponded with the greatest successes in the civil rights movement, that the fact of blackness and the “historicity” of the Negro and his recognition of this way of seeing sports in a place like Canada will persist because “spectators in this context have discovered their blackness, their ethnic characteristics, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all, ‘Sho’ good eatin’.”

  And if we really want to know how serious a matter this is, put the very expensive Adidas shoe on the other foot, and walk into a locker room with Venus, or Serena, or Tiger Woods, the first time, and observe — not even like a fly on the wall — but observe the reception with which the three of them are welcomed …

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  My life, remembering it now, with the small victories and gigantic surrenderings, was marked by the good fortune that winked at me, on Fridays. On Friday afternoons around twelve-thirty. There are certain times of the day that I remember, and make a point of remembering; and all of them coincide with the arrival of the postman at my door on Brunswick Avenue, bearing tidings of no joy. Notices of businesses intent on suing me; reminders that the Hydro was not paid, that the Bell Telephone Company, the most heartless so-called public company — or a public company providing service to the public — serving the needs of Torontonians, but which, certainly in the black community, had an atrocious image of racism and oppression, and a profound absence of understanding. Your service will be terminated and the arrears must be paid in full, in cash or by certified cheque, “within five days from the date of this letter” and you wondered if the Bell knew that, as immigrants in Toronto in the 1950s, when loneliness, unemployment, racism in housing, and the cold months of October, November, December, January, February, March, and April, the immigrant cannot, because of the factors mentioned above, have the kind of life of poor happiness and joy he had back in Barbados or Trinidad or the Bahamas, compared with the more materi
alistic life he now has in Toronto, a life of more money, of better steaks and lamb chops, and a communalism which he lives in here, a way of life that is different from the colonialism he knew back home; so long as he had the ten dollars that the millionaire pays for a choice cut of steak; and the Bell does not understand that in his loneliness bordering upon mental breakdown, that he has to reinvent his society back home right here in the seven months of cold and desolation of the spirit, and bring his family to meet him in the cold apartment, or flat, or room, or basement suite. The Bell did the right business thing, but crucified the immigrant by doing the insensitive thing — cutting him off from his roots. For Toronto was inhospitable.