The White Boy Shuffle

by Paul Beatty

  When the Civil War broke out, Compton enthusiastically went to enlist, knowing that he’d be turned away but hoping to serve the South in some capacity. As expected, the draft board told Compton he was unfit for combat, though his breeding, poker face, and guile could be used in other ways. The Confederacy asked him to be the chief negotiator in the top-secret trading of surplus bales of Southern cotton for the Union opium the Rebels desperately needed to treat their wounded. This job required Compton to take a train from Durham to Washington, D.C., every two weeks to meet with the penny-pinching Yankees. The catch was that Franz von couldn’t accompany his master on these missions, since a crafty nigra, even one as outwardly dutiful as Franz von, would be an unnecessary breach of security.

  Franz von spent the first two years of his war fighting separation anxiety and faithfully awaiting the 6:15 P.M. arrival of the Hootenanny Choo-Choo from Washington, D.C. Franz von was never happier than serving as his friend’s footstool into the carriage that carried them back to the Tannenberry plantation.

  Sunday March 27, 1864. The 6:15 pulled in and Marse Compton Tannenberry’s cane never made its exploratory pokes from the first-class car. Compton’s whiny yell of “Where’s my nigger?” failed to travel down the length of the platform. Franz von waited for hours, then drove the empty buggy back to the plantation. Why won’t the Tannenberrys look him in the eye when he tells them Marse Tom wasn’t on the train? Franz von returns to the station at 6:15 the next night and every night for the rest of his life, looking every passenger that gets off the train dead in the face. No one ever had the nerve to tell Franz von that his comrade and owner died when he accidentally swallowed a piece of opium he was transporting, mistaking it for one of the sugar cubes he brought back for Old Franz von and the unrequisitioned horses.

  I wish that my shameful history had stopped with pitiful Franz von, that I could say that after years of obedience my forefathers embraced the twentieth century’s waves of black pride. The seventh-graders ate quiet lunches in the school cafeteria. I told the story of Wolfgang Kaufman to the rustle of brown paper bags and the muffled crunches of mouthfuls of potato chips. Wolfgang Kaufman was my great-great-uncle who once held the highest appointed municipal position a Negro in Nashville, Tennessee, could aspire to in the 1920s, chief of the Department of Visual Segregation. With Jim Crow as his muse, he spent muggy afternoons under a splotchy painter’s cap, painting and hanging the FOR WHITES ONLY and FOR COLORED ONLY signs that hung over quasi-public places throughout Nashville. At five dollars an hour, not many Nashville blacks were doing much better, and Wolfgang took pride in his stenciled artistry. A fit of absentmindedness caused him to lose the precious contract when he was spotted exiting from the men’s room after taking a satisfying early-morning number two in the whites-only toilet. The sight of a dark black man zipping up his fly and pulling underwear from the crack of his ass was too much for any virtuous white woman, especially the one passed out in horror at his feet. Ms. O’Dwyer came to with Wolfgang hovering over her face, apologetically jabbering something about there being no toilet paper in the colored washroom. Quickly regaining her faculties and privileged sensibilities Ms. O’Dwyer slapped Wolfgang across his pleading lips and reported him to the mayor’s office. Some benevolent civic official commuted his lynching and soon after the nigger moved to Chicago and was polishing floors at WGN radio with a huge “Thank ya Lawd” smile on his face.

  One sunny Tuesday morning a tacky fat-and-skinny twosome barreled into the station to rehearse scenarios for a new radio show. Wolfgang briefly stopped squeegeeing the soundstage windows to listen to the duo, Freeman F. Gosden and Charles J. Correll, run through their stale repertoire. “Funny thing happened to me on the way to the station today.” Along with the station managers, Wolfgang groaned and covered his ears, remembering hearing their baritone voices when he was hightailing through New Orleans. They were good mimics, but their material was awful. Wolfgang decided to help the boys out. During a break in rehearsal, he popped his derby-topped head into the studio, removed the stubby cigar from his mouth, and suggested to the worried-looking Gosden and Correll that they join him for lunch. “Y’all gonna hear some real comedic genius.” Having nothing to lose, the white boys followed Wolfgang to the Chicago Circle Cab Company, where a group of cabbies on their lunch breaks sat inside the dispatch booth talking about each other’s shortcomings and women and telling hilarious, if only slightly exaggerated, stories of black life in a big city. The bashful peckerwoods sat dumbfounded on the fender of a broken-down cab. Neither man had ever contemplated the existence of a black society beyond elevator operators and occasional snapshots of well-to-do Negroes in the Sun-Times. Here were men talking in a myriad of dialects about a vivacious life which to most of America was invisible. The butt of most of the jokes was an understated college-educated cabdriver named Enos. The loudest and most rambunctious of the Negro storytellers was a plump unemployed dandy named Sandy. Wolfgang smiled as the similarities in physique and personality dawned on the struggling radio personalities. Wolfgang stood up and sang a slow rendition of “Carry Me Back to Ol’ Virginny,” and Gosden and Correll raced back to the station, their heads buzzing with ideas for a weekly show called Amos ’n’ Andy. Soulless white American radio was destined for droll hours of Fibber McGee and Molly till Wolfgang Kaufman shucked ’n’ jived to its rescue. America got a pair of stumbling jitterbugging icons; Wolfgang Kaufman got a ten-cent raise.

  Ms. Murphy’s seventh-grade history class, still in rapt attention, unanimously voted to skip watching Eyes on the Prize so they could hear the tale of Ludwig Kaufman. Son of Wolfgang, Cousin Ludwig used his father’s tenuous mop-bucket industry connections to become a manager of white acts that ripped off the Motown rhythm-and-blues hysteria. Some of his more popular acts were Gladys White and the Waitress Tips and the Stevedores, whose melodic hit, “Three Times a Longshoreman,” made a little noise on the eastern seaboard. Ludwig was proudest of his project the Four Cops, a Los Angeles-based quartet who charted with a ballad entitled “Reach Out and I’ll Be There Hittin’ You Upside the Head with a Nightstick.”

  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 aske
d me to blow reveille. Front and center, nigger.

  The racist campestral doctrine of Yeehaw, Mississippi, raised Mr. Rolf 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.

  Two

  My earliest memories bodysurf the warm comforting timeless-ness of the Santa Ana winds, whipping me in and around the palm-tree-lined streets of Santa Monica. Me and white boys Steven Pierce, Ryan Foggerty, and David Schoenfeld sharing secrets and bubble gum. Our friendship was a buoyant one based on proximity, easy-to-remember phone numbers, and the fact that Ryan always had enough money for everybody. We were friends, but didn’t see ourselves as a unit. We had no enemies, no longstanding rivalries with the feared Hermosa Beach Sandcastle Hellions or the Exclusive Brentwood Spoiled Brat Millionaire Tycoon Killers. Our conflicts limited themselves to fighting with our sisters and running from the Santa Monica Shore Patrol. My co-conspirators in beach terrorism and I suffered through countless admonishments from overzealous officers lucky enough to grab one of us in some act of mischief that was always a precursor to a lifetime of incarceration bunking with society’s undesirables. “Young man, try to imagine a future behind bars.”

  “What you in for, young buck?”

  “I garnished the potato salad of this obese family of Orange County sea cows with sand crabs.”

  “Premeditated?”

  “Hell, yeah! The entire clan beached themselves fully clothed twenty feet from the water. Tourists. Fucked up the local vibe.”


  “Hey, that’s worth a couple of years, easy. Chow’s at six o’clock.”

  After I was escorted home by the police “one too many times,” my mother made me join Cub Scout Pack #251, starting me on the socialization treadmill toward group initiation and ceremonial induction. I was kicked out after three meetings for failing to learn the pledge, but the experience stayed with me. It was as if somebody assigned a den mother to point out the significance of campy blue uniforms with buttons in every imaginable place, flags, and oaths. My salt-air world began to subdivide into a series of increasingly complicated dichotomous relationships. Thankfully, I still remember when my worldview wasn’t “us against them” or “me vs. the world” but “me and the world.”

  I was an ashy-legged black beach bum sporting a lopsided trapezoidal natural and living in a hilltop two-story townhouse on Sixth and Bay. After an exhausting morning of bodyboarding and watching seagulls hovering over the ocean expertly catching french fries, I would spend the afternoon lounging on the rosewood balcony. Sitting in a lawn chair, my spindly legs crossed at the ankles, I’d leaf through the newest Time-Life mail-order installments of the family’s coffee-table reference library. Predators of the Insect World, Air War Over Europe, Gunfighters of the Old West; I loved reading about red ant-black ant wars, dogfights at fifteen thousand feet, and any cowboy “who was so mean he once shot a man for snoring.” The baseball game would crackle and spit from the cheap white transistor radio my father gave me for my seventh birthday. The tiny tweeter damp with drool from Dodger play-by-play man Chip Parker salivating over Rusty Lanahan’s agility around the bag and how despite allegations of spousal abuse the first baseman with the All-American punim remained a shining role model for the city’s youth. If I still swore on my mother, I’d swear that between pitches I could hear the fizzing of the sun setting behind me, cooling down with a well-earned bedtime dip in the Pacific. I liked to twist the glossy Time-Life photos in the fading yellow light. When the praying mantis’s chalky lime green changed to ghostly white and a B-26 Marauder bomber’s drab army olive melted away into a muddy dark brown, it was time for dinner. The call of the irate mother could be heard over the roar of the airplanes flying off the page.