by Ross, Fran
Oreo recognized the value of Jimmie C.’s cha-key-key-wah language over the years. For her, it served the same purpose as black slang. She often used it on shopkeepers who lapsed into Yiddish or Italian. It was her way of saying, “Talk about mother tongues—try to figure out this one, you mothers.” (42)
Ross’s novel can be read as a deliberate extension of the possibilities for expression, humor, self-defense, intellectual stimulation, and aesthetic pleasure in the various mother tongues or invented languages that the heroine can claim as her own, from the almost unrepresentable dialect of her African American grandmother to the code-switching “Yidlish” that is the lingua franca of several relatives on both sides of her family. In addition to the vernaculars of her own blood kin, Oreo can also claim fluency in the salty street talk of hustlers, pimps, and prostitutes, as well as the obscure erudition of cranky scholars.
Oreo’s ability to speak and communicate with a diverse cast of characters is a skill she cannot take for granted. Her grandfather is silent for much of the novel; her grandmother speaks a southern dialect alien to the northeast; her brother sings a secret invented language that resembles a cross between baby talk and the ooga-booga lingo of natives in old Tarzan movies. Oreo hears in his babbling a “radical” new language that serves as an extravagant means of self-expression and self-defense, like black slang or the arcane scat of bebop hipsters.
Ross seems to anticipate hip-hop culture’s technologies of sampling and distorting sound at the same time that she satirizes the “mainstream” culture’s marginalization and appropriation of racial and ethnic difference, when Oreo substitutes for her actor father in the Harlem studio of Slim Jackson, the mute “Mr. Soundman.” Pitching the products of “Tante Ruchel’s Kosher Kitchen,” she performs a shmaltzy shtick aimed at Jewish consumers. At the very moment that she is searching for her Jewish roots, tracing her father through the brothels and sound studios that are his accustomed haunts, Oreo replays her father’s sold-out commercialism, even as her performance in the radio commercial calls into question the whole idea of authentic ethnic identity. With the close proximity of commercial recording studio and bordello, Ross satirically notes the pimping of creativity that capitalist cultural production requires. Significantly, both establishments are located in Harlem, where Oreo’s father sells his talent in order to buy time with black prostitutes and to provide his wife with domestic help (also black women).
The satirical force of Ross’s parodic inversions relies on the reader’s awareness of historical roles in which African Americans and Jews have been cast in the making of popular culture. Oreo’s passable impersonation of a Jewish housewife inverts such popular culture scenarios as Al Jolson’s performance in The Jazz Singer as the son of a Jewish cantor who sings “jazz” in blackface in the first major Hollywood film to incorporate synchronous sound. Oreo’s mimicry also brings to mind the radio production of Amos ’n’ Andy, in which characters speaking a comical black vernacular dialect were played by white actors. The roles of Slim Jackson and Samuel Schwartz invert the more typical relations of white producers and managers of black talent before the 1960s.
Ross aims her satire at the commercialization of culture that tends to produce reductive and often degrading caricature, while it deprives many Americans of a richer, livelier linguistic heritage. Although Oreo has an appreciation of the vernacular, she is also aware of the power of the stereotype, which she manipulates to her own tactical advantage. The closer Oreo comes to unraveling the clues that will enable her to find her father and discover “the secret of her birth,” the more she relies on her talent for improvisation and impersonation. She moves from her conventionally essentialist performance of Jewishness as the niece of “Tante Ruchel” to an equally stereotypical performance of blackness as a spy in her father’s house. At one point she impersonates a domestic day-worker in order to glean insider information about the Schwartz family, pumping their black housekeeper for juicy details as they gossip together like yentas. Later, impersonating the family’s trusted factotum and confronted with an officious medical professional, Oreo’s acting combines African American vernacular with body language borrowed from Hollywood’s stereotypical black servants, in a calculated ploy to dig deeper into the Schwartz family’s business and discover the secret withheld by her father.
He slit open the envelope, read the letter, and subjected Oreo to untoward scrutiny. She tried to look dull-normal when he said what she had expected someone to say.
“I’ll have to verify this with Dr. Resnick.”
Oreo replaced dull-normal with sullen-hurt, the look of the congenitally insulted. “He jus’ gib me de ’scription. Say fill it.” She had decided to use [the housekeeper’s] economical sentence structure and [her grandmother] Louise’s down-home accent. (203)
Oreo’s cynical manipulation of stereotypes underscores Ross’s increasingly biting satire as the heroine enters the Schwartz household, not as a long-lost daughter, but as a trickster in the guise of a servant. At one point a friend of her father’s even mistakes her for one of Samuel’s “harlots of Harlem” (182-184). The extent to which identity, kinship, and heritage are constructed around race, culture, and economics may be the ultimate lesson of Oreo’s quest, as Ross questions the “natural” bond presumed to exist between parent and child. Finally, in the sections titled “The story of Helen and Samuel, Oreo’s version” and “Clues, shmues,” Oreo comes to her own conclusions about her origins, ultimately relying on her powers of interpretation to piece together and understand her family’s history of strained relationships. Oreo imagines this story as a film treatment for a Hollywood biopic, a scenario complete with a requisite “Montage of Variety headlines of the (‘O’s Pop Top Flop’ genre” (205). In the process, Ross describes her method of composing this novel. The myth of Theseus (also a search for paternal origin) generates a list of episodes, characters, and clues, which the novelist strings together in the labyrinthine twists and turns of her own parodic plot.
Is Oreo a black text? Ross was surely aware that, while Norman Mailer’s jazz-influenced “White Negro” saw himself as the essence of hip sensibility, secular “black Jews” or any other African Americans who identify themselves intellectually as “people of the book” might be branded as oreos, when literary culture is associated with a “white” heritage. One of the novel’s comic epigraphs quotes the most commonly repeated definition of “oreo”: “Someone who,” like the cookie, “is black on the outside and white on the inside.” However, her protagonist is not a culturally whitewashed, deracinated, or “wannabe white” character who has assimilated European-American cultural styles in order to escape the supposed inferiority of African American culture, or to make herself more acceptable to the mainstream. Oreo claims no cookie-cutter identity; rather, she is a character whose cultural hybridity has given her an intimate view of two of the diverse subcultures that have made significant contributions to the production of American culture. Along with her biracial and bicultural identity, Oreo maintains an abiding interest in the mechanics of identity construction and cultural reproduction. Through Oreo’s adventures, Ross depicts a complex negotiation of identity within a racial, ethnic, sociocultural, and linguistic heterogeneity that extends beyond black and white. While Oreo is visually identifiable and self-identified as African American, the content of her identity is formed dynamically, improvisationally, and contingently as she interacts with others, choosing from a diverse menu of sometimes competing possibilities and influences that vary from one encounter to another.
In Oreo’s interactions with members of both sides of her family, as well as with neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and strangers, Ross’s novel suggests that acculturation is not a one-way street, but is more like a subway system with graffiti-tagged cars that travel uptown as well as downtown, or even more like an interconnected network of multi-lane freeways. Particularly in racially diverse and integrated settings, immigrants of various races and national origins, on their wa
y to becoming American, may emulate the cultural styles of black Americans, since African Americans, though a minority, are as much the founders of American culture as Anglo Americans. Anglos themselves are a minority of white Americans. Oreo’s biracial and bicultural heritage is not so exceptional when one considers that most native-born Americans, regardless of skin color, are products of racial hybridity, just as American culture and language are products of cultural and linguistic hybridity. The significant contribution of black Americans to the national culture includes the problem and challenge that linguistic and cultural difference offer to American democracy, and to the creative production of African-American writers.
Entering the maze of Ross’s imaginatively constructed novel, the reader is reminded that a labyrinth is “an intricate structure of interconnecting passages,” much like the text of Oreo; and also that “labyrinth” is the name given to the internal architecture of the ear, the destination of the spoken word. In this unfortunately overlooked work, Fran Ross lends the reader a remarkable eye for the baffling absurdity of everyday life and a receptive ear for the noisy diversity of the American idiom. Oreo is a text that assumes the verbal intelligence, the linguistic and cultural competence of readers who appreciate the rich diversity that contributes to the complexity of their own identities.
HARRYETTE MULLEN
Biographical information was gathered from Gerald Richard Ross, Gerald Ross, III, Ann Grifalconi, and the Temple University Alumni Association. I gratefully acknowledge all these sources, and I especially appreciate the cooperation of the Ross family, who generously shared their memories and personal documents with me.
Works Cited
Brown, Rita Mae. Rubyfruit Jungle. New York: Bantam Books, 1973.
Ingram, Billy. “The Richard Pryor Show.” http//www.tvparty.com/pryor.html.
Jong, Erica. Fear of Flying. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. London: Secker and Warburg, 1994 (1922).
Kelley, William Melvin. Dunsfords Travels Everywheres. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.
Mailer, Norman. The White Negro. San Francisco: City Lights Press, 1957.
Mullen, Harryette. “One Smart, Tough Cookie: The Lit, Grit, and Motherwit of Fran Ross’s Oreo’ (forthcoming article).
Ross, Fran. “Richard Pryor, Richard Pryor.” Essence. April 1979: 70ff.
Wilson, Harriet. Our Nig. New York: Random House, 1983.
Copyright © 1974 by Frances D. Ross
Originally published in 1974 by Greyfalcon House, Inc.
Reprinted in 2015 by New Directions, by arrangement with Ann Grifalconi, Greyfalcon House
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Danzy Senna
Afterword copyright © 2000 by Harryette Mullen
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
First published as a New Directions Paperbook in 2015
Manufactured in the United States of America
Designed by F. D. R.
eISBN 978-0-8112-2323-2
New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin
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