Brown: The Last Discovery of America

by Rodriguez, Richard

  Thus did the Dutch sailors in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby spy the sheer cleft of an approaching “fresh green breast.” That same green breast is today the jaded tip of Long Island, summer home to New Amsterdam investment bankers and other rewarded visionaries who do not resemble their portraits. And the tragic hustler’s ghost:Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning—

  We—I write in the early months of the twenty-first century—we are now persuaded by Marxist literary critics to goddamn any green light; to hack away at any green motif. Someone offstage has suffered and no good can come of it. We are a college of victims, we postmoderns; we are more disposed to notice Fitzgerald’s Dutch sailors were not alone upon the landscape (we easily pick out chameleon Indians hidden among the green tracery) than we are to wonder at the expanding, original iris: How the Indians must have marveled at those flaxen-haired Dutchmen.

  Well, most likely the Indians were too terrified to morpholo gize or eroticize on the spot. What happens next? Watch, as the Indians did watch—with darker dread and puzzlement—what cargo these pale sailors unloaded. When: From below-deck emerged Africa in chains, the sun in thrall to the moon.

  Thus, perceiving Europeans having only just arrived, the Indians already saw. Indians saw Original Sin. The dark ceiling. The stain spreading like oil spill. Rumor, too, must have spread like wildfire across the Americas—making green impossible from that moment, except as camouflage or tea.

  Forgetting for the moment the journeys of others and the lateness of the hour; considering only the founding triad of our clandestine exhibit—Indian, European, African—we see (as well as the Founding Sin) the generation of the erotic motif of America. A brown complexity—complexity of narrative and of desire—can be foretold from the moment Dutch sailors and African slaves meet within the Indian eye.

  I think I probably do. (Have brown thoughts.)

  Chapter Three

  THE PRINCE AND I

  THE SCREEN AT PALO ALTO’S VARSITY THEATER WASN’T AS wide as it should have been. There were those 180-degree screens in San Jose where, if you sat in the first row, you would appreciate that a motion picture is a series of still frames. Even at the Varsity Theater, though, when T. E. Lawrence crossed the desert, the desert rendered Lawrence’s person minuscule and his ambition gigantic. By force of will, T. E. Lawrence would claim the desert’s name for himself. “Lawrence of Arabia” was a hero’s name; an English schoolboy’s imagination of the world as a playing field. Clive of India, Kitchener of Khar toum, Lawrence of Arabia.

  Such is the potency of David Lean’s film, I cannot conceive the man without the person of Peter O’Toole—white on white on white. His hair ostensibly bleached by the sun, his skin pale as sand; robes undulant as membranes of a sea anemone; his eyes madly blue.

  The film’s most memorable sequence begins when Lawrence dons the robes of Araby. His first impulse is the schoolboy’s; he draws his pirate dagger. (The dagger becomes his looking glass.) His next impulse is to run, holding his diaphanous cape behind him to catch the wind—a delirious princess, a psalmist’s bride.

  Understand: I was a bespectacled dark-skinned English major at Stanford University when Peter O’Toole tripped gi gantically, girlishly, across the screen of the Varsity Theater. Nevertheless, this vision of the hero as transvestite deeply pleased me and I privately issued a warrant—as a queen does to a marmalade company—to Lawrence of Arabia, for finding his eccentric place in the world of men.

  Immediately I began reading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom wherein photographs revealed an author of only slightly less heroic cast than Mr. O’Toole, and much less mascara.

  Who would approve an opposite tale? It was one thing for a hipless Englishman to play the swarthy pirate. The reverse would have been impossible to praise or to admire. Much less to film. No British director would film, in Cinemascope: Rodriguez of the Reading Room!

  I was experimenting with impersonation. But why must I portray my ambition as impersonation? Not the Toffee who yearns to balance a cup and saucer on his knee, my ambition was to become conversant with American and British, mainly British, high literature—the best-known or best-said in a tongue I had determined to own.

  I was experimenting with my body, trying to copy an ease and heedless appetite I recognized in books as youth, but which my puzzling bookish mind could only emulate with dogged endurance. It was assumed, by the two or three people at Stanford who assumed anything at all about me, that I was in the library. I was not in the library. I went to the Stanford Stadium daily, to run around the track, then to run up and down the stadium steps. I was maddened by this impulse, this mimicry of my studies. I would go to the stadium two, then three times a day.

  I was studying Puritanism and that, too, interested me; not least for its prohibition of impersonation.

  At about this time, Malcolm X, an American puritan, discouraged African-American adolescents from hair straighten ers and skin lighteners.

  At about this time, ethnic studies departments were forming on some campuses. Such quorums would produce the great puritans of my age. The puritans would eventually form opinions about me, and I about them.

  Americans are in the habit of dressing the noun, “puritan,” in the pejorative—puritan gray—meaning, in the main, sexual repression. I think America’s deeper puritanical strain is evident in our fear of the stage, of all things theatrical. The wicked stage.

  In the America of my youth, there was real life and there was theater (the red-and-gold disease, as Cocteau called it). Theater was a rival to Creation, to the business of earning money and raising children and watering the lawn. Our parents warned us against “big ideas.” Big ideas were not good for us. The theater would give us big ideas that were inaccessible to us in our real lives.

  In England, Puritans were famous for their objection to the confusion of the playhouse and to its seduction: The kettle-drums and face powders and the actors lewdly strutting—boys playing women, rabble playing at kingship, rabble wearing the raiment of kings and speaking the sentences of kings, sentences no king could bear the weight of. Some historians believe that Puritans of Shakespeare’s time were scandalized less by what transpired onstage than by the prostitutes and thieves, the sordid groundlings, who frequented the plays, conspired with kings.

  “You are idle shallow things. I am not of your element,” Malvolio shrieks to the pit, to the beggars and molls in the pit, even—it must be—at the actor playing himself. Malvolio is shamed by a tricked vanity, so, so, so, but to be judged by these! Noisemakers of Cheapside alleys, barefoot urchins splashing plague from puddles. And at court, too, he is mocked. Her Majesty laughs, therefore must Malvolio’s original laugh at himself (Malvolio may have been a parody of Sir William Knollys).

  Theatrics were an offshoot of liturgy—of the Mass, of the Passion and miracle plays and the lewd plays that preceded Lent. Puritans believed men were created to stand in pure relationship to God. Puritans ordained no intermediaries—no king or bishop or actor; no mother of God, no liturgy. Puritans had their day in England, in the seventeenth century. They severed the stalk of divine right. They dissolved all sham, dumb show, liturgy. Playhouses were shuttered and locked. And England kept a sober house.

  But whirligig Time restores gaudy Aurora. After the Restoration, after the return of the anointed and the rouged, Puritans were once again persecuted in England. But before these great acts and their conclusions on the political stage of England, a small band of English Puritans set sail for America to pursue the freedom of an undivided relationship to God.

  In early November, American grammar-school children used to be handed mimeographed drawings of Pilgrims to color. Pilgrims sailed over the horizon of November in sturdy brown ships, firing upon their antecedents—witches and pumpkins mostly. They came here to worship in their own way and
to invent their isolation.

  These Pilgrims were not the Canterbury kind, hiccuping and falling off their horses, devolving forever in their Prologue. The Canterbury pilgrims would be lucky to arrive before the twelfth grade. Grammar-school Pilgrims were an appealing, sober people with straight lines for mouths. They stood in the way of popish Christmas, but were themselves soon routed by snowflakes and candy canes and yellow Bethlehem stars.

  Puritans composed a great American theme: One could become something new in America, something different from the cast-iron roles and faiths and the shackles that Europe imposed. But there was also something un-American about the Puritans’ insistence upon a deathless identity once here. For America would turn out to be a land of inventors and self-inventors, a land of imposture. The theatrical possibilities of America would extend to blackface and feathers. Insofar as America would become an anti-Puritan country, Americans would dream of becoming other than they were. Insofar as America would remain a Puritan country, theatricality would meet the accusation of “inauthenticity.” What is at stake in all this is the nature of authenticity, which is the Puritan dilemma.

  From the first, there were Puritans and there were Indians and historical accidents—several parties converging upon the clearing in the woods. The exalted metaphor for that difference, for that convergence, was a turkey dinner. Indians came to the Thanksgiving feast dressed for Halloween. They had painted their faces and stuck feathers in their hair and they wore the skins of the animals of the forest. Birdcalls heralded their appearance in the clearing. Indians were theatricals impersonating Nature, portraying their place in Nature, which was also—and the Puritans saw it—their claim on the land.

  And the Indians were royals; here was hierarchy and here was priesthood, even frippery. The costumes, the castes the Puritans had fled in England, America provided in savage parody. (As if the masques of court had pursued them in nightmare.)

  The famous opposite tale of colonial America was that of Pocahontas. Her life reads as a Puritan parody; it certainly was an Anglican parody of Puritanism. She is a princess. We first hear of her cartwheeling down Main Street without any knickers on. (Her name meant “playful one.”) As a child, Pocahontas saves the life of an Englishman. As an adult, she marries an Englishman, a different Englishman. She “goes native”; converts to her husband’s church (the church the Puritans had fled); she takes the name of Rebecca. With her husband she travels back in time to London, toward her new innocence; assumes a title there. She is presented to Queen Anne. She is painted holding a plumed fan and with a garland of feathers upon the brim of her hat, a riding hat. She gives birth to a son and dies in England of the smallpox. She is laid to rest beneath an effigy, alongside the swift-flowing Thames. Her son later sails out to Virginia, marries there. Families in Virginia still claim some aristocracy as descendants of Pocahontas.

  One hundred years after the death of Pocahontas, Joseph Addison, in a disquisition on London street signs, wonders at the Bell-Savage—a tavern sign—“which is the sign of a savage man standing by a bell. . . .” He conjectures the sign is a pictogram for the French, belle-sauvage. Might it not, as well, be a lost homage to the American princess?

  One hundred years or so after Thanksgiving, the descendants of the first colonists would dress as Indians to portray themselves as authentic to their landscape, to portray the old country as having no claim on them, therefore. This was the Boston Tea Party.

  Three hundred years after Thanksgiving a tribe of Indians at Stanford University would object to a theatrical Indian on the field of Stanford Stadium. Their puritan objection would be to the inauthenticity of the portrayal.

  My interest is in this intersection—the intersection in America of the private theatrical with the public theatrical; the intersection of the closet and the meetinghouse; the impulse to play and the fear of play.

  It is fall: I am sitting in the Stanford Stadium, in my year of T. E. Lawrence. I don’t know if you remember those Saturdays in Palo Alto. The smell of peanuts and cigarettes, wet leaves. And smoke in the air. Remember how we cheered? Inauthentic to me, I confess. I wasn’t interested in football. I wasn’t cheered by the black- and white-skinned redskins—“Stanford Indians.”

  In those days many American high schools and colleges named their athletic teams “Indians,” connoting physical prowess and, too, a renegade mythos. Tailgate parties, kegs of beer. And, too, an acrid poetic aroma of Indian summer that often accompanied the first contests of the school year.

  But this day, the U.C.L.A. Bruins are overwhelming the Stanford Indians. I am wearing a costume I have copied from an illustration in Esquire—loafers, khakis, blue shirt, a red sweater draped over my shoulders. (Miles Standish.) At about this time, my younger sister decided to go to school in Paris. My mother wept and blamed me for all the “big ideas” I’d put in my sister’s head. My sister was dry-eyed as she disappeared around the corner of the boarding gate; she never looked back. I had written a letter to her this morning. I couldn’t wait for her to see Lawrence of Arabia; another big idea.

  So many ironies played. I was, in those years, a most oblivious Indian. I did not think of myself as an Indian. Nor, incidentally, did Stanford. According to the logic and sympathy of my university, I was nothing more ancient than a “minority student,” a new thing, freshly minted, a pilgrim. A minority, not because of my Indian face or Indian blood, but because I was related to Mexico. Were I, today, a student at Stanford, university bureaucrats would enlarge my disadvantage to describe it hemispherically—I would be Hispanic or Latino, not yet an Indian.

  But there are Indians on campus during my time, oh yes. America is already far enough into the puritan revival we call “the sixties” so that some college and high school athletic teams are embarrassed to be named Indians. Angry American Indians at Stanford, impersonating angry African Americans, have already renamed themselves “Native Americans,” thus disallowing the white irony of lost Columbus. (The Indians are learning to control parody, an American task.) We are already far enough into the sixties so that protests against the use of an Indian as an athletic mascot have been heard from the university’s Native American theme house, where a tribe of undergraduates lives together, of a feather.

  The Stanford Indian logo was a cartoon, an aspect of the Age of Disney. The Stanford Indian was a sort of troll. He had a big nose, red skin, pigtails, eyebrows expressive of peeve. The Stanford Indian was roughly a counterpart to Yosemite Sam; perhaps I misremember. He wasn’t the Mohawk Gas sort of Indian, though, or the nickel sort. Certainly he was perceived as objectionable by Native American undergraduates. So the Stanford Indian had to go, and with him the bland, “flesh-colored” Pilgrim. The world would see them no more.

  There was another Indian. His name was Timm Williams. Williams, despite his name, was a “full-blooded” Yurok. Every Saturday home game during the football season, Timm Williams would take from his bedroom closet—I am making this up; I have no idea where Timm Williams kept his costume—would take from his bedroom closet a pair of buckskin britches, moccasins, a feathered war bonnet trimmed with fur. Thus attired, and somehow transported, Mr. Williams would step into the limelight of the Stanford Stadium as “Prince Lightfoot.”

  When Stanford was down, Prince Lightfoot menaced the opposing team; he put a “hex” on them. Whenever Stanford scored, a cannon fired. The Stanford band played. Blond cheerleaders—the “Stanford Dollies”—each wearing a headband with a single feather, rejoiced with a victory dance, whirled till they showed their underpants. Prince Lightfoot lifted his arms skyward in thanksgiving to the Great God Grid-iron. Shantih.

  All I know about Timm Williams’s closet comes from a press release—an obituary—from the Stanford University News Service, 3-7-88, from which I quote:Williams was 27 and working for a steamship company in San Francisco when an Indian headdress that he had made caught the eye of a Stanford friend who wanted to wear it to the ’51 Big Game.

  Williams said he wouldn’t lend
the headdress, but the friend sent word back to Stanford boosters about him, and they promptly asked him to dance at a Big Game rally in San Francisco.

  “I said I’d gladly do it, if they could get me tickets to the Big Game,” [Williams] later recalled. The rally organizers agreed, and “Prince Lightfoot” began his reign.

  Williams made his first trip to Stanford the next fall and performed at the bonfire in the sunken diamond. After his dance, a rally leader asked the crowd whether they wanted Prince Lightfoot as Stanford’s official Indian. They cheered.

  I privately derive an unsubstantiated inference or two: Timm Williams liked to dress up. He sought, through the theatrical invention of himself, to portray his true self to himself by playing the Indian publicly.

  Subordinate conjecture: His spare time was spent making a feathered headdress. Intended to wear? Or as a spiritual exercise? It was not, I’m guessing, a Yurok headdress. In the photographs, it resembles a Plains Indian headdress.

  Why did the friend send word back to Stanford boosters about him? (You gotta see this guy?)

  Why two “m”s? Theatrical aspirations?

  Why does one feel sure Timm Williams would have danced, even without tickets to the Big Game? His private impulse (making a headdress) wasn’t private at all, as it turns out, but a revelation—for those with eyes to see. As one might leave a book out for a visitor to observe. Oh that? I think it more likely Timm Williams suggested to his friend he “send word back to the Stanford boosters.”