Brown: The Last Discovery of America

by Rodriguez, Richard

  As traitors do. To my unformed eye, the woman sitting on my aunt’s sofa looked just like the Clairol Lady of the magazine advertisements of the time. The Clairol Lady was married to the Hindu. That much I got. The Hindu was my Indian uncle’s nephew on his dark-scented side, snuff-after-dinner side.

  As we came home from that long, heated Christmas dinner—the enforced good behavior seemed an extenuation of the forms of the High Mass the evening previous—my mother grew impatient with my childish pesterings concerning the blond woman who perched so demurely upon my aunt’s sofa. The woman’s first name was a biblical name. Her last name was his, an Indian name. But where did she come from? My finger traced circles within my warm breath on the dark car window. My brother and sisters were asleep. What is it you want to know, Richard? They met in college. But that wasn’t what I wanted to know.

  I had impure thoughts.

  I never questioned how we were made. God made us. Or how we were related to India. We were Mexican. They were Indian. Somehow we were all brown. That thou shouldst descend to mortal clay. Mortal clay. Ashes to ashes. I was an altar boy. But I wouldn’t believe such a blond woman was natural to us.

  I had heard the term “ash blond.” Perhaps she was an ash blond. She was unnatural is what I meant. Unnatural to us. She was the opposite of divorce, but just as strange. She was the opposite of Adam. She was Eve, coming out of nowhere.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. And so I believed, that I had sinned, whenever I confessed to the unseeing voice of Father Edmund O’Neill in the dark confessional box. This was the opposite of punishment.

  Pure thoughts are few and far between. Impurities are motives, weights, considerations, temptations that digress from God. I think I’ll have hotcakes for breakfast, for example, during the Elevation of the Host. Or, I threw a rock at Billy Walker because I loved him.

  Well, who attended the ash-blond wedding? Was it accomplished with saffron robes? With incense? Did they make the blond woman dance some hootchie-kootch dance in a red veil, a diamond stuck in her navel as in a Betty Grable movie?

  A young woman from San Jose who writes to me, tells me, by way of introduction, that she is the daughter of a “New York Jew” and an “Iranian Muslim.”

  That is what I want to know. That is what I want to hear about—children who are unnatural to any parish because they belong to no precedent. Brown children are as old as America—oh, much older—to be the daughter of a father is already to be brown. To be the rib-wife of Adam was already to be brown; to be Adam summoned from dust as the magpies watched and nudged one another. But public admissions of racial impurity are fresh and wonderful to me.

  The reason I remain interested in brown history today is because, as a boy, I was embarrassed by my sexual imagination. I was looking for the world entire. I suspected dimensions I could not find—by find I mean read about, I suppose. I never expected to form a “we” beyond my family. When would the impulse come, as it came to the birds, as it came to the bride? That was why the presence of the blond woman disturbed me so. She was proof of some power in the world I could not admit I felt.

  Mixed soul, I suspect, may become, in this twenty-first century, what “mixed blood” was for the eighteenth century. A scandal against straight lines and deciduous family trees. Against patriarchs who do not sufficiently recall that Christ formed an alliance of the moment with the Samaritan woman—some spark of wit, perhaps; some amused recognition or willingness that intrigues us still. Perhaps a smile. Already, the assembly of holy men, the rabbis and priests and mullahs agree they do not like it. The brown theology of syncretism abroad in the land—cross-dressed Christmas dinners—the lotus and the holly. That apostasy should form flesh they do not like. My church’s definition of “mixed marriage,” for example, had nothing to do with blood, I knew that, but with the irreconcilability of questions and answers.

  Love conquers all. As does Saturday night at the Rose and Crown. As does the rain that falls on the just and unjust? Is the love of God brown, really, like the love of a man for a woman? Or are you just saying that? That’s what I want to know. By brown I mean biological, not some drapery or mist, but spirit stuck in flesh, pitiful, like those mastodons stuck in the La Brea tar pits, bleating for mamas who died millions of years ago. The love of God beating a path through birth canals in order to call us mama. Is it real?

  Painters sometimes refer to brown as a “dead color”—not as in Aramaic, or the bosom of Abraham, but in quietude, slowness to delight, misgiving.

  I recently asked a painter which were the brownest paintings he could think of.

  He said cubists found their preoccupation with form disallowed a bright palette; nothing more than burlapy brown. The capture of form rather than the capture of light. Form, space, but not progression. There is no time in cubism. All is present tense. The Nude cannot descend the staircase. Though she has reached the bottom, she has not yet left the top.

  A texture favored by cubists, an illusion favored by cubists, was the plane of wood. A plane of wood favored by cubists was the table. The table favored by cubists was the table upon which objects had been arranged. Ladies and gentlemen, the table made of wood: Part the curtain. Stand there. Or over there. Or here. Crawl underneath. Stand here, directly above, careful of the light. The table, the book, the matchbox, the chessboard, the cigar, the coffee, the Figaro. The rock I threw at Billy Walker. All present at once as several points of view. The illustration of a faculty humans intuit, though we do not possess it. A faculty Virginia Woolf intuited. A faculty we ascribe to ghosts or angels. Or cubists.

  Cubism, as ghosts might see us: manifest, but without motive; moving through the form of a room, but without motive. Incapable of recalling a motive for what we are engaged in—passion, chess, music, absence, descending a staircase—a series of stop-frames fanning out from a pin in the middle, which is the moment. The moment for which Emily in Our Town pleads: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?

  We cannot. We must be mistaken to live. We do notice, however, how oddly we are constructed, how oddly we are evolved. Hands. Lips. Birth canals. As are our implements. Things we pick up and put down. Gloves. Forceps. The way we must hold the guitar constructs the guitar. It stands to reason. We have only two hands. The guitar constructs music. Music constructs silence. (An Icelandic composer interviewed on the radio said silence constructs music.) Silence constructs hope or fear. Of ghosts or angels. Cubism is not for angels. For angels, as for Virginia Woolf, motive alone is manifest.

  The reason I threw a rock at Billy Walker’s stupid face was I had a crush on him.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been thirty years since my last confession. I threw a rock at Billy Walker’s beautiful face.

  How many times? At what velocity?

  The priest does not ask if I intended to mar the face. One of the things I love about the church is that motive is assumed: Because I am human. What alone interests the confessor is the form of humanity I wish to confess. Confession is constructed as we are constructed. The confessional box prefigures the American I.

  I am the sinner, irreducible. My soul is irreducible. Not my red hand.

  I looked for the impure in everything. I truly looked for a mixture of motive. The stories in the history book that interested me were stories that seemed to lead off the page.

  I lived my life in fragments. For I knew nothing was so dangerous in the world as love, my kind of love. By love, I mean my attempt to join the world. My cubist life: My advantage (my sympathy toward brown and the bifocal plane) was due to the fact that from an early age I needed to learn caution, to avert my eyes, to guard my speech, to separate myself from myself from myself. Or to reconstruct myself in some eccentric way—my pipe protruding from my ear, my ear where my nose should be—attempting to compose myself in a chair that slants like a dump shovel. My eyes looking one way, my soul another. My motive could not be integrated with my body, with act or respons
e or, indeed, approval.

  And the crucifix, too, superimposed upon my every thought, was a kind of cubism, a private perspective, a quartered plane, a window from which I observed, unobserved, and apparently without motive.

  I looked to art to reconcile me to life. But nothing in art is remotely like life. The cross is closer to life than art is.

  A man of my acquaintance, now in his seventies, tells me he needed, as a boy, to go to his small town’s library in summer, surreptitiously to slide his hand into the liverish side of Noah Webster, to divine what he knew all along he was. This, after he bent over his prep school roommate one night to kiss that sleeping boy. He hadn’t meant to. The boy woke up! What’s wrong? Frankie, what’s wrong? Nothing’s wrong. Go back to sleep.

  The way we are constructed constructs the violin. The violin constructs music. But what of the dulcimer? What of the harp? What of the device that held Bob Dylan’s harmonica? What of the French horn? What of the French kiss?

  I assure you, music comes first. Or accident. Bones. Spoons. Rubber bands. Boredom creates music. We adapt the physical world to our innate liking—but what is innate? Whatever is music. Love comes first. The first principle comes first. God’s love comes first and is not changed, cannot be diminished or turned away by the instrument. Though the symphony, of course, is an invention, a dream of resolution worked out by someone sitting alone.

  The way we are constructed constructs love? Limits love? (We die.) The making of love? No. That is a heresy. God so loved the world that the Word became incarnate, condescended to mortal clay. God became brown. True God and true man.

  Where there’s a will there’s a way. Sodomy is among the brownest of thoughts. Even practitioners find it a disagreeable subject. Theological condemnations of sodomy have scrolled into a pillar of negation rising from a small, hometown passage in Genesis wherein some redneck rowdies of Sodom—heterosexuals all, I’d be willing to bet—make obscene remarks about a couple of hunky angels they see passing through town. Nice suit.

  In an earlier America, some churches, forgetting themselves, pronounced black-and-white love sinful. Churchmen surfed the Scriptures for any phrase that might pose as an injunction against miscegenation. Most churches still unite in the opinion that homosexuality is a grave moral offense and a vanity. A priest visiting my parish preached a sermon wherein he referred to homosexuality as a “lifestyle.” By which he meant a choice. So, too, my beloved Father O’Neill (to whom I confessed as a child) said to my sister, a few months before he died, that he disapproved of “Richard’s lifestyle.”

  Homosexuality requires cubism to illustrate itself, perhaps. But homosexuality is not a lifestyle. Homosexuality is an emotion—a physiological departure from homeostasis, which roughly translates as:Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

  Do not say “I love him” before a convention of Anglican educators at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, though, as I did (when they thought they had engaged me to speak about “diversity”). Not a few Anglican educators will jump up, as they did; disinclined to consider my particular diversity. Accept the invitation to the small Baptist college or the yeshiva or the Jesuit university, talk about separate races and distinct ethnic ities and the divisions in American social life, talk about literature, talk about God. (But do not speak about love.)

  I passed many adolescent hours at the Clunie Public Library in Sacramento, looking—I couldn’t have said what I was looking for—I was looking for a brown history of America, I was looking for the precedent that made me possible. I became an amateur student of photographs, of crowds, of the swarming of history, people converging upon the moment. I became a connoisseur of American parades and train stations, drugstores, Armistice Days, state funerals, Fourths of July. Any evidence of exception. What is that lone black man doing in the Irish saloon in New York? I noted black faces at FDR’s funeral. I remember an earlier photograph from a book on California—Los Angeles in the 1920s—what looks like a Filipino or Mexican family is standing on the front steps of a small wooden church, within a congregation of African-American women and children. However hard I peered into that long-forgotten day there was no answer. What are they doing there?

  Or Francis Parkman’s Oregon Trail. In 1846, young Parkman left behind the known world to survey the Far West. On his way out, he would meet Mormons, mountain men, Indians. But it was in St. Louis—the first portal of the narrative—that my cubist eye lingered. What is it you want to know, Richard? Parkman boards a boat on the sluggish Missouri along with representatives from four corners of history:In her cabin were Santa Fé traders, gamblers, speculators, and adventurers of various descriptions, and her steerage was crowded with Oregon emigrants, “mountain men,” Negroes, and a party of Kanzas Indians, who had been on a visit to St. Louis.

  Were such encounters so mundane in this fresh landscape as to require no explanation? What were their smells and seating arrangements; what were the mutterings of uncommon voices? Several races and continents converging in the suspicious glance of eyes. Did I read such proximity as erotic? Indeed, I did. I had no other way to read. I was looking for physical inclusion in the world. I was amassing an encyclopedia of exceptionalism for my own use. What did Negroes infer from the whiny, fiddlelike intonations of mountain men? What, in God’s name, had the Kanzas Indians been doing in St. Louis? Were some naked? Were all armed? Blanketed? Beaded? Braided? Painted? Tattooed? Were the smells sordid? Tallow-lit? Shit-smeared? Tobacco-stained? Did all drink from one barrel? Was there danger in every glance? Every nonchalance? As upon the 38 Geary bus in San Francisco?

  Parkman does not say.

  Sitting beside me on the 38 Geary bus, a young man, likely seventeen, stares straight ahead, his eyes apparently concentrating upon what he is listening to, as tssch, tssch—the drum and the cymbal—bleed from the earphones of his Sony Walkman. I imagine the young man’s privacy as a sunless cave of heavy metal. The expression on his face might pass for gladness.

  The 38 Geary Municipal bus line in San Francisco (excluding buses designated “Express”) carries roughly 47,000 passengers on an average weekday. The bus runs from the old Transbay Terminal downtown, past Union Square, the Tenderloin, Japan Town, the Western Addition, the Inner Richmond, the Outer Richmond, and on out to sea. Because it is a crosstown line, one commonly overhears Vietnamese, Chinese, Spanish, Taga log, Japanese, Russian, English. The route from Mission Street to Ocean Beach, moreover, is traveled by many Homeless (an imprecise appellation); downtown for mendicancy; the beach for anonymity. The 38 is not a Missouri riverboat, but is descriptive of diversity as I know it.

  Two decades ago, I first noticed Sony Walkmans wrapped around American heads. Surely the Japanese had misconstrued the American market? Tokyo is a city that expresses a peculiarly native talent for the small space—a Japanese discretion for living upon an island and within the confines of a congested city with walls sometimes still constructed of paper. Whereas the hoisted boom box—demanding, thumping, parting the crowd, proclaiming one’s existence—on the teenager’s shoulder along Market Street, for example, seemed, at the time, more truly an expression of the American capacity for rudeness; something worth deploring.

  I will now admit the Japanese were prescient. Congestion aboard the 38 Geary turns the American toward Tokyo for civility. Headsets provide aural Nicorette for the duration; headsets provide alleviation from introspection or misanthropy. On the bus, the teenager and I sit so tightly packed our thighs touch. And yet we are transported as though separately, invisibly. I owe my solitude to Johannes Gutenberg (well, as does my seatmate; the Walkman is an extenuation of the book).

  One does not relinquish one’s identity for the duration of a ride on the 38, but one does allow one’s purpose to slip its leash, to merge with the idea of civic order, which in this case is the idea of arriving safely at one’s destination. Those who insist upon their identities, even on the 38 Geary, are cautiously regarded by other passengers as
potentially dangerous.

  But there are spires to observe and clouds, coats, briefcase interiors, flashes of privacy as potent as leitmotivs in an Edith Wharton story; eyes to avoid. There are conversations to overhear, newspapers, books to read:Since I was not bewitched in adolescence

  And brought to love,

  I will attend to the trees and their gracious silence,

  To winds that move.

  Silencing Philip Larkin, a phone tweedles in someone’s purse or pocket. And now it is Scandinavia’s turn to chart a course for this crowded 38. Finland, a nation famous for sardines and suicide and short winter days, uses more cell phones, per capita, than any other country in the world. Everyone in the flaxen-haired capital of despair is on the phone, one hears.

  And here, too, advertisements assure us of “connection,” of never missing the call, of not wasting the moment, of being alive if only because the phone rings in the forest. To watch people on their phones in a crowd is to notice how disconnected they seem; how unprepared for solitude they seem. Neurosis, yes. Novelty is the American neurosis.

  But to be forced to overhear the diary of a twit is still considered a foul. The other day in the elevator at the 450 Sutter Medical Building, a woman, oblivious of our overhearing, snarled to the mouthpiece of her cell phone that she was going to get an abortion and that was that.

  Americans do not grant privacy to cell phone users. For one thing, the cell phoner insists on maintaining an “I” in situations where Americans have largely resigned themselves to taking their places in crowds and waiting to reemerge as singular.

  I’m sure you have noticed joggers still do occupy private space in public America. Joggers can spit on the sidewalk, they run nearly nude, they pant, sweat, snort like dray horses. They are private, they are invisible. We understand they are in ristauro and in relation only to themselves, to their bodies, to “healthy activity.” We do not stare.