by Paul Beatty
It figures a sell-out Kaufman helped jump-start the American Revolution.
Liver-lipped Euripides Kaufman, pint full, whistle and lips wet, deftly redirected the scorn of his colonial rabble-rousing shipmates from him onto a lone adolescent redcoat sentinel stationed in front of the House of Commons just outside the tavern. “Hey, blokes. Isn’t that lobster-backed scoundrel the Brit scalawag who cheated the barber Jack Milton out of the coinage for a fair-priced trimming ’n’ shave yesterday past?” With Euripides and Crispus leading the way, the drunken mob scampered outside for a closer look. Mugs in hand, they surrounded the nervous guard and peppered him with insults. Euripides stood about a yard away from the redcoat, looked him up and down, turned to his mates, and said, “Verily, that’s the tea-and-crumpet-eating-scofflaw. Crispus will support me claim, won’t you, big boy?”
Crispus’s eyes, like my father’s, like Euripides’s, were eager to please, but his mouth was empty of revolutionary dozens. Pining for white America’s affection, Crispus Attucks looked toward my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandad for guidance. Then he parroted Euripides Kaufman’s caustic sentiments into the face of the lone attaché of England’s New World venture capitalism. “Aye, a Cockney chimpanzee with his sparkling flushed pink arse a bit distant from the rest of the pack. Where’s your scone-colored missus? Snuggling up to King George, rubbing his pasty paunch and counting our taxes? Squawk! Crispus Attucks wants a cracker! Squawk!”
How could two nominally free niggers be more libertine? Inciting the colony’s whine for independence, black booster engines to the forthcoming rocket’s red glare. At some point during the famous imbroglio, Euripides, emboldened and bloated with beer, took out his penis and produced a pool of piss in front of the brigade of British reinforcements. Sensing that the armed platoon had reached its saturation point, he shouted, “Tax this!” and smartly marched to the rear of the now uproarious crowd. Leaving an inky, drunken Crispus Attucks fronting the overwhelmingly white mob, blathering unintelligible insults to the throne, threatening the entire British empire with his wooden nigger-beater. Then the now famous volley of shoots and thud of bodies flopping onto the dusty cobblestones.
American history found Crispus Attucks dead on a Boston street, but has yet to find Euripides Kaufman’s contribution. At the subsequent trial a witness for the prosecution recounted that he heard the soldier who deposited the ball of lead in Crispus’s heart regretfully say, “Damn, I shot the wrong bloody nigger.” Good thing too, because had that British soldier shot the right nigger, my seventh-grade class at Manischewitz Junior High would never have gotten to laugh at the ridiculous sons and daughters of the confederacy’s servant class. All fathered by my great-to-the-seventh-power granddad Euripides Kaufman.
It was in Ms. Murphy’s class that for the first time anyone outside my immediate family heard the tales of the groveling Kaufman male birthright. During Black History Month, to put a class of rootless urchins in touch with our disparate niggerhoods, Ms. Murphy assigned us to make family trees. Although most kids could only go back as far as their grandparents, it was with unabashed pride that we gave oral encapsulations of our caricature American ancestries. No one knew enough to be embarrassed at not knowing our own histories, much less those of any of the posterboard Negro heroes on the walls.
I sat midway up the first row of seats in from the door, bored with kids holding up their family trees and giving the same speech: “Ummmmm, the boys are the circles and the girls have the triangle heads. This is me. My six sisters. My brother, he dead. My other brother, he dead too. My mom. My dad. And here go my grandparents. My grandfather was in Vietnam and he crazy. Any questions? Where was my mother born? She was born in Arkansas and she met my father on the Greyhound bus. They fell in love in San Antonio and he touched her in the restrooms in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Then I came. Fuck you, Denise, I wasn’t born in no nickel pay toilet.”
Finally Ms. Murphy called my name. I tucked my family tree under my arm and made my way to the front of the classroom, slapping my boy Jimmy Lopez upside his noggin for good measure. Lifting one hand high above my head, I unfurled my gigantic family tree. It rolled well past my knees and the class ooohed the generations of crinkled stick nigger couples holding stick hands.
I started at the top, with Euripides Kaufman, and went from there. With my mother’s hand in my back, her words pouring from my mouth, I stiffly yapped on like a skinny ventriloquist’s dummy. I told the class how the Kaufmans migrated south when Swen Kaufman, Euripides’s well-traveled grandson, left Boston, unintentionally becoming the only person ever to run away into slavery. Being persona non anglo-saxon, Swen was unable to fulfill his uppity dreams of becoming a serious dancer. He was unwelcome in serious dance circles, and the local variety shows couldn’t use his “Frenchified royal court body syncopations” in their coony-coony minstrel productions. “Take the crown off your head, jigaboo. Show some teeth,” they said. Swen would stoop and bow under any other circumstances, but when it came to dance he refused to compromise. So on a windy night he packed his ballet slippers and stowed away on a merchant ship bound for the Cotton Belt.
Debarking in coastal North Carolina, Swen set out on a sojourn, seeking artistic freedom. He traipsed the tobacco roads, using his New England blue-blood diction to put off the curiosities of those concerned with his freeman status. When he ran across lynch mobs, hound dogs, and defenseless parasol-toting Southern belles, he’d simultaneously gaze at their feet and hold his nose just high enough to suggest a hint of breeding. Answering their inquiries, Swen rolled his r’s in polite deference.
“You ain’t from ’round here, is you, bwoy?”
“No sir. Do the leotards give me away, sir?”
“Mind if we ask youin a few questions?”
“Why no, I fully understand your rrrreasons for rrrrrousting me under suspicion of my being a rrrrrunaway Negrrrrrro. Please rrrrrrresume your interrogation forrrthwith.”
“You ain’t Scottish, iz ya, bwoy?”
After three days on the road, Swen found himself on the outskirts of a small farming town called Mercy, North Carolina. There he came upon the fields of the Tannenberry plantation, where some slave hands were turning up rows of tobacco. The rise-and-fall rhythm of the hoes and pickaxes and the austere urgency of the work songs gave him an idea for a “groundbreaking” dance opera. A renegade piece that intertwined the stoic movement of forced labor with the casual assuredness of the aristocratic lyric. Entranced with the possibilities, Swen impetuously hopped the wooden fence that separated the slave from the free. Picking up a tool, he smiled at the bewildered nigger next to him and churned feudal earth until sundown, determined to learn the ways of the field slaves. I suppose the niggers warned him, but Swen wouldn’t have understood their pidgin drawl. “Fool I don’t know who you is, but whoebba you is, if you gwine slave in this heah tobacky row you bettuh stop scatterin’ the top serl in the wind. ’Cuz if de Tannenberrys don’t eat den you knows the pigs and chickens gwine watch the niggers die.” Swen headed back to Marse Tom Tannenberry’s sleeping quarters happy with his first day of slavery. He went to bed that night on a stomach full of pig ears and corn leaves, and from every daybreak until his death he woke up an unindentured servant.
Initially, upon seeing a free extra hand in the cabins, Marse Tom Tannenberry smiled at his good fortune, recalling poorer days when family members outnumbered the slaves. A precocious Confederate tyke, he’d pulled on Grandma Verona’s billowing yellow whalebone dress, pleading and pouting for a nigger of his own. Marse Tom recalled the spittle and scorn in her voice when she replied with something about darkies not growing on trees.
In the chill of a just-breaking morning, Swen Kaufman danced to work. Giddily in rehearsal for his magnum opus, his lanky frame spun “jump, ball, change” in the lifting dark North Carolinian mist. The slaves hated him. Marse Tom grew to hate him. Swen returned from the fields happier than he’d ever been in Boston. He considered himself dancer-in-reside
nce at the Tannenberry plantation, free room and board and plenty of rehearsal space. Come sundown the dirty energetic primo cotton picker pranced home, back straight, chin up, a Yankee clipper lost at sea, pointing his toes in the wind.
Marse Tom decided Swen’s cultured Boston manners and skip-to-my-lou verve were bad for morale. Worse yet was the fascination in Missus Courtney Tannenberry’s lit-up cheeky countenance as she sat around listening to Swen’s stories of his carefree European escapades as a fashionable valet noir for a French choreographer. Raised in northern Virginia, Missus Tannenberry considered herself a balletomane and aficionado of high art. She’d sit under the bighouse portico fanning herself and aching for culture not based on agrarian harvest cycles. Swen was eager to play raconteur. Excused by the missus from fieldwork, he’d fill her swooning head with stories of dining in seaport bistros in Marseilles and witnessing the exquisite nascence of modern dance at the Paris Opera, the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, and London’s renowned King Theater. They discussed Swen’s theories on how the rigid daring obstinate Russian psyche would push ballet to the heights of expressionistic art. Punctuating his points with leaps and sashays around the gazebo, Swen conducted ironic lectures on how the tradition of European patrician gloating and African tribal rituals influenced the Southern cotillions. In wishful reenactments of performances staged hundreds of times in his head, he’d spin and lift Missus Tannenberry’s toddling daughters to the clouds. Marse Tom wasn’t havin’ it and demanded that Swen leave the grounds. Swen refused. How could he leave midway through choreographing a hand dance based on the dexterity needed to remove cotton balls cleanly from the stem and the intricacies of the Missus’s crocheting techniques?
Didn’t a whole lot of niggers get whipped on Tom Tannenberry’s plantation, but Marse Tom whipped Swen Kaufman. Demi-plié—five lashes. Second position—ten lashes. Pirouette over the cotton seedlings—fifteen lashes; rock salt and scotch in the wounds. A performance of Swen’s “Dance of the Discreet Glance” behind the stables merited a beating that started the dogs barking and kept slaves and masters up through the night listening to Swen’s skin sizzle. Eventually the slaves came to admire Swen’s persistence and to appreciate his art, but not before Tom Tannenberry beat the classic romanticism out of Swen’s feet and slapped the worldly effluvium from his mouth. Crumpled and broken on the ground, lips painted with blood, face powdered with red clay dust, Swen was told he could nigger jig to his heart’s content.
He healed and did, soon falling in love with his favorite partner, Clocinda Didion. Swen and Clocinda’s wedding was his final performance. Under the guise of rehearsing an elaborate wedding ceremony, he used every slave on the plantation in a glorious swirling production. On the wedding day they danced. To the accompaniment of body drums and fiddles, maids of honor, bridegroom, and guests swooped across the fields. They tightroped the tops of fences many had never even dared look at, much less touch. For most it was the first time they’d been within twenty yards of the fences. The audience consisted of the pregnant Missus Tannenberry and her four daughters trailing the action as it traversed the grounds, applauding at the appropriate intervals. In the middle of the ceremony the Tannenberry women held the broom cheering as the happy helot couple jumped over it kissing in midair, landing in matrimony. In the last movement the adults passed unlit torches to the children then lay in the slaves’ graveyard next to the mounds of earth and rotted tombstones The children peered into the windows of the bighouse the still unlit torches resting on their bony shoulders Then they too went to the graveyard and lay down next to their parents. Missus Tannenberry cried for a month afterward and on every anniversary of Clocinda and Swen’s regal wedding visited the graveyard.
All this before recess. Over coffeecake and chocolate milk, kids who normally spent the respite from math teasing me about the length of my pants and placing bets on which of two shirts I would wear tomorrow begged me to continue my story.
“What happened next?”
“Why didn’t they light the torches?”
“How much is a sixpence in American money?”
“Did Euripides Kaufman know George Washington?”
“What happened next, motherfucker?”
The bell rang and they rushed back to the classroom to find Ms. Murphy sitting on the edge of her desk. The students sat in little plastic orange chairs and leaned over the tabletops. All ears and big eyes. I continued my presentation, swelling with a strange pride.
Swen and Clocinda Kaufman begat some astoundingly servile niggers. One of whom, Franz von Kaufman, was exceedingly bootlicking even for a slave. Franz von Kaufman was born looking like the quintessential Mathew Brady 1857 nigger daguerreotype. Though fresh out of Clocinda’s womb, Franz von’s glossy dark black skin was fissured by creased and starched wrinkles. A shock of wispy gray hair capped a sunken face, tight lips, and sullen yellow watery suffering eyes. Everyone called him “Old Franz von.” Missus Tannenberry delivered Compton Benjamin Quentin, the Tannenberry’s youngest and only male child, within days of Franz von. The two boys shared the same crib and nipples. Even in infancy Franz von’s subservience was evident. If baby Marse Compton wanted the nipple Franz von suckled, he’d nudge Franz von, whine, and drool in his ear, and Franz von would move without complaint. No whining, no whimpering. Clocinda soon figured out that the little Tannenberry devil was born greedy and nearly blind.
The stubborn Compton fancied himself a brave explorer and refused to let his poor sight handicap him. One nose-to-nose close-up look at his dusky running buddy Old Franz von and young Marse Compton knew intuitively that to realize his lofty goals, he’d need a loyal manservant. He asked his father that Franz von be given to him, and Tom Tannenberry, remembering his longing for a “nigger of his own,” quickly agreed. While Franz von was still a pup, Marse Tom handed his leash over to Compton Tannenberry. “Remember, son, you promised to take care of it.”
In years to come Old Franz von served as Compton’s Seeing Eye dog, constant companion, and best friend. Franz von and Compton could be found playing Inquisition in the walnut groves. This game was a degenerate version of hide-and-seek where Franz von would roll in a honeysuckle patch and then play the heathen. Bathed in young Marse Compton’s favorite smell, Franz von would hide among the walnut trees, awaiting discovery and salvation. The sightless erstwhile Torquemada would seek Franz von out, nose open for the unique scent of honeysuckle and unwashed infidel. His ears honing in on Franz von’s faux heretic war cries and blasphemes. “The creeks burble ’n’ gurgle, the rustle in the leaves, are the boogers, sniffles, and breeze of the sneezing gods of Dixie.” Compton would find Franz von, tie him to a tree, trade his spit for Franz von’s land and soul, pelt him with walnuts, and convert the swarthy pagan by reciting biblical verse.
Time aged Marse Compton more than it did Franz von. At twenty-five Old Franz von remained a taller version of the tame Negro he’d always been; only the wrinkles circling his eyes and lips had deepened. He hadn’t grown wiser, more worldly, or even bitter about his servitude. Newfangled ideas confused him. Franz von the young adult didn’t understand the nigger talk about abolition, or the white folks’ pride in their metal gunboats. Those Braille books Marse Compton got with increasing frequency in the mail frightened him. How could he read Marse Compton the poems of Ovid and Homer if the great myths were transformed to raised dots? “Can’t teach an old nigger new tricks,” the Tannenberrys teased him. Old Franz von laughed at their perceptiveness and stayed by Compton’s side, safely leading him past the few pitfalls faced by a spoiled Southern aristocrat.
Compton Tannenberry slipped just as easily into his destined adulthood. The denizens of Mercy marveled at the contrast of his princely smooth upright blind gait to Franz von’s sighted slumped-over shuffle. In Compton’s presence the white folks could often be heard saying how he’d aged gracefully, gone from barley malt to fine scotch whisky. When Marse Compton wasn’t around, the niggers who toiled under the sun and his Confederate shogunate would
say that Marse Compton hadn’t aged but curdled like stagnant milk. His white arrogance had piled and thickened, casting its sour odor wherever he went.
Sundays were for church ’n’ cards. In the afternoon Franz von sat in an unvarnished pew in the farthest corner of the Anglican Saxon Triple Baptist Church. From there he watched the good Reverend William Dern deliver sermons that alternated between damnation and salvation. Compton Tannenberry allowed no one but Franz von to shepherd him down the aisle to partake in the communion. He held Franz von tightly at the elbow while receiving the vintage spirit and the cracker body of Christ. Nights were spent in the sacrosanct parlors of the Mercy Socialite Club for Genteel Gentlemen. During the high-stakes poker games Franz von sat at Compton’s side, placing Compton’s bets for him, tapping out their secret code on Compton’s arm to let him know the cards in his hand. Compton quickly calculated his odds, and Franz von humbly reeled in the winnings from the astonished stately Tar Heel gentry. Once safely away from the gaming tables, Franz von and Compton would tell their running joke that they had the advantage because no one could read a blind man’s eyes and no one could read a nigger’s mind.