by Ross, Fran
Frances Dolores Ross was born June 25, 1935, in Philadelphia, the eldest child and only daughter of Gerald Ross of Littleton, North Carolina, and Bernetta Bass Ross of Petersburg, Virginia. Her father, a welder, died in an automobile accident returning home from work in New Jersey in 1954. Her mother worked as a store clerk after attending Saint Augustine College in North Carolina. Fran Ross, whose childhood nickname was “Frosty,” is remembered as a precocious bookworm, an artistically inclined doodler, and a spirited athlete by her two younger brothers, Gerald Ross, Jr., and Richard Ross. Their maternal grandmother, Lena Bass Nelson, was employed as a cook for the Irish-American family of Arthur J. O’Neil, a Seagram’s Company vice president. Fran Ross and her brother Gerald often spent weekends at the home of the O’Neil family, helping “Big Mom” when her employers had large dinner parties. During school vacations, Fran also occasionally accompanied her grandmother to the O’Neil summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. The Ross family lived in Philadelphia in a Pearl Street house owned by Lena Bass and attended Mount Carmel Baptist Church.
As a child, Fran Ross often heard Yiddish spoken by the family of Samuel Koltoff, the Russian Jewish immigrant proprietor of the next-door corner store. Another Jewish family, the Millers, employed her brother Gerald in their neighborhood “five and dime” store. Ross attended George Brooks Elementary School and Shoemaker Junior High School. A few days before her sixteenth birthday, she graduated with honors from Overbrook High School, where the student body at the time was predominantly white and Jewish. Her brother Gerald’s classmate Wilt Chamberlain played varsity basketball in the same high school. Ross herself, a lifelong sports fan, played basketball at Camphor Memorial Church Center and with the Varsity Pantherettes at Richard Allen Youth Center. In high school, she was a member of the debate team, literary club, and art club; her interests included literature, drama, and cartoons. She received a full college scholarship and graduated in 1956 from Temple University with a B.S. degree in Communications, Journalism, and Theater. Ross sought work as a journalist and was employed for a time at Curtis Publishing Company, home of the Saturday Evening Post. Finding it difficult to get suitable employment in Philadelphia, she moved to New York in 1960. There she worked as a proofreader and copy editor at McGraw-Hill and later at Simon and Schuster, where, among other things, she proofread the first book written by Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City.
Oreo, Ross’s only novel, was released by Greyfalcon House in 1974. Although Ross never published another novel, she continued to work as a freelance writer and editor, while living “a bagel’s throw from Zabar’s in a terrace apartment on Riverside Drive in the same building as Jules Feiffer” (Essence, 70). Ross wrote pieces for Essence, a magazine for black women, as well as for the feminist humor magazine Titters, and published a facetious article on black slang in Playboy magazine. Ross’s freelance activity supplemented her income as part owner and vice president of a mail-order company that produced educational media.
In 1977, on the strength of her published novel and a few sample television scripts, she interviewed for a job as a comedy writer for the controversial and short-lived Richard Pryor Show. Encouraged by the producer Rocco Urbisci, Ross had hoped that income from television work might allow her to complete a second novel; but with the expenses of her move from New York to Los Angeles, she barely broke even on the venture. Having given up her New York apartment, Ross was distressed to learn that the star had misgivings about committing himself to a weekly television schedule and submitting to network censorship of his outspoken humor. At an emotionally intense meeting of the show’s creators, Ross found herself pleading with the reluctant Pryor to go ahead with the network program, arguing that he could make an impact as a socially conscious black comedian. Although Pryor’s associates Paul Mooney and Urbisci collaborated with the comedian on other projects after the show was canceled, Ross scrambled for work at other studios. She soon discovered that she was even more of an anomaly as a black woman comedy writer in Los Angeles than she had been as an editor and author in New York. She submitted sample scripts and tried unsuccessfully to interest network executives in her idea for a pilot program featuring an African American character. Rather than pursuing her only offer—a possible job writing for the Pryor Show’s competition, Laverne and Shirley—she returned to New York, where she continued to work in publishing and media until her death on September 17, 1985.
A black and white photograph of the author on the back of the novel’s original dust jacket shows a youthful-looking black woman with full lips and a kinky Afro hairstyle, wearing hoop earrings, a necklace of large beads, and a garment that might be a dashiki. The epitome of Afrocentric style, the author’s portrait seems to engage in a lively dialogue with the novel’s title and the eye-catching cover design created by Ann Grifalconi, an award-winning writer and illustrator of multicultural books for children, and the publisher of the original Oreo. The artwork features a cropped Nefertiti-like image of a smiling black woman wearing a star of David pendant. In the photograph, Ross poses in front of a sunny window, holding eyeglasses and a pencil in one hand, gazing skeptically at the camera, as if daring the photographer to try to capture her soul, as if challenging the reader to solve the riddle of Oreo. Although the author herself warned readers that the book is fiction rather than autobiography, the novel does incorporate or allude to a few circumstantial facts that are known of Ross’s life, including her education at Temple University (where Oreo’s parents meet), her journey from her Philadelphia birthplace to New York City (like her heroine’s odyssey), and her work in advertising and mass media (where Samuel Schwartz, Oreo’s father, earns his living).
Oreo is one of a very few works of satire written by African American women. Historically, black women are far more likely to be the objects rather than the authors of parody and satire. Like William Melvin Kelley’s Dunsfords Travels Everywheres (1970), which also combines vernacular dialects and literary invention in a Joycean romp through language, Ross’s Oreo languishes in the purgatory or limbo of innovative works by black writers that have been overlooked in the formation of the African American literary canon. Although it is notable for its satirical response to the racial and sexual politics of the 1970s, Oreo apparently failed to find its audience, possibly because in the process of commingling two ghettoized vernaculars, African American and Yiddish, the novel also draws on material that both black and Jewish readers might find offensive, perplexing, or incomprehensible. Ross’s double-edged satire includes a Jewish immigrant who retains a voodoo consultant named Dr. Macumba; a reverse-discrimination tale of an all-black suburb where a local ordinance is selectively enforced to keep white people from moving into the neighborhood; a black radio producer’s script of an advertisement for Passover TV dinners; a joke about the heroine’s odds of inheriting sickle-cell anemia and Tay-Sachs disease; and a fight in which Oreo beats a predatory pimp to a pulp while wearing only a pair of sandals, a brassiere, and a mezuzah. Ross frequently confronts her readers with conventional stereotypes encoded in familiar jokes. In Oreo, the stereotype is often made more conspicuous by an unexpected twist or inversion, forcing into consciousness the underlying assumptions of jokes about sex, race, and ethnicity.
With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, inside jokes, neologisms, verbal quirks, and linguistic oddities, Ross’s novel dazzles by deliberately straining the abilities of its readers, as if she wrote for an audience that did not yet exist. Relatively few people in 1974 would have possessed the linguistic competence, multicultural literacy, and irreverently humorous attitude toward racial and ethnic identity that Ross demonstrates and expects of Oreo’s ideal audience. The more that today’s readers have come to learn and understand about America’s cultural diversity and the less constrained by narrow definitions of identity, the more likely we are to comprehend and appreciate Ross’s satire, which seems to have arrived ahead of its time.
What makes this quirky novel accessible, d
espite its idiosyncrasy, is Ross’s lively appropriation of popular culture genres, including jokes, cartoons, graffiti, advertising, palmistry, cookbooks, and dream books. Ross borrows as heavily from such sources as she does from the culture of high literacy represented by classical literature and “great books,” dictionaries, thesauruses, and other reference works, as well as the scholarly essays, handbooks, and bureaucratic pamphlets of academics, technical writers, and other specialists. Oreo borrows without prejudice from elite as well as popular forms of writing and speech, just as she takes equal pleasure in European classical music and “singing telegrams well sung” (178). Ross exploits the double-edged humor of jokes incorporating Yiddish in particular and of “ethnic humor” in general. On the one hand, Yiddish is popularly associated with a certain brand of “Jewish humor”; on the other hand, Yiddish as a language of foreigners, immigrants, or ghettoized Jews may simply “sound funny” to non-Yiddish speakers. Ross also suggests that ethnic humor is a significant aspect of the serious business of constructing American identities within a mainstream culture that rejects some while appropriating other aspects of diverse ethnic groups. As the insider humor of a minority group crosses over into American popular culture, becoming ethnic humor, it allows some members of the marginalized community to make a living by laughing at what makes an ethnic minority group seem “funny” or strange or incomprehensible to others.
As often happens, one minority ethnic group can also be pitted against another when one group is comically portrayed or caricatured by the other. Ross satirically examines just such scenarios, although she departs from the cultural script with a wisecracking heroine who feels free to claim or discard whatever she wishes of African American, Jewish American, and “mainstream” American cultures. Like its eponymous heroine, Oreo is a hybrid, a product of racial and cultural miscegenation. While Oreo can claim a high-culture pedigree as an innovative literary work retelling a classical Greek myth, Ross also appropriates the lowbrow shtick practiced by performers of stand-up comedy, along with the brisk hucksterism brought to you by advertising copywriters who collaborate with actors and directors in the making of commercials for radio and television. Jokes, cartoons, graffiti, and advertising cohabit with linguistics, classical mythology, picaresque novels, and feminist manifestos as influences on the construction of the novel.
In Oreo the ancient Greek myth of Theseus’ journey into the Labyrinth becomes a linguistically riotous feminist tall tale of a young black woman’s passage from Philadelphia to New York in search of her white Jewish father. Ross’s brain-teasing humor gives Oreo its distinctive wit. It is essentially a ludic text, full of verbal games, jokes, puns, and puzzles. Ross clearly delighted in inviting readers to play along with her rollicking parody of classical myth. However, there is also a serious aspect to her heroine’s playful wrangling with language. The Labyrinth that Theseus entered was a kind of game created by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete; but the intricate maze served the serious purpose of corralling the violent Minotaur. In certain Greek myths, solving a riddle is a test of the hero’s ingenuity, suggesting that life itself is a game of wits. Oreo’s journey is not merely a whimsical comic adventure, but also a meaningful quest for self-knowledge. As she seeks the answer to the riddle of her origins, word games entertain the heroine in her solo journey, and keep her wits sharpened for verbal duels with the assorted characters she encounters on the streets of New York, who correspond to the bandits that Theseus slays on his overland journey from Troezen to Athens.
A satire on relations between African Americans and Jews, as well as a topsy-turvy treatment of racial and ethnic shibboleths and stereotypes in American popular culture, Oreo is also a formally inventive picaresque novel written as a series of language games, comic translations, bilingual wisecracks, and arch etymological puns that call to mind crazily erudite vaudeville routines performed by comedian Professor Irwin Corey; elaborately constructed shaggy dog stories with absurdly far-fetched punch lines delivered with the raised eyebrow of Groucho Marx; the high hipster monologues of Lord Buckley; and the X-rated comedy of Lenny Bruce, Redd Foxx, and Richard Pryor. Ross’s linguistic range stretches from scholarly wit and airy erudition to vernacular dialects and stand-up comedy shtick. The author’s etymological puns trace her tongue back to its Greek and Latin roots, at the same time that her novel updates an ancient myth with several new twists, including a heroic feminist protagonist whose Labyrinth is the New York subway system, and whose Minotaur is not a bull-headed man but a mannish bulldog named Toro. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, possibly one of its models, Ross’s novel is, on a smaller scale, a zesty, pun-filled parody of a classical myth.
Oreo’s tongue-in-cheek mimicry of the Greek hero underscores Ross’s cheekiness as an African American woman who travesties both James Joyce and the Greeks while blithely seeking her place in a Western literary tradition. Ross’s clever parody is wildly irreverent in many respects, drawing interesting parallels between the macho hero Theseus, who is credited with the invention of wrestling, and her militantly feminist heroine, Oreo, who uses verbal wit and martial arts to dispatch her male adversaries. Like Theseus, when Oreo comes of age, she sets off to find an absentee father who has left behind clues to the “secret of her birth” and tokens of a paternal legacy, “sword and sandals,” traditionally passed from father to son.
If Theseus’ entry into the Labyrinth suggests the masculine hero’s return to the womb followed by the rebirth of a new self through the feminine power of his guide, Ariadne, Oreo’s quest to meet her deadbeat dad suggests a feminist daughter’s claim to self-knowledge as well as her determination to challenge patriarchy and to contest the phallic power of the male. Unlike Theseus and the Minotaur, who owe their existence to the perverse promiscuity of gods and aristocrats, Oreo is the legitimate offspring of a middle-class couple who happen to be of different races and religions; and unlike other feminist heroines of the 1970s, Oreo remains virginal throughout her often risky adventures. Although Ross stirs racy jokes and spicy sexual innuendo into the mix of Oreo, it is perhaps because of conventional strictures on the sexual expressiveness of black women that Ross prefers to demonstrate her heroine’s physical and intellectual prowess in martial and verbal arts rather than in sexual adventures such as those of Erica Jong’s Isadora Wing in Fear of Flying, or Rita Mae Brown’s Molly Bolt in Rubyfruit Jungle, two novels published in the year before Oreo appeared.
As a literary heroine, Christine “Oreo” Clark is both particular in her individual and cultural identity and universal in her quest for self-knowledge. Though Oreo is a physically beautiful young woman, what is most striking is her ability to amuse herself in any situation, owing to her speculative intelligence and wry sense of humor. Her attention to verbal quirks and habits of speech defines her character and calls the reader’s attention to the artifice of language as a cultural construct, demonstrating the materiality as opposed to the transparency of the spoken and written word. Christine Clark, nicknamed Oriole (the bird), but called Oreo (the cookie), is the offspring of an African American mother and a Jewish father. Oreo’s parents divorce shortly after her younger brother is born, and she grows up knowing only the black side of her family: her African American mother, Helen, her brother, Moishe (called Jimmie C.), and her mother’s parents, James and Louise Clark. Each member of the family has a different idiosyncratic relationship to language, thus contributing to Oreo’s semiotic competence and opening the text to a variety of verbal experiments and variations on the spoken and written word.
James, Oreo’s black grandfather, is speechless following an immobilizing stroke that occurs minutes after hearing that his daughter “was going to wed a Jew-boy” (3). Her grandmother Louise speaks an almost incomprehensible southern dialect. Helen, Oreo’s mother, converses in standard English sprinkled with Yiddish she learned from her father, who before his stroke ran a mail-order publishing business selling religious publications to an exclusively Jewish clientele. Oreo’s mother is a gifted p
rofessional musician and eccentric amateur mathematician who ponders whimsical “head equations” whenever she suffers from boredom or distress. Oreo’s younger brother, Jimmie C., expresses himself with a secret musical language of his own invention, and prefers to sing rather than speak. When a neighbor’s tomcat loses a fight with an alley cat, the woman announces, “My cat’s a coward.” The sensitive Jimmie C., who has put his fingers in his ears during the cat fight, hears “Mah cassa cowah,” thus providing the family with a strange new idiolect:
Jimmie C. was delighted. He decided to use this wonderful new expression as the radical for a radical second language. “Cha-key-key-wah, mah-cassa-cowah,” he would sing mysteriously in front of strangers. “Freck-a-louse-poop!”