The three things that a nigger likes:
Tight pussy,
loose shoes,
and a warm place to shit.
It’s the same pattern as “What are little girls made of? / Sugar, / and spice / and all things nice, / that’s what little girls are made of” and “Pease porridge hot, / pease porridge cold, / pease porridge in the pot, nine days old”—with the third item in the list having twice as many beats as the first two. Morgan traces the pattern back to an epigrammatic masterpiece from ancient Sumer: “Aba garra? Aba galla? Aba urma ganna aburu?” (“Who is miserly? / Who is opulent? / For whom shall I reserve my vulva?”) The rhythm of Butz’s joke gives it some power, but these examples demonstrate just what’s missing: rhyme, wordplay, or wit. The only surprise is the loose shoes—a mildly amusing image leavened with assonance—but that’s hardly enough to make anyone laugh.
Or is the whole crudeness of the humor somehow the point? Does the joke simply hope to keep piling up ugliness till someone laughs in incredulity or agreement? Is it supposed to work like the joke I heard when Ricky Walker leaned over to me in tenth grade and asked, “Do you know what the American Dream is?”
“Yeah, it’s some ideal about, uh . . .”
“No. It’s all the niggers swimming back to Africa. With a Jew under each arm.”
“How could they swim like that?” I said, sneering at the contradiction in his joke, only to be told, witheringly, “That’s the point.” Then he laughed at my dawning consternation.
Was Ricky’s joke only a joke?
“It’s only a joke” was more or less Butz’s defense, and it’s one every joker resorts to when a humor bomb blows up in his face: “You know, I don’t know how many times I told that joke, and everywhere—political groups, church groups, nobody took offense, and nobody should. I like humor. I’m human.” Butz was almost certainly lying. It’s hard to imagine many pastors, even those few who didn’t flinch from the racism, chortling at “pussy” and “shit” while mounding their Styrofoam plate with scalloped potatoes and Sea Foam Salad. But like Butz, I too have weakly mustered “It’s only a joke,” when my love of a joke’s audacity enticed me into an amoral blindness to what’s being said. Every time I think of Earl Butz, I wince and think, There but for the grace of God—and the fact that reporters don’t follow me around the country—go I.
Religious bigotry, racism, sexual discomfort, and death provide the tension in jokes, the friction to wordplay’s lubrication, and in this thematic memoir of my life as a joker, the story of my life shifts back and forth in time as I explore how I learned to think about religion, race, and sex through the complex and often unattractive medium of jokes. Even in their frequent ugliness I love jokes. They illuminate how we think and the often irresolvable contradictions our lives are built on. The laughter they draw from us both expresses our sorrow at our inconsistency and soothes it. I love the sound of laugher; my voice joining almost musically with yours in a fearful celebration of how the frailties of others are also our own.
One
Catch It and Paint It Green
I was slow to delight in disorder, in which words didn’t mean what I’d understood them to mean and in which phrases had secret histories I couldn’t know. I was an anxious child, one who sat at his desk and, sounding out words so he could spell them, felt them dissolve on his lips. Or I wrote them with such attention to each mark of the pencil that they disintegrated into their component lines and curves, hooks, and squiggles. Clutching a child’s fat pencil, I painstakingly etched words, upstroke and downstroke, onto the lined paper of my Blue Horse Pencil Tablet, paper so near to pulp you could see brown flecks of bark and heartwood in it. I concentrated on the letters until they started to look queer, alien, wrong. I looked back and forth from the book to my handwriting, trying to see what I had copied incorrectly. When I found no mistake, I distrusted my eyesight. I often erased the word and wrote it again, spelling it the same correct way as the first time but trying to make it look right in my handwriting. I wrote and erased and wrote and erased till I rubbed holes through the paper.
The sounds of the words were even slipperier than their shapes. Certain small, obvious words were the most likely to crumble in my mouth. As I repeated them, the sounds shifted and the word warped. The word word was one of the worst. The w stretched out or shortened as I said it different ways. So did the ur sound following it. And the duh at the end could be the end of one syllable or break off and establish itself as a separate syllable if I over-enunciated, which I almost always did once I started to think about what I was saying. I was terrified by the porcelain delicacy of words. Language was so fragile I could break it just by trying to grasp it, and since it was the only tool I had to make sense of the world, if I destroyed it I also destroyed my own identity. Several times I was so terrified by a word’s crumbling in my mouth that I stretched out on the floor between my brother’s bed and my own—a place where no one could see me—and cried until I was panting.
Maybe I should have asked my mother for help, but I remembered working myself into a frenzy when, trying to write a sentence for a homework assignment, I had a word slip out of my mind—a basic word, one I should’ve known. I burst into the kitchen, gasping, “Wuz! Mama, wuz!” I was frantic, my face sticky with tears, but even in my agitation I saw excessive alarm spread across her face. I’d been born two and a half months premature and then placed for several weeks on a respirator that stunted some babies’ development by over-oxygenating their brains. Mom had watched for it, braced for it, probed for it, and at long last brain damage had raced into her kitchen, clutched her leg, clamped its damp face to her belly, hysterically begging, “Wuz!”
“What? What are you saying?” she demanded as I clung to her, wailing, “Wuz, Mama, wuz?” Her body was stiff with fear.
Finally she grasped what I couldn’t put into words. I could feel her muscles relax. Smiling with more amusement than I thought my stupidity called for, she spelled out, “W-A-S.”
Wuz was restored to its essential was-ness, and I immediately calmed down. But words remained skittery. The was a persistent vexation, shifting between a short e sound and or a long e that knocked it up against thee from the Bible. Not much later, mama changed. One day she snapped, “Don’t call me Mama, boy. I’m your mom.” She didn’t want to be a countrified mama, as her mother was to her and her sister back in Georgia was to her boys. The wife of an air force officer, she wanted to be that modern thing, a mom. My calling her Mama, especially in front of her friends, undermined how she wanted to see herself. It was hard for me to imagine words having the power to change who we are and still being able to fall apart when looked at too closely, but there was Mama’s—Mom’s—clear demonstration of it happening.
Words were, I thought, like eggs. Hold them loosely and they fall through your fingers and splatter on the linoleum; grasp them too tightly and they are crushed, messily, in your hands. Or maybe words were more like the photos in the newspaper. If I looked at them from across the room, they blurred into blotchy gray shadows, but if I hovered over the pictures, my nose grazing the page, all I could see were individual gray dots. The discomfort of trying to focus on the dots made me suspect that eyes weren’t supposed to be used this way. To make sense of the photos, I had to hold them somewhere between too far and too close, just as I had to hold the egg firmly enough to control it but not so firmly that it cracked. Words worked the same way. Words, and maybe the whole world, had to be held gently and understood from the proper distance if they were to mean something.
• • •
The funniest thing about the first joke I ever heard is that my father told it to me. I was sitting on the living room floor in front of the couch, building a cage of Tinkertoys around a cabin made of Lincoln Logs. The long Tinkertoy spokes kept tapping the green roof slats of the log cabin out of place, which was infuriating to a seven-year-old. Frustrated, I was always on the verge of smashing the whole thing flat. I did not like the green s
lats. I was pretty sure, even then, that the roof of Lincoln’s childhood cabin wasn’t made of boards greener than lime Kool-Aid. The slats’ bright dye made me want to suck them, which I did compulsively, especially once I was forbidden to do so. They turned my lips a morbid gray-green.
Dad stood over me in his air force uniform. He was a captain. He had just returned home from work to the tract house on North Carolina’s Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. Craning my neck, I looked up the long expanse from his summer khakis to his pink face, pale blue eyes, and prematurely bald head, and in the tensing of his thin lips, I saw him hesitate. He seemed to be pondering—pondering me. Did the color of my lips give me away?
“What’s black and white and red all over?” he asked.
What? Wait. Why was he asking? This question sounded a bit like the bullets he fired at me over supper: “What’s four plus seven?” “What’s our address?” “What’s the capital of South Dakota?” “Why can’t you just do what you’re told without pouting and whining?”
But this question sounded different. There was something worrying and peculiar in the way he almost chanted, as if he both did and didn’t expect me to answer. He seemed amused by my answer before I’d given it. And what a confusing question. If something was black and white, it couldn’t be red at the same time. That was just basic to knowing what words meant, wasn’t it? My father’s lips were now pressed into a tight line. I was taking too long to answer.
The only thing I could think to say always meant trouble.
“I don’t know.”
“A newspaper,” he said, grinning.
I closed my eyes, retreated into my mind to absorb the answer. I couldn’t do it. I opened them, looked at my father, my head cocked to the side—apprehensive, stupid, trying to think and failing. Nothing connected. This was not unusual in my relations with the adult world. I must have looked like a beagle instructed to determine pi.
“I don’t understand.”
“A newspaper is read,” he said and nodded. He was encouraging me to keep working at it.
I conjured a picture of a newspaper painted red. I envisioned Dad painting the kitchen stool. He’d spread newspaper on the carport floor and then placed the unfinished wooden stool upside down in the middle of it. The paint often over-sprayed onto the Goldsboro News-Argus, covering much of the paper with a glossy coat of royal-blue enamel. In my mind I turned the blue paint to red. But that didn’t help. Where the newsprint was red, it was no longer black and white.
“A newspaper is read after you read it,” Dad said.
“But it’s not red. It’s still black and white.”
“Listen to me! It’s R-E-A-D, not R-E-D. The same word means different things.”
“That’s not fair! It’s cheating!”
“It’s not cheating. It’s a joke.”
“It doesn’t make sense!” I wailed.
“It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s a joke, you stupid idiot!” he snapped, and marched out of the room.
After he was gone, I remember sitting on the carpet, tapping one Lincoln Log with another. Read sounds the same as red. Now that my father’s expectant eyes were no longer locked on me, I got it. The joke had faked me out by leading me to think the sound meant one thing when it really meant another. If that wasn’t cheating, I didn’t know what was. But the margins in a newspaper, I thought, weren’t “read,” so it wasn’t actually read all over, was it? And what about the pictures? Did looking at them count as reading? I didn’t think so.
A few minutes later, Dad came back in the living room—to make amends, I now realize—and asked me why the chicken crossed the road.
“I don’t know,” I said. That seemed to be a safe answer to these joke things.
“To get to the other side.”
I nodded as if I understood, tried to smile, and he left the room again, appeased if not happy. In a way I did understand. The joke was a parable about simplicity. The chicken’s crossing the road was broken down to its simplest possible motivation, but one so fundamental as to be completely dull and unsatisfying. I’d come dangerously close to asking Dad what chicken we were talking about. The chickens in my grandmother’s grassless backyard waddled in circles, scratching the Georgia red clay for bugs and overlooked feed corn, and not a single hen had ever shown the least interest in crossing Vineyard Road. I had, though, seen plenty of others flopped dead by drainage ditches, their red and brown feathers erect in the backwash of air as our station wagon shot past, and I vividly remembered seeing a dead chicken humped at the base of a mailbox, a dog jabbing his muzzle into the carcass. Crossing the road was a skill in which many chickens were fatally deficient but maybe they possessed desires I was unaware of.
I was a single-minded little literalist and these jokes seemed like annoyances made of words, not life, the way math problems at school were annoyances made of numbers. If you had two apples and Mr. Smith gave you three, Mrs. Johnson gave you four, and Miss Ingle gave you three, how many apples would you have? I understood the mathematics behind the silly question, but I couldn’t imagine a world where grown-ups I didn’t know stopped me one after the other and gave me more than I could eat of a fruit I didn’t like.
Later, when I encountered more complex word problems in arithmetic, I believed them to be especially lame versions of jokes, dubious contraptions made of words that led to an answer that had nothing to do with life as I knew it. I couldn’t conceive of caring what time the train leaving Santa Fe at noon at forty miles an hour would pass the train leaving from Denver an hour later at fifty miles an hour. Maybe I’d care if I was on one train, my mother was on the other, and I could remember to look up at the exactly calculated minute and wave to her as we passed each other, but I doubted that would be possible. I’d get engrossed in reading a comic book, forget the time, forget to look for her, and then, later, I’d get fussed at for not paying attention.
• • •
At school, I met my father’s first joke again, and once more it flummoxed me. “What’s black and white and red all over?” asked the joke page of My Weekly Reader. Well, I know that one, I thought with jaded triumph. It’s a newspaper. Everybody knows that.
Wrong! said My Weekly Reader. It’s a blushing zebra. That’s just dumb, I thought, enraged. Zebras don’t blush. What could make a zebra blush? And even if it did, it wouldn’t blush all over its body, just as people didn’t blush all over theirs. My Weekly Reader helpfully printed a black-and-white picture of a zebra, its head radiating squiggly heat-lines of embarrassment as it looked back over its shoulder with an abashed grin. Its white stripes were shaded gray, to suggest it was blushing. But the picture made me crazier than the joke. Even in the picture, the black stripes of the zebra remained black, which was—aha!—a clear refutation of the joke’s logic.
What was this joking? It was challenging my grasp of reality. Was joking like what my mother often said as she flipped off the bedroom light after tucking me and my brother into bed? Hand hovering over the switch, she sang, “Where was Moses when the light went out?” Click went the light, and framed in the doorway by the hall light behind her, my mother, chuckling, answered her own question, “In the dark!” Other times the question had a different answer, one that made her laugh out loud: “Down in the cellar with his shirttail out!”
“In the dark” was an obvious non-answer answer, like “to get to the other side,” and “down in the cellar with his shirttail out” was nonsense with a hint of naughtiness. Other than that, all I understood about these moments was Mom’s pleasure in the words. “Where was Moses when the light went out?” was, I discovered many years later, the refrain of a novelty song from her youth. In the song, Moses is courting Becky Cohen, and when the lights go out, old man Cohen is relieved to hear Becky keep playing the “pianer” in the dark while he leaves the room to find money to feed the gas meter. He is, he tells Becky, sure her Moses was courting her respectably—“loving in a Yiddisher manner,” but Cohen still wants reassurance: “Te
ll me, darling daughter, while I went to get the quarter / Where was Moses when the light went out?”
The refrain broke free of its source, became a catchphrase, and people simply invented answers for it, including one I never heard at home: “Down in the cellar eating sauerkraut.” We Southern Baptists weren’t notable consumers of fermented cabbage, and the only Moses I’d heard of was the one who led the children of Israel out of Egypt. In my mind, he was the Moses in the dark with his shirttail flapping free. I wondered why he was not wearing the long heavy robe he wore in my illustrated Bible. My lack of understanding did not, however, keep me from absorbing (if not entirely appreciating) how my mother, after she had turned out the lights on another day that ended with me safely in bed, allowed herself a moment of carefree nonsensical pleasure imported from a time before I was born.
• • •
I slowly eased my grip on my natural literalism, and began to enjoy the unrealities that language made possible. Chickens yearn to cross roads, zebras blush, and newspapers are red all over while remaining black and white. You could play with words, just as you played with marbles, yo-yos, kites, and Matchbox cars.
Jokes were toys made of words. They were like the jack-in-the-box whose handle I spent hour after hour cranking, listening to the rink-a-tink tune of “Pop! Goes the Weasel” and then crowing with laughter when the clown shot out of his box, flung his folded arms wide, and bobbed at the end of his spring, idiotic and yet sinister with his huge hooked nose, bright red cheeks, and derisive grin. Frightening as he was, Jack was mine to control. I determined when he lunged out of his box, and once he did, I folded his hands across his chest and shoved him back down into his dark enclosure. I could spin the crank rapidly, frantic notes pelting from the box till the clown popped out. More often I turned the handle with obsessive patience, feeling the bumps on the roller inside the music mechanism flick over the tines, making “Pop! Goes the Weasel” unwind as a tinny dirge, until Jack’s spring overpowered the loosening latch and the clown once more launched to the end of his hidden spring. I loved the absurdity of the clown with his arms flying apart wider than the box that held him and his long black gown that, stretched over his uncompressed spring, made him look much taller than the box from which he’d leapt.
The Joker: A Memoir Page 2