by Mezz Mezzrow
Peck: see peckerwood
Peckerville: any Southern town
Peckerwood: any white Southerner
Peepers: eyes
Pen: penitentiary
Penny one: a single penny
pick up on: get, take, learn; also, smoke marihuana
Pick up on what’s going down: understand what’s happening
Pick up on some vittles: get some food, eat
Pick up the tempo: play faster
Pigeon: young girl
Pill: pellet of opium, also called yen pox
Pink: white
Piss-ant: a nobody, small fry
Pitch a boogie-woogie: get excited, get worked up
Plant you now and dig you later: got to go now, I’ll see you later
Play: thing to do, program of action, the order of the day
Play hip: pretend to understand
Playground: see chippy’s playground
Poke: pocket, wallet
Politician: trustee in a jail
Poppa De-Da-Da: New Orleans character who originated a strutting kind of dance
Pounder: cop on the beat
Prayerbones: knees
Press roll: a type of roll on the snare drums
Psycho kick: psychopathic form of behavior
Pull a creep: leave
Pull a fade-out: go away
Pull somebody’s coat: enlighten, tip somebody off
Pump: heart
Punk: young man who plays the feminine role in a homosexual relationship
Push: sell, handle, purvey
Put down: do, be active in some way
Put somebody on: let him smoke some marihuana
Queen: woman, girl
Quiet ones off the main drag: sidestreets
Quit it: leave
Raise: arm (on your left raise = on your left)
Raise sand: make a fuss, create a stir
Rap: a criminal charge
Razzmatazz: anything old-fashioned, corny
Ready: competent, dauntless
Recite: play a good solo on your instrument
Reefer: cigarette of marihuana
Rhyming: verbal game in which an idiomatic conversation is conducted in rhythmic, rhyming phrases
Riff: n., musical phrase or passage; v., to play such distinctive phrases
Righteous: good, right, satisfying
Righteous bush: marihuana
Righteous spiel: correct, convincing and honest talk
Rinky-dink: antiquated, broken down
Rip-bop: corruption of jazz now in vogue, very fast, frenzied and mechanical type of music; also known as re-bop and be-bop
Roach: small butt from a cigarette of marihuana
Rock: dollar
Rods: long bars under a freight car
Roost: home
Rooster: buttocks
Rubber: automobile
Rumble: fight
Run in: arrest
Run somebody away: chase away
Run with: associate with
Run your mouth: talk a lot
Salt and pepper: cheap brand of marihuana
Salty: sour, hostile, unpleasant
Sand: an oldtime Negro dance
Sawbuck: Ten-dollar bill
Scat: sing nonsense syllables
School: teach
Scoff back: eat a lot
Scraggy: dilapidated
Scratchpad: verminous room or flophouse
Screw: prison keeper
Scuffle: struggle to get along
Scuffle up: raise, collect, get together
Scumpteen: a lot of
Send: give you a good feeling
Sell out: run away
Shakes: d.t.’s
Shake-up: mixture of corn whisky and wine
Shark: man with a good line that women fall for
Sharp: alert, dressed well, keen-witted
Show: to make an appearance
Short-histe: masturbatory, perverted
Shroud-tailor: undertaker
Shying: the technique of cooking opium pills
Signify: hint, put on an act, boast, make a gesture
Simpy: doped, imbecilic
Skin-beater: drummer
Skullbuster: brain-twister, a tough problem; also, something very good
Sky-pilot: preacher
Slammer: door
Slave tip: work
Slot: form of greeting
Slow drag: dance music in slow tempo
Smeller: nose
Snagging: verbal game in which person who has to say “What?” gets a mark against him
Snap your cap: go crazy
Snatcher: detective
Snatchpad: bed
Sniffer: nose
Snow: cocaine
Solid: good
Sometimey: unstable, unpredictable, neurotic
Soundbox: larynx, throat
Spade: Negro
Spaginzy: Negro
Spike: add alcohol to beer
Splash: rain
Splinter your toupee: go crazy
Spring: release from jail
Square: unenlightened person, a working man, an orthodox follower of the rules
Square from Delaware: unenlightened person
Squinch-eyed: heavy-lidded, with the eyes half closed
Stash: v., to hide or put away, to go to sleep; n., house, bed, hiding-place
Stick of tea: cigarette of marihuana
Sticking: having some or a lot, not destitute or empty-handed
Stinchy: stingy
Stir: penitentiary
Stoolie: stool pigeon, informer
Storyville: the old tenderloin district of New Orleans
Straighten: pay up, straighten out a debt
Stretch your chippy’s playground: eat
Strides: pants
Stringpost: neck
The Stroll; Seventh Avenue in Harlem; any main street
Strollers: pants
Struggle-buggy: jalopy
Stuff: a lie, a line, something suspect or unacceptable
Stuff with the dead one’s pictures: paper money
Stud: guy, man
Study about: think, about, contemplate
Suds: beer
Suspicion: suspect
Suzie-Q: a Negro dance
Tab: project, line of activity, program
Tail: somebody who follows you
Tailgate: New Orleans style of trombone playing
’Taint no crack but a solid fact: it’s the truth
Take low: cower, act humble
Take some weight off somebody: relieve, cheer up
Talk behind somebody: believe and support what he says because he’s honest
Tall: intoxicated, or stimulated by marihuana
Tea: marihuana
Tea-pad: place where you smoke marihuana
Teen-inetsy: teeny-weeny, tiny
Tell a green man something: enlighten me, put me wise
Tenth Street: ten dollars
Tick twenty: ten o’clock, (times of day are doubled to confuse outsiders)
Tighten: sell a bill of goods, clinch a deal, win over
Tighten somebody’s wig: let him smoke some marihuana
Tin: small amount of opium
Tinklebox: piano
Tip: way of acting, pattern of behavior, environment, program
Tipple ukelele: twelve-stringed ukelele
Tog: dress up
Tonsil-juice: saliva
Top: head
Tops: roofs of passenger trains
Torpedo: gunman
Toy: a quantity of opium
The Track: Savoy Ballroom in Harlem
Trail: walk
Trey: three
Trey of knockers: the three balls over a pawnshop
Trickeration: misleading words or acts
Trilly: walk in a carefree way
Troubled with the shorts: broke, poverty-stricken
Tubs: drums
Turf: street
Tush-hog: muscle man who touches people for protection money, bully
Twinklers: stars
Twister: key
Two’s and fews: small change, a little money
Typewriter: machine gun
Unbooted: ignorant, naive, unenlightened
Uncle’s: a pawnshop
Uncle Tom: symbol of the bowing and scraping humility of the traditional Southern Negro
Unhip: naive, unenlightened, corny
The unlucky: Friday
Uppity: snooty, ritzy, conceited
Ups: the upper hand
Vine: suit of clothes
Viper: marihuana smoker
Walking bass: a bass part that moves up and down the chords
Waller: wallow
Wash away: kill
(Your) water’s on and it’s boiling: there’s trouble brewing for you
Wear the green: have some paper money
Weave the four F’s around somebody: high-pressure romancing (find ’em, fool ’em, frig ’em and forget ’em)
Weed: marihuana
Weight: blues, depression
Wet your tonsils: drink
White stuff: cocaine, morphine and heroin
Widen: leave
Wig: head or hair
Wig-trig: idea
Wooden kimono: coffin
Woodshed: practise or study alone
Wren: young girl
Yarddog: low or uncouth person
Yen hok: implement used in cooking marihuana
Zooty: stylish, fashionable
AFTERWORD
IN THE SUMMER OF 1968 D.J. BRUCKNER WENT TO CHICAGO TO cover a political convention for the Los Angeles Times and found himself a war correspondent. Time after time his thoughtful dispatches from the erupting sidewalk fronts dealt with the “Negroid” styles of the young white middle-class street fighters, the wholesale ways in which they mimicked their Black brothers in dress, hairdo, lingo, stance. What he was observing, Bruckner decided, was one more chapter in “a passionate love affair with the ghetto”—carried on by people far removed in color and circumstances from the ghetto.
That love affair in one form or another, sometimes flamboyantly, sometimes furtively, has been going on up and down this country, fired with utmost passion, since the founding days. It heaved up the national theatrical craze of the nineteenth century, the minstrel show, and a very great deal of our popular culture before and since. One of its interminable chapters, a short but meaningful episode, is the story of Mezz Mezzrow.
Mezzrow’s obsessive and unrelenting embrace of the pariah nether world did, to be sure, take him to extremes. He was not unique in adopting the black man’s music, slang, bearing, social and sexual modes—those cultural co-optations were and are to be observed in hundreds and hundreds of whites, sometimes in many millions. He was not alone in hanging around with blacks, moving physically into the closed black world, marrying a black girl and having a child with her. But search all the histories of personal “negrification” as you will, you’ll never turn up another case of a man who after extended immersion in the ghetto came to believe he had actually, physically, turned black.
Mezzrow, after his long years in and under Harlem, did truly think his lips had developed fuller contours, his hair had thickened and burred, his skin had darkened. It was not, as he saw it, a case of transculturation. He felt he had scrubbed himself clean, inside and out, of every last trace of his origins in the Jewish slums of Chicago, pulped himself back to raw human material, deposited that nameless jelly in the pure Negro mold, and pressed himself into the opposite of his birthright, a pure Black.
When I first sought him out in a Greenwich Village jazz club somewhere around 1942, I knew nothing of this personal mythology. I thought he was simply an odd jazz musician who might be the subject for an interesting magazine article. After some nights with him on his home grounds in Harlem, I realized that it would take a lengthy book to do his reincarnation myth full justice. This is the book.
As the job was getting done, it dawned on me that though our ostensible subject was one very particular man it was really about an impersonal matter, a process that sweeps around and through many white American heads: Negrophilia. I began to wonder whether Negrophilia and Negrophobia were, as linear, one-way logic would suggest, polar opposites, or whether to get at the devious psychology of the thing you wouldn’t have to see the two mindsets dialectically, in some other relationship than as mere opposites. After Really the Blues was published, I wrote two essays on the subject, in 1947 and 1948.
This kind of speculation was not in tune with the intellectual climate prevailing in our country just after the war. So I did not publish these theoretical articles in American magazines, except for Commentary. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir did, however, kindly make room for all of my meanderings on this subject in their Paris organ, Les Temps Modernes. Some time after they appeared a young medical student from Martinique, a black man named Frantz Fanon, showed up in Paris to continue his studies. He was reading everything he could get his hands on that had any remote bearing on race and racist psychology. He dug up the things I’d published in Les Temps Modernes and found, apparently, that they related to the problems he was thinking about.
Years later, when he came to write his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, he discussed these pieces of mine in detail, and intelligently. It was an instance of intellectual transculturation that pleased me—ideas do, somehow, however haltingly and by however circuitous a route, get around. Consider, if you will, that the theme of the speculations that follow is, White Skin, Black Masks.
This discussion deals with American popular culture up through the Forties. The scene today is admittedly a radically different one. All the same, I think my commentary has a defensible place alongside the original Mezzrow volume. It is my reaction to the world that Mezzrow was very much a part of. It is also my reaction to the experience of writing the Mezzrow book. In any case, the phenomenon of Negrophilia is still very much with us, though it has taken on stunningly new forms, some of them political. My tentative analysis of this totally remarkable matter may still have some validity—I suspect it does, however arguable it may be.
ECSTATIC IN BLACKFACE
The Negro as a Song-and-Dance Man (1947–48)
“The plaintive and derisive songs of an oppressed people,” anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer notes, “. . . have become the background of the whole society’s pleasures and distractions.” And, according to one of our foremost dance critics, John Martin, the Negro “has certainly given us at least the basis for all our popular dances.” Apparently, if happiness is “a kind of virtue” with us, song and dance are two of its most coveted forms—and these forms we consider almost a monopoly of the Negro, worth borrowing from wholesale.
Strange, this “aesthetic” commerce across the rigid barriers of caste. In two key areas, at least, the pursuit of happiness narrows down pretty much to a pursuit of the Negro; becomes, in fact, a mass touching—even fondling—of the Untouchable. . . .
We pride ourselves on knowing the “real” Negro, the “authentic” Negro; and, over long decades, we have come to equate him with one of our primary Europe-evading folk heroes—the ecstatic song-and-dance man. But does the Negro “give” so freely, through his muscles and his mouth, simply because he is “being himself”? Or is it rather because white America, craving a song and dance it cannot generate itself, so ardently wants him to?
We sense the broader cultural backdrop that sprawls behind the Negro song-and-dance man: it is the whole formalized and institutionalized American joy-quest. The pursuit of happiness, of course, is far more than an abstract political guarantee; in living terms it is a mass striving which fans out to embrace; ultimately, all those things Americans pursue in the hope of being made happy. Under the fun-oriented sway of this mass endeavor come “the whole society’s pleasures and distractions”—the sum-total of our activities over and above our food-getting and rent-pa
ying. And almost everywhere in these “non-useful,” “non-pecuniary” reaches of our culture the image of the Negro crops up with jumping-jack persistence, blithely hurdling caste fences.
It is no secret that our entertainment industries have always featured the Negro prominently, and nearly always in set “happifying” images. From post-colonial times on there has been a strong Negroid component, not only in our song and dance music, but in our vaudeville, drama, cartoons, popular humor, and related fields; and today it shows up, sometimes overwhelmingly, in movies, bestsellers, juke-boxes, dance halls, and so on. But this cultural Negrophilia spreads far beyond the amusement industries. If the entrepreneurs of these industries play up Negro themes it must be because there is a steady current of mass interest in them, and that interest must make itself felt in other areas too.
It does; standard amusement fare quite aside, America is inundated with many more tangible kinds of commodities to which one stock Negroid image or another is attached. One afternoon’s browsing through any fair-sized shopping center will turn up an imposing array of these mass-produced images: on food labels, wallpaper, napkins, nylon stockings, perfumes, bandanas, charm bracelets, earrings, sweaters, men’s shorts, lampshades, ash trays, figurines, the billboard and magazine ads for a wide variety of food and drink. A good deal of our standard décor, in fact, both modern and traditional, is dominated by the Negroid motif. All this, of course, in addition to the Negro’s highly visible presence in many bestsellers, children’s books, dolls, toys, and masks, on postcards and greeting cards.
In certain standard and stylized forms, then—most often radiating from an ecstatic grin—the Negro image is a central feature of our “pleasure” culture. And when such a motif endures so doggedly in the culture of a nation, we can guess that it is heaved up from the more profound “fun-loving” depths of the mass mind; there must be some deep-set mechanism behind its constant display.
What we have, then, is the mass production and consumption of stock images of the Negro in the pleasure-culture of white America—including, of course, the image of the Negro as an ecstatic song-and-dance man. From beginning to end this process is sparked by an intense, at times almost obsessive, cultural interest in the Negro—in the midst of a caste situation whose whole premise is that the Negro, as pariah, hardly deserves a second glance.
There are in our pleasure-culture certain areas in which whites produce images of the Negro for their own consumption, or hire Negroes to act out those images. And there are other areas in which the Negro appears as himself, creating himself in his own image. The Negro song-and-dance man is hailed as such a self-creation; his sounds and movements are taken to reflect only his own “insides.” When this “uncued” ecstatic appears, it is alleged, the whites hug the sidelines as mere passive spectators, memorizing his ad libs for future use.