by Mezz Mezzrow
But in these pariah-elite exchanges the emotional traffic is not always one way; it sometimes happens that the “spectator” is really the star performer—by proxy. Most often, despite the claims of many whites to an uncanny sort of racial omniscience, their concept of “the Negro as he really is” turns out to be a coy fiction, designed to camouflage the Negro as the white world sees him and forces him to behave. By a devious interracial irony the “creative” Negro, far from being his own spontaneous self, may actually be dramatizing the white man’s image of the “spontaneous” Negro “as he really is.” Ad libs, too, can be cunningly cued; even ecstasy, or what passes for it, can be an extremely learned response.
No doubt the Negro sings and dances lavishly, unstintingly, to a degree that is unheard-of among other groups in America; and out of his “effortless” creations have come our most characteristic forms of song and movement, the only ones we did not import from Europe. But what we take, in the singing and dancing Negro, for his own self-portrait may very well be a composite portrait which the white world has slapped together haphazardly out of its own emotional leftovers and flung over the Negro. We may be creating, via the Negro’s musculature and larynx, what we could not create in our own persons. So that the “happifying” Negro ecstatic we pursue so hotly may be a lot closer to us than we think; he may be our own phantom self—in blackface. More and more we are coming round to the view that the pariah in any caste society is in large part molded by the master’s image of him. The anti-Semite, says Sartre, creates the Jew.
The pariah, it must be remembered, has few norms of his own to sustain him; the norms under which he is born and lives out his life are those laid down by his masters; it is a difficult matter not to see himself, to some degree, through his master’s eyes. His master’s eyes are mirrors; his sense of selfness is largely a reflex of what he sees there.
In part, then, “the” Negro must be a “reflex being”—what Gunnar Myrdal calls a “reactive personality”—led by the encompassing glare of his culture to think that he is, after all, something like the lowly thing his masters think he is. But the caste system has never taken such totalitarian hold of the American unconscious as it presumably did for long centuries of the Hindu; if it had, jazz, jitterbugging, and jive could never have evaded their cultural quarantine in slave quarters and ghetto. Nor would the white man mimic the Black man’s culture as he has done and continues to do. It follows that there must also be a more conscious level of personality shaping—one unique with the American Negro—on which an entirely different order of “distortion” takes place.
In part, too, the Negro must sense that he deviates from his master’s official picture of him, the one on which the whole structure of caste rests. He gleans that, far from being merely an abomination, he is in some way an object of considerable admiration and envy too. But in a world controlled by whites, he must conceal his inner departures from the official norms they have worked out for him; everything depends on it. If he is not wholly a “reactive personality,” he must pretend to be. When the reflex falters, a false face must be clapped on.
Unless, of course, the white man will not take offense at such personality “lapses.” That happens in very special cases, as when Br’er Rabbit turns into Bigger Thomas—or when New Orleans jazz, largely an accommodation to the mask, suddenly erupts into bop, a partial jibe at the mask.
There is, then, a nimble interplay of image, reflex, and false face across the caste lines which is death to all real spontaneity. It is nowhere more striking than in the entertainment fields, which feature the “spontaneous” Negro. In fact, most Negroes in our culture spend most of their lives “on”; the eyes of the white community seldom wander far from them. Every Negro is to some extent a performer.
Reflex, or the simulation of reflex—jazz, like most of the Negro’s cultural creations, has traditionally teetered between these two extremes. Yet there are those who make a cult of this or that Negroidism without noting this dizzy shuttling between genuine robotism and mock robotism in the Negro performer; who consider the object of their interest, whether he acts reflexively or calculatedly, “the Negro as he really is.”
Aren’t they missing the whole point of the performance? Instead of grasping the phenomenon that unfolds before their eyes they themselves become part of the phenomenon—for their eyes cue the performance. The more they relish the Negro on the stage as “authentic,” blinding themselves to the degree of calculation in the performance, the more must the Negro performer cling to the masks which they take for real faces. It makes no difference whether he feels at home in them or not. His audience does not recognize that order of subjective problem. The relationship across the footlights is not between subject and subject, but between subject and object.
Myrdal sums up this proliferating irony in a suggestive phrase: the tyranny of expectancy. The white man’s expectant imaging is the tyrant that bludgeons the pariah’s personality into being what it “really” is in a caste situation, whether as automaton or as masquerader. But anybody who does not see the subtle dividing line between reflex and false face, who overlooks the point at which because becomes as if and conscious intent creeps into the performance, has closed his eyes to the real meaning of most Negro art forms. At the same time, he guarantees that the Negro will continue to create himself in everybody’s image but his own. The truth about the Negro performer is that he is required to be a Negro impersonator.
The purely passive, pliable, reactive side of the Negro is steadily losing ground to the consciously manipulated mask which he dons as part of a deliberate act. That is, the extent to which he really feels himself to be what the white man thinks he is is dwindling, and the extent to which he pretends to be this or that, to achieve certain effects among certain groups of whites, is on the rise. And in that murky inner space where the mechanical fades into the willful lies the source of most Negro art forms. If the shift is ever completed the mask will be thrown off entirely and a startling new crop of art forms will mushroom.
The American caste system, which never set too well on the national mind, is now losing its hold entirely on the Negro’s inner life. If he still goes through the motions of caste ritual, on or off the stage, it is now a maneuver rather than a reflex, carried off with all sorts of subtle interpolations not called for by the script.
The unique thing about the American Negro is that he has never been fully able to take what he saw in his culture’s mirror for gospel truth. All along, from the day the first slaver discharged its human cargo on American shores, his life has had overtones of as if. No doubt that not-quite-real quality of his daily experience has had a lot to do with crystalizing the Negro’s engulfing sense of the absurd and his penchant for sheer nonsense. A burgeoning giggle can be traced in the Negro dance from the beginning—from the plantation shuffle and Cakewalk to the triple lindy and the applejack. There was already a leavening of irreverent laughter in New Orleans jazz, even in the earlier blues; and bop is, above all, a satirical music.
Indeed, the stylized grin that motored the Negro’s song and dance, and which we took for a simple beam of ecstasy, may have been, from the start, less transparent and more enigmatic than we had imagined. The Negro must, in fact, impersonate the song-and-dance man said to be lurking in him. Whatever touches of his own he adds to the animated picture—sly interpolations, satirical asides, nihilistic nonsense, mock emotionalism, dabs of caricature—must be applied around the edges, blended imperceptibly into the background. These touches may also be applied by his Black brothers and sisters; in this sense the Black community itself tends to reinforce the Blackface image. Any outright flinging aside of the image, any wiping off of the standard grin, will be tolerated only in special circumstances.
In India the caste system was held to derive from the “natural” fact that Brahma created the noble Brahmins from his forehead, other intermediate castes from his arms, torso, etc., while the pariahs emanated from the god’s lowliest anatomical portions
or, indeed, from sources in no way divine. Accordingly the Brahmins could not be touched by the pariahs simply because the god’s lowliest parts were not worthy to touch his loftiest ones. But a systematic vaulting of all barriers occurred in the sakti-puja, orgies among members of all castes, whose purpose was the wholesale venting of all taboo urges. Sakti-puja was also given a religious sanction: the orgy was actually organized as a celebration of sakti, “the power of the god in female form,” and the taboo meat and drink consumed were first sanctified by offering portions of them to Vishnu, the goddess Sakti, and the female body representing Sakti.
Obviously it is possible to enforce caste protocol in public and violate it in private, along with other rigid regulations, only when a community is tightly organized around a set of myths with the aura of divine origination about them. Then both the prohibition and its disturbance can be attributed to the divine will, and ambivalence is projected out from the individual psyche into the remote control-room of the gods. Once the doubleness is defined as a dictate of supernatural powers it is no longer a human failing, the individual can wear one face in public and another in private without being disturbed by the apparent disparity between them. Consider, by way of contrast, the terrible guilt-ridden ambivalence that wracked the whole American South for two full centuries and more over the furtive sex relations between white men and Negro women.
We see where the “singlemindedness” of the Brahmin, and therefore of the Untouchable, comes from. It is ambivalence drained of guilt and uneasiness through being disguised as obedience to the manifold and unfathomable dictates of the gods, the supervisorial powers of the universe. Thanks to the device of divine sanction the Brahmin found it possible to be entirely consistent in the public and private departments of behavior without the two consciously clashing or even confronting each other. Hate was confined to one area, love to another; the linkage between the two was not at all apparent, one in no obvious way infiltrated the other. And because the Brahmin was so “together” in each department, the pariah, as a reactive personality, was too.
So there was no inconsistency noticeable between the Brahmin’s socio-economic deportment and his cultural deportment. Socio-economically he defined the pariah as unworthy of notice; and in his official culture he did not notice him. Culturally the Untouchable was as untouchable as elsewhere, and so it came about that the Untouchable played his lowly flute and the Brahmin plunked his lofty lute and the two types of music (and the dance forms associated with them) remained as steadfastly separate as did the men who made them.
It is very much as though the Hindu Untouchable, breaking painfully out of the crust of his culture, had suddenly realized that for two thousand years he had been a sleepwalker enacting a vast lie as though it were gospel truth. If he decided to keep up the masquerade for quite practical reasons—or simply because, as yet, he had no fully composed face of his own in reserve for such emergencies—it would now be on the basis of as if rather than because. And no doubt he would inject a little “face-saving” satire into his rendition of the role.
We have never been able in our own caste dealings to develop this kind of orderliness, love here, hate there, of the Hindi. Ambivalence surfaces from minute to minute in our daily lives—the subterranean bobs up, the private permeates the public, the cultural attitude mocks the socio-economic. We are not a community in the tight, rigid, monolithic sense that the Indians were; we have no unilinear myths that we share to such a mass extent that we can use them to departmentalize our cleaved emotions and give to each department a sanction from on high.
Emotionally we are infinitely more fluid, turbulent, tossed, our loves and hates confusedly meshed. Unable to rid ourselves of the guilts attached to ambivalence—because we have no firmly enthroned myth figures onto whom we can project the whole both-and state—we can rarely take up any one attitude or sentiment with complete conviction, to the steady exclusion of its opposite. Without the “divine word” to steady it, our emotional polarity remains in constant uneasy motion, always reversing itself, turning now one face upward and now its opposite.
To be sure, there were many attempts made in the early days of slavery to work up theological principles that would sanction the enslavement of Negroes by Christians. But they were doomed to failure, first because of the ambivalence inherent in Christian doctrine itself (the doctrine of eternal damnation as the fate of all infidels as against the doctrine of all living things being the creatures of God and therefore deserving equally of charity), second because of the clash between a theology that was somehow made to justify slavery and the democratic ethos. So the taboos essential to the institution of slavery, and later to the institution of caste, never could receive any real divine sanction, and many whites must accordingly have suspected that they were entirely arbitrary, the rankest after-the-fact rationalizations.
In such a climate there must have been considerable impulse from the American beginning to violate these caste taboos, since restrictions that smack of the arbitrary never rest easily on people. But theological sanction could no more be found for the violations than for the taboos that men wanted to violate. The white man was caught, as a result of the never adequately motivated caste system, in the emotional trap of ambivalence.
And this ambivalence, because it could not be clamped in position by mythic props, came constantly to the surface of daily life. Its first manifestations was our obsessive cultural-aesthetic curiosity about the Negro who, as pariah, was defined in socio-economic areas as beneath notice. From this early curiosity about the pariah, out of which was born last century’s prime popular art form, the minstrel show, came many of the characteristic features of our present-day mass culture.
It might be said that in many significant respects our mass culture is now, and has always been, the form which sakti-puja takes in America. Jazz, jitterbugging, zoot, jive, Negrophilia in general—these are daily street-corner and hangout sakti-pujas taking place in the open because we have no techniques for draining off our all-at-once emotions about the beckoning Untouchable in private.
It follows that with us, Negrophilia and Negrophobia are not, or are not just, polar opposites. We may have to see them, before we’re through, as the two sides of one coin, a coin we’re forever flipping. We can’t help ourselves. By the law of averages, it comes up now heads, now tails. By the law of association, every time one side shows up, we’re acutely aware of the presence of the other just below.
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The sociology of jazz, as of all cultural transactions between the castes, is clear enough. There is, first of all, the general phenomenon: the white world, violating all of its caste conceits about the pariah’s worth, constantly places images of the Negro before itself or encourages the Negro to impersonate those images. Almost always, of course, these stilted pictures embody stubborn preconceived notions, rooted in a subsoil of white need and yearning which deserves the most careful study.
What if an elite poaches culturally on its own pariah over many decades? It can happen that the social effects of the pariah’s creations seep back into them to infuse their aesthetic essences; that the social all but floods the aesthetic.
In Negro music and dance, assuredly, the profounder truths are more often sociological than aesthetic. That is precisely the cramping limitation of all pariah culture, especially of that intended for export across caste lines. For its content is ultimately the creation of its intended audience, and the apparent creator is most typically only a middleman between the white as tyrannical psychic impresario and the same white as passive sidelines consumer.
The Negro’s role in all this is hardly one of “self-expression.” He simply dispenses to his masters the wish-filled images that emanated from them in the first place—while adding more and more pointed comments under his breath.
In these very special joy areas the Negro is regarded as a capsule of undiluted “aestheticism,” immune to the arrows of outer circumstance. Why it should be thought that the Negro, smot
hered by the harshest set of social circumstances in America, should be the only American fully insulated against circumstance, is a little difficult to understand; but perhaps what is wanted here is the most dramatic demonstration that can be had of the-subjective-conquering-the-social. Feeling crushed by the circumstances themselves, Negrophiliac whites prefer to see the Negro as a pre-social creature in whom the romping subjective is king; the Negro must be defined from “within” because we feel ourselves so thoroughly puppetized from “without.” The theory would seem to be that the Negro is lucky to be a pariah: banished to the outskirts of the community, he thus evades all the pressures and batterings to which one is subjected at the center and which are lethal to the “inner spark.”
In this view aestheticism—which here means little more than emotionality, instinct-release, the good time: in short, the stock forms of happiness we pursue—is a luxury of the periphery. It denotes a carefree, pleasure-bound state which must be given up when one becomes “serious” and enters into the life of the workaday community. In our wistful social geography, the aesthete is the dweller on the outskirts. The white aesthete, or would-be aesthete, is shocked, therefore, and even feels betrayed, when his fringe-Negro’s joyous brow becomes furrowed by the sober concerns of the orthodox: by “serious” dance and “serious” music, among other things. This, to the white, smacks of selling a priceless birthright. It amounts to trading ecstasy for respectability, sex for prestige, spontaneity for technique, folk vigor for sophisticated gentility, the solar plexus for prefrontal lobe.
By turning to Negro art forms to sidestep harrying social “irrelevancies” the white joy seeker helps to perpetuate an image of the Negro artist as a “natural” singing and dancing creature who is impervious to the pummelings of social forces. He seeks the mythological Negro—an inveterately thick-skinned idol who is nourished exclusively from “within,” who lusts and exults come what may, whom “nothing gets down.” And for the Negro jazz musician the presence of such an aesthete in the vanguard of his audience is a social fact he can’t blink. This aesthete must be catered to, under penalty of splintering his pure-joy trance and driving him away.