Who We Be : The Colorization of America (9781466854659)

by Chang, Jeff; Herc, D. j. Kool

  The Yellow Kid was alien, urban, loony, and instantly accessible. He became a killer app for the tabloids, helping elevate the reps and circs of both Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Outcault’s creation is remembered by history because he had gone beyond Saalburg’s Ting-Lings. He had shifted the focus from what whites were not to what whites were.

  The Yellow Kid put the bustle and thump of the streets of New York—where immigrant, white, and Black kids were beating out a new national language of play—right onto his nightie: “Dis is a new piece we’re pla’in.” Yet if street culture could sometimes be leveling, the emerging national visual culture was the opposite. In the 1896 strip “The Yellow Kid’s Great Fight,”4 a Black boy—drawn with a monkey face and round white lips—was knocked out by the Kid, then humiliated by a goat. By the final frame, the goat had taken the gloves from the Black boy—he had no name, was simply referred to as “dat nigger”—and the smiling Yellow Kid’s nightie read, “Dat goat took my part cause I am a kid.”

  Whiteness was the power to define, appropriate, and transfigure. Relocation programs, forced-assimilation projects, anti-immigration laws, and court rulings on racial classification were about defining who could be white. Jim Crow was about defining who was Black—and so it was about who could not be white. In the popular culture, whiteness acted fluidly, displacing and absorbing all the strands of non-whiteness and finally masking itself, while remaining center stage. So in the funnies, over the next half-century, the little Black Sambos and whitened Yellow Kids disappeared, and in their place animals took over the show.

  Strangely—or maybe not so strangely—this development was traceable to a singular trio of a mouse, a dog, and a Kat invented by a New Orleans-born, Los Angeles-raised biracial Black genius. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, which ran from 1913 to 1944, was a thoroughly American invention.5

  Krazy was a black cat in love with Ignatz, a white mouse. Ignatz repaid that with bricks to the head, which Krazy took as signs of tender affection. The white Offissa Bull Pupp expressed his own love for Krazy by chasing down Ignatz and locking him up. It was almost like the Civil War restaged as a bizarre love triangle, full of desire and philosophy and race-bending and gender-shifting and broken English and brick-throwing—race and jokes and casual brutality whipping round in circles in a bright American desert of primary colors.

  Herriman played with black and white, in life and in art. His grandmother was born in Havana. His parents were listed as “mulatto” in public records and his own birth certificate read “colored.” But when he died, “Caucasian” was written on his death certificate. Before Krazy Kat, Herriman’s strip Musical Mose wrung laughs from the ways a blackface Mose attempted to pass for white.6 When he invented Krazy, Ignatz, and Offissa Pupp, he broke out of minstrelsy’s conventions into something new—a quintessential American story of identity, with characters whose destinies depended upon each other, where all of the hurts and laughs came through intimate moments of recognition and misrecognition.

  But the animals that followed Krazy, Ignatz, and Pupp, especially the cartoon ones, revived minstrelsy in new ways. Felix the Cat,7 Mickey Mouse, and Bugs Bunny picked up the big eyes and lips, white gloves, and sideways grins.8 This “blackface design,” as Lehman calls it, was efficient. Inky bodies with big eyes eliminated the need for detail and provided instant comic context.

  Many of the neo-minstrel animals were endowed with yes-we-can optimism and improvisational genius and, when sound—specifically the looney merrie sound of African American music—hit the cartoons, a whole lot of rhythm. Mickey was a corked-down jazz-age mouse. Bugs was a Brooklynized Br’er Rabbit.9 When the animals appeared with Black characters, they appeared more human than the humans, freer than the freed. Eventually the animals also erased kids of color from the funnies page, except for a few remaining Sambo characters.10

  Blackface design and neo-minstrelsy streamlined processes in another significant way. The whitened vaudeville mouse and the urbanized trickster rabbit shouldered the rise of industrial-era entertainment empires. If a national popular culture was forged in nineteenth-century minstrelsy, twentieth-century cartoon neo-minstrelsy helped propel the development of American visual culture.

  The Wee Pals gang. Art from 1973 King Features promotional brochure. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.

  CONFEDERATE FLAGS AND RAINBOWS

  After World War II, NAACP protests against the major studios—Warner Bros., Walter Lantz, Paramount, and others—helped end the era of neo-minstrelsy. By the 1950s, Jackie Ormes was flipping Milton Caniff’s flyboy adventure scripts with Torchy in Heartbeats, a strip featuring the Beyoncé-esque character Torchy Brown, in search of racial justice, hot fashion, and sweet love in faraway places. Oliver Harrington, whose comic-strip character Brother Bootsie was an ordinary Harlemite dealing with the follies of racism and protest, was fleeing the House Un-American Activities Committee to join expats like James Baldwin and Chester Himes in Paris. Ormes’s and Harrington’s works could be read only in Black newspapers.

  Original art of the first Wee Pals strip, published February 15, 1965. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.

  If such history felt weighty, Morrie Turner’s characters shrugged it off. In the first Wee Pals strip, published on February 15, 1965, Turner introduced three of his principal characters: Randy, an Afroed Black boy in a smart cardigan; Oliver, a clean-cut, overweight, white Spanky McFarland preppie with huge spectacles; and Turner’s alter ego, Nipper, the soul of the strip—a small, unathletic Black child possessed of a gentle trickster wit.

  In Alabama, civil rights demonstrators were about to march into a month of deadly clashes with white supremacists and state police. But Turner drew—and would always draw—Nipper’s eyes covered by a Civil War–era Confederate soldier’s hat, the better to call attention to the boy’s perpetual smirk. In that debut strip, Nipper spent the first three panels parading in front of Randy and Oliver waving a rebel flag. “Obviously,” Randy remarked to Oliver, “American history is not a required subject of the kindergarten class.”

  In later strips, Nipper would learn about the Civil War. But he chose to keep the hat. “We pardon in the degree that we love,” he’d tell Wellington, a mop-topped, turtleneck-sporting white kid.

  The blackface animals were gone. Instead Turner drew kids—usually in midrun on the way to play—having profound discussions about race and community. Youth—as Alain Locke, the herald of the Harlem Renaissance and the savant of Black visual culture, had once put it—speaks for itself.

  The ink on the Civil Rights Act had not yet dried. The Voting Rights Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act were soon to be signed. But Wee Pals already belonged to the future. Oliver introduced the neighborhood kids to each other. Here was Peter “the Mexican-American,” George “the Oriental,”11 Rocky “the full-blooded American Indian,” and Randy, who, Oliver paused to note, was “a Afro-American, Negro, Black, Colored, Soul Brother.”

  “And what are you?” Peter asked Oliver.

  “Very careful!” Oliver replied.

  The expanding Wee Pals cast would include Ralph, an “Archie Bunker-type character” who served as a narrative foil, a deaf girl named Sally, and a fireball feminist named Connie. She tormented Oliver, because the only hole in his Berkeley-raised political correctness was his gender insensitivity. It was up to Sybil Wrights, a sensitive and sensible Black girl, to check and correct Connie’s temperamental excesses.

  When the neighborhood baseball team needed to come up with a nickname, the boys began arguing, coming up with names that might befit a sequel to The Warriors. George suggested “The Yellow Dragons,” Rocky “The Redskins,” Jerry “The Mitzvah Boys,” Randy “The Black Bombers,” Paul “The Brown Destroyers.” It fell to Nipper to suggest the obvious choice: “The Rainbows.” Jesse Jackson might have been taking notes.

  THE VALUE OF HUMOR

  Morrie Turner was born on December 11, 1923, the youngest of four boys. His parents had met in New Orleans, th
at first great continental city of miscegeny. His mother, Nora, had attended Southern University and worked as a teacher and a nurse. His father, James, shined shoes until he secured a job as a Pullman porter, working the line to Chicago. By the time Turner was born, they had settled in West Oakland, California, not far from the transcontinental railroad terminus.

  Much later, television producers—led by a young exec named Mike Eisner who would go on to build a “Disney Renaissance” on cartoon films like The Lion King, Pocahontas, Mulan—began adapting Wee Pals into a cartoon renamed Kid Power. They asked Turner where he had come up with the idea. “I told them I lived it. West Oakland, believe it or not, because it was the Depression, it was totally integrated,” Turner said. “We were all poor—yeah, ghettoized—but there were all the races there.”

  From his mantle Turner would pull down a photo of his 1929 kindergarten class at Cole Elementary. The sepia photo had faded, yet the picture bore more color than the American imagination could handle for decades to come. Among the thirty-seven children, there were seven Blacks; six Mexican Americans; two Chinese Americans; a Japanese American; and the Native American girl with the heart-shaped face, the object of his unrequited crush. Some held teddy bears or rag dolls. Three of them waved American flags. Turner pointed out the friends who took him to their Portuguese festivals, Jewish synagogue events, and Chinese lunar New Year parties. “You didn’t know what the heck was going on, but you knew there was a lot of food there,” he laughed.

  While his father was working the rails, the boys ran to the park, played games, or headed to Yosemite Gym to box. His brothers were well known in the neighborhood; elders called them “the fighting Turners” with equal parts exasperation and bemusement. Morrie preferred spending time reading Krazy Kat, The Katzenjammer Kids, and Terry and the Pirates, and drawing imaginary friends. When he was twelve, he wrote to Milton Caniff asking for advice on how to be a cartoonist. Caniff answered with a letter that was six pages long, typed and single-spaced.

  When Turner’s schoolwork wasn’t going so well, he dreaded the days his father returned from Chicago. In the middle of the last beating Turner received, the boy dove under the bed and scampered like a sand crab from one end to the other until his father was laughing so hard he gave up. “I learned the value of humor that day,” Turner said.

  War broke out. The Japanese American family across the street disappeared. Turner graduated from Berkeley High in 1942 and was drafted. On his way to Kentucky to join the 477th Army Air Forces Bomber Group, an all-Black unit that served as one of the feeders for the famed Tuskegee Airmen, he encountered segregated facilities. At the base, hostilities ran even higher. Turner had arrived shortly after the Freeman Field Mutiny, a proto–civil rights protest in which Black officers desegregated a white officers’ club. Over 160 Black airmen had been arrested in the aftermath, and two of the group’s squadrons had been inactivated.

  Assigned night duty after a full day of hard labor, Turner snuck a copy of Richard Wright’s Black Boy to his post to read, and fell asleep. A white MP shook him awake, and dragged him into military custody. Turner was charged with neglect of duty. The white prosecuting officer was determined to make an example of him. Turner spent nearly a month in the brig at Fort Knox.

  As he awaited his hearing, the army assigned decorated Black colonel Benjamin Davis to oversee the 477th in an effort to reduce racial tensions. Black officers now took leadership positions, and Turner’s case was dismissed. But even under Davis’s leadership, it became clear to the members of the “overtrained” 477th that they would not get a chance to prove their mettle overseas. Like hundreds of thousands of other African American soldiers, Turner never saw combat. Instead, his commanding officer assigned him to draw cartoons for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, a job Turner was happy to take.

  When Turner returned home, he married his high-school sweetheart, Letha, and took a subpoena clerk job at the Oakland Police Department that allowed him to doodle through the night shift. He began selling his work to Boy Scout and baking magazines, then to a number of mainstream magazines. He seemed to be following the career of one of his heroes, the African American illustrator E. Simms Campbell.12

  As his cartoons began appearing in Collier’s, Better Homes and Gardens, and the Saturday Evening Post, he decided to quit his night job. But only Negro Digest, which made Turner a regular contributor, purchased his work that featured nonwhite characters. Inspired by Dick Gregory and Martin Luther King Jr., Turner wanted more.

  One night Charles Schulz gave a presentation at a local cartoonists’ meeting on the evolution of his strip and its characters. That night Turner went home and created Nipper and a Black version of Oliver, the beginnings of an urban Peanuts gang. Two Black newspapers, the Berkeley Post and the Chicago Defender, picked up his new strip, Dinky Fellas. Soon Turner realized an all-Black strip was not going to work. He needed characters of other cultures to complete the jokes he was writing. The revised Dinky Fellas became Wee Pals. When the tiny Lew Little Enterprises syndicate picked it up, Turner was forty-one years old.

  Between George Herriman’s death in 1944 and Morrie Turner’s national debut in 1965, the industry and the country had changed. The comics business had become huge, the form had become standardized, and the content had turned conservative. Comic strips were decades behind the social mainstream. Turner was a middle-aged man in tune with the children of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. But the funny pages were less a mirror of the tastes of children than of middle-aged men.

  “I went to a Boston newspaper, I think it was the Globe,” Morrie recalled. “I showed it to the editor. He said, ‘I showed it to some Negro people around here. They wasn’t impressed.’ I said, ‘Why don’t you try showing it to some Black people?’ He looked at me like, What the hell are you saying to me? I shook his hand and I said, ‘Thanks for your time,’ and I left.”

  “Humor In Hue” from Negro Digest, February 1967. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.

  HOW IT FEELS TO BE AMERICAN

  For most of the 1960s, Turner’s best customer was Negro Digest, later renamed Black World. There, his Humor in Hue cartoons ran between discussions on the role of Black artists in American culture, essays by John Hope Franklin and John Henrik Clarke, and poems by Nikki Giovanni and Amiri Baraka. The strips reflected the sharpening militancy in Black America.

  In November 1961 Turner had drawn a strip for Negro Digest in which a blond girl painted a Black boy’s face white and then told him, “Now Mother won’t forbid our playing together!” But by the end of 1966, Stokely Carmichael and Huey Newton had stepped onto the national stage and Turner was drawing a mischievous Black boy scaring the shopping boxes out of a white matron’s arms with the whisper of two words: “Black Power!”13 As the long, hot summer drew to a close, even Turner was losing his patience. Turner’s strip for the September 1967 issue depicted a boy turning from a TV western to ask his father, “Why do they call it ‘colored television’ when there ain’t none on it?”

  Turner directed his swelling anger at those he felt were exploiting the issue of race: white segregationists, white admen, even Black nationalists. And in his rage he seemed to have gained a level of prescience. He drew a Black psychotherapist with an African American man clad in Nazi gear on the couch. The shrink remarked, deadpan: “Your case is destined to make psychiatric history.” With that strip, Turner had anticipated by over three decades Dave Chappelle’s pivotal “post-racial” skit, the blind Black white supremacist Clayton Bigsby.

  His cynicism was peaking when the National Cartoonists Society invited him to join a four-week USO Thanksgiving tour to Vietnam. Police incidents had sparked major riots in the inner cities of Detroit and Newark. Nearly a thousand Americans and many more Vietnamese were dying each month overseas. Turner strongly opposed the war, and antiwar demonstrations were mounting. But over the protests of friends and family members he agreed to go.

  Turner landed in Saigon with five other cartoonists, all of whom were als
o veterans. Three were pro-war, two others, Bil Keane and Bill Sanders, were also antiwar, a perfect pollster’s sample. No longer a twenty-one-year-old private grounded in a segregated company thousands of miles from the front, Turner would finally see war up close.

  The artists visited an airfield where operating tables had been set up. The units had been battling to take a hill nearby. They were on their third or fourth try. Helicopters buzzed in with wounded men, arms and legs and heads riddled with shrapnel or blown to bits, clothes ripped and stained with blood, screams piercing through the roar of the choppers.

  The cartoonists moved on to the hospital, where they met with the soldiers, told jokes, and drew pictures of them—soldiers’ wheelchairs transformed into baby carriages with helicopter blades carrying them away. They would spend the next four weeks going through South Vietnam, dressed in army gear and combat boots like the troops, entertaining them. “You felt good about yourself,” Turner recalled. “But honestly, what they had us doing was kind of stupid.”

  Turner was struggling to reconcile everything he was feeling. The South Vietnamese, he couldn’t help but notice, were treating him with more deference than his white colleagues. “It had to have been my skin,” he said. And what the hell was this war about anyway? They were all dying.

  One afternoon Turner sat down in a quiet room to have a smoke. Nothing made sense, an unfocused rage was mounting, and he needed to clear his head. A white MP appeared. “You don’t want to sit there,” the MP told him. Turner bit down on his cigarette. He was almost twice the age he had been when he had been locked in the brig. He was not going down this road again. He glared at the MP.

  “Why?” he asked, his back stiffening.

  “Those are caskets,” the MP said.

  Turner sprung up and scanned the room—there were dozens of cordwood boxes, stacked three high. They were filled with the bodies of those who had fought and died and were going home. In his anger, pride, and shame, he realized that this was the first time he had ever felt fully American.