The Purple Decades

by Tom Wolfe

  Pedagogy

  “Go ahead. Try me. The next one of you peckerwoods who sprays burning lighter fluid into my locker, boosts the tape deck out of my car or pees on the upholstery, hits me in the back of the head in the hallway with a johnny-mop canister or a urinal puck, tries any mackin’ or jackin’ in the back of the class, seals up this room with Krazy Glue so I can’t get out, makes goomba-goomba sounds and asks the substitute teacher if she’s got life insurance, or refers to me as ‘you mollyfoggin’ lamehead,’ is gonna get a new hole in his nose.”

  MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS

  l

  Going downtown to mau-mau the bureaucrats got to be the routine practice in San Francisco. The poverty program encouraged you to go in for mau-mauing. They wouldn’t have known what to do without it. The bureaucrats at City Hall and in the Office of Economic Opportunity talked “ghetto” all the time, but they didn’t know any more about what was going on in the Western Addition, Hunters Point, Potrero Hill, the Mission, Chinatown, or south of Market Street than they did about Zanzibar. They didn’t know where to look. They didn’t even know who to ask. So what could they do? Well … they used the Ethnic Catering Service … right … They sat back and waited for you to come rolling in with your certified angry militants, your guaranteed frustrated ghetto youth, looking like a bunch of wild men. Then you had your test confrontation. If you were outrageous enough, if you could shake up the bureaucrats so bad that their eyes froze into iceballs and their mouths twisted up into smiles of sheer physical panic, into shit-eating grins, so to speak—then they knew you were the real goods. They knew you were the right studs to give the poverty grants and community organizing jobs to. Otherwise they wouldn’t know.

  There was one genius in the art of confrontation who had mau-mauing down to what you could term a laboratory science. He had it figured out so he didn’t even have to bring his boys downtown in person. He would just show up with a crocus sack full of revolvers, ice picks, fish knives, switchblades, hatchets, blackjacks, gravity knives, straight razors, hand grenades, blow guns, bazookas, Molotov cocktails, tank rippers, unbelievable stuff, and he’d dump it all out on somebody’s shiny walnut conference table. He’d say “These are some of the things I took off my boys last night … I don’t know, man … Thirty minutes ago I talked a Panther out of busting up a cop …” And they would lay money on this man’s ghetto youth patrol like it was now or never … The Ethnic Catering Service … Once they hired the Ethnic Catering Service, the bureaucrats felt like it was all real. They’d say to themselves, “We’ve given jobs to a hundred of the toughest hard-core youth in Hunters Point. The problem is on the way to being solved.” They never inquired if the bloods they were giving the jobs to were the same ones who were causing the trouble. They’d say to themselves, “We don’t have to find them. They find us” … Once the Ethnic Catering Service was on the case, they felt like they were reaching all those hard-to-reach hard-to-hold hard-core hardrock blackrage badass furious funky ghetto youth.

  There were people in the Western Addition who practically gave classes in mau-mauing. There was one man called Chaser. Chaser would get his boys together and he would give them a briefing like the U.S. Air Force wing commander gives his pilots in Thailand before they make the raid over North Vietnam, the kind of briefing where everybody is supposed to picture the whole mission like a film in their heads, the landmarks, the Red River, the approach pattern, the bombing run, every twist and turn, the SAM missile sites, the getaway, everything. In the same way Chaser would picture the room you would be heading into. It might be a meeting of the Economic Opportunity Council, which was the San Francisco poverty-program agency, or the National Alliance of Businessmen, which was offering jobs for the hard core, or the Western Regional Office of the Office of Economic Opportunity, or whatever, and he’d say:

  “Now don’t forget. When you go downtown, y’all wear your ghetto rags … see … Don’t go down there with your Italian silk jerseys on and your brown suede and green alligator shoes and your Harry Belafonte shirts looking like some supercool toothpick-noddin’ fool … you know … Don’t nobody give a damn how pretty you can look … You wear your combat fatigues and your leather pieces and your shades … your ghetto rags … see … And don’t go down there with your hair all done up nice in your curly Afro like you’re messing around. You go down with your hair stickin’ out … and sittin’ up! Lookin’ wild! I want to see you down there looking like a bunch of wild niggers!”

  This Chaser was a talker. He used to be in vaudeville. At least that was what everybody said. That was how he learned to be such a beautiful talker. When the poverty program started, he organized his own group in the Western Addition, the Youth Coalition. Chaser was about forty, and he wasn’t big. He was small, physically. But he knew how to make all those young aces of his take care of business. Chaser was black with a kind of brown hue. He had high cheekbones, like an Indian. He always wore a dashiki, over some ordinary pants and a Ban-lon shirt. He had two of these Ban-lon shirts and he alternated them. Anyway, he always wore the dashiki and a beret. He must not have had much hair on top of his head, because on the sides his hair stuck out like a natural, but the beret always laid flat. If he had as much hair on the top of his head as he had sticking out on the sides, that beret would have been sitting up in the air like the star on a Christmas tree. When everybody started wearing the Afros, it was hard on a lot of older men who were losing their hair. They would grow it long on the sides anyway and they would end up looking like that super-Tom on the Uncle Ben Rice box, or Bozo the Clown. Sometimes Chaser would wear a big heavy overcoat, one of those big long heavy double-breasted triple-button quadruple-lapel numbers like you see the old men wearing in Foster’s Cafeteria. When you saw Chaser with that big coat on, over top of the dashiki, you’d have to smile, because then you knew Chaser wasn’t in anybody’s bag. Chaser was in Chaser’s bag. That was all right, because you don’t meet many men like Chaser. If there is any such thing as a born leader, he was one of them.

  “Now, you women,” he’d say. “I don’t want you women to be macking with the brothers if they ain’t tending to business. You women make your men get out of the house and get to work for the Youth Coalition. Don’t you be macking around with nobody who ain’t out working for the Youth Coalition. If he ain’t man enough to be out on the street working for the people, then he ain’t man enough for you to be macking around with.”

  This worked like a charm with the women and with the men, too. Chaser kept saying “You women,” but he was really talking to the men. He was challenging their masculinity. A lot of these young aces knew that their women thought they weren’t man enough to stand up and make something out of themselves. And the women liked what he was saying, too, because he was including them in on the whole thing.

  Then Chaser would say, “Now when we get there, I want you to come down front and stare at the man and don’t say nothing. You just glare. No matter what he says. He’ll try to get you to agree with him. He’ll say, ‘Ain’t that right?’ and ‘You know what I mean?’ and he wants you to say yes or nod your head … see … It’s part of his psychological jiveass. But you don’t say nothing. You just glare … see … Then some of the other brothers will get up on that stage behind him, like there’s no more room or like they just gathering around. Then you brothers up there behind him, you start letting him have it … He starts thinking, ‘Oh, good God! Those bad cats are in front of me, they all around me, they behind me. I’m surrounded.’ That shakes ’em up.

  “And then when one of the brothers is up talking, another brother comes up and whispers something in his ear, like this,” and Chaser cups his hand around his mouth like he’s whispering something. “And the brother stops talking, like he’s listening, and the man thinks, ‘What’s he saying? What kind of unbelievable shit are they planning now?’ The brother, he’s not saying anything. He’s just moving his lips. It’s a tactic … you know … And at the end I’ll slap my hand down on th
e desk—whop—and everybody gets up, like one man, and walks out of there. And that really shakes ‘em up. They see that the people are unified, and disciplined, and mad, and tired of talking and ready for walking, and that shakes ’em up.”

  Chaser had his two main men, James Jones and Louis Downs. Downs was Chaser’s showpiece. He was sharp. He was young and had a very athletic build. He had a haircut of the intellectual-natural variety and a pair of José Feliciano sunglasses and a black leather dashiki, and he’d have on a pair of A-1 racer pants. The A-1 racers are not just narrow, they’re like a stovepipe, with the 16½-inch cuffs. And he’d have on either a pair of Vietnam combat boots with the green webbing or a pair of tennis shoes, but a really expensive kind of tennis shoe. You look at them and you know he really had to look especially hard to find that pair. He’d always be bracing his hands in front of him, pressing the heels of his hands together, which made the muscles pop up around his neck and his shoulders. James Jones was Chaser’s philosopher. He was a talker, too. He’d come on like a Southern Christian Leadership preacher, giving all the reasons why, and then Downs would come on hard and really sharp. Between the three of them, Chaser and Downs and James Jones, they were like the Three Musketeers. They were beautiful to behold.

  Chaser was funny. Just like he had everything planned out on his side, right down to the last detail, he thought the Man must have it planned out that far, too. Chaser had a kind of security paranoia. At a demonstration or something you’d see Chaser giving instructions to his boys with his hand over his mouth. He’d always be talking with his hand over his mouth, mumbling into his fingers, and he’d tell his boys to talk that way, too. Chaser was convinced that the Man had electronic eavesdropping devices trained on them. He’d tell you about the “parabolic earphones” and the deaf-mutes. He believed that the Man had trained a corps of deaf-mutes to read lips for crowd control. He’d have you believing it, too. It was like, What would you do if you were a deaf-mute and shuffling and shitkicking through life and the government comes along and offers to pay you money for reading lips and playing C.I.A … . Chaser didn’t blame them any more than he’d blame a dog … They were being exploited like all the other Toms that didn’t know any better …

  Brothers like Chaser were the ones who perfected mau-mauing, but before long everybody in the so-called Third World was into it. Everybody was out mau-mauing up a storm, to see if they could win the victories the blacks had won. San Francisco, being the main port of entry for immigrants from all over the Pacific, had as many colored minorities as New York City. Maybe more. Blacks, Chicanos, Latinos, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, American Indians, Samoans—everybody was circling around the poverty program. By the end of 1968 there were eighty-seven different groups getting into the militant thing, getting into mau-mauing.

  Nobody kept records on the confrontations, which is too bad. There must have been hundreds of them in San Francisco alone. Across the country there must have been thousands. When the confrontations touched the white middle class in a big way, like when black students started strikes and disruptions at San Francisco State, Columbia, Cornell, or Yale, or when somebody like James Forman came walking up to the pulpit of the Riverside Church carrying a four-pound cane the size of the shillelagh the Fool Killer used to lug around to the State Fair to kill fools with—when Forman got up there with that hickory stick like he was going to swat all undeserving affluent white Christians over the bean unless they paid five hundred million dollars in reparations—then the media described it blow by blow. But what went on in the colleges and churches was just a part of it. Bad dudes were out mau-mauing at all the poverty agencies, at boards of education, at city halls, hospitals, conventions, foundations, schools, charities, civic organizations, all sorts of places. It got to be an American custom, like talk shows, Face the Nation, marriage counseling, marathon encounters, or zoning hearings.

  That was certainly the way the message came down to the youth of the Third World in areas like the Mission, Chinatown, and Japan Town. Mau-mauing was the ticket. The confrontation route was the only road. So the Chinese, the Japanese, the Chicanos, the Indians picked up on mau-mauing from the bloods. Not only that, they would try to do it exactly like the bloods. They’d talk like the bloods, dress like the bloods, try to wear naturals like the bloods, even if their hair was too straight to do it. There were Spanish and Oriental dudes who washed their hair every day with Borax to make it fluff up and sit out.

  When anybody other than black people went in for mau-mauing, however, they ran into problems, because the white man had a different set of fear reflexes for each race he was dealing with.

  Whites didn’t have too much fear of the Mexican-American, the Chicano. The notion was that he was small, placid, slow, no particular physical threat—until he grew his hair Afro-style, talked like a blood or otherwise managed to seem “black” enough to raise hell. Then it was a different story.

  The whites’ physical fear of the Chinese was nearly zero. The white man pictured the Chinese as small, quiet, restrained little fellows. He had a certain deep-down voodoo fear of their powers of Evil in the Dark … the Hatchet Men … the Fangs of the Tong … but it wasn’t a live fear. For that matter, the young Chinese themselves weren’t ready for the age of mau-mauing. It wasn’t that they feared the white man, the way black people had. It was more that they didn’t fear or resent white people enough. They looked down on whites as childish and uncultivated. They also found it somewhat shameful to present themselves as poor and oppressed, on the same level with Negroes and Mexican-Americans. It wasn’t until 1969 that militants really got into confrontations in Chinatown.

  Every now and then, after the poverty scene got going, and the confrontations became a regular thing, whites would run into an ethnic group they drew a total blank on, like the Indians or the Samoans. Well, with the Samoans they didn’t draw a blank for long, not once they actually came up against them. The Samoans on the poverty scene favored the direct approach. They did not fool around. They were like the original unknown terrors. In fact, they were unknown terrors and a half.

  Why so few people in San Francisco know about the Samoans is a mystery. All you have to do is see a couple of those Polynesian studs walking through the Mission, minding their own business, and you won’t forget it soon. Have you ever by any chance seen professional football players in person, like on the street? The thing you notice is not just that they’re big but that they are so big, it’s weird. Everything about them is gigantic, even their heads. They’ll have a skull the size of a watermelon, with a couple of little squinty eyes and a little mouth and a couple of nose holes stuck in, and no neck at all. From the ears down, the big yoyos are just one solid welded hulk, the size of an oil burner. You get the feeling that football players come from a whole other species of human, they’re so big. Well, that will give you some idea of the Samoans, because they’re bigger. The average Samoan makes Bubba Smith of the Colts look like a shrimp. They start out at about 300 pounds and from there they just get wider. They are big huge giants. Everything about them is wide and smooth. They have big wide faces and smooth features. They’re a dark brown, with a smooth cast.

  Anyway, the word got around among the groups in the Mission that the poverty program was going to cut down on summer jobs, and the Mission was going to be on the short end. So a bunch of the groups in the Mission got together and decided to go downtown to the poverty office and do some mau-mauing in behalf of the Mission before the bureaucrats made up their minds. There were blacks, Chicanos, Filipinos, and about ten Samoans.

  The poverty office was on the first floor and had a big anteroom; only it’s almost bare, nothing in it but a lot of wooden chairs. It looks like a union hall minus the spittoons, or one of those lobbies where they swear in new citizens. It’s like they want to impress the poor that they don’t have leather-top desks … All our money goes to you …

  So the young aces from the Mission come trooping in, and they want to see the head man. The wo
rd comes out that the No. 1 man is out of town, but the No. 2 man is coming out to talk to the people.

  This man comes out, and he has that sloppy Irish look like Ed McMahon on TV, only with a longer nose. In case you’d like the local viewpoint, whites really have the noses … enormous, you might say … a whole bag full … long and pointed like carrots, goobered up like green peppers, hooked like a squash, hanging off the face like cucumbers … This man has a nose that is just on the verge of hooking over, but it doesn’t quite make it.

  “Have a seat, gentlemen,” he says, and he motions toward the wooden chairs.

  But he doesn’t have to open his mouth. All you have to do is look at him and you get the picture. The man’s a lifer. He’s stone civil service. He has it all down from the wheatcolor Hush Puppies to the wash’n’ dry semi-tab-collar shortsleeves white shirt. Those wheatcolor Hush Puppies must be like some kind of fraternal garb among the civil-service employees, because they all wear them. They cost about $4.99, and the second time you move your toes, the seams split and the tops come away from the soles. But they all wear them. The man’s shirt looks like he bought it at the August end-of-summer sale at the White Front. It is one of those shirts with pockets on both sides. Sticking out of the pockets and running across his chest he has a lineup of ball-point pens, felt nibs, lead pencils, wax markers, such as you wouldn’t believe, Paper-mates, Pentels, Scriptos, Eberhard Faber Mongol 482’S, Dri-Marks, Bic PM-29’s, everything. They are lined up across his chest like campaign ribbons.