Three Days Before the Shooting ... (139 page)

Talk about being elected and set aside! Hell, they were deodorized, dunked in a hyssop-and-myrrh bath of sentimentality, and treated as though no more than floaters in their beholder’s color-confused eye! And if you think I’ve blown my mind consider this: When a simple “a” and “n” are added to the titles of those most famous of black Southern “uncles,” namely Remus and Tom, they are quickly stripped of their deodorant and amenable masks and become—Lord help them—“Uncle(an) Tom” and “Uncle(an) Remus”!

Now I
know
that you’re laughing, but this hilarious hint of a secret stink that lay barely detectable beneath the title of affection bestowed upon kindly Southern Negro men has bothered me from the moment it reached out and slapped me for blundering into its secret—which happened through my drunken mistyping of “uncle,” a word so familiar that we seldom think of its slippery connotations. But with that blunder I penetrated the cover of that tricky, Bible-and-Constitution-quoting snake in the grass. He’s been there waiting all the time, and when there’s an avuncular relationship between a black adult and a young white friend the joker asserts himself with such rattling mockery that we pretend that he doesn’t exist. It’s no wonder that some of our folks who don’t read books are offended by the very
idea
of poor old Uncle Tom. Perhaps it’s because they’ve been so conditioned to listening for what’s said by being left
un
said that they hear implication which others find it more comfortable to ignore. So for all of Uncle Remus’s skill in telling our own folktales they find him suspect. And despite poor Uncle Tom’s loyalty to the Christian virtues which guide their own lives they reject him as vehemently as they reject Simon Legree.

Which is ironic, since that worthy uncle (who, by the way, was patterned after a man of your profession) appeared in the book which President Lincoln praised for its role in arousing support for the war which led to our so-called Emancipation. Come to think of it, maybe there was an echo of the same ambiguous uncleanliness at work in the game we played back during the days when horse-drawn wagons made the steaming evidence of life’s irrepressible stink and cycling a property of every street and roadway. Coming upon it we’d step aside with giggling chants of “Never kick a horse turd ‘cause it might be your uncle.” A boy’s silly joke, true; but one in which a philosophical idea of one of your distinguished forerunners, Nicolas of Cusa, found verification. Much as our boyish fascination with death and dying, resurrection and immortality found comic relief in the arcane doings of tumblebugs.

Okay, Mister Preacher, so I’m being childishly excremental, but it’s by way of giving you an idea of the vein my mind was set working in following your assignment. For when Sippy, the boy, and the sight of a white man and black child cavorting in a publicity photograph became linked in my mind, I was forced to ask myself what exactly did such a recurring juxtaposition of the generational and racial, the innocent and the worthy but somehow unclean really mean? Out of what mixture of motives and complex needs did they arise? And why did the figures who embodied those needs and motives keep turning up in books, stage plays, and movies? (Hell, Hickman, it just occurred to me that when Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson danced up and down the stairs they were a more recent instance of the same ubiquitous pairs! And what about Matt Henson and Admiral Peary?) So I asked myself what was the real function and hidden connection of such pairs in the psychological processes of everyday life? And then in my frustration I asked myself how the hell did you, an old jazzman and former barbershop cynic, come to be so involved in such a relationship? Quite frankly, I was so snarled in the mess that pretty soon I found myself thinking of you as “Uncle(an) Lon”!

Now if you assume that I began thinking along this line while in my cups, you’re right; I was indeed. But even so, the characters who reached out and grabbed didn’t spring out of a bottle; instead, they exploded out of a bunch of books which I had read for pleasure no less than for college credits. Thus, thanks to you, Sippy and the stray white boy roiled the placid waters of my academic studies. And, just as I feared, the two of them caused me one heap of confusion.

And that confusion began to spread when I learned that my snap judgments as to the connections between Sippy and the young man wouldn’t stack. For it was soon clear that whenever and wherever he had been touched by the gentle hands of his blessed Hagar—and I still think it was down South—the boy had actually run into his Negro con-man-gambler of an “uncle” up North. And at—of all places—a famous racetrack. Just how he came to be in that particular scene remains a mystery, but it seems that being hungry and down on his luck he’d hit on Sippy for some eating change, and that was the beginning.

Being flush with his own winnings, and always a free-spending sporting man, this Negro gambler had not only given the boy a stake but had added a tip on a winning horse which paid off at the rate of eight to one. And then, taking a whimsical liking to the boy, Sippy offered him a place to stay and the boy accepted. I understand that Sippy was both pleased and surprised, because he was testing the boy’s attitude toward his racial identity and had anticipated being turned down. But then, heaven help us, after discovering the kid’s unusual intelligence, Sippy decided to use him in a cockeyed experiment that only a black rascal like himself could have conceived.

Which was no less—now get this!—than to make the young man over into Sippy’s own larcenous freebooter’s conception of what an ideal American should be! Don’t ask me what put him up to it, because such insight is too far beyond my limited range of vision. But since I’ve finally come to recognize you as one of those whom a professor once described as “past-masters of profane ecstasy” who have been self-transformed into “latter-day celebrants of religious exaltation,” I’m hoping that you can do better. For I assume that the experience of such a mysterious transformation will have provided you with privileged insight into a wide variety of life’s dog-assed aberrations.

As for me, Sippy remains a mystery, but I
imagine
that after working from boyhood inside the walls of white folks’ bedrooms, bathrooms, dining rooms, country clubs, and various kitchens, he simply decided that most white males not only failed to measure up to what they claimed to be, but fell far short of his own high, if garbled, standards. (Incidentally, he had an ironic, debonair respect for most white women, and this despite the role of goddess-trollop imposed upon them by some of their menfolk—but I won’t go into
that
!
)
The point here is that Sippy seems to have set out to create himself a white man who measured up to his own high, if mammy-made, standards! And this, I take it, was the logic behind his experiment. In other words, Sippy was out to create himself an ideal white American male in his own mammy-made image!

But once again, please don’t ask me as to what precisely put such an idea in Sippy’s head, because I don’t know. All I can say is that from working around the affluent he seems to’ve become obsessed with the mystery of manners, style, and power. But most of all with
power
. And here I mean a dimension of power that ranges so far beyond the limits of finance, science, or politics that it takes on connotations of the mystical. Sippy seems to’ve considered such power an extra portion that is available but to the precious few who are blessed with his own rare powers of perception while remaining elusive to those who were otherwise in control of the good things of life, and he resented the situation. Therefore I suppose that it was probably some minor incident, some sneer or snub or snide remark, that provoked him to take a detached, irreverent outsider’s look at the assorted types of whites with whom he came in contact; and after comparing
their
opportunities, accomplishments, and approaches to life with what he saw as their wasted
possibilities
, he then compared their assets with his own and made his cockeyed decision.

Therefore I imagined that Sippy—who incidentally was given to speaking of himself in the third person (a characteristic of his type’s rampant, self-centered myth-making)—probably told himself, “Now here they are, living on the tip-top of the greatest country in the world, bragging and lording it over everybody else but got no more sense of the swinging
style
that’s needed to go with such good luck than a gorilla knows what to do with an Omega watch or a flying machine! And yet they have the nerve to treat Sippy like
he’s
a clown! Done completely ignored the fact that if you do it to others they’ll do it to you, ‘cause in the game of life it’s a Golden rule that everybody on earth is
somebody’s
fool!

“So all right, in this kooky country what you see is what you get, and what you
don’t
can get you
got!
So as far as
they
can see Sippy’s just a nowhere nobody who they don’t have to see, and that mistake will finally get them. Because they’re missing the simple human fact that Sippy just might be as smart as they claim to be
and
have a mind and eyes of his own. So for all their attempts to ban him from the action he’s still in a position to see a hell of a lot about the scene which they keep overlooking. Starting with the fact that Sippy’s a natural-born gambler and a cool, homegrown American cat who don’t belong to nobody but his own hard-cutting
self!
Therefore he’s not
about
to waste his precious time blaming all his troubles on something which happened so long ago as slavery. ‘Cause judging from everything that Sippy can see, only those who free
themselves
can be truly free!

“Therefore he’s not taking low for
anybody
, and neither is he leaping off the sidewalk for a bunch of ignorant squares who can’t see that it’s by trying to keep
him
from having a fair share of democ racy that they keep crapping out on their
own
liberty. Neither is Sippy wasting time moaning and groaning about the way life’s deck of cards is stacked, because since that terrible day when Abe Lincoln dropped his guard and got himself wasted, the odds have been against him. That’s how the deal went down and nobody can undo what’s already happened. So from then ‘til now they’ve been in charge of the game and standing pat, but since the Constitution guarantees Sippy a chance at the cards he’s going to lay in the bend and grin while he plays his hand the best way he can. And it don’t matter a
damn
to Sippy who’s in charge of the jive-assed dive, just show him another five—just a lousy
five—
and not only will he use what they overlook in order to stay alive, he’ll do it in a true In-God-We-Trust American style! Meanwhile, if they insist on being top man on the country’s totem pole, then let them compete and not only
act
like they deserve all that freewheeling power, but let them convince Sippy that they mean to
use
it in the way it was meant to be!”

(You’ll note, dear Hickman, that this is only my interpretation, but right or wrong, Sippy seems to have kept an unblinking eye on the difference between reality and an as-yet unfleshed ideal. Therefore he hoped for the best while expecting the worst and kept an eye peeled for the joker. And if I’m not mistaken he knew damn well that a “five” is both a playing card and the banknote graced by the image of Abraham Lincoln. The man was devious even in his hopes!)

So it appears that after a brief period when he drifted into prizefighting and footracing (he once beat the then champion, Bojangles Robinson, at running backwards by a yard and scored a dozen knockouts as a middleweight before hanging up his gloves), Sippy became a hustler. As such, he gained a flamboyant reputation as an ace prizefighter, footracer, whoremaster, and chippy-chaser; a reputation which he glamorized by sporting tailor-made suits, hand-made shoes, Barcelona hats, and raccoon coats, and driving a lavender Marmon roadster, a red Pierce-Arrow convertible, and a white, suede-topped Lincoln touring car; in which, weather permitting, he enjoyed showing off his huge, blue-eyed black-and-white Great Dane dog—all this by supplying some of the most powerful men in the country with bootleg liquor, advice on horse-racing, prizefighters, and tips on the stock market obtained from mysterious sources. But being a resourceful con artist, he was
also
pretending to work as a waiter; a strategy which allowed him to make useful contacts with important guests and pick up quick bits of easy change by gambling in the locker rooms of various high-class clubs and hotels.

[SIPPY]

In fact, it was during that phase that he was given the job of butler by the millionaire, who was only a few years younger but light-years behind Sippy in experience. And here, thanks to their black-and-white relationship (which violated every nuance of the nation’s established code), I must give you a few words about this young millionaire.