Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
“Well,” says the Flak Catcher, “I make $1,100 a month.”
“How come you make so much?”
“Wellllll”—the grin, the last bid for clemency . . . and now the poor man’s eyes are freezing into little round iceballs, and his mouth is getting dry—
Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“How come you make so much? My fadda and mudda both work and they only make six hundred and fifty.”
Oh shit, the cat kind of blew it there. That’s way over the poverty line, about double, in fact. It’s even above the guideline for a family of twelve. You can see that fact register with the Flak Catcher, and he’s trying to work up the nerve to make the devastating comeback. But he’s not about to talk back to these giants.
“Listen, Brudda. Why don’t you give up your paycheck for summer jobs? You ain’t doing shit.”
“Wellll”—the Flak Catcher grins, he sweats, he hangs over the back of the chair—
Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram—“Yeah, Brudda! Give us your paycheck!”
There it is . . . the ultimate horror . . . He can see it now, he can hear it . . . Fifteen tons of it . . . It’s horrible . . . it’s possible . . . It’s so obscene, it just might happen . . . Huge Polynesian monsters marching down to his office every payday . . . Hand it over, Brudda . . . ripping it out of his very fingers . . . eternally . . . He wrings his hands . . . the little muscles around his mouth are going haywire. He tries to recapture his grin, but those little amok muscles pull his lips up into an O, like they were drawstrings.
“I’d gladly give up my salary,” says the Flak Catcher. “I’d gladly do it, if it would do any good. But can’t you see, gentlemen, it would be just a drop in the bucket . . . just a drop in the bucket!” This phrase a drop in the bucket seems to give him heart . . . it’s something to hang onto . . . an answer . . . a reprieve . . . “Just consider what we have to do in this city alone, gentlemen! All of us! It’s just a drop in the bucket!”
The Samoans can’t come up with any answer to this, so the Flak Catcher keeps going.
“Look, gentlemen,” he says, “you tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Of course you want more summer jobs, and we want you to have them. That’s what we’re here for. I wish I could give everybody a job. You tell me how to get more jobs, and we’ll get them. We’re doing all we can. If we can do more, you tell me how, and I’ll gladly do it.”
One of the bloods says, “Man, if you don’t know how, then we don’t need you.”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! Whadda we need you for!” You can tell the Samoans wish they had thought of that shoot-down line themselves—Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram—they clobber the hell out of the floor.
“Man,” says the blood, “you just taking up space and killing time and drawing pay!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! You just drawing pay!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“Man,” says the blood, “if you don’t know nothing and you can’t do nothing and you can’t say nothing, why don’t you tell your boss what we want!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! Tell the man!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“As I’ve already told you, he’s in Washington trying to meet the deadlines for your projects!”
“You talk to the man, don’t you? He’ll let you talk to him, won’t he?”
“Yes . . .”
“Send him a telegram, man!”
“Well, all right—”
“Shit, pick up the telephone, man!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! Pick up the telephone!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“Please, gentlemen! That’s pointless! It’s already after six o’clock in Washington. The office is closed!”
“Then call him in the morning, man,” says the blood. “We coming back here in the morning and we gonna watch you call the man! We gonna stand right on top of you so you won’t forget to make that call!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! On top of you!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“All right, gentlemen . . . all right,” says the Flak Catcher. He slaps his hands against his thighs and gets up off the chair. “I’ll tell you what . . .” The way he says it, you can tell the man is trying to get back a little corner of his manhood. He tries to take a tone that says, “You haven’t really been in here for the past fifteen minutes intimidating me and burying my nuts in the sand and humiliating me . . . We’ve really been having a discussion about the proper procedures, and I am willing to grant that you have a point.”
“If that’s what you want,” he says, “I’m certainly willing to put in a telephone call.”
“If we want! If you willing! Ain’t no want or willing about it, man! “You gonna make that call! We gonna be here and see you make it!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! We be seeing you”—Ba-ram-ba-ramba-ram—“We coming back!”
And the Flak Catcher is standing there with his mouth playing bad tricks on him again, and the Samoans hoist their Tiki sticks, and the aces all leave, and they’re thinking . . . We’ve done it again. We’ve mau-maued the goddamn white man, scared him until he’s singing a duet with his sphincter, and the people sure do have power. Did you see the look on his face? Did you see the sucker trembling? Did you see the sucker trying to lick his lips? He was scared, man! That’s the last time that sucker is gonna try to urban-factor and pre-fund and fix-asset with us! He’s gonna go home to his house in Diamond Heights and he’s gonna say, “Honey, fix me a drink! Those motherfuckers were ready to kill me!” That sucker was some kind of petrified . . . He could see eight kinds of Tiki sticks up side his head . . .
Of course, the next day nobody shows up at the poverty office to make sure the sucker makes the telephone call. Somehow it always seems to happen that way. Nobody ever follows it up. You can get everything together once, for the demonstration, for the confrontation, to go downtown and maumau, for the fun, for the big show, for the beano, for the main event, to see the people bury some gray cat’s nuts and make him crawl and whine and sink in his own terrible grin. But nobody ever follows it up. You just sleep it off until somebody tells you there’s going to be another big show.
And then later on you think about it and you say, “What really happened that day? Well, another flak catcher lost his manhood, that’s what happened.” Hmmmmmm . . . like maybe the bureaucracy isn’t so dumb after all . . . All they did was sacrifice one flak catcher, and they’ve got hundreds, thousands . . . They’ve got replaceable parts. They threw this sacrifice to you, and you went away pleased with yourself. And even the Flak Catcher himself wasn’t losing much. He wasn’t losing his manhood. He gave that up a long time ago, the day he became a lifer . . . Just who is fucking over who . . . You did your number and he did his number, and they didn’t even have to stop the music . . . The band played on. . . Still—did you see the look on his face? That sucker—
WHEN BLACK PEOPLE FIRST STARTED USING THE CONFRONTATION tactic, they made a secret discovery. There was an extra dividend to this tactic. There was a creamy dessert. It wasn’t just that you registered your protest and showed the white man that you meant business and weakened his resolve to keep up the walls of oppression. It wasn’t just that you got poverty money and influence. There was something sweet that happened right there on the spot. You made the white man quake. You brought fear into his face.
Black people began to realize for the first time that the white man, particularly the educated white man, the leadership, had a deep dark Tarzan mumbo jungle voodoo fear of the black man’s masculinity. This was a revelation. For two hundred years, wherever black people lived, north or south, mothers had been raising their sons to be meek, to be mild, to check their manhood at the front door in all things that had to do with white people, for fear of incurring the wrath of the Man. The Man was the white man. He was the only man. And now, when you got him up close and growled, this all-powerful superior animal turned out to be terrified. You could read it in his face. He had the same fear in his face as some good-doing boy who has just
moved onto the block and is hiding behind his mama and the moving man and the sofa while the bad dudes on the block size him up.
So for the black man mau-mauing was a beautiful trip. It not only stood to bring you certain practical gains like money and power. It also energized your batteries. It recharged your masculinity. You no longer had to play it cool and go in for pseudo-ignorant malingering and put your head into that Ofay Pig Latin catacomb code style of protest. Mau-mauing brought you respect in its cash forms: namely, fear and envy.
This was the difference between a confrontation and a demonstration. A demonstration, like the civil-rights march on Washington in 1963, could frighten the white leadership, but it was a general fear, an external fear, like being afraid of a hurricane. But in a confrontation, in mau-mauing, the idea was to frighten white men personally, face to face. The idea was to separate the man from all the power and props of his office. Either he had enough heart to deal with the situation or he didn’t. It was like saying, “You—yes, you right there on the platform—we’re not talking about the government, we’re not talking about the Office of Economic Opportunity—we’re talking about you, you up there with your hands shaking in your pile of papers . . .” If this worked, it created a personal, internal fear. The internal fear was, “I’m afraid I’m not man enough to deal with these bad niggers!”
That may sound like a simple case of black people being good at terrifying whites and whites being quick to run scared. But it was more than that. The strange thing was that the confrontation ritual was built into the poverty program from the beginning. The poverty bureaucrats depended on confrontations in order to know what to do.
Whites were still in the dark about the ghettos. They had been studying the “urban Negro” in every way they could think of for fifteen years, but they found out they didn’t know any more about the ghettos than when they started. Every time there was a riot, whites would call on “Negro leaders” to try to cool it, only to find out that the Negro leaders didn’t have any followers. They sent Martin Luther King into Chicago and the people ignored him. They sent Dick Gregory into Watts and the people hooted at him and threw beer cans. During the riot in Hunters Point, the mayor of San Francisco, John Shelley, went into Hunters Point with the only black member of the Board of Supervisors, and the brothers threw rocks at both of them. They sent in the middle-class black members of the Human Rights Commission, and the brothers laughed at them and called them Toms. Then they figured the leadership of the riot was “the gangs,” so they sent in the “ex-gang leaders” from groups like Youth for Service to make a “liaison with the key gang leaders.” What they didn’t know was that Hunters Point and a lot of ghettos were so disorganized, there weren’t even any “key gangs,” much less “key gang leaders,” in there. That riot finally just burnt itself out after five days, that was all.
But the idea that the real leadership in the ghetto might be the gangs hung on with the poverty-youth-welfare establishment. It was considered a very sophisticated insight. The youth gangs weren’t petty criminals . . . they were “social bandits,” primitive revolutionaries . . . Of course, they were hidden from public view. That was why the true nature of ghetto leadership had eluded everyone for so long . . . So the poverty professionals were always on the lookout for the bad-acting dudes who were the “real leaders,” the “natural leaders,” the “charismatic figures” in the ghetto jungle. These were the kind of people the social-welfare professionals in the Kennedy Administration had in mind when they planned the poverty program in the first place. It was a truly adventurous and experimental approach they had. Instead of handing out alms, which never seemed to change anything, they would encourage the people in the ghettos to organize. They would help them become powerful enough to force the Establishment to give them what they needed. From the beginning the poverty program was aimed at helping ghetto people rise up against their oppressors. It was a scene in which the federal government came into the ghetto and said, “Here is some money and some field advisors. Now you organize your own pressure groups.” It was no accident that Huey Newton and Bobby Seale drew up the ten-point program of the Black Panther Party one night in the offices of the North Oakland Poverty Center.
To sell the poverty program, its backers had to give it the protective coloration of “jobs” and “education,” the Job Corps and Operation Head Start, things like that, things the country as a whole could accept. “Jobs” and “education” were things everybody could agree on. They were part of the free-enterprise ethic. They weren’t uncomfortable subjects like racism and the class structure—and giving the poor the money and the tools to fight City Hall. But from the first that was what the lion’s share of the poverty budget went into. It went into “community organizing,” which was the bureaucratic term for “power to the people,” the term for finding the real leaders of the ghetto and helping them organize the poor.
And how could they find out the identity of these leaders of the people? Simple. In their righteous wrath they would rise up and confront you. It was a beautiful piece of circular reasoning. The real leaders of the ghetto will rise up and confront you . . . Therefore, when somebody rises up in the ghetto and confronts you, then you know he’s a leader of the people. So the poverty program not only encouraged mau-mauing it, it practically demanded it. Subconsciously, for administrators in the poverty establishment, public and private, confrontations became a ritual. That was the way the system worked. By 1968 it was standard operating procedure. To get a job in the post office, you filled out forms and took the civil-service exam. To get into the poverty scene, you did some mau-mauing. If you could make the flak catchers lose control of the muscles around their mouths, if you could bring fear into their faces, your application was approved.
NINETY-NINE PERCENT OF THE TIME WHITES WERE IN NO physical danger whatsoever during mau-mauing. The brothers understood through and through that it was a tactic, a procedure, a game. If you actually hurt or endangered somebody at one of these sessions, you were only cutting yourself off from whatever was being handed out, the jobs, the money, the influence. The idea was to terrify but don’t touch. The term mau-mauing itself expressed this game-like quality. It expressed the put-on side of it. In public you used the same term the whites used, namely, “confrontation.” The term maumauing was a source of amusement in private. The term maumauing said, “The white man has a voodoo fear of us, because deep down he still thinks we’re savages. Right? So we’re going to do that Savage number for him.” It was like a practical joke at the expense of the white man’s superstitiousness.
Almost every time that mau-mauing actually led to violence, you would find a revolutionary core to the organization that was doing it. If an organization was truly committed to revolution, then the poverty program, or the university, or whatever, was only something to hitch a ride on in the first place. Like at San Francisco State when the Black Students Union beat up the editor of the school newspaper, The Gater, and roughed up a lot of people during the strike. The BSU was allied with the Black Panthers. Stokely Carmichael, when he was with the Panthers, had come over to State and worked with the BSU, and given a speech that fired up the brothers for action. The willingness to be violent was a way of saying we are serious, we intend to go all the way, this is a revolution.
But this was a long way from the notion that all black militants in the ghetto were ready to be violent, to be revolutionaries. They weren’t. A lot of whites seemed to think all the angry young men in the ghettos were ready to rise up and follow the Black Panthers at a moment’s notice. Actually the Panthers had a complicated status in the ghettos in San Francisco. You talked to almost any young ace on the street, and he admired the Panthers. He looked up to them. The Panthers were stone courageous. They ripped off the white man and blew his mind and fucked him around like nobody has ever done it. And so on. And yet as an organization the Panthers hardly got a toehold in the ghettos in San Francisco, even though their national headquarters were just over the Bay Brid
ge in Oakland. Whites always seemed to think they had the ghetto’s leaders identified and catalogued, and they were always wrong.
Like one time in an English class at San Francisco State there was a teacher who decided to read aloud to the class from Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. This teacher was a white woman. She was one of those Peter, Paul, and Mary-type intellectuals. She didn’t wear nylons, she didn’t wear make-up, she had bangs and long straight brown hair down to below her shoulders. You see a lot of middle-class white intellectual women like that in California. They have a look that is sort of Pioneer Hip or Salt of the Earth Hip, with flat-heeled shoes and big Honest Calves. Most of the students in her class were middle-class whites. They were the average English literature students. Most of them hadn’t even reached the Save the Earth stage, but they dressed Revolutionary Street Fighter. After the strike at State, middle-class students didn’t show up on campus any more in letter sweaters or those back-to-school items like you see in the McGregor ads. They dressed righteous and “with the people.” They would have on guerrilla gear that was so righteous that Che Guevara would have had to turn in his beret and get bucked down to company chaplain if he had come up against it. They would have on berets and hair down to the shoulders, 1958 Sierra Maestra style, and raggedy field jackets and combat boots and jeans, but not Levi’s or Slim Jims or Farahs or Wranglers or any of those tailored hip-hugging jeans, but jeans of the people, the black Can’t Bust ’Em brand, hod-carrier jeans that have an emblem on the back of a hairy gorilla, real funky jeans, and woolly green socks, the kind that you get at the Army surplus at two pair for twenty-nine cents. Or else they would go for those checked lumberjack shirts that are so heavy and woolly that you can wear them like a jacket. It’s like the Revolution has nostalgia for the proletariat of about 1910, the Miners with Dirty Faces era, because today the oppressed, the hard-core youth in the ghetto—they aren’t into the Can’t Bust ’Ems with the gorilla and the Army surplus socks. They’re into the James Brown look. They’re into the ruffled shirts, the black belted leather pieces from Boyd’s on Market Street, the bell-cuff herringbones, all that stuff, looking sharp. If you tried to put one of those lumpy lumberjack shirts on them, they’d vomit. Anyway, most of the students in this woman’s English literature class were white middle class, but there were two or three students from the ghettos.