Shortly after our long-distance conversation I happened to pass a music-store window in which was a publicity photograph for Ted Lewis’s version of “Me and My Shadow,” wherein a strutting Lewis wearing top hat, tails, and silk-lined cape is pointing his clarinet skyward as he plays pied piper to the little brown-skinned boy whom he featured in his act as “Ted Lewis Junior.” Dressed in miniature top hat and tails, the kid enacts his role of “shadow” a short distance behind his partner, and as he dances to Lewis’s reedy noodling he has a signifying grin on his face which reminded me of the way young William Lee had grinned when eyeing the raised tail of George Washington’s horse. The coincidence was, as the saying goes, a “gasser” which damn near knocked me out!
Hickman, I had been passing the shop for weeks without any conscious reaction, but this time those two familiar characters leaped from their position beneath pedestals bearing busts of Bach, Beethoven, and Wagner and threw me slap-dab into the middle of that murky context of relationships between children and adults, blacks with whites, and whites with blacks, which your problem had triggered in my mind. It was as though the two, man and boy, had been waiting for me! And once they caught my attention they were like pied pipers in summoning up other couples like themselves to join them in a game of firing jeering riddles at me that were so outrageous that I felt like kicking my own behind!
Recalling how you kidded me for wasting my time reading for pleasure, my fascination with such characters will probably have little meaning for you, but while the idea might disgust you they did, nevertheless, play a significant role in my investigation. Starting with George Washington and William Lee and continuing through such characters from books as Uncle Remus and his little white friend, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, Captain Ahab and his cabin boy, Pip, and especially those famous runaways, poor white and slave, Huck Finn and Jim. If you remember any of them (and I’m sure you do), perhaps my agitation over the similarity between their relationships and that of Sippy and the boy will become a bit clearer.
For one thing, each of the pairs had relationships which bridged the color line—you might say that they performed feats of daring on an invisible high wire that stretched dangerously above the gap which separates the races. For another, each of the pairs sported and spieled within areas that were usually taboo. Therefore one could say that they operated on privileged ground—or at least the Negro members of these unusual duos did. In a sense these couples were innocents who lived in a screwed-up Eden after the Fall—no, not the Fall you preach about but the Civil War, Reconstruction, and all the other mess which was its aftermath. With all the hostility around them they lived charmed lives which made them invulnerable to the taboos which defined their friendships as threats to social order.
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 unsaid 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.
It seems that Sippy ran into the young man when working at a certain exclusive club. It was during a big champagne party at which the young man got crying drunk, wandered into the kitchen, and made a nuisance of himself by sitting on its range and beating a saucepan with a wooden spoon. Naturally this caused a crisis in the kitchen, because such unusual conduct was disgraceful. And especially from a young man who was usually quite gentlemanly. Therefore the kitchen’s orderly routine was brought to a halt, with no one—cooks, chefs, tuxedoed headwaiter, white-jacketed waiters, or astonished busboys—knowing what to do about it.
Drunk as a coot and mad as a sorehead bear, the young man was calling everybody names that made some of the churchgoing older waiters want to break his neck. Then, from beating on the pan he turned to cursing and striking at anyone who came within range, but out of respect for his wealthy family no one was willing to lay a hand on him—until, that is, Sippy wandered into the kitchen from a party which he had just finished serving on an upper floor. Then, hearing the commotion and seeing everybody crowding around and doing
nothing, Sippy recognized the young man and took charge.
“Mister So-and-So,” Sippy said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing, sitting on top of that range like a goddamn clown on a throne? Who do you think you’re kidding, perched up there like all of a sudden you’re some kind of iron-assed devil? I want to know, and I mean right this minute! Because by now even the dumbest stud in this kitchen knows that if that range was fired up your butt would be blistered—which it ought to be—and burned ten shades blacker than mine!
“And just look at what you’re doing to that fine tuxedo! Good Lord almighty, man, what’s come over you, the son of a son of a Virginian, that you can’t handle your liquor any better than that! Do you know what your daddy will do when he hears about this? Hell, I’ll tell you what he’ll do, he’ll bust a gut and then go upside your head, that’s what he’ll do! So now you come down off that dam’ range and let me bring you back to your senses!”