In the Flesh

In his 1901 autobiography, Booker T. Washington recounts an incident he witnessed on a train that illustrates just how “difficult it sometimes is to know where the black begins and the white ends.”

He describes a conductor inspecting a light-skinned passenger seated in the “colored” compartment. The official examines the man’s eyes, nose and hands. If the rider is Negro, he doesn’t want to send him into the white coach. If he is white, he doesn’t want to insult him by asking his race. To solve his quandary the conductor bends over to glance at the man’s feet. At last he is convinced that the passenger is properly seated among his own kind.

Washington himself was racially mixed, the son of a black slave and a free white man. There were reports that his father lived on a nearby plantation. But his identity and the circumstances of his involvement with Washington’s mother were unclear. Like Frederick Douglass before him, who heard it whispered that his master was his father, Washington’s family history was only a rumor.

Richard Rodriguez’s beautiful new book, “Brown,” is a meditation on America’s family secrets. It is a lyrical hymn on the tenebrous side of history, one not marked by triumphs or defeats but by entanglements born of eroticism and, sometimes, love. It is at once a homily on the dangers of puritanism in an impure world and the confession of an aging baby boomer who has given up trying to reconcile the contradictory elements of his American soul.

Rodriguez calls this long-awaited collection of essays the third of a trilogy on “American public life and my private life.” Though “Hunger of Memory” (1982) and “Days of Obligation” (1992) were, respectively, about class and ethnicity, “Brown” presumes to be about race. But race is only the book’s point of departure. Rodriguez’s meditation on the meanings of brown--a color whose essential beauty and mystery, he says, derive from the fact that it is a mixture of other colors--is also an exploration of American culture in an era of trampled borders.

If “Hunger of Memory” was priggish and ungenerous in its vision of assimilation, “Days of Obligation” was Rodriguez’s reconciliation with his ethnicity. This third installment, however, is more daring, far-reaching and more resolutely unresolved than its antecedents. In “Brown,” Rodriguez regards the nation at large with his California mestizo eyes.

Having destroyed the notion that brown is monochrome, he challenges the shibboleth of white and black purity. If brown is the byproduct of collisions--wanted and unwanted--between strangers, then we Americans are all brown by definition. “Brown” is a paean to impurity.

Of course, the ideal of the United States as a crucible forging Old World identities into new Americans has been something of a civic religion since the early 20th century. But it has always been woefully incomplete. For one thing, the national ideology was never extended to blacks and other nonwhites. Even Israel Zangwill, whose 1908 play “The Melting Pot” popularized the eponymous ideal, wrote that whites were justified in avoiding intermarriage with blacks. He would only recognize that “spiritual miscegenation” between black and white had enriched American culture.

Responding to criticism from sectarian Jews of the era, Zangwill, whose drama featured a Russian-Jewish immigrant who rejected his faith’s prohibition of intermarriage, also retreated from his ideal of the biological mixing of ethnic whites in America. In an essay published in 1914, he conceded that “the Jew may be Americanized and the American Judaised without any gamic interaction.”

In “Brown,” Rodriguez speaks of all types of intermingling, “gamic” and otherwise. He extends his gratitude to American blacks for remaking the English language, giving it so much of its cadence and dynamism, and then sharing it with the children of immigrants.

Throughout these essays, Rodriguez expands our vision of our shared lineage and recasts the traditional American narratives. He upends the notion of U.S. history as one that runs from East to West. America, he says, is destined to be the intersection of North and South. He asks us to consider a history in which whites are not both the subject and the verb, one in which “minorities” are not merely direct objects.

Challenging Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis that Europeans became Americans by battling the wilderness, Rodriguez argues that it was the struggle (and romance) with the Indians that first distinguished United States culture from the Old World. He muses over whites’ debt to Indians for their early lessons in survival and their perennial fascination with “going native.” The Boston Tea Party. The Improved Order of Red Men. The impersonation of the Indian long has given American children “the license to wildness.” It is no wonder, he concludes, that “Europeans began to regard all Americans as savage.”

Once having established our mestizo past, Rodriguez turns his attention to the Hispanic tones of our future. Half a century ago, “brown was like the skinny or fat kids left over after the team captains chose sides.” There was no room for brown in a black and white world. Today, brown threatens to recalibrate America’s sense of self. The encroachment of Latin America, which for all its cultural hang-ups still acknowledges its mixed racial origins, could give the United States a more “playful notion of race.”

For American blacks, Rodriguez wishes the freedom “to admit brown,” “to speak freely of ancestors, of Indian and Scots and German and plantation owner.” He is skeptical of arguments that American Hispanics will create a Spanish-speaking version of Quebec. Though Pat Buchanan heralds the end of American civilization, this self-described “queer Catholic Indian Spaniard” is confident of both the “omnivorous” nature of the English language and the adaptive strength of Hispanicity. “Try as we will to be culturally aggrieved by day, we find the gringos kind of attractive in the moonlight.”

But the Mexicans who daily stomp on “the legal fiction that America controls its own destiny” also begin to shade United States culture with deeper, more visceral shades of brown. “Mexico is a brown idea we would rather not discuss,” he writes. To Rodriguez, brown means fecundity and inevitability. It is the color of complexity and of illicit passion. It smells of shame and sin.

Despite its impure past, America still adheres to the fiction of its purity and innocence. While no contemporary writer has rhapsodized on the American cult of possibility more eloquently than Rodriguez, here he laments our growing fearfulness. Though always infused with the foreboding of his Irish Catholicism, Rodriguez’s writing is more preoccupied than ever with finitude. Brown is also the color of aging.

But his middle age--he turns 58 this year--and thoughts of mortality have not turned Rodriguez away from the world. Indeed, “Brown” is an embrace of life and all its complications. He is concerned that as borders--be they ethnic, religious, aesthetic or sexual--fall all around us, Americans are too busy erecting new walls behind which to hide. “We feel surrounded, that’s the thing.”

He hopes that as the South fuses with the North, it will rescue America from its fear of nature, from its loneliness, from its “desire for cleansing.” The South is the “netherworld of biology, sex, hair, infection, blackened skin, multiplicity.” Rodriguez’s confessional trilogy is Augustine in reverse. In “Late Victorians,” perhaps the finest essay in “Days of Obligation,” he weighs the price of his own equanimity, his secret to survival as a gay man in the age of AIDS. In “Brown,” while still acknowledging his temperate character, he has at last learned to love the corruptible flesh.

Still, he yearns for the South in the way that only a Northerner can. His longing is reminiscent of Rilke’s attraction to the sensuous European South or the scores of Northern Protestant painters who have flocked to portray the warm hues of the Mediterranean.

In “Hunger of Memory,” Rodriguez writes of having “a conventional sex life” during his undergraduate years. Separately, he discusses his penchant for secrecy. In “Brown,” he explains how the combination of his sexuality and his secrecy helped forge his extraordinary vision. When asked to measure the influence of his homosexuality on his writing, Rodriguez invokes the memory of another great celebrator of American multiplicity. “[Walt] Whitman’s advantage was that--prohibited from admitting the specific--he learned to speak of the many.”

But in “Brown,” Rodriguez writes of both the specific and the many. (“Sodomy is among the brownest of thoughts.”) Near the end of these rich, wide-ranging essays, he broods over his own “brown paradox”: the tension between his Catholicism and his homosexuality.

Over the years, Rodriguez’s own sense of self has grown broad enough to accommodate--but not to resolve--his own contradictions. This is precisely what he wishes for America. But before we can embrace the many sides of our collective lives, we must cultivate a stronger faith in life itself.

*

From ‘Brown’

Brown as impurity.

I write of a color that is not a singular color, not a strict recipe, not an expected result, but a color produced by careless desire, even by accident; by two or several. I write of blood that is blended. I write of brown as complete freedom of substance and narrative. I extol impurity.

I eulogize a literature that is suffused with brown, with allusion, irony, paradox--ha!--pleasure.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

Brown bleeds through the straight line, unstaunchable--the line separating black from white, for example. Brown confuses. Brown forms at the border of contradiction (the ability of language to express two or several things at once, the ability of bodies to experience two or several things at once).