Beat It

Today’s gem is courtesy of Jack Kerouac, whose obscure final novel, Pic, I recently uncovered.  It’s a paperback original from 1971.  This is the book whose noble idea it was to tell its tale from the perspective of a little black boy, in the dialect of what the author calls “North Carolina farm country.”    It’s not available in print anymore in a volume by itself, and it isn’t hard to understand why.

For his protagonist, Keroac chooses not just a black boy, but the blackest black boy around, just so you’ll be sure to get the picture:

“They said I was the darkest, blackest, boy ever come to that school.  I always knowed that, cause I seed green boys, and I seed orange boys, then black, but seed never one so black as me.

Well, I gave this no never mind, and ‘joyed my-self…One day two white boys came by seed me and  said I was verily black as  nigger chiles go.  Well, I said that I knowed that indeedy.” (page 2)

It gets worse. The legacy of slavery also makes its appearance in this story about the decedents of slaves.  Slavery time in Pic was a sugary, nostalgic era–to think of it as a young kid a couple generations removed even “fetches up recollections”–and the planters who profited from the ownership and sale of other human beings weren’t really half-bad:

“…’Now, you know why Mr. Otis give Grandpa Jackson that shack and that peice of land you were born on–and why Mr. Otis Wanted to help you today?’

‘Nos’r, Slim’ I say, and I shore wants to hear it.
‘Because your grandpa was born a slave and Mr. Otis’ grandpa owned him once, you never knowed that did you?”

“Nos’r, Slim, nobody never told me that,” I say, and seem to me I heard folks talk about slave one time, and it fetch up recollections, you know.
‘Mr. Otis,’ my brother say, ‘he’s a good man and feels he owes some of the colored folks some help now and then…’ (page 36)

Elsewhere, the narrator, Pic, claims that his sister-in-law Sheila loved his brother Slim, “like she was his slave (page 72)”

I’ve always had suspicions about the Beats that I couldn’t quite put a finger on.  I think happening upon Pic about sums it up: that this generation of artists, with a bohemian call seductive enough to shock white America out of the square 1950s, was instrumentally complicit in the never-ending American quest to profit from the lives of people of color, without really offering anything in exchange–and  that, in fact, the Beat generation lay new foundations for the continuation of that quest.

For good measure, and to keep it global, here’s a passage from Beat William Bourroughs’ Naked Lunch, a book which–true to its intent, surely–is deeply disturbing.  Set in a fictional land called “Interzone”–in effect, the city of Tangier as warped by the vision of some terrifically spoiled foreign junk addicts, and riddled by gore, depravity, and culturally insensitive Orientalist no-nos–its every page is intended to revile and offend.   Now, Bourroughs, at least, tends to give the impression of being as self-consciously offensive as he can be, so that some part of even its overt racism might almost–by some stretch–be considered to be progressive, since it so startlingly forces the reader to confront horrific stereotypes that might otherwise lie beneath consciousness.  Still, I consider it a basic point of good manners that one shouldn’t come to someone else’s country only to portray its inhabitants as spooky half-humans:

“A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakech hotel room second floor…(He is after processing by a Texas mother who dressed him in girl’s clothes as a child..Crude but effective against infant protoplasm…) The other occupants are Arabs,  three Arabs…knives in hand…watching him…glint of metal and points of light in dark eyes…” (page 185)

Are these guys obsolete yet?  Seriously.