one
UNLIKE THE TYPICAL bluesy earthy folksy denim-overalls noble-in-the-face-of-cracker-racism aw shucks Pulitzer-Prize-winning protagonist mojo magic black man, I am not the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son. I wish I were, but fate shorted me by six brothers and three uncles. The chieftains and queens who sit on top of old Mount Kilimanjaro left me out of the will. They bequeathed me nothing, stingy bastards. Cruelly cheating me of my mythological inheritance, my aboriginal superpowers. I never possessed the god-given ability to strike down race politic evildoers with a tribal chant, the wave of a beaded whammy stick, and a mean glance. Maybe some family fool fucked up and slighted the ancients. Pissed off the gods, too much mumbo in the jumbo perhaps, and so the sons must suffer the sins of the father.
My name is Kaufman, Gunnar Kaufman. I’m black Orestes in the cursed House of Atreus. Preordained by a set of weak-kneed DNA to shuffle in the footsteps of a long cowardly queue of coons, Uncle Toms, and faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers. I am the number-one son of a spineless colorstruck son of a bitch who was the third son of an ass-kissing sell-out house Negro who was indeed a seventh son but only by default. (Grandpa Giuseppi Kaufman rolled over his older twin brother Johann in his sleep, smothering him and staking claim to the cherished seventh sonship.) From birth my parents indoctrinated me with the idea that the surreal escapades and “I’s a-comin’” watermelon chicanery of my forefathers was the stuff of hero worship. Their resolute deeds and Uncle Tom exploits were passed down by my mother’s dinner table macaroni-and-cheese oral history lessons. There is nothing worse than a loud griot, and my mother was the loudest.
Mom raised my sisters and me as the hard-won spoils of a vicious custody battle that left the porcelain shrapnel of supper-dish grenades embedded in my father’s neck. The divorce made Mama, Ms. Brenda W. Kaufman, determined to make sure that her children knew their forebears. As a Brooklyn orphan who had never seen her parents or her birth certificate, Mom adopted my father’s patriarchal family history for her misbegotten origins.
On summer afternoons Nicole, Christina, and I sat at my mother’s feet, tracing our bloodlines by running our fingers over the bulging veins that tunneled in her ashy legs. She’d place her hideous pedal extremities on a throw pillow and we would conduct our ancestral investigation while filing down the rock-hard bunions and other dermal crustaceans on her feet.
We started with the basics. Danger, Kids at Work. Nicole, my youngest sister, whom I nicknamed the Incredible Eternal Wailing Baby, would open up the questioning in her self-centered style, all the while scraping the mound of dead skin that was my mother’s left heel.
“Maw, am I adopted?”
“No, you are not adopted. I showed you the stretch marks last week. Put some elbow grease into it, goddammit. Pull the skin off with your fingers if you have to, shit.”
Then Christina, middle child, whom I lovingly rechristened with the Native American appellation Fingers-in-Both-Nostrils-Thumb-in-Mouth-and-Snot-All-Over-the-Fucking-Place, would pull on the heartstrings to tighten the filial ties.
“What about me and Gunnar?”
“No.”
“Can you prove it?” Christina would ask, anxious and unconvinced, her heavy breathing blowing mucus bubbles from her nose.
“Which ones those crinkly lines on your stomach is mines?”
“Chrissy, if anyone is fool enough to tell you that they your parents, believe them. Okay?”
“Maw.”
“What, Gunnar?”
“Your feet stank.”
“Shut up before I make you fill out that application to military school.”
The advanced course in Kaufman genealogy didn’t start until Mom returned home from earning our livings by testing the unlucky poor for VD at a free clinic in East Los Angeles. I remember she enjoyed bringing the sharp stainless-steel tools of her trade and glossy Polaroids of the most advanced cases to the dinner table. Spit-shining the speculums and catheters, she’d tell her awful jokes about “pricking the pricks and hunting the cunts.” I swear somewhere in her unknown past traveling minstrels cakewalked across candlelit theater stages.
The seven o’clock suppers were carnival sideshows, featuring Mom the Amazing Crazy Lady. She’d wipe our greasy lips, lecturing us about the horrors of sexually transmitted disease while passing mashed potatoes and photos of pussy lesions around the table. For the coup de grâce she’d open a prophylactic package, remove and unroll a blue sheath, and stuff the receptacle end into a nostril. Then she’d sit there lecturing us about the joys of safe sex with a crumpled condom swinging from her nose and bouncing off her chin with each syllable. Suddenly she’d press the open nostril closed with her finger and with a snort snake the unlubricated rubber up her nose. She’d open her mouth and produce a soggy piece of latex, holding it up for all to see with a gloating “Ta-dah. Let’s eat.”
The festivities continued throughout the meal. Though her designation as world’s loudest griot cannot be substantiated, the Guinness Book of World Records lists her as having the world’s loudest swallow.
SWALLOW. Ms. Brenda W. Kaufman (b. 1955) of Los Angeles recorded unamplified swallows at 47 db (busy street = 70 db, jet engine = 130) while guesting on the David Letterman show drinking New York City tap water on May 3, 1985.
On her birthdays I watch the videotape of her performance. A man with an English accent holds a microphone to her throat while she enthusiastically drinks a clear glass of water. In the bottom righthand corner of the screen is a VU meter with a needle that jumps wildly with every booming swallow. My sisters and I yelled our heads off every time the needle moved into the red zone.
When she returned, we proudly took turns placing our fingers on her bobbing Adam’s apple as she drank her milk. Between swallows Mom would ask about our schoolwork and bemoan our miseducations. Slamming down an empty glass of milk, she’d run her tongue over her top lip and bellow, “See, there isn’t anything a Kaufman can’t do. Those history books say anything about your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on your father’s side, Euripides Kaufman? Betcha they don’t. Pass the fucking dinner buns and let Mama tell you about a colonial Negro who would’ve pulled himself up by the bootstraps had he had boots. The first of a legacy of colored men who forged their own way in the world. Gunnar, you listenin’?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mom could tell a motherfucking story. She’d start in with Euripides Kaufman, the youngest slave in history to buy his freedom. I heard the chains shackled to the spirits of Kaufman Negroes past slink and rattle up to the dining room windows. Dead niggers who smacked their arid lips and held their rumbling vacuous stomachs while they stared at the fried chicken, waiting for Mom to tell their tales.
Too small to smelt and work iron in his master’s Boston blacksmith shop, Euripides spent his bondage doing donkey work. After running barefoot errands over the downtown cobblestones, he’d look for ways to fill his idle time. Sitting on the grassy banks of the Charles River, he’d watch the jongleurs woo money from the pockets of sentimental passersby. At age seven Euripides saw a means of income. The baby entrepreneur ran home, spread globs of lamp oil over sooty black skin, and parked himself outside the busiest entrance to the Boston Common. Every promenading Bostonian who passed him by answered Euripides’s toothy obsequious grin and gleaming complexion with a concerned “Can I help you, son?” To which Euripides replied, “Would you like to rub me head for good luck? Cost a sixpence.”
Soon Euripides had a steady clientele of Brahmins and Tories, redcoats and militiamen paying to pass their palms over his bristly head for luck and a guaranteed afterlife. Six months later he decided to shave his skull to heighten the tactile pleasure, and business boomed. Word quickly got back to his owner and eponym Chauncy Kaufman about the little tar baby’s ingenuity in bringing a small measure of fame to his shop. Soon customers came into the shop to have their horses shod and to pat the “l’il black bastard’s” head. Customers rode up, tied their horses to the hitching post, and proclaimed, “Four new shoes, Chauncy. Where’s Euripides? Last week I forgot to palm his stubbly skull and the missus caught me buggering the Negro lass in the attic. Come ’ere, you baldheaded good-luck charm, you.”
Copyright © 1996 by Paul Beatty
