In 1934, though, when my mother viewed her demolished little boy, she was not quite so tolerant. Immediately, she challenged the manhood of all the assembled wops in my grandfather’s apartment and demanded a Sicilian vendetta in the grand old style of the one that had been visited upon poor Charlie Shoe way back there during the Perils of Pauline. It was my father who reasoned that we would never be able to find a half-dozen anonymous niggers on Park Avenue, and even if we did find them, what were we supposed to do? Beat them up? In their own territory? The “in their own territory” was an afterthought. My father had no stomach for violence, even if his own darling little blind bastard had just been the victim of violence. In that respect, my father was distinctly anti-American. He managed to convince the others that discretion was the better part of valor, and we all sat down to enjoy my grandmother’s rigatoni.
I kept thinking about those kids who’d beat me up.
I kept wondering why they’d done it.
I don’t wish to nag a theme the way I would a note in a blues chorus, but when I first began playing jazz, there were no factions, no divisions, you either knew how to blow or you didn’t. Jazz was the true melting pot, the full realization of the American myth I’d learned as a kid. I can honestly say I never got any draft about being a white man playing black music until 1950. I’d been married to Rebecca for almost two years by then. We had one child and another on the way, and times were not precisely rosy. I was still playing here and there in some of New York City’s lesser-known toilets, and when I got a shot at cutting a record with some fairly well-known musicians, I thought success was just around the corner. I met the leader of the band and his trumpet player in front of the Brill Building. Both men were black. The leader, a bassist named Rex Butler, took one look at me and (just as my mother had said, “Mama, it’s the Jew,” in the presence of the dry-goods salesman) said to his trumpet player, “This white cat won’t swing, man.” The worst thing you can say about any jazz musician is that he doesn’t “swing.” He can have great chops, he can be inventive as hell, but if he doesn’t swing, forget him. The trumpet player remained silent. I didn’t know whether he was nodding his head in agreement or picking his nose noncommittally. “Sorry, man,” Butler said, and that was that; they cut the record with a black piano player.
That was in 1950.
Sixteen years before that, I was still trying to reconcile what had happened to me on Park Avenue with what was happening everywhere around me. I was almost eight years old and beginning to make some value judgments of my own, and it seemed to me that whereas my grandfather’s concept of family was a limited one, including as it did only half the wops in Harlem, Fiormonte, and the suburbs of Naples, it nonetheless was not in conflict with the larger concept of family being developed in the American myth. I did not yet know it was a myth; that realization would come later, much later. For me, at eight, it was a glowing dream which had as its basis an impossible and unlikely collection of people from different nations who, united by a common ideal and a rapidly growing common tradition, and working together to achieve that ideal, could make this the strongest, most prosperous, most enlightened country on the face of the earth, with liberty and justice for all whether they were Irish, Italian, Negro, German, English, Czech, or double-check American.
In 1934, I thought I knew what being American meant, even though my concept seemed to clash violently with my mother’s. To her, Fiorello La Guardia, the goddamn mayor of New York, was “just another greaseball,” whereas Father Coughlin was an “American,” and she wouldn’t have missed his radio broadcast every Sunday night if you’d offered her “all the tea in China.” I still don’t understand that woman, and I’ve known her for forty-eight years. I was thirty-seven before I discovered she’d always hated fish and therefore cooked it in the most impossibly inedible manner every Friday night of my childhood merely because she considered herself a good Catholic. But she had quit going to confession when she was sixteen, and I don’t think she’s stepped inside a church since the day she got married, and I know she practiced birth control because when I was a kid I found a small box in the top drawer of the dresser, on the side belonging to my father, and my brother Tony said, “Iggie, those are nothing but scum bags.” I listened to my mother when I was young, but I couldn’t decipher what she meant by “I’m American, don’t forget,” because it didn’t jibe with the larger concept of the American family as it was being taught everywhere around me — and especially by Miss Goodbody.
Miss Goodbody told me that the proper descriptive term for a colored person was neither nigger nor boogie, but instead Negro. She told me that calling a Negro a nigger was tantamount to calling an Italian a wop. Since I hadn’t ever been called a wop except by the six niggers on Park Avenue, I wasn’t even aware that the term was derogatory. The only other place I’d heard the expression was in my own kitchen, from the lips of Stella the Ail-American Girl, who used it interchangeably with “greaseball,” “ginzo,” “guinea,” and sometimes “greenhorn” (though this last term of affection was usually reserved for the Irish). But I began thinking about it. And I decided I would be very careful about using the word “nigger” so casually, and that I would not refer to Jews as “Jews,” which somehow also sounded derogatory, but instead say “Jewish people.” Similarly, Miss Goodbody taught me to say Pole for Polack and Spanish for Spic — which I’d never said, anyway, since the massive Puerto Rican influx hadn’t yet begun in New York, and the slur was alien to us wops in the ghetto. In fact, the first time I ever heard the word was when Miss Good-body warned me against using it.
Well, once you’ve revised your vocabulary, you’ve come a long way toward revising your thinking. I find it ironic that after all those years of training myself to say “Negro,” I then had to learn to say “black,” which in my youth was only half a word, the unvoiced expletive “bastard” being clearly understood, as in the black expression “mother,” where the “fucker” is as silent as the X in “fish.” Do I sound bitter? The hell with you; Fm blind. And besides, I know something now that I did not know then, and there is almost as much exhilaration in recognizing the lie as there was in living it. It’s the truth that keeps eluding me; it’s the truth that’s so difficult to find. The lies are always there, you see, and just when you think you’ve cornered one with the broom, another one pops out of a tinned-up hole on the other side of the room, and you’ve got to start all over again. There are times, admittedly, when you think you’ll never be able to cope with this place that’s overrun with scampering lies, times when you wonder why in Christ’s name you bother searching for the truth at all; who the hell are you — Diogenes? Wouldn’t it be easier to just lie down and relax somewhere under a shade tree, with clouds drifting through an azure sky you’ve never seen and can never hope to see, and just allow the lies to run free over your body, to lick your face into final submission and pick the flesh from your bones, revealing at last the stark white truth of your skeleton? Or is there perhaps a sweeter form of surrender? Might you not put a bullet in your brain, or a knife in your heart, could you not slit your wrists in the bathtub, or jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, or onto the tracks of the subway your grandfather or mine built, and end it, shit, just end it? Yes, I suppose you could. But then you’d never have known, isn’t that so? And how can you hope to learn anything, sonny, if you don’t ask questions?