The Beiderbecke Affair

‘I don’t see color’

Several days ago I patched together a few thoughts on race-mixing. The writer Steven Augustine posted a series of comments, arguing that race is in need of a “re-think,” that the term “race” itself is racist, and, finally, that my sister considering herself to be “black” is the product of “proto-Nazi nonsense . . . It’s Eugenics, pure and simple.”

Whew.

A reader responded to Augustine’s thoughts via e-mail:

The argument that “race does not exist as a natural category” makes me SO MAD in part, because it was at the cent of the anthropology curriculum at my college, and made me feel SO stuck (if “culture doesn’t exist, then what the hell are we studying?!) and finally pushed me over the edge. Steve: NOT HELPFUL. But thank you for your comments.

I have a couple thoughts. In Making Whiteness (1998), University of Virginia history professor Grace Hale writes that “identities are slippery, ambiguous, and individual things.” So any discussion of race (or “race,” if you prefer) is necessarily going to be charged because we’re talking about how we identify ourselves. When my sister describes herself and her husband as “the only two black people in a church full of whites,” it hardly matters whether the latest biology asserts that race doesn’t exist. It does for her!

However, Augustine is correct to point out that this identity is on one level arbitrary—all things being equal, she could just as easily identify herself as white. He is also correct to suggest that this identity has, in a way, been forced upon her by history. After all, all things are not equal. In the United States of America, people with dark skin are not and never have been considered white.

Nor, let’s face it, have they necessarily wanted to be.

Central to Hale’s argument is that “racial making,” as she puts it, goes both ways. The idea of whiteness began as a denial of racial identity, but in the years between Reconstruction and the Second World War, an entire infrastructure of white identity was built. And its foundation, of course, was segregation. If whiteness started out as the denial of race, it ended as the denial of blackness.

It’s sad. It’s unfair. But it’s the world we live in, and I welcome the discussion. In the meantime, playing color blind—or arguing that race doesn’t exist—won’t get us very far. Wouldn’t well all like to be like Stephen Colbert, who famously said, “Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me sir”?

Yesterday’s New York Times, for instance, highlights a report on transracial foster care and adoption. Multiracial families don’t produce psychological or social problems in kids, according to the report, but “these children often face major challenges as the only person of color in an all-white environment, trying to cope with being different.”

“The idea of being color-blind is great, and we’d all like to get there,” Adam Pertman, executive director of the Adoption Institute, told the Times. “But the reality is that we live in a very race-conscious society, and that needs to be addressed. We can’t simply pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and leave it up to the child to cope.”

Hear, hear. (Although this strikes me as not necessary at all.) Oh, and as for the issue of eugenics—Virginia has a fascinating role to play in that history. More soon . . .

IMAGE: Anti-miscegenation propaganda

A Modest Salute

My grandfather, Ray Wolfe, was 21 years old in 1917, a farmer from tiny Lost Nation, Iowa, who was drafted into the Navy as the United States prepared for war with Germany. He didn’t go overseas—he was stationed at the Great Lakes, instead—but he served. I admire that.

My sister Bridget served, as well. She was not quite 23 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and, as a newly commissioned officer, she volunteered to go. She also served in Bosnia and, most recently, during the initial invasion of Iraq. She volunteered for this last tour, as well, and I admire that even more.

My grandfather’s brother Melvin was a Marine in the 1920s and 1930s who saw action in Nicaragua, the Philippines, and Shanghai. My grandmother had twin brothers who fought in Europe during the Great War. A cousin was decorated at Pearl Harbor, and an older, more distant relative may have been an Iowa cavalryman in the Civil War.

My mom’s oldest brother fought in Europe during the Second World War, and I have a cousin who just joined the Marines.

Today’s a day for sunshine and brats. But I’ll be thinking of them and their service, too.

PREVIOUSLY: A great picture of Ray and his family

IMAGE: My grandfather’s World War I draft card

It's a Complicated Story (Part 2)

. . . by which I mean race in America.* I know, this is hardly a penetrating insight, but it’s on the mind regardless, what with Barack Obama reminding us that he has “brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents,” and some guy in Georgia responding by creating T-shirts that liken the candidate to Curious George. “This is not 1941 in Alabama,” the dude told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when confronted with the suggestion that comparing a black man to a monkey might be racist, “so get over it.”

True enough. It’s not 1941 in Alabama. The same guy, though, once created a sign that read, “I wish Hillary had married O.J.,” which suggests that fears of miscegenation have never really gone away. After all, what is O.J. Simpson if not, for some people at least, a kind of Nat Turner, a symbol of the black man rising up not just to murder whites, but white women? Virginian William Styron won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel in which the legendary slave-cum-preacher-cum-rebel is sexually attracted to a white woman whom he then murders. African Americans loudly protested.

Sure, he could have loved Margaret Whitehead, the actor Ossie Davis said at the time, but that’s not the point.

What I am disturbed about is that this is one of the areas about which I fear my country can be immediately psychotic and destructive. I have only to think back in the last hundred years to the more than 3,500 black men lynched in the South, the rationale of such activities being that these men constituted a threat to white womanhood . . . Are we that clear of our horror at the thought of a black male lusting after white flesh?

Not according to Cinque Henderson, an African American who wrote in The New Republic this week that “had Barack married a white woman, his candidacy would’ve never gotten off the ground with black people.” Regardless of whether he’s right, what’s interesting is the idea that the fear and skepticism of race-mixing is not limited to whites. Notice how Davis talks about “our horror.” Does his pronoun refer to Americans or just African Americans? He’s not clear, and perhaps that’s the point.

In his 2003 book Mulatto America, Stephan Talty argues that Native Americans were willing, at least at first, to mingle culturally with newly arrived whites. For obvious reasons, however, “the merging of black and white was more contentious.” As early as 1691, Virginia expressed its own skepticism of the idea by banning interracial marriage.

Still, Talty notes that “the ferocious responses to unions of black men and white women that have become a cliché of southern ‘honor’—the lynchings, the castrations, the pathological obsession with black rapists—date mostly from the Civil War period and onward; the institutionalized terror that ruled the South after the war was not the rule.” In fact, he claims that whites often looked out for their black neighbors who might have been unfairly accused, and that, in the end, it was white women and not black men “who bore the brunt of the society’s disapproval when they strayed from their assigned beds.”

Of course, interracial marriages weren’t always the union of black men and white women. Richard Loving was white, his wife Mildred black. When Mildred died this month, she left behind the legacy of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court decision (handed down in 1967, the same year Styron’s novel was published) that banned discrimination in marriage based on race. She was also part of another legacy in Virginia, the “secret” mixing of the races. That provocative adjective “secret” comes courtesy of the New York Times, which wrote on Wednesday about the history of miscegenation in Mildred Loving’s hometown, tiny Central Point, Virginia.

Mixed-race folks have a history of settling there, apparently, making it difficult sometimes to tell the difference between black and white. But then that’s what nosy neighbors and Jim Crow laws were for. “Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied,” according to the Times. “But when [locals] ventured beyond Caroline County—where no one knew them—many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to ‘pass’ as white.” They could use any movie theater or bathroom or lunch counter they pleased. They could even serve alongside whites in the Army.

“The community developed a system for protecting racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families,” the Times continues. “When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.”

Then there were people like Mildred Loving, whose heart forgot to play by the rules, making it impossible for her neighbors to look the other way. Somebody called the sheriff and he rousted her and her new white husband out of bed at two in the morning.

It’s a complicated story, and rarely do these things have happy endings. When my adopted sister—biological mother black, biological father white—married her husband—white mother, black father, then deceased—she remarked that they were the only two black people in a church full of whites. Her voice hinted at both a kind of sadness and something else. Was it victory? I don’t think so. That’s too simple an emotion for Miscegenation Nation.

* This is the second time I’ve posted this image, but only the first time I’ve elaborated.

ELSEWHERE: Cross posted here.

IMAGE: Me and my sis

It’s a Complicated Story

This is one in an occasional series documenting unlikely discoveries made while unpacking thirty-seven brown boxes of books and papers.

Family Snapshot

I’ve never received much advice one way or the other from my parents—or at least that’s what I’ve always believed. But while unpacking boxes, I happened upon a letter my dad mailed to me my freshman year in college. It was typed, of course. And dated September 24, 1990. The advice he dispenses is not earthshaking, but it’s sincere. I don’t remember receiving it, but I do know that I’ve followed it.

In the intellectual maelstrom that is Iowa City, it is quite easy for people with passionate personalities (that includes both of us) to lose their cool and go over the deep end. Please don’t. Always keep that curious mind of yours alive, and don’t become too ideological (if I might borrow a word from your poli sci prof). Back in the days when the bookmobile used to come to McKinley (remember that delightful book you loved about the engineer, policeman, et al.), there was always a book up near the front on display which was entitled How To Argue With a Conservative. I always refused to read it because I found the premise--that liberals are always right and conservatives always wrong--objectionable. Some of the finest people I presently know and have ever met are religious fundamentalists and/or political conservatives. [. . .] After a while it gets confusing. I would like to think that the people I agree with are always the good guys, but quite often I really dislike people I vote for. (For instance, I actually actively dislike Tom Harkin but like Charles Grassley a lot. I always thought Gary Hart was a phony compared with Walter Mondale, but I happened to agree with Hart in ’84 far more than I did Mondale. It’s just not fair, as you used to say so much.)

The letter, by the way, was right next to the above photo—a family snapshot of a different sort.

This is one in an occasional series documenting unlikely discoveries made while unpacking thirty-seven brown boxes of books and papers.

Am I Writing Away My Book?

I recently received a kind note from an anonymous reader who, while complimenting the writing she found here, wondered if I wasn’t “writing away” my book. You remember, my book, the one about Bix Beiderbecke. And it’s true: I haven’t written a chapter in several months. “I know some use their blogs for various means, including sanity, or order, or neither,” she continued, “but just as one heart to another, I hope you are spending 10x the time writing your book as you are writing the blog.”

Not even close. In fact, there are times when The Beiderbecke Affair seems to be a giant excuse not to write. I even quit for a spell, lest this diversion prove a little too diverting. But then, while drafting a response to this reader, I realized something important—that this blog, which was so ferociously mocked by a couple of my closest friends when it began, has become indispensable to my book. Here are a few reasons why:

• Through these pages I met Terry Teachout, who graciously set aside an afternoon to speak to me for and about my book.

• Through these pages I came to the attention of Ted Gioia, who offered me a gig writing about Bix for jazz.com.

• More than once, commenters have pointed me in the direction of critical sources.

• The Bix-related writing I have done here has served as a kind of first draft for at least two chapters in the book.

• Through these pages I have been able to gauge that, yes, there is interest in such a book as mine about Bix Beiderbecke.

• Finally, through these pages—and through unexpected emails like the one from my anonymous reader—I have received the sort of encouragement writers dream of.

So thank you for that, and thanks to everyone else who has made this project so much fun over the past few years.

‘I rather expected you to exercise a bit more control’

Still emptying boxes. The above picture was discovered in the vicinity of the note below. This is our kitchen—still is, actually—and my dad used to stand on one end, near the back door, and toss his fishing cap in the direction of my head. A kind of horseshoes. I remember him doing this, except that more likely I am just thinking of this photograph.

January 26, 1972

Brendan, me boy,

I trust, lad, that the time will come when you will exhibit a bit more intelligence than that presently displayed. You are on your third day of diarrahea (sp?), and you seem to enjoy it! I had rather expected you to exercise a bit more control by now.

Actually, Brendan, I am quite proud of you. I get rather excited when I think of your future. I do hope I won’t be too hard on you. Love God and your fellow man, and serve both. Remember the Sermon on the Mount.

Peace,

Your father

Funny that today neither of us particularly loves nor serves God, and only my dad serves his fellow man. And what strange ways we’ve chosen to communicate with one another . . .

PREVIOUSLY: Kitties cute and easy to love. Courage tastes of blood.

This is one in an occasional series documenting unlikely discoveries made while unpacking thirty-seven brown boxes of books and papers.

‘I was never a bright child’

I found the above photo while unpacking boxes. It dates to August 1941 and shows my dad with his dad. My grandfather, an Iowa farmer two generations removed from Ireland, died of cancer just shy of his 45th birthday. Dad was nine months old.

“Dad loved horses, always had several around the farm, and went to Montana often to shop for horses,” my dad wrote in an email.

Somewhere there is a photo of him in full cowboy garb that I always thought was real, and I didn’t learn until I was an adult that it was merely one of those photos where you stick your head above the cardboard cutout of the cowboy! I was never a bright child.

Ed Lassen once told me a story about my parents that I found interesting. Mom must have been looking out a house window and saw Dad doing something to a horse that disturbed her, so she came storming out of the house and really ripped into him in the presence of Ed, a young hired man. I mention that because Mom once told me that she was a very quiet presence until Dad died and she had to remake herself just to survive in this big, bad world.

PREVIOUSLY: Exiled a second time; lost among the Wolfes; a prolific and often brilliant writer of letters

This is one in an occasional series documenting unlikely discoveries made while unpacking thirty-seven brown boxes of books and papers.

‘What matters, in the end, is your point of view’

For eight months, my books and papers have been boxed and stacked and far away. “Papers” makes it sound as if I’m keeping some sort of official archive—although, in a way, I am. Since elementary school, I have kept letters and cards, notes passed in class, stories I have written, ticket stubs and theater programs, even snapshots my mom sends me of her garden. Of course, I am just as avid and sentimental a collector of books, hence this series of posts, in which I pined for a few of my favorites. As I waited for their delivery last week, my neighbor wondered why in hell I would buy so many books when I could just as easily use the public library. Here, then, is my reply: passages like this, to be discovered by opening one of my purchases at random:

In his Fractal Geometry of Nature, the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot asks the apparently simple question ‘How long is the coast of Britain?’ The coast is obviously not smooth and regular. It goes in and out in bays and estuaries and promontories and capes. If you measure it at one hundred miles to an inch, all of these irregularities appear. But if you measure it at twenty miles to an inch, new bays open up on the coastlines of promontories and new promontories jut out from the sides of bays. When you measure these as well, the coastline gets longer. At a mile to an inch it is even longer . . . and so on, until you crawl around on your hands and knees measuring the bumps on the side of each rock that makes up the coast. The more accurately you measure it, the more uncertain it becomes. What matters, in the end, is your point of view. Mandelbrot compares the length of the border between Spain and Portugal in a Portuguese and a Spanish atlas. In the former it is 20 per cent longer than in the latter, not because the territory is disputed, but because the Spanish surveyors used a larger scale, and thus measured fewer squiggles.

And this is what my life has felt like of late, suddenly measured on the smaller scale of thirty-seven boxes full of measurements, recordings, and thoughts—from anonymous notes by mysterious ninth-graders that begin, “Dear Brendan, I really don’t know you that well, and you don’t know me, but I really like you and I want to get to know you better. And I’m serious too!” to reflections on the infinity of a coastline.

IMAGE: Europe as a Queen (1570) by German cartographer Sebastian Munster

This is one in an occasional series documenting unlikely discoveries made while unpacking thirty-seven brown boxes of books and papers.

O Anguished Pen!

This was found in one of thirty-seven brown boxes that arrived Thursday from a storage locker in Iowa City. It’s a typed “Dear Jane” letter, dated September 1, 1994, in which I quote Plutarch, John Donne, and Bonnie Raitt; in which I suggest that my breakup is more painful than the loss of a young child; in which I melodramatically inventory the many mementos of my first love. It goes unnoted in the letter that these mementos had been burned the night before—not simply thrown away, but heaped into a pile in the parking lot of my apartment building and set afire. There was even a teddy bear, and the fraternity boys partying downstairs from me began to chant “Burn, Teddy, burn!” For the next month, charred bits of love letters followed me up and down the street, in the wind. That was one irony. That I have saved this letter for more than thirteen years—

Dear W—,

Today is a big day for me. I’ve done something I’ve never done before: I’ve thrown out something you’ve given me. OK, I admit I don’t still have the silk boxers you gave me (for Valentine’s Day?) or even the Notre Dame cap. They, like a lot of other things, fell apart. But today marks the first time I have ever thrown away anything that you have written, that you have sent me, that has your name on it, that relates to you, or that in any way reminds me of you or of us. No big deal, right? It was just a birthday card. So I mustered up the courage to toss everything else, too: a whole box filled with all of the letters you had written me over the last three-and-some years (too many to count, but I noticed that some were addressed to Brendan, Brendan Wolfe, Brendan Martin, Brendan Martin Wolfe, Brendan M. Wolfe, BMW; one was even addressed to Endan Bray and had Xs and Os on the back). Other things that went were the photograph of you (along with its shiny gold-colored frame) I used to keep on my desk, the one you actually took of yourself at B—’s party so long ago; and a Polaroid of “The Wonderful” and “The Bully” flanking D— that I swiped from the Summer Vacation Program. Also, the ticket we got for open container October 2, 1992. (It doesn’t mention how all we wanted to do was use your bathroom.) “Campanile Me!” UNI Homecoming ’92 button. A book of matches—Halftime Sports Bar—with “555-5813 Call me! W—” written inside. A letter you wrote me in a bowling alley on the back of a Hepatitis B fact sheet. And a strange dialogue scribbled on the torn reverse-side of a card advertising Dixie beer at the Wheelroom Bar: “Brendan is a babe but he doesn’t pay enough attention to me.” “HE SPOILS YOU 24 hrs a day.” “Charles’ twin is giving me looks.” “DO YOU WANT ME TO KILL HIM? I WILL . . .” “No, just throw BIG Bones @ him.”

These are some of the things I threw away today.