PARTISAN REVIEW
569
"Touch me," Pat said, throwing her hot Hughs over him. And
then they were fucking on into the night.
"Oh, God," he said, and forgot his responsibility forever. They
fucked, they fucked.
"Wait," said the girl, for she was no longer a lady. She then
got up on her knees. They fucked, they fucked.
Tall tales these, pornographic fish stories, more jive, excess in a world
of excesses that finally do not satisfy. Brown begins where Mailer's
"White Negro" leaves off and comes to say, if I may use the tip of my
Scripto again, that being hip, being consciously hip is not called for,
the world of the swinging outlaw, the brutal stud is no longer viable:
"If
you're black you don't need to get at anything. You're already there."
I don't think that
Mr. Jiveass
is a Black novel. It's too "revelant"
to be so classified, and I think Cecil Brown might agree. In an epilogue
~hat
is soaring, poetic - all of that - he laces his ultimate honesty with
doubt:
You think that your acts have been lies because you have been
acting like a white hero in some white man's novel. But you need
to realize that your creator is not some white man, but a black
brother, a nigger, a jiveass very much like yourself. And if you
chose to see only blackness, that doesn't mean you're blind; it means
only that you are living out of your insides, living out of where you
first began.
Ah, even this, in the final analysis, even this is jive. All is jive.
The only time I have really understood jive as a word was at a
protest meeting on campus in Santa Barbara when Governor Reagan, after
Cambodia and Kent State, closed down the universities and proclaimed
that there would be no assemblies. The spokesman for the Blacks said,
in a moment of eloquence and solidarity, that they brought down their
jive on us in Isla Vista and they brought down their jive on us in this
university and we are going to go out and go down and go to Wash–
ington and we are going to tell them . . . we're going to say to Mr.
Mitchell and Mr. Nixon that they had better get their thing together ...
If
only rhetoric could do it.
Maureen Howard
