290
PEARL
K.
BELL
his grandson's family because they lived on the wrong side of
Indianapolis, "right there with the hoi polloi." What his race meant to
Grandfather was elementary: he was black at a time when everyone was
white and it was his duty "to pass on the record of alienated majesty" to
his descendants.
As his grandson moves into the revolutions of the sixties, assaulted in
equal parts by condescension, celebration, and hostility, he finds Grand–
father's notions more and more unacceptable. With his highly developed
sense of comic irony, he often offends his solemn black classmates, but he
is also eager to have "the social satisfaction of being a Black Power ad–
vocate in a suburban high school." Yet he can't let go of the feeling
"that everything all-Negro, separate, and tribal was a corral, and any–
thing white a great opening-up to the general dance." Torn by what he
calls his "Popular Front mentality" he seesaws between pride in his
blackness and chronic resistance to being part of a Movement that is in–
imical to ironic detachment.
Neither irony nor ellipitcal detachment provided much comfort
when he entered Columbia in the early seventies, years after "the golden
days of '68." He searches out the Harlem scene yet can't feel himself to
be part of it. But he discovers soon enough that being black in New
York is not the same as being black in Indiana. Staying on in the city
after graduation, he finally gets a dose of the racism he had more or less
escaped back home and, characteristically, finds some comedy in the
ugliness:
Taxi drivers would not stop for me after dark, white girls jogged to
keep ahead of my shadow thrown at their heels by the amber
streetlamps. Part of me didn't blame them, but most of me was hurt. I
carried props into the subway - the latest
Semiotext(e),
a hefty volume
of the Frankfurt School - so that the employed would not get the
wrong idea or, more to the point, the usual idea about me. . .. That
Bicentennial summer
I
got over it.
But it was not so easy to get over the racism of the aged Djuna
Barnes, the legendary relic of the avant-garde twenties who hired him
one summer to run errands and be generally useful. One day she orders
him to wash out a blouse, and he refuses. "She started to say that she
didn't understand why blacks had become so touchy, caught herself....
but I knew what she meant." He walks out and decides to write a
caustic attack on every writer who ever wrote a disparaging word about
blacks.
When that proves impossible, he finds another menial job, and then
