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'I am from a
racist family. I was educated in a racist school. I was a parishioner in a
racist church. I live in a racist city.'
Well, here we go, the Memphis writer Tom Graves (Crossroads: The Life
& Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson) has stepped forward to testify
about growing up in a segregated society where racism was as natural as the
white lines in a parking lot or the Klu Klux Klan using electric crosses for
their vigilante rallies. White Boy is an interesting story, and in at least one
respect makes a good sociological comparison to the autobiography of Malcolm X.
In his formative days, X trolled the dance halls of Harlem and Manhattan, did
the Lindy Hop white girl shagadelic as a matter of political preference. So
too, inversely, Tom Graves. Black magic women, Wild Bill's Blues Club, North
Memphis, still there today in what one Trip Advisor reviewer describes as a
'sketchy part of town'.
TG describes it as a
venue with 'authentic, undiluted electric black blues that played to a black
audience, unlike that canned Muzak blues ("Stormy Monday' anyone?) down on the
touristy Beale Street...'
'Five dollars at the
door and the music would start at 11 pm. They sold beer by the quart and
offered three food items: burgers, 'wangs', and fries. One dollar per
wang.'
This is where he found
them, although he came into contact with some in various Memphis work
environments over the years. Strange Brew? Sometimes, although there's a
melancholy humor about all this sexual buccaneering. White stoner blondes just
weren't doing it for him. And, sometimes, black ladies. For instance, one
rendezvous was with a black school cafeteria worker but when he discovered that
she moonlighted up-river in Nashville as a stripper (she dressed up in a
Catholic schoolgirl's uniform) and had six kids, the fantasy chilled. "I really
could not wait to drop her at her house and let that one sink into the swamp of
my past."
So much for
double-agents... or was it?
It must be a truism
that there can no racial integration without sexual integration. All you have
to do is look at South America. Today, when you live far away from the
Mississippi valley and Ground Zero, it's a liberated TV world where Tiger Woods
struts the fairways and greens of white middle class America racking up the
trophies both on and off the course and you think there's nothing unusual about
it.
'Like Gore Vidal, I
don't believe in turning down television appearances and sex'
The politics of race
relations is a difficult subject, especially for those of us who only know it
by reading books like White Boy or by watching TV. For Tom Graves, it certainly
wasn't always love and peace. He describes in some detail his days as a PR
writer for the Memphis School Board and the acrimonious workplace disputes with
a black female administrator that led to his transfer to a local hell-hole
middle-school as a teacher. While much of this autobio is funny, there's little
humor in this particular reminiscence. Reading TG's icy scorn for this lady is
almost injurious. But, as Dorothy Parker et. al. said, revenge is a dish best
served cold.
What to make of all of
this? I remember a Professor who married a a blonde Russian woman when studying
in Moscow. He brought her back with him to Canada, and after a year or so, she
left him. He became quite alcoholic and self-destructive. Why did he marry her?
"It was like having my own dictionary in bed with me," he said. And laughed the
gallows laugh. Of course he suspected he was being used as a passport out of
Soviet Russia, yet he just couldn't help himself. The cultural fascination when
personified as a sexual exotic was impossible to resist.
Black Magic
Woman
Therefore you can
suppose any blues aficionado wouldn't mind having some of that special voodoo
on hand, no matter the risk. TG admits that he got involved in his greatest
folly as part of a quest to better understand the blues.
How? Early in the new
millennium, TG turns his thoughts to West Africa -- perhaps he should go there,
research the roots of the blues, and when he's there, check out the women. He
gets on the Internet, somehow ends up on a dating site, and before you know it,
he's in Senegal entangled with a statuesque lady who fulfills his Bitches Brew
fantasy on every level. Too good to be true? A set-up? Could be. He says he was
suspicious, did research, consulted the soothsayers. The plot here -- and there
is a plot -- is worthy of a novel, and the reader might believe that at this
juncture of his story, TG is indeed living in a neo-gothic plantation romance
in the manner of Kyle 'Mandingo' Onstott.
Don't laugh -- any
man who sells his Peter Green Black Magic Woman '71 Les Paul guitar and his Art
Deco collection to make an African romance happen deserves some sympathy for
what comes down. Not quite as bad as Oedipus Rex, say, but bad enough. Still,
no regrets, he says. He made the lady sign a prenupt. Now, that's rock and
roll... and that's a great story.
Some readers will
remember Albert Goldman's outrageous biography of Elvis Presley. Tom Graves was
a researcher for Goldman on that project, so naturally you might wonder, did
black folks like Elvis? You know Miles Davis didn't think much of him but in
Memphis, blacks liked him, says TG, and relates a story told to him by Rufus
Thomas, a blues funk singer (best known for 'Walking the Dog') and a well-known
DJ for the local black radio station WDIA. Thomas was the first to include
Elvis on the playlist and even his 5 year old daughter was smitten. Elvis was
popular, both sides of the street.
And while TG doesn't
touch on it here, it's quite possible that Elvis Presley's hybrid musical style
and its popularity at home and across the world had a big positive influence on
race relations. Several of Presley's early hits were written by the black
pianist and singer Otis Blackwell. And while the ghost of Johnny Ray haunts the
Elvis vocal on Heartbreak Hotel, the big emotional influence is surely that of
the Delta blues.
How about the death of
Bessie Smith one rainy night on Highway 61? Graves sets the record straight.
No, Bessie didn't die because she was denied entry to a 'whites only'
hospital....
School teachers will
like this book, if only for some of the anecdotes about TG's year of teaching
the urban poor at a predominately black middle-school. One incident stands out:
a black kid whose dad tried to strangle him during a parent-teacher meeting. TG
and a colleague rescue the kid, remove him from the room to the safety of a
broom closet. When they return, the dad is unconcerned. Says TG, 'He sat there
smiling like a mule eating briers." Great simile, although it might be one
commonly used in the South.
'Believe me,' says TG,
'in Memphis City Schools, not only do these things happen, they happen every
day.' And: 'Every middle-school teacher knew girls were more prone to fight
than boys'. Ouch. This doesn't fit the official script.
I would say the root
of this book is to be found in Beat literature, although there's nothing
experimental about the narrative. The blunt, confessional exposition puts it in
the tradition of I Jan Cremer or Chet Baker's autobio As Though I Had
Wings. These are counter-culture testimonies, written not as literature,
but as social documents. While Tom Graves is a professional writer and tends
towards the personalism of the 'New Journalism' -- if you read one of his other
books such as Louise Brooks,
Frank Zappa and Other Dreamers and Charmers you do pick up some
autobiography along the way -- he has limited the thematic sweep of this memoir
to the issue of race.
So, White Boy: the
confession of a social reactionary? Or raunchy reminiscence of a rock and roll
journalist smitten by the blues? Both, surely. In 50's America, if you were
white and poor, you were never as poor as a black simply because your whiteness
acted as caste superiority. This is a popular sociological view on the matter.
And money alone doesn't erase the racial line. Judging by the Tom Graves
experience, it takes sex, a little rock and roll... and the universal mystique
of the blues.
© LR April
2019
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