The Purple Decades - a Reader, Page 26
Tom Wolfe
He pulls up one of the wooden chairs and sits down on it. Only he sits down on it backwards, straddling the seat and hooking his arms and his chin over the back of the chair, like the head foreman in the bunkhouse. It’s like saying, “We don’t stand on ceremony around here. This is a shirtsleeve operation.”
“I’m sorry that Mr. Johnson isn’t here today,” he says, “but he’s not in the city. He’s back in Washington meeting some important project deadlines. He’s very concerned, and he would want to meet with you people if he were here, but right now I know you’ll understand that the most important thing he can do for you is to push these projects through in Washington.”
The man keeps his arms and his head hung over the back of his chair, but he swings his hands up in the air from time to time to emphasize a point, first one hand and then the other. It looks like he’s giving wig-wag signals to the typing pool. The way he hangs himself over the back of the chair—that keeps up the funky shirtsleeve-operation number. And throwing his hands around—that’s dynamic … It says, “We’re hacking our way through the red tape just as fast as we can.”
“Now I’m here to try to answer any questions I can,” he says, “but you have to understand that I’m only speaking as an individual, and so naturally none of my comments are binding, but I’ll answer any questions I can, and if I can’t answer them, I’ll do what I can to get the answers for you.”
And then it dawns on you, and you wonder why it took so long for you to realize it. This man is the flak catcher. His job is to catch the flak for the No. 1 man. He’s like the professional mourners you can hire in Chinatown. They have certified wailers, professional mourners, in Chinatown, and when your loved one dies, you can hire the professional mourners to wail at the funeral and show what a great loss to the community the departed is. In the same way this lifer is ready to catch whatever flak you’re sending up. It doesn’t matter what bureau they put him in. It’s all the same. Poverty, Japanese imports, valley fever, tomato-crop parity, partial disability, home loans, second-probate accounting, the Interstate 90 detour change order, lockouts, secondary boycotts, G.I. alimony, the Pakistani quota, cinch mites, Tularemic Loa loa, veterans’ dental benefits, workmen’s compensation, suspended excise rebates—whatever you’re angry about, it doesn’t matter, he’s there to catch the flak. He’s a lifer.
Everybody knows the scene is a shuck, but you can’t just walk out and leave. You can’t get it on and bring thirty-five people walking all the way from the Mission to 100 McAllister and then just turn around and go back. So … might as well get into the number …
One of the Chicanos starts it off by asking the straight question, which is about how many summer jobs the Mission groups are going to get. This is the opening phase, the straight-face phase, in the art of mau-mauing.
“Well,” says the Flak Catcher—and he gives it a twist of the head and a fling of the hand and the ingratiating smile—“It’s hard for me to answer that the way I’d like to answer it, and the way I know you’d like for me to answer it, because that’s precisely what we’re working on back in Washington. But I can tell you this. At this point I see no reason why our project allocation should be any less, if all we’re looking at is the urban-factor numbers for this area, because that should remain the same. Of course, if there’s been any substantial pre-funding, in Washington, for the fixed-asset part of our program, like Head Start or the community health centers, that could alter the picture. But we’re very hopeful, and as soon as we have the figures, I can tell you that you people will be the first to know.”
It goes on like this for a while. He keeps saying things like, “I don’t know the answer to that right now, but I’ll do everything I can to find out.” The way he says it, you can tell he thinks you’re going to be impressed with how honest he is about what he doesn’t know. Or he says, “I wish we could give everybody jobs. Believe me, I would like nothing better, both personally and as a representative of this Office.”
So one of the bloods says, “Man, why do you sit there shining us with this bureaucratic rhetoric, when you said yourself that ain’t nothing you say that means a goddam thing?”
Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram—a bunch of the aces start banging on the floor in unison. It sounds like they have sledge hammers.
“Ha-unnnnh,” says the Flak Catcher. It is one of those laughs that starts out as a laugh but ends up like he got hit in the stomach halfway through. It’s the first assault on his dignity. So he breaks into his shit-eating grin, which is always phase two. Why do so many bureaucrats, deans, preachers, college presidents, try to smile when the mau-mauing starts? It’s fatal, this smiling. When some bad dude is challenging your manhood, your smile just proves that he is right and you are chickenshit—unless you are a bad man yourself with so much heart that you can make that smile say, “Just keep on talking, sucker, because I’m gonna count to ten and then squash you.”
“Well,” says the Flak Catcher, “I can’t promise you jobs if the jobs aren’t available yet”—and then he looks up as if for the first time he is really focusing on the thirty-five ghetto hot dogs he is now facing, by way of sizing up the threat, now that the shit has started. The blacks and the Chicanos he has no doubt seen before, or people just like them, but then he takes in the Filipinos. There are about eight of them, and they are all wearing the Day-Glo yellow and hot-green sweaters and lemon-colored pants and Italian-style socks. But it’s the headgear that does the trick. They’ve all got on Rap Brown shades and Russian Cossack hats made of frosted-gray Dynel. They look bad. Then the man takes in the Samoans, and they look worse. There’s about ten of them, but they fill up half the room. They’ve got on Island shirts with designs in streaks and blooms of red, only it’s a really raw shade of red, like that red they paint the floor with in the tool and die works. They’re glaring at him out of those big dark wide brown faces. The monsters have tight curly hair, but it grows in long strands, and they comb it back flat, in long curly strands, with a Duke pomade job. They’ve got huge feet, and they’re wearing sandals. The straps on the sandals look like they were made from the reins on the Budweiser draft horses. But what really gets the Flak Catcher, besides the sheer size of the brutes, is their Tiki canes. These are like Polynesian scepters. They’re the size of sawed-off pool cues, only they’re carved all over in Polynesian Tiki Village designs. When they wrap their fists around these sticks, every knuckle on their hands pops out the size of a walnut. Anything they hear that they like, like the part about the “bureaucratic rhetoric,” they bang on the floor in unison with the ends of the Tiki sticks—ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram —although some of them press one end of the stick onto the sole of their sandal between their first two toes and raise their foot up and down with the stick to cushion the blow on the floor. They don’t want to scuff up the Tiki cane.
The Flak Catcher is still staring at them, and his shit-eating grin is getting worse. It’s like he knows the worst is yet to come … Goddamn … that one in front there … that Pineapple Brute …
“Hey, Brudda,” the main man says. He has a really heavy accent. “Hey, Brudda, how much you make?”
“Me?” says the Flak Catcher. “How much do I make?”
“Yeah, Brudda, you. How much money you make?”
Now the man is trying to think in eight directions at once. He tries out a new smile. He tries it out on the bloods, the Chicanos, and the Filipinos, as if to say, “As one intelligent creature to another, what do you do with dumb people like this?” But all he gets is the glares, and his mouth shimmies back into the terrible sickening grin, and then you can see that there are a whole lot of little muscles all around the human mouth, and his are beginning to squirm and tremble … He’s fighting for control of himself … It’s a lost cause …
“How much, Brudda?”
Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram—they keep beating on the floor. “Well,” says the Flak Catcher, “I make $1,100 a month.”
“How come you make so much?”
Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“How come you make so much? My fadda and mudda both work and they only make six hundred and fifty.”
Oh shit, the cat kind of blew it there. That’s way over the poverty line, about double, in fact. It’s even above the guideline for a family of twelve. You can see that fact register with the Flak Catcher, and he’s trying to work up the nerve to make the devastating comeback. But he’s not about to talk back to these giants.
“Listen, Brudda. Why don’t you give up your paycheck for summer jobs? You ain’t doing shit.”
“Wellll”—the Flak Catcher grins, he sweats, he hangs over the back of the chair—
Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram—“Yeah, Brudda! Give us your paycheck!”
There it is … the ultimate horror … He can see it now, he can hear it … Fifteen tons of it … It’s horrible … it’s possible … It’s so obscene, it just might happen … Huge Polynesian monsters marching down to his office every payday … Hand it over, Brudda … ripping it out of his very fingers … eternally … He wrings his hands … the little muscles around his mouth are going haywire. He tries to recapture his grin, but those little amok muscles pull his lips up into an O, like they were drawstrings.
“I’d gladly give up my salary,” says the Flak Catcher. “I’d gladly do it, if it would do any good. But can’t you see, gentlemen, it would be just a drop in the bucket … just a drop in the bucket!” This phrase a drop in the bucket seems to give him heart … it’s something to hang onto … an answer … a reprieve … “Just consider what we have to do in this city alone, gentlemen! All of us! It’s just a drop in the bucket!”
The Samoans can’t come up with any answer to this, so the Flak Catcher keeps going
“Look, gentlemen,” he says, “you tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Of course you want more summer jobs, and we want you to have them. That’s what we’re here for. I wish I could give everybody a job. You tell me how to get more jobs, and we’ll get them. We’re doing all we can. If we can do more, you tell me how, and I’ll gladly do it.”
One of the bloods says, “Man, if you don’t know how, then we don’t need you.”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! Whadda we need you for!” You can tell the Samoans wish they had thought of that shoot-down line themselves—Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram—they clobber the hell out of the floor.
“Man,” says the blood, “you just taking up space and killing time and drawing pay!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! You just drawing pay!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“Man,” says the blood, “if you don’t know nothing and you can’t do nothing and you can’t say nothing, why don’t you tell your boss what we want!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! Tell the man!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram “As I’ve already told you, he’s in Washington trying to meet the deadlines for your projects!”
“You talk to the man, don’t you? He’ll let you talk to him, won’t he?”
“Yes …”
“Send him a telegram, man!”
“Well, all right—”
“Shit, pick up the telephone, man!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! Pick up the telephone!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“Please, gentlemen! That’s pointless! It’s already after six o’clock in Washington. The office is closed!”
“Then call him in the morning, man,” says the blood. “We coming back here in the morning and we gonna watch you call the man! We gonna stand right on top of you so you won’t forget to make that call!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! On top of you!” Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram
“All right, gentlemen … all right,” says the Flak Catcher. He slaps his hands against his thighs and gets up off the chair. “I’ll tell you what …” The way he says it, you can tell the man is trying to get back a little corner of his manhood. He tries to take a tone that says, “You haven’t really been in here for the past fifteen minutes intimidating me and burying my nuts in the sand and humiliating me … We’ve really been having a discussion about the proper procedures, and I am willing to grant that you have a point.”
“If that’s what you want,” he says, “I’m certainly willing to put in a telephone call.”
“If we want! If you willing! Ain’t no want or willing about it, man! You gonna make that call! We gonna be here and see you make it!”
“Dat’s right, Brudda! We be seeing you”—Ba-ram-ba-ram-ba-ram—“We coming back!”
And the Flak Catcher is standing there with his mouth playing bad tricks on him again, and the Samoans hoist their Tiki sticks, and the aces all leave, and they’re thinking … We’ve done it again. We’ve mau-maued the goddamn white man, scared him until he’s singing a duet with his sphincter, and the people sure do have power. Did you see the look on his face? Did you see the sucker trembling? Did you see the sucker trying to lick his lips? He was scared, man! That’s the last time that sucker is gonna try to urban-factor and pre-fund and fix-asset with us! He’s gonna go home to his house in Diamond Heights and he’s gonna say, “Honey, fix me a drink! Those mother-fuckers were ready to kill me!” That sucker was some kind of petrified … He could see eight kinds of Tiki sticks up side his head …
Of course, the next day nobody shows up at the poverty office to make sure the sucker makes the telephone call. Somehow it always seems to happen that way. Nobody ever follows it up. You can get everything together once, for the demonstration, for the confrontation, to go downtown and mau-mau, for the fun, for the big show, for the beano, for the main event, to see the people bury some gray cat’s nuts and make him crawl and whine and sink in his own terrible grin. But nobody ever follows it up. You just sleep it off until somebody tells you there’s going to be another big show.
And then later on you think about it and you say, “What really happened that day? Well, another flak catcher lost his manhood, that’s what happened.” Hmmmmmm … like maybe the bureaucracy isn’t so dumb after all … All they did was sacrifice one flak catcher, and they’ve got hundreds, thousands … They’ve got replaceable parts. They threw this sacrifice to you, and you went away pleased with yourself. And even the Flak Catcher himself wasn’t losing much. He wasn’t losing his manhood. He gave that up a long time ago, the day he became a lifer … Just who is fucking over who? … You did your number and he did his number, and they didn’t even have to stop the music … The band played on … Still—did you see the look on his face? That sucker—
When black people first started using the confrontation tactic, they made a secret discovery. There was an extra dividend to this tactic. There was a creamy dessert. It wasn’t just that you registered your protest and showed the white man that you meant business and weakened his resolve to keep up the walls of oppression. It wasn’t just that you got poverty money and influence. There was something sweet that happened right there on the spot. You made the white man quake. You brought fear into his face.
Black people began to realize for the first time that the white man, particularly the educated white man, the leadership, had a deep dark Tarzan mumbo jungle voodoo fear of the black man’s masculinity. This was a revelation. For two hundred years, wherever black people lived, north or south, mothers had been raising their sons to be meek, to be mild, to check their manhood at the front door in all things that had to do with white people, for fear of incurring the wrath of the Man. The Man was the white man. He was the only man. And now, when you got him up close and growled, this all-powerful superior animal turned out to be terrified. You could read it in his face. He had the same fear in his face as some good-doing boy who has just moved onto the block and is hiding behind his mama and the moving man and the sofa while the bad dudes on the block size him up.
So for the black man mau-mauing was a beautiful trip. It not only stood to br
ing you certain practical gains like money and power. It also energized your batteries. It recharged your masculinity. You no longer had to play it cool and go in for pseudo-ignorant malingering and put your head into that Ofay Pig Latin catacomb code style of protest. Mau-mauing brought you respect in its cash forms: namely, fear and envy.
This was the difference between a confrontation and a demonstration. A demonstration, like the civil-rights march on Washington in 1963, could frighten the white leadership, but it was a general fear, an external fear, like being afraid of a hurricane. But in a confrontation, in mau-mauing, the idea was to frighten white men personally, face to face. The idea was to separate the man from all the power and props of his office. Either he had enough heart to deal with the situation or he didn’t. It was like saying, “You—yes, you right there on the platform—we’re not talking about the government, we’re not talking about the Office of Economic Opportunity—we’re talking about you, you up there with your hands shaking in your pile of papers …” If this worked, it created a personal, internal fear. The internal fear was, “I’m afraid I’m not man enough to deal with these bad niggers!”
That may sound like a simple case of black people being good at terrifying whites and whites being quick to run scared. But it was more than that. The strange thing was that the confrontation ritual was built into the poverty program from the beginning. The poverty bureaucrats depended on confrontations in order to know what to do.
