Books Mr. Jiveass Nigger

BEFORE you start reading this book, take a good look at the cover. There's nothing there but a white background and, in the center, a big black hand curled into the sign that says fuck you. Take a look, not only because it is the most graphic illustration of everything that The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger ends up being about, but also because, by the end of the book -by the time Cecil Brown has led you through the garish circus of lies, illusions, and rip offs that go reeling through the world of his characters - it will be good to have a "message" that definite and unequivocal to hang on to. Fuck you. And you. And you. And you. In this book, the words are not meant as a challenge, or a threat, or a command. They are the only words a black man can scream out once he has stopped his whoring to the white world, once he has chosen "to see only blackness," and "to live right out of his insides." The novel itself is a 2000 mile an hour trip through all the shit it takes to finally make that choice, and it's all the reader can do to keep up with the pace.

The character whose adventures make up most of the novel's action. Mr. Jiveass Nigger himself, is a young black from the rural South with the unfortunate name of...well...George Washington. Jiveass is a first degree con artist, a black stud who lives off white women and weaves a reality out of the lives he hands off to the world at large. The lies succeed in ripping off everyone but himself, and so he leaves America for Denmark hoping to find out if there is any way to survive without the lies, to see if there is "any mother fucker in this despiteful world who ever told himself the truth."

In Copehagen, however. Jiveass (or Anthony Miller, as he is now calling himself) finds himself spending his days in the Drop Inn restaurant having long intellectual discussions with fellow expatriate blacks, and his nights in bed with a series of white women who come equipped with all sorts of far-out perversions (sexual and otherwise) that seem guaranteed to strip away all of his carefully prepared defenses. The novel gets progressively more manic as the two worlds begin to collide and intersect and Jiveass finds that even the lies no longer mask the absurdity of his situation or help to give him a sense of who he is or what the hell he is doing.

The shattered fragments of Jiveass' philosophy finally come together when he regains consciousness after a fist fight having to do with the question of his only friend's alleged homosexuality. Jiveass sees homosexuality as a destructive form of weakness designed to rot a man's identity out from under him-just as he see his own relations with white women as a way of prostituting himself and submitting to the white world, rather than attacking it and identifying himself as one with his blackness.

He decides he no longer has any need to hide from himself through lies, or even to scratch desperately for something that he can be sure is true, because "If you're black you don't need to get at anything. You're already there. You can live right out of your insides." He decides to go back to America, where he can at least fight on familiar territory. Once there, he plans to write a seven hundred page book, every single page of which will be empty, except for the phrase. "Kiss my blackass." The book, he says, will be autobiographical, reflecting a black man's struggle to live in white society.

ALL OF WHICH, to use Mr. Jiveass Nigger's expression, is cool. Very, very cool. The hero, George Washington, can now walk off into the sunset, feeling very beautiful inside, knowing he can make it on his own terms and tell the white world to go sit on its own white ass. The author, however, has seen to it that the reader is not left in quite so secure a position. He has made quite sure that you never know where you stand in relation to the book; although one minute you may be laughing with him at all the jive, at all the perversion, the next minute he's laughing at you. You've got to find your own way of dealing with the book, and it's not easy.

Cecil Brown has a very subtle way of creating total chaos within your imagination without you ever realizing how it all came about. The style and general format of the novel are easy and without interruption; yet somehow, amid the general flow of things, realities are contorted, perspectives tiltcrazily, and the whole tone of the novel can shuttle back and forth from snide humor to outright malevolence. "All is jive," says Mr. Jiveass Nigger, and from the beginning of the book until its end, you're never quite sure if you might not just be the one who's being jived.

Following the conclusion of the book, there is a short epilogue, entitled. "An Epiphanic Conclusion of Some Important Matters." In it. Cecil Brown addresses the character of the book's title and raps about some of the themes presented in the tale itself. He has a few words for those who would try to interpret these themes too sharply from their own point of view, denying them the freedom that the book demands:

They need to understand you, Need to. If they fail to understand how you live they'll "kill" your ass, and call you a "dead man." Which incidentally is the way they classify everything they "kill."

As sure as you are a jiveass nigger, some well-meaning intellectuals will be picking through your soul... will be picking through your dirty drawers, and undoubtedly some frail lady will turn your dead cock over with the tip of her Scripto looking for "meaning." But they will not find it here, not the same meaning they find in fine "homes" in the Berkeley hills, Wall Street, PepsiCola, Perry Como, Toilets, Nixon, crew cuts, and Cadillacs. You will have them understand what you mean by jive.