How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(30)
And in our own way, we told him exactly that. And we did reckon. We knew, and know intimately, that there are more ways to perform in white face than to bleach your skin, slice off your nose, and fry your hair. Fifty years ago, James Baldwin wrote that it is only in “his” music that the American Negro is able to tell “his” story. Baldwin, as boldly imaginative as he was (even though he wrote about Michael in a paragraph for a piece called “Freaks and Ideal of American Manhood”), could not forecast what Michael Jackson’s work would do to the way we heard and saw our American character in our American stories. Michael worked to entertain us and, at the end, like most dutiful workers, he seemed to believe that even if your boss is a deceptive vulture, the customer is always right.
Like a lot of you, I’ll spend what would have been Michael’s fifty-fifth birthday waddling in the regrettable American mess Michael Jackson left and wondering if we failed to let him know how thankful we were for his work. I cry not when I think about his dead whitened body, his growing children, or the really predictable way his family has carried on in his death. I cry when I see my grandma watching Aunt Sue, Aunt Linda, and Mama huddled around the new record player in their tiny living room in Forest, Mississippi. It’s 1969, and Grandma is behind the door swelling with pride as all three of her children listen to that last note of “Who’s Loving You” spin safely away into a series of grainy hiccups. Neither Grandma, Aunt Linda, Aunt Sue, or Mama can imagine a day forty-four years in the future when their grandson, nephew, and son will tell whoever is listening that the greatest American worker of our time, a curious little paroled black boy from Gary who felt compelled to work in white face while changing the way music sounds and looks, would have been fifty-five today, but he is dead.
Michael, you were so fucked up, and so are we. We see you, really. And we love what we see. We know you were tired, and now maybe you can take care of yourself. Please don’t worry, though. Your work ain’t going nowhere. Get your rest, brother. Your work is here.
II.
Not so deep down, we all know that safety is an illusion, that only character melds us together. That’s why most of us do everything we can (healthy and unhealthy) to ward off that real feeling of standing alone so close to the edge of the world. Bernard Jeffrey McCullough was happy to be there with us.
Bernie Mac knew that vulnerability was our kryptonite and kryptonite our only chance at a compassionate life. He became a comedian at five years old. In 1963, Mac walked into a room where his mother was weeping and asked her why she was crying. Minutes later, Bill Cosby was introduced on The Ed Sullivan Show. As his mother’s tears turned into laughs, Mac promised his mother that night that he would become a comedian.
Long before Bernie Mac’s network show, he had the ability to look like he was never supposed to be on stage. He was the most wonderfully regular, perpetually forty-three-year-old looking black man you have ever seen in your life. Mac looked forty-three at thirty-two, forty-three at forty-three, and forty-three at fifty. And something about that eased our suffering and reconnected us, to home, to our uncles. He didn’t seem desperate to be funnier, sexier, skinnier, tougher, richer, whiter, or blacker. Whether we watched him on stage, television, or the big screen, a huge part of us always believed that he was too wonderfully black and home for mainstream appeal. The racially myopic parts of us couldn’t understand how white folks, Asian Americans, and Latinos could feel Bernie Mac. It wasn’t at all that we thought Mac and home were too small to shine in that arena. Mac, who really was the best of home, simply seemed too textured, sincere, ironic, and, really, too much like our uncle to be fully accepted and celebrated by anyone but us.
A significant amount of the work of all performers is done before they open their mouths. In Mac’s roaming eyes, his long elegance, his toothy scowl that looked like a smile and his toothy smile that looked like a scowl, we felt the one uncle at the family reunion who fabricates the best stories, mixed with the sole uncle who refuses to eyeball-fuck the sexy young “second” niece that all the other uncles are trying to convince themselves isn’t really related by blood. Long before he opened his mouth on stage, television, or the big screen, that was Bernie Mac to us.
Mac lacked the all-out freakish comic ability of Eddie Murphy and the agitating political savvy of Chappelle. He came into our world via Def Comedy Jam, not as the heir apparent like Martin Lawrence, Joe Torry, or Jamie Foxx. Like Pryor, and the lesser-known Robin Harris, Bernie Mac seemed happy to share the experience of suffering on the edge of the world with us.
For younger black boys in the late 80s, Robin Harris was familiar enough to be that super uncle we all had. He was black, irreverent, big-eyed, stout, caring, reckless, and, most important to his comedy, he had that just happy-to-be-alive glow. Like Mac, Harris probably came out of his mother’s womb looking twenty-five years old. By thirty, he looked forty-five. And by thirty-six, Robin Harris was dead.
Like Mac, Harris’s most famous bit involved caring for bad-ass kids. In Harris’s bit, he takes his girlfriend and her son, along with his girlfriend’s friend, BeBe, and her four bad-ass kids to Disneyland. Of course, BeBe’s kids have never been anywhere, so they tear Disneyland to pieces. BeBe’s kids jump Mickey Mouse, cut off Donald Duck’s feet, and chase Blood and Crips alike out of the park. And on the “It’s a Small World” ride, Harris would say that the children, led by the three-year-old who “can talk and shit in his Pampers at the same time,” jump out of the boat and start grabbing their dicks and strutting through the water, growling, “Smawl Wuhl! Smawl Wuhl! We…BeBe’s kids. We don’t die. We…multiply.”