Eulogy for Nigger
DETROIT. Hundreds of onlookers cheered… as the National Association of Colored People put to rest a long-standing expression of racism by holding a public burial for the N-word . . . Two Percheron horses pulled a pine box adorned with . . . a black ribbon printed with a derivation of the word. The coffin is to be placed at historically black Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery. —Associated Press, July 9, 2007
I live in the un-LA part of Southern California; I’m a little out of the loop. I didn’t know about the five-oh beat-down on Rodney King until the video went viral. I didn’t know the verdict until I smelled smoke. By the time I heard about the Low-Speed Chase, OJ’s Bronco was back in Brentwood. I did know that verdict; you could hear Nancy Grace squealing like a skewered shoat all the way from New York. But I didn’t know Nigger was even sick.
In hindsight, I see symptoms. The U.S. Geological Survey started taking Nigger’s name off maps back in ‘62. In ‘79, Richard Pryor declared he would speak Nigger’s name no more. In ‘88 Jesse Jackson said the Americans formerly known as black should be called African Americans, to “shift the definition from the racial description to a cultural and ethnic identity.” In ‘91 Niggaz Wit Attitudes decided they weren’t Niggaz4Life; now they were N. W. A.
Still, there’d been no change in Nigger’s vital signs. Unemployment for black—excuse me, African—Americans was still twice as high as it was for non–African Americans. The median income of African American families was still only 61 percent of that of non–African American families. African Americans were still way ahead in Department of Justice statistics—arrests, convictions, and sentences that seemed . . . disproportionate—also in being stopped and frisked and shot multiple times. Jay Leno was still making OJ jokes, like he never heard of Robert Blake.
But that’s no excuse. Nigger had been my mentor; I should have kept in closer touch. Especially after the Pryor thing. You wouldn’t know it from listening to the Colored People, but Nigger was quite a comedian; he wrote half of Richard’s jokes. Richard used to say Nigger gave him strength, let him rise above, and that he called Nigger’s name “like a preacher singing hallelujah"—Richard’s words, not mine. Then he goes to Africa with “white honky bitch"—again, his words, not mine—and comes back saying he’s sorry he ever spoke Nigger’s name. That had to hurt Nigger, not that he would have shown it. But I bet he said a few words about Richard’s mama, whom Nigger knew quite . . . frequently.
Perhaps I should not criticize; it was I who was neglectful. But the way the Colored People buried Nigger made me irate.
They did not even pretend to hold a wake, though, as everybody knows, Nigger loved a shindig, especially when it was just us . . . chickens. He’d take whatever was on hand, cook it down, spice it up, and serve it on a paper plate like china at the Ritz. Then he’d get out his guitar. Some said the Devil did the tuning, but it was Nigger who’d wring the blues out of that old six-string, even with two strings broke. And drink? Jesus needed water; Nigger could make wine from anything. Maybe the Colored People were afraid to have a wake; even dead, Nigger would have been the life of that party.
I know the funeral was a publicity stunt/fund-raiser. I hope they raised enough to finally let Colored retire. But a horse-drawn wagon? They’re in Detroit, and they couldn’t come up with a third-hand Continental? Nigger would have pawned his gold toothpick to send Colored off in style.
Besides cheap, that funeral was wrong. At a funeral you do not cheer, even if the departed was your landlord and you’re six weeks behind on rent. You do not deny the departed with his entitles, including all initials. “N-word?” My A-word.
Nor do you diss the deceased. But that’s what the Colored People did. The mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick—now there’s a fine African American name, or is it black Irish?—ordered “N-word” buried with “all the nonsense that went with it.” Like Nigger invented slavery, segregation, and restrictive housing covenants. The governor, an ex-Canadian Scandihoovian who did not know Nigger from Négritude, said with Nigger gone, we could “say hello to a new country that invests in all its people.” Like it was Nigger the government had been bailing out. At least she didn’t claim Nigger interfered with her when she was a tour guide at Marine World Africa USA.
At least the Colored People had a preacher—but then, Colored preachers do funerals for free. This one wasn’t even worth what he wasn’t paid. He said Nigger was “the greatest child racism ever birthed.” Apparently, his mama never told him where Colored preachers come from.
My daddy was a Colored preacher, of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion persuasion. He did not speak softly to sin. I’ve seen him terrify many a sinner into salvation—he once made a murderer wet his pants. But he would eulogize whores, whoremongers, even lawyers to where their own mothers wanted to recognize them. Judgment, he said, was God’s business; the Last Words spoken should be forgiving of all flaws.
Nigger had flaws. So does the U.S. Constitution, which gave license to the slave trade and took a cut “not exceeding ten dollars” a head. But the Colored People wouldn’t dream of burying the Constitution, and Congress made the third week of pro football season Constitution Week, during which paeans are to be sung. It seemed to me Nigger at least deserved better Last Words. So I wrote a Eulogy for Nigger. It went something like this:
Friends, Americans (African and non-African), countrypersons: lend me your ears. I come to bury Nigger, not to praise him. He was my friend, faithful and just to me, but these honorable Colored People say otherwise, and I speak not to dispute, only to augment. Before you heap clods and contumelies on his coffin, you should know that Nigger was more than a word.
His name was Nigger. N-I-G-G-E-R, from the Latin masculine nominative niger meaning not “black” but “shining black,” as opposed to ater, meaning “black but dull.”
He was born in Virginia in the eighteenth century. His mother, black and comely as the bride of Solomon, was a slave and, partus sequitur ventrem, so was he. His father—free, white, and wealthy—was their owner. His name was Jefferson.
Jefferson did not acknowledge Nigger, but kept a watchful eye, and recorded his “personal observations,” which he published in a book, Notes on the State of Virginia, which he assumed Nigger could not read.
But it was forbidden for a slave to read, and as everybody knows, Nigger would half-kill himself to do anything forbidden. Years later, Nigger told me this trait was formed when he overheard Jefferson say he liked “a little rebellion now and then,” so he became contrary just trying to please. In any case he’d taught himself to read. Now he sneaked into the study to read Jefferson’s Notes.
When Colored People explain why they hate Nigger, they often describe a childhood trauma. They were eight and very small, heart-filled, head-filled with glee. Then some white child called them “nigger.” They were so devastated that’s all they can remember of Baltimore. I often wonder how they recognized the word as insult, but the real question is, how did Nigger’s denotation acquire negative connotation? See Jefferson’s Notes.
Nigger’s face, wrote Jefferson, was an “eternal monotony . . . an immoveable veil of black.” Nigger had “a very strong and disagreeable odour.” Nigger was “in reason much inferior” and “incapable of comprehending the investigations of Euclid.” Nigger might appear brave, but this was due to “a want of forethought.” Nigger’s griefs were “transient.” Nigger napped because “an animal . . . who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep.” Nigger’s love was “more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation,” and of “the senses only.” Nigger was “ardent after his female” but just as “the Oranootan” preferred “black women over those of his own species,” Nigger preferred white women because of their “flowing hair” and “more elegant symmetry of form.” Therefore, were he ever freed, Nigger would have “to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.”
These words came not from the lips of some prepubescent peckerwood, but from the pen of a Founding Father who would one day be president. They included no pejoratives. Jefferson was, even by contemporary standards, politically correct. Yet Nigger must have been devastated.
He claimed otherwise. Years later, Nigger told me he had been not hurt but enraged by Jefferson’s Notes. He had read Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence,” which said all men were endowed by their Creator with Rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. He’d therefore assumed his procreator planned to set him free. But now he saw Jefferson had meant “all men . . . not you, Nigger.” That did it; right then he was through with Jefferson.
I think what really did it was what Jefferson said about Nigger’s mama, with whom Jefferson still made the two-backed beast. I think the rage of love to hatred turned lingered awhile. But Nigger did not linger. He’d taught himself to write and also to forge Jefferson’s signature. Now he wrote himself a pass, took a dump in the dumbwaiter, and removed himself beyond the reach of Jefferson.
Still, where’er he wandered, Nigger found his Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness obstructed by assumptions, expectations, and misperceptions shaped by Jefferson’s Notes. Nigger joined the cavalry and served honorably . . . until they drummed him out for going horseback riding with the colonel’s sister-in-law. Nigger starred in professional baseball until white players protested that his speed on the bathpaths reflected ape ancestry and demanded that management “get that Nigger off the field.” (In other words, they threw him out because they couldn’t throw him out.) The University rejected him on account of the Euclid thing. But a few professors thought he would do for Hampton or even Fisk, and offered him a job as a janitor so he could save up for tuition. That was when Nigger realized that even in sympathetic minds and hearts his name was linked with Jefferson’s definition, and that, were he not careful, definition could become prophecy.
Nigger took the job. He did not find it difficult. His mother had taught him how to deal with educated whites. (Years later, Nigger told me how she’d whispered, “overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let ‘em swaller you till they vomit or bust wide open,” then kissed him and gone down to Jefferson’s bedchamber.) Thanks to Jefferson’s Notes he was presumed indolent and would be found industrious on circumstantial evidence, e.g., a broom in hand.
He did find there were undocumented fringe benefits. He was not allowed to borrow books, but his dustbin was better than a library card; no fee for late returns. If he asked sufficiently simpleminded questions, professors would postulate, albeit condescendingly, while he dusted their diplomas. Accredited by mop and pail, he could loiter and listen outside lecture halls. Nigger audited like an M-word F-word.
Nigger loved his learning. But what made him wanna holler and throw up both his hands was how often he found Jefferson’s Notes quoted, footnoted, paraphrased, and plagiarized in monographs, textbooks, dissertations, medical case studies, and memorandums of law. By the time he’d completed his untranscripted coursework, Nigger realized Jefferson’s definition would never be changed by scholarship. He applied his education to commercial endeavors—patent medicines, real estate, and what is now called the gaming industry—although he continued working at the University. When he finally left, his faithful floor mopping and toilet plunging was commemorated with a plaque in the basement of College Hall, across from his custodian's closet, which was then converted to an office for the director of minority recruitment.
The Colored People buried Nigger as if he were a pauper, but no one ever knew Nigger’s net worth as he never filed tax returns. When I met him, during his last years at the University, I suspected he was wealthy, but his only extravagances involved wine, women, song, gold fillings, and Cadillacs. Once his foreman, seeing him in his Fleetwood Eldorado, which was as long as the Titanic, said, “Nigger, how can you afford that car?” Nigger replied, “Your mama bought it for me . . . or was that your wife?” and drove on.
Such insubordination was one of Nigger’s many faults. To be honest, Nigger often lived down to Jefferson’s definition. Jefferson said, despite “hard labour through the day,” Nigger would “be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later.” Everybody knows Nigger was no early-to-bed. Nigger did drink, dip, gamble, and smoke the first thing smoking. Nigger did cuss prodigiously in routine conversation, using both Anglo-Saxon monosyllables and Latinate polysyllables, often using “mother” as a prefix. Nigger did frequent juke joints and dance with women of any age or girth, moving his hips more than his feet. Nigger was indeed ardent after his female . . . or anybody’s. Nigger did carry a razor. Nigger did do time from time to time.
Those flaws alienated other black Americans, who had been equally obstructed by the irrational prejudices rationalized by Jefferson’s Notes. They’d broken their health and hearts striving to disprove what Jefferson had written, or at least to prove it did not apply to them—one poor fool actually sent Jefferson a sheaf of calculations to demonstrate that he could too comprehend Euclid. They’d straightened their hair, bleached their skin, invented Mum™, forethought to a fare-thee-well . . . then went to war anyway to demonstrate they were too brave. They’d studied diligently at Colored colleges, hoping to do graduate work at the University. They’d formed organizations and run the meetings in strict accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order, even if they had to hold them on the Canadian side of the Falls.
But for all their striving, all they’d gained was a cotton-picking compromise that gave them a separate finger, and a membership in an organization dedicated to the proposition that they needed advancement but still referred to them politely as Colored People . . . so long as they paid dues.
For this they blamed Nigger who, with bad hair, bad odor, and bad attitude, insisted on behaving like . . . himself. One college-educated Colored Person said it was the responsibility of the “Talented Tenth”—which, of course, included him—to “guide the Mass away from the contamination . . . of the Worst,” which, of course, meant Nigger. Nigger called the Talented Tenth “clichty,” and said they were jealous because they lacked the luck to Black on Saturday night.
At this point the Colored People conceded that Jefferson had been right about Nigger, but proclaimed the advent of a “New Negro” who, unlike Nigger, was “culturally articulate,” capable of “artistic self-expression” and able to document “the recent transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro.”
Only . . . there was Nigger, sitting in front of The Founder’s Library, documenting what the monkey did to the lion way down in the jungle and cutting up a watermelon. The New Negroes said, “Nigger, please! You’re dragging us all down. We’re trying to get the New York Times to capitalize ‘negro.’” Nigger just reminded them that only half of that watermelon was his.
In Detroit the Colored People were content to bury Nigger, but there was a time when what they really wanted to do was lynch him.
I admit, I was not always a Nigger-lover. When I was six and very small, on the first day of first grade, a boy called me “nigger” and punched me in the nose. All I could remember was the pain and blood, but for years afterward I had a Pavlovian reaction, cringing mentally and physically at the sound of Nigger’s name. But when I grew tired of cringing, Nigger helped me see words as weapons that I too could wield. My mother taught me language; Nigger taught me to curse.
When I found myself in the Ivory League, it was Nigger who helped me navigate the strait between “Negro” and “black,” who pointed out the implications of the euphemisms—”underclass,” “overachiever,” “Person of Color,” “tangle of pathology”—Nigger who wondered—aloud, for my benefit—what they called a black man with a Ph.D. after he’d left the room.
By the time I’d completed my own coursework, I’d realized Jefferson’s definition had so shaped America that Nigger was ineradicable. Take Nigger out of history; all that was left was indentured servitude. Take Nigger off the map by renaming “Nigger Hollow”, “Freedom Road”; the Underground Railroad is no more than the A train. Take Nigger out of Huckleberry Finn; what’s left is “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.” Take Nigger out of Native Son; Bigger not only does not rhyme, he does not get born. Take Nigger out of music; no spirituals, no rags, no blues, probably no From the New World Symphony and definitely no American String Quartet. Take Nigger out of social policy; what’s left is progressive jazz.
Nigger was never a leader of his people, because he was always of the people. Nigger knew the trouble we’d seen better than Jesus. Nigger was no drum major for justice because he knew justice was liable to beat you like a drum. He knew what it was like to swallow pride and profanity to preserve a paycheck. He knew you had to see yourself for your self but at the same time be aware of how you were being seen, and he knew that double vision could make your eyes cross to where you had to do something. Who do you think taught Jesse Jackson to spit in the soup?
That’s why I loved Nigger. And while I do not insist you love him too, I do insist you recognize my right to speak his name.
And if Nigger’s death has given this nation under God a new birth of freedom, then he should not have been buried like a sharecropper. Nigger should have lain in state in the rotunda of the Capitol, to be viewed by all the honorable men and women in government—if there are any.
Nor should the Colored People now rejoice. For it is written “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” If it be so with Nigger, and if Nigger was as they claim, evil, disembodied, still, now, walks abroad, but some day our descendants—Colored People, Negroes, black Americans, or African Americans—will be on their knees in that Jim Crow cemetery, digging like hungry hound dogs.
So went my eulogy for Nigger. One paper ran it as an obit, but would not put Nigger’s name in the headline. I sent a copy to the Colored People, with a suggestion that, for their next publicity stunt/fund-raiser, they build a plaster-of-Paris model of the Jefferson Memorial and blow it up with firecrackers on the Fourth of July. They sent me an invitation to purchase a ticket to their Centennial celebration. I was not tempted; with no Nigger involved, it would be less a wingding than a cotillion. But the occasion—A Century of Advancement: Are We There Yet?—made me think about touching up Nigger’s Eulogy.
I thought about touching it up again when America elected an actual African American president, and I saw Jesse Jackson, who’d run as a black American, standing in the cold crying tears that had to be at least a little bittersweet.
I thought about it yet again when I heard the state of Michigan was investigating Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick for corruption, and he was protesting he’d “been called a nigger more than any time in my entire life.” The ex-Canadian Scandihoovian governor responded, saying that “the N-word . . . has no place in public or private discourse.”
I wondered why that woman was so down on Nigger, without even trying to get to know him. Nigger would have hung with her; Nigger socialized without regard for race, creed, color, or previous condition of nationality. He might have drawn the line at politicians—but then, he’d said he would not want his sister to marry a white American . . . until she did. Then there was Nigger at the wedding—pocket watch, gold toothpick, white spats and cane, and two jugs of dandelion wine so strong that, after a single glass, Nigger’s new brother-in-law could actually dance . . .
Obviously, I could not get Nigger off my mind. Worse, I kept inventing evidence that he might be alive. There had been no viewing. The coffin had been closed. There was no death certificate, no autopsy report. The Colored People buried Jim Crow in 1944, but he did not actually die for twenty years. I imagined Nigger living quietly in some southern college town under the name “Historically Black.” Nigger knew how to maintain a low profile; Nigger was keeping his head down while Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin were getting theirs blown off. And when they sentenced the mayor to twenty-eight years, stealing less than what Wall Street bankers call a bonus, I wondered if even he thought Nigger was dead.
Obviously, I was in denial. My heart was in the coffin there with Nigger; I had to pause till it came back to me.
Meanwhile white Americans were having a get-off-the-field day with the “N-word.” Conservative white Americans loved that locution because it allowed them to voice all their “personal observations” while taking credit for not saying Nigger’s name—like nobody knew they were signifying.
Liberal white Americans loved it because when they were eight and very small, Mummy said never say it because it would hurt somebody’s feelings and good help was hard to find. Now they could say “N-word” to their Inner Child’s content.
Both conservative and liberal white Americans agreed black Americans (including maids) should not speak Nigger’s name, even at a party with just us chickens, even if no chicken gave a squawk. Which reminded me of something Nigger said back in ‘66: “Now we are engaged in a psychological struggle . . . whether or not black people will have the right to use the words they want to use without white people giving their sanction to it.”
But it seemed to me that what was at issue now was not Black Power but White Privilege; white Americans, even those with impeccable liberal credentials, felt unsafe uttering Nigger’s name anywhere—even in boardrooms or country club locker rooms, or at country music concerts, or in conversation with their mistress; not even on SiriusXM. And it was unthinkable that a black American could get away with anything a white American could not . . .
Obviously, I had moved from denial into anger.
I did not think about touching up Nigger’s Eulogy again until I read a report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, assessing American children’s chances for success in school and life. On a scale of 1 to 1,000, Asian children scored 776, white children, 704, and African American children, 345.
Then I read another report, from the U.S. Department of Education, which revealed that in public schools, including kindergarten, African American students, especially boys, were disciplined more frequently and harshly than white students. One in five African American boys had been suspended at least once. African American students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled.
Then I read that the African American attorney general, speaking at a Historically Black university in Baltimore on the sixtieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, said that “significant divisions persist and segregation has reoccurred,” and that subtle, institutionalized racism might be more “pernicious” than bigoted outbursts.
After that I was too depressed to touch up anything.
But eventually I moved into acceptance. Nigger was now one of the many thousand gone. I would keep him in my heart and mind, as I do all those I’ve loved and lost—some Colored, some Negro, some black, some Nigger.
Only then I saw on ESPN that the National Football League was considering a rule forbidding players to speak Nigger’s name on the field. And suddenly I saw the glory of the coming of this once segregated, now politically correct NFL. The advent would be during Constitution Week. A white man in a black-and-white-striped shirt would call a black man for calling another black man Nigger and march off a 15-yard penalty against the Redskins.
While I was rolling on the floor, I remembered a story Nigger told me, about how he went to see a movie, way back in the day—so far back the film was silent, although the piano was playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “America the Beautiful.” When Nigger looked down and read the captions, he saw they were saying he caused the Civil War.
It did not take forethought to predict a lynching, so Nigger jumped right out of the balcony—fortunately, he landed on an immigrant, which broke his fall. He ran out onto the street where he found the Colored People picketing the film. He was about to join them when they handed him a broadsheet that quoted the President saying the movie was “all so terribly true” and the Chief Justice saying it reminded him of his days in the Ku Klux Klan. Nigger made a bee-line because clearly this was no time for walking in circles.
I said, “Nigger, that’s a terrible story. Didn’t it drive you crazy?”
He said, “Nigger, I was already crazy. I’m tellin’ you how I got into comedy.”
A shorter version of this piece appeared in Obit in 2007 and in Best American Creative Nonfiction in 2008. This version has been substantially revised, with assistance from Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Etheridge Knight and Countee Cullen.
