You could feel the steam under your shirt. It spread from the press and settled on the skin. Summer. Winter. It didn’t matter. The heat was unbearable. Like Florida in summer, or the deep dark recesses of Conrad’s African jungles. Curtis said it reminded him of home in North Carolina, the heat hanging thick, pressing down, enveloping him in memory.
You waited for him to explain. Would lean in close as he talked, his Southern patter folding in all manner of observations, creating a verbal gumbo. He kept it low, his chatter offered only to those in the know, those in his circle. He heard everything, watched everything, and kept up a running commentary that trashed those who most deserved it — the owners of the tux shop and cleaners where you both worked, some of your white coworkers, the ones that either ignored him or affected a ‘70s jive talk out of Shaft because they thought that’s how black folks acted — and he made it clear that he knew how people saw him and that he didn’t care.
You want to say more about him, but you knew far less about him than you should have, far less than you knew about almost any of the other people who worked there. Curtis was black. Small and wiry. The only black guy among a sea of white workers. He’d make periodic trips south, bring back assorted goodies — weed, crank, occasionally some coke. He’d take orders from his friends. You were one of his friends, and still you knew so little. You’d talk at work and sometimes when you’d drive him in. You would look up from the dishes in your New Brunswick apartment and see his face in the window, his eyes staring in before he’d tap and rush around the side of the house to the main door. He came in talking and continued the entire ride, and maybe you’d smoke a morning joint to prep for the day. You were one of his friends.
Friend. I look at the word today and shake my head. We were friendly, but were we friends? I didn’t know where he lived, exactly where he was from. I never asked him how he ended up in New Brunswick, or what he planned to do later in life, never thought to have the same kinds of conversations with him that I had with others — about life choices and literature, music and movies and girls. I was seeing Annie by then, was serious, but we didn’t talk about that, about anything personal.
Curtis was cool, and that’s what held the attraction for me — not sexually, but in an intellectual way. Curtis was a symbol. Like the leather motorcycle jacket I wore despite not riding a bike, being too fearful and cautious. Curtis was cool in a way no one I knew was cool, was part of the bohemian attire I affected. Curtis was born into his coolness, I thought. It was innate, genetic. Came from a place I couldn’t understand. Like a character in Kerouac, “a colored maniac,”[1] lacking “white ambitions,”[2] someone who — in Norman Mailer’s calculus — was forced by racism to live outside the white world and so knew the impending, existential doom awaiting us.
This is what I believed back then as a 22-year-old kid living in New Brunswick on the bottom floor of a two-story rental in what Kerouac would have called the ”colored section” of the city. There was an empty warehouse across the street and several auto body and car repair shops on the adjoining streets. You could see St. Mary’s Church across an open lot. I’d sometimes sit on our stoop and smoke under the street light, watch the stray cats dart from the shadows. It was always quiet, or mostly so, just far enough from the public park that was home to drug markets and violence to create a veneer of safety, but close enough to sense the threat.
I saw myself as “beat,” living on the fringe. It was play-acting, based on my reading of Kerouac and his cohorts. This was not New York or San Francisco in the immediate post-war years, though New Brunswick was home to poetry and music. The Cold War, which cast an existential shadow, was waning even as the threat of nuclear war seemed as dire as it had been at any point in the previous three decades. Ronald Reagan was in the white House. A conservative curtain was descending on American culture, and I was reading On The Road again and again, seeing in the novel a kind of freedom that no longer seemed possible.
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty — Kerouac and Neal Cassidy’s alter egos — tossed off convention, chased kicks, their manic desires for life and more life in the face of the growing suburbanization and homogenization of American culture creating what I (and many others) thought was a new ethos, a new sensibility. Paradise — and Kerouac’s later alter egos — sought something real and pure, something he would never find, because it does not exist in the way he believed. Kerouac sought bliss, and he saw those dispossessed from white society, those in poverty and living on the margins as somehow pure. He characterizes these outsiders as the “fellaheen” — a word he borrows from Arabic. Its root is “fellah,” which means “Egyptian peasant” or “plowman.” The fella (or fallah) were the poor workers, the field hands, the slaves. It is a word that signals class distinctions, castes, but that Kerouac in On The Road and elsewhere imbues with a religious sensibility. The fellaheen, as he writes in Lonesome Traveler, were the great mass of the poor who have a “timeless gayety” about their lives, despite the poverty, the harshness of circumstances, who are a “people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues.”[3]
Kerouac comes to this idea again and again, as do many of the writers of that moment, black and white. It is a cultural paradigm with a long provenance, one baked into our literature, our art, into the culture as a whole. This “romantic racism," to use Jon Panish’s phrase[4], is the flip side of overt racial hostility, but it is really not very different. Kerouac — through his alter egos Sal Paradise in On The Road, Leo Percepied in The Subterraneans, Jack Dulouz in numerous books — “tried to enhance and ennoble his position as a voluntary social outsider by linking himself to the historical status of African Americans as forced outsiders and victims of white oppression,” a deliberate distortion of African American culture” that “trivializes the true nature of American racial oppression by blurring (if not obscuring) the difference between voluntary and forced outsiders.”
There was a night in New Brunswick, N.J., probably in 1981, well before redevelopment remade the city, demolished its waterfront, chased the poor blacks who lived in the old city market area to the outskirts. We lived just outside the city, had driven in to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Art Cinema, a theater that had certainly seen better days and now was known for running XXX films and midnight showings of Rocky Horror.
My first memories of the city were of a high school football game in 1978. I was an end-of-the-bench wide out and defensive back for our suburban high school, and we went into New Brunswick to play at the city’s Memorial Stadium. I don’t remember New Brunswick being a rival, but the crowd was rowdy and the game was chippy — at least, that’s how I remember it. Our running back — one of only a handful of black players on our team — was badly injured on a play that caused our bench to erupt in anger. He was carried from the field and did not return that night, but we managed to win. The tenor of the game was rough and the crowd reflected this, and as we filed from the stadium onto the street and into our bus, we were escorted by police and security.
Because of this, and because of the small-scale riots just 10 years before, we were invited by our parents, by teachers, by many we knew to see New Brunswick as a dangerous place, as someplace we should avoid. New Brunswick was home to “the other,” to danger, to menace. The notion of urban areas beset by violence, especially by black violence, was ingrained in the culture, cities as dystopian hells-capes. Still cities had their pull, especially for the rebellious and artistic. The presence of Rutgers and of bars like The Melody and Roxy, where one could see punk rock or read poetry, was important, but so was this whiff of danger, which was thrilling. There was something primal about the city, I assumed, closer to the bone as the cliche goes.
This is the central trope in Norman Mailer's essay, "The white Negro," in which he describes a cultural marriage between black Americans and "the American existentialist -- the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l'univers concentrationnaire, or with slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled.”[5]
Mailer is correct to describe the African American’s existence in 1950s America as living with "danger from his first day" -- an observation that still holds. "(N)o experience can ever be casual to him, no Negro can saunter down a street with any real certainty that violence will not visit him on his walk.”[6] However, to him, the “black American” is interested only in "following the need of his body,” a canard that reveals the racism that underlies this kind of thinking. The need to focus on survival means he can't afford the "sophisticated inhibitions of civilization,” Mailer said. He lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Saturday night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infinite variations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his organism.
The essay first appears in Dissent[7] in the fall of 1957 -- about the same time that On The Road is published. There was criticism — notably from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and many of the Beats themselves — but the essay’s chief conceit endured, in film, music (Patti Smith's "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger,"[8] compares the American artist, the visionary, the rebel to blacks as an oppressed group), and continues with today’s “hipster racism.”[9]
The intent may not be racist, may even be the opposite, as it is when Sal is in Denver in On The Road and wishes he was “a Negro.”[10] The “best the white world had offered,” he says, “was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.” He wants to shed his skin, to be a Negro, "a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a 'white man' disillusioned.” He wanted to shed his “white ambitions” and “exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.” This is happening at a time when African Americans are agitating for full citizenship, when legal and de facto segregationbrutally constrained their lives and potential. The Civil Rights movement is in its infancy, just a few years before Brown v. Board of Education is decided, though he is finishing the writing of the novel and as the Montgomery bus boycott is making national headlines. The romanticizing of the “Negro” offers the flip side of the kind of hate-based racism that is embedded in American political and economic structures dating back to slavery. For Sal/Jack, African Americans are archetypes, de-historicized, the products of an American history stripped of its brutalities.
“There was an old Negro couple in the field with us,” Sal says early in On The Road. “They picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience their grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; they moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bags increased.”
Patience here means nobility, and it also implies an apolitical simplicity, the slavery reference stripped of the brutalities of the plantation system and the ways in which the institution infected nearly every corner of American life. Sal fails to consider the damage, to even acknowledge it. Why decades after slavery was abolished in the United States, is this couple still working the fields for pennies, why is it that Mexicans do the same, living in tents? Sal doesn’t see this history. It is inconvenient, would contradict his religious notion of the fellaheen as possessing a kind of innate dignity that comes from living beyond what we now know as the grid, and living in poverty, under the radar.
This might seem an easy critique in 2022. We are more aware, after all, of how racism works and how it infects even the most positively intentioned relationships. But it is not meant to be easy, or to cancel — to use the term du jour — Kerouac as a writer. What strikes me today is how easy it was — and remains — for white artists, white allies in the battle against white supremacy to fall into what the scholar Ibram X. Kendi calls "racist thinking” or “racist ideas,” which he defines as “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another group in any way.”[11]
Kerouac’s “romantic racism” falls within this paradigm, borrowing from the idea of “original man” that drove much of Enlightenment thought on race. The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau believed “the original ‘man’ was free from sin, appetite or the concept of right and wrong, and that those deemed ‘savages’ were not brutal but noble.”[12] Rousseau’s contemporary James Cook offered a similar take, writing in his journals that the Australian Aborigines live in a Tranquillity which is not disturb’d by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life, they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household-stuff, they live in a warm and fine Climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air, so that they have very little need of Clothing.
We see this formulation again and again — in the Victorians, in Kipling, in Hemingway, and in Kerouac’s description of Mexico in Lonesome Traveler as “the Pure Land,” where a “fellaheen feeling about life,” a “timeless gayety” so different than what he found in the United States, where “the influence of civilizations sung over the border like a cloud” (22).
Nobility, presented this way, is not very different from the fear and hate that animate white Supremacist thinking, that justifies slavery of and violence against black and brown people, that casts police as the blue line separating civilization from savagery, and allows for the perpetuation of “ghettos.”[13]
This history is deeply rooted, even personal, and certainly affected my family and my own way of viewing the world as I grew up. I think back to my suburban neighborhood in the 1970s, which was overwhelmingly white and meant as an escape from the disorder of the city, especially from the schvartes, to use my grandmother’s Yiddish slur against blacks. My grandmother grew up in the New York, raised my dad there. She remained in Rockaway Beach until she moved to Florida after we left for New Jersey. I’d like to believe that she did not hold hate or a deeply felt prejudice in her heart, that she was part of that contingent of liberal Jews in the middle part of the 20th Century who allied themselves with African Americans and worked to change society. Her use of the slur — and my dad’s innate political conservatism — tells me otherwise. This kind of casual racism, mostly based on fear and a sense of separation, was my inheritance, something that informed my own attitudes in ways I did not understand for decades.
My mom, for instance, didn’t like the kid down the street. She told me so, not mincing words. He was black. That’s what she said. The kid was a bit quiet, kind of doughy in appearance when he was younger. He would play baseball and football with us in my yard and at the church lot down the street.
Mom didn’t trust him. Didn’t like him. Didn’t really know him. It didn’t matter to me. Didn’t stop my friends and me from dragging him to the baseball field, not initially. But I have to wonder if he sensed something, picked up on her coldness to him, and whether my inability to connect beyond pick-up games had something to do with this, whether her prejudices ultimately helped drive me away from him and made having a real friendship with him impossible. Made it difficult to fully embrace friendships with the handful of black kids who lived in my neighborhood or in our town.
Animus is not the issue. Race infects American society in ways too numerous to catalogue, the assumed division between black and white is pernicious in its effect and tenacious in its hold. There are reasons for this, systemic causes that drive this separation and have throughout our history. My mom’s dislike of the kid down the street, her distrust, was learned behavior. She was born in 1940, lived in an almost uniformly Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, in a city that was carved up by racial and ethnic groups. Jews stayed with Jews, blacks with blacks, Italians with Italians, Puerto Ricans with Puerto Ricans, and so on. To cross that line meant conflict.
In many ways, this makes Kerouac and the Beats’ willingness to engage with black culture a somewhat revolutionary act. He constantly crosses the line, though his relation to black culture is limited, is romanticized and partial, because it cannot be anything more — and my own relations with African Americans over the years, perhaps even today, were partial and romanticized in similar ways. Kerouac’s conception of the fellaheen allowed me to pare back an intrusive world, helped me get “closer to the bone,” as I said. That’s where my mind was when I first read Kerouac, when I would go into New Brunswick or listen to jazz or American soul. It think it influenced my incomplete friendships with Curtis and others, and may still influence how I react to what I see around me.
I want to believe I’ve grown, that the culture has changed, that my reactions to the romantic racism in Kerouac’s novels are an indication that I can see something that I was unable to see 20, 30, 40 years ago.
Still, I remember a conversation I had during the pandemic, in the days following George Floyd’s murder by police. You are the kind of person who sees color, he tells me. He’s white. A former high school classmate. We were on social media. You see a black man and think, he must be oppressed. I see a man. This should not bother me. His argument is disingenuous. He declares himself colorblind, but his declaration is a sham, a way of avoiding deeper conversations about the structural racism that continues to impose limitations on many black Americans. Police are not the villains, he says. They were wrong this time. Killing Floyd. But he passed a bad check. He shouldn’t have been killed but he should have resisted. The police are their to protect us, to protect society, civilization.
I hear echoes in this conversation of an earlier one, with a white kid I worked with at a Mexican restaurant in the late 1980s. We were smoking a joint. The paper was on a table, headline screaming about the assault on a jogger in Central Park. He calls the kids arrested “niggers,” uses the word freely. Says there are “niggers” and “blacks,” that “niggers” are like the guy who just left with his take out order, high fade like Kenny Walker, gold chains, and all that. “Thuggy.” All that. “blacks” are more respectable, he says. You can hang with them.
He passes the joint.
“Like those kids in Central Park,” he says. “Niggers.”
Like George Floyd. Like Freddie Gray. Like Michael Brown.
You see color and I don’t, my high school friend says. I can’t disagree. But maybe this makes me a better person than I was back then, or at least a more aware one. Perhaps, this is all we can expect.
I’d like to ask Curtis about all of this, find out what he thought of me, of the times in which we lived. But we lost touch. Last I heard was that he had died, though I can’t even be sure of that. Someone said it was drugs. Maybe AIDS. I can’t be sure.
~ ~ ~
[1] Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody, McGraw-Hill, 1972, p. 261.
[2] Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. New York: 1982. Penguin, p. 180.
[3] Kerouac, Jack. Lonesome Traveler, Grove, 1985, p 20.
[4] Panish, Jon. “Kerouac’s The Subterraneans: A Study of ‘Romantic Primitivism.’” MELUS, Oxford University Press, Vol. 19, No. 3, Autumn 1994, https://www.jstor.org/stable/467875. Accessed 18 March 2022
[5] Mailer, Norman. "The White Negro." Advertisements for Myself. 1960: New York. Signet, p. 304.
[6] Mailer, p. 306
[7] Mailer, Norman. “The White Negro.” Dissent, republished, 20 June 2007, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957)
[8] Smith, Patti. Easter, Arista, 1978.
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/25/hipster-racism-lena-dunham-prejudice
[10] On The Road, p. 180
[11] Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped From the Beginning, Nation Books, 2016, p. 5.
[12] Gardner, Helen. The scholar Helen Gardner, an associate professor of history at Deakin University in Australia, explains (https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-myth-of-the-noble-savage-55316). Both the Rousseau and Cook comments are from this article.
[13] Duneier, Matthew. Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, The History of an Idea, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2017.
Hank Kalet lives in New Jersey, with his wife Annie and their dogs. He’s a poet, essayist, and journalist, and author most recently of As an Alien in a Land of Promise, a collaboration with photographer Sherry Rubel. His work has appeared in The Progressive, In These Times, Main Street Rag, Serving House Journal, TLS (online). This Broken Shore, Adelaide, the Journal of New Jersey Poets, numerous anthologies, and elsewhere. His essay, “The Philosopher’s Stone,” was shortlisted for the Adelaide Literary Award Best Essay in 2019. He teaches journalism at Rutgers and freshman composition at several community colleges.
“Nobel Savages in Kerouac’s Imagination” is part of a larger manuscript in process, tentatively titled Paradise Reconsidered.
