"You Just Never Can Know What's Up the Road": An Interview with Cecil Brown

Abstract

"You Just Never Can Know What's Up the Road":An Interview with Cecil Brown Zachary Manditch-Prottas (bio) and Cecil Brown In 1969, Cecil Brown's provocatively titled debut novel The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger made quite a splash on the literary scene. From legend of hardboiled letters Chester Himes, to liberal outlet The New Leader, reviewers noted that Brown's prose was as knowing as his subject matter was titillating; the mixture of the erotic and uproarious made for a novel of uniquely sophisticated parody. Jiveass relates the satiric odyssey of a classic trickster figure named George Washington (one of several aliases) who, fed up with American bigotry, lands in Denmark on a quest of self-discovery. Washington, in the midst of the many entangled social revolutions of the 1960s, traverses the streets and sheets of Copenhagen finding his shrewd sexual allure to be his greatest asset—but also his greatest impediment—during his curious journey. Insofar as the many women he beds are permissive blondes among the well-to-do, the story negotiates the underbelly of white America's greatest anxiety: interracial sex. Indeed, the novel can be read as a sardonic rejoinder to the phallocentrism of a certain strand of Black Power and to a much longer legacy of white phallic anxiety.1 Thus, the thematic imperatives that pushed the novel's evocative wit were both timely and timeless, making it all the funnier, all the more biting, and its author all the more difficult to peg. Undoubtedly, a new voice had arrived in African American literature, but reviewers were unsure if that voice was jocular or scathing. Fellow satirist of Black life Charles Wright christened Brown the "literary superman of the year." The New York Times dubbed him a "born pornographer gone straight."2 As we settle into our chairs to begin our interview, I mention this particular Times review; Brown knowingly grins. He later explains that he did actually begin with the provocative title and then, his grin widening into his eyes, "went about filling in the rest from there." Brown has a skill for leading with allure, drawing readers close with a story so compelling that it may be some time before they realize they have wandered into something more serious. Brown tells me that while living in Copenhagen himself, he wrote the novel so that he "could laugh at himself." On the other hand, his story's hero, Washington, says toward the conclusion of his riotous adventure that he would like to write a "serious book." Jiveass is, in the blues tradition, both. Indeed, for Brown, laughter and seriousness are longtime traveling companions of African American expression. Across Brown's forty-year writing career, in novels like the hilarious, although often tragic story of Black comedians in Hollywood, Days Without Weather (1983), his moving autobiography of his rural coming-of-age, Coming Up Down Home (1995), and his thorough folk history Stagolee Shot Billy (2003), he has always maintained a particular interest in "the trickster." He tells me that he "revels" in those who have the ability to "get out of situations using their wit." He has known more than his fair share of (in)famous tricksters. He is a folklorist whose life, by his own account, is somewhat folkloric. Behind his writing is a tapestry of tales featuring a Who's Who of mid-twentieth-century African American cultural history. Brown may refer nostalgically to Eldridge Cleaver as his Berkeley "running buddy" in one breath and taking "Jimmy's" [James Baldwin's] car out for late-night joyrides in the South of [End Page 275] France in the next. He relates his encyclopedic knowledge of the legend of Stagolee to a passing gesture Miles Davis made backstage that had him, Paul Mooney, and Richard Pryor in stitches. The stories keep coming, each full of that liveliness that only legends contain, and, as you wait for the next punchline, storyteller Cecil Brown knows that he's got you, right there where amusement and seriousness meet. Zachary Manditch-Prottas: How did you get started writing? Cecil Brown: Well, I grew up in North Carolina, by Cape Fear River. In the...