Word: nigger
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...South the scapegoat for its own failings. As many a Northern politician has discovered, condemning the South is a good way to avoid the reality that it is not only the South but all of American society that needs reconstructing. "James Baldwin said the white man invented the nigger because he needed him," Pat Watters writes; "so, too, the nation may have invented the South...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...