We took Owen and
Balder to the State Library,
in the
to see The Creature From the Black Lagoon,
filmed at nearby
Wakulla Springs, in 1953.
The library showed
movies on Friday night.
For the university
community. College-town
hanger’s-on. At one point, the creature puts his hand
on the gunwale of
the boat Julia Adams is sunning herself
on the deck of, his
scaly, webbed-fang fingers, and Balder hollered,
“Black McGoon!” Everybody laughed. I had McGoon and the Malay Gibbon,
Hylobates Lar, a
good crossword-puzzle word, dressed up like Charlie Parker,
3-D glasses up on
his head, one green lens and one red, and Amadeo Modigliani,
in white silk scarf
and
an organ-grinder’s
monkey. This was not done.
The Italian could be
the blackamoor, but not
vice versa. Nor could I use them as characters in
the book I was
writing, A HISTORY OF THE SECOND
SEMINOLE WAR, in
which one of them played
Osceola and the
other one played Wildcat.
Totem and Taboo. Sigmund
Freud.
Edward Sapir. “Psychiatric and Cultural Pitfalls
in the Business of
Getting a Living.” Work makes you crazy.
You can’t say
savages, you can’t say crazy people, you can’t say
feeble-minded, or an
idiot, you can’t say retarded. You can’t
even say
handicapped or
disabled. I am white. Les White.
More white than him,
less white than
you. Less white than what it takes,
presumably.
Less white than what
it took. Too white. I was blinded by
my whiteness.