Oreo
Authors: Fran Ross
In memory of my father, Gerald Ross;
and my great-aunt Izetta Bass Grayson (Auntie)
Oreo defined: Someone who is black on the outside and white on the inside
Oreo, ce n’est pas moi.
—
F.D.R.
A likely story.
—
Flaubert
Burp!*
—
Wittgenstein
Epigraphs never have anything to do with the book
*Anything this profound philosopher ever said bears repeating. — Ed.
8.
Sinis
9.
Phaea
10.
Sciron
11.
Cercyon
12.
Procrustes, Cephissus, Apollo Delphinus
15.
Pandion
The first time I read Fran Ross’s hilarious badass novel,
Oreo
, I was living on Fort Greene Place, Brooklyn in a community of people I thought of as “the dreadlocked elite.” It was the late 1990s, and the artisan cheese shops and organic juice bars had not yet fully arrived in the boroughs, though there were hints of what was to come. Poor people and artists could still afford to live there. We were young and black and we’d moved to the neighborhood armed with graduate degrees and creative ambitions. There was a quiet storm of what Greg Tate described as “black genius” brewing in our midst. Spike Lee had set up a production studio inside the old firehouse on DeKalb Avenue. Around the corner on Lafayette Street was Kokobar, a black-owned espresso shop decorated with Basquiat-inspired paintings; there were whispers that Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker were investors. Around the corner on Elliot Street, Lisa Price, aka Carol’s Daughter, sold organic hair oils and creams for kinky-curly hair out of a brownstone storefront.
Years earlier I had read Trey Ellis’s seminal essay “The New Black Aesthetic” from my West-Coast dorm room, curled beside my dreadlocked, half-Jewish boyfriend. We saw glimmers of ourselves in his description of a new generation of black artists. We, too, had been born post-Civil Rights Movement, post-Loving, post-soul, post-everything. We were suspicious of militancy, black or otherwise, suspicious of claims to authenticity, racial and otherwise. We were culturally hybrid—“cultural mulattos,” as Ellis put it—whether we had one white parent or not.
Now, in nineties Fort Greene, we had arrived. Many of the black kids in our midst were recovering oreos: they’d grown up listening to the Clash, not Public Enemy, playing hacky sack, not basketball. They were all too accustomed to—as my friend Jake Lamar once put it—being “the only black person at the dinner party.”
Only now we were throwing our own dinner party. We were
demi-teint
—half-tone—a shade of blackness that had been formed in a clash of disparate symbols and signifiers, nothing pure about us. We were authentically nothing. Each of us had experienced a degree of alienation growing up—being too black to be white, or too white to be black, or too mixed to be anything—and somehow at the same moment in time we’d all moved into the same ten-block radius of Brooklyn together.
Oreo
came to me in this context like a strange uncanny dream about the future that was really the past. That is, it read like a novel not from 1974 but from the near future—a book whose appearance I was still waiting for. I stared at the author photo of the woman wearing the peasant smock and her hair in an Afro and could easily imagine her moving through the streets of Fort Greene. She belonged to our world. Her blackness was our blackness.
Oreo
, its first time around in 1974, had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. It got a few amused and somewhat confused reviews in
Ms. Magazine
and
Esquire
but apparently didn’t speak to the wider cultural landscape of the moment. It came out only two years before that other novel, the cultural sensation, Alex Haley’s
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
. While
Oreo
may have been one of the least-known novels of the decade,
Roots
went on to become the single most popular novel of the decade, black or white. It occupied the number one spot on the
New York Times
bestseller list for twenty-two weeks. It was adapted into one of the most-watched television miniseries of all time.
For most Americans my age—particularly if you are black—
Roots
is part of our childhood iconography. We can all trade stories of sitting on the family-room floor, watching with a mixture of rapture and disbelief. I remember weeping when Fiddler died, because I too played the fiddle. I remember how at school, the day after the miniseries aired, a white girl walked up to a table of black kids in the cafeteria and said, with tears in her eyes, that she was so sorry about slavery, and could she please empty their lunch trays for them?
The titles themselves of these two texts—
Roots
and
Oreo
—imply the profound gap between the works—giving us a clue into the kind of black narratives we like to celebrate and the kind we’ve tended to ignore.
Roots
looks toward the past. It offers black people an origin story, an imagined moment of racial purity—when the Mandinka warrior Kunte Kinte is kidnapped off the shores of Gambia. It constructs a lost utopia for us and a clear fall from Eden, Africa.
Oreo
, from the title alone and its first loony pages, suggests murkier, more polluted racial waters.
Indeed, Oreo’s origin story is one of gleeful miscegenation. The moment Samuel Schwartz falls for Helen (Honeychile) Clark, it’s too late to look back. An “oreo” is, of course, a cookie, white on the inside and black on the outside; it is also the taunt of choice for black people who appear to “act white.” Fran Ross embraces this epithet, embraces the idea of falling from racial grace. But it’s no mulatto sentimentalism—no “ebony and ivory” simplistic tale of racial mushiness. From page one, both sides of Oreo’s family—the black and the Jewish—are equally horrified by their children falling in love. In fact, James Clark, Helen’s father, Oreo’s black grandfather, is so horrified by his daughter’s coupling with a Jewish guy that his actual body becomes encoded by hate—paralyzed into the shape of a half-swastika.
Oreo, born Christine Clark, the biracial progeny of the fall, is our heroine, and like all good heroes and heroines, she’s on a quest. But unlike Alex Haley, Oreo is trying to find her white side—her missing Jewish father. Her absent father is no site of longing; he’s a voice-over actor in Manhattan who has left her an absurd list of clues to help her locate him. He’s a bum, according to her mother. “I’m going to find that fucker,” is how Oreo sets out on her search, which feels more like an excuse to wander away from her home than a real desire for a father.
Oreo is cheeky, mischievous, a trickster—or, as one uncle says of her: “That girl’s got womb . . . she’s a real ball buster.” She is radically, almost aggressively mixed; within one passage she can and does code-switch with ease between a multitude of tongues—from Yiddish to so-called Ebonics to highbrow academic jargon. She’s tainted from the get-go, a mad-cap play on Dubois’s “double-consciousness.” Only in this case it’s not doubled, it’s tripled, quadrupled, and on. This multiplicity she inhabits is not a “burden” that she must fight to keep from tearing her “asunder.” Rather, it’s a source of strength and agility. Her twoness keeps her on her toes, enables her to move between multiple worlds. She is as Jewish as she is black; there is nothing tragic about this mulatto. She is, if anything, a comic mulatto, turning the world on its head with a verbal precocity and wit that sharpen her ability to shape-shift and pass.
Aesthetically,
Oreo
has all the hallmarks of a postmodern novel in its avoidance of profundity and its utterly playful spirit. The novel draws no conclusions and the quest leads to no giant revelatory payoffs. The father and his secret about her birth constitute, in the end—and without giving anything away—as absurdist and feminist a send-up of the patriarchal myth as one could hope to find. The novel at every turn embraces ambiguity. Its quest-driven plot is at every step diverted by wordplay and metareferences to itself. It feels in many ways more in line stylistically, aesthetically, with Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut than with Sonia Sanchez and Ntzoke Shange, to name two other black female writers of Ross’s time.
Oreo never becomes a fully believable character, and this feels appropriate to the work’s spirit. The novel does not strive for realism; Ross is not trying to construct a seamless, plot-driven narrative, or a sympathetic, three-dimensional main character. We are always aware of Oreo as a construct, and her story as a construct. Puns, wordplay, stand-up comedy riffs, menus, charts, tangents: the journey to find the father is just a chance for Ross to meander through her wicked and free imagination and to push us toward a hyperawareness of language itself. “Christine,” Ross writes, and she could be writing of herself, “was no ordinary child. . . . She had her mother’s love of words, their nuance and cadence, their juice and pith, their variety and precision, their rock and wry.”
Alongside the feminist standards we had lying around my house when I was a kid,
Our Bodies, Ourselves
and Erica Jong’s
Fear of Flying
, there was this anthology of black literature called
Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America
, which always seemed to be in the kitchen. It was one of the early canonizing texts of the burgeoning African-American Studies departments. On the cover was a silhouette of a black male face, foreboding and sad, surrounded by a circle of red. I guess that male profile was supposed to be taken literally, because inside, of the thirty-four authors included in the book, exactly four were women.
Oreo
was published seven years after this anthology; the second-wave feminist movement had come of age, and women were beginning to find their voices, cracking open the male literary establishment bit by bit. By the 1980s, black literature was a dark male symphony no longer. Black women writers had come into vogue. And yet even by the 1990s, as I read
Oreo
in my apartment in Fort Greene, the birthplace of post-soul black bohemia—and even now, so many years after the fact, as the Brooklyn I once knew sits in gentrified, glittery ruins—Ross feels to me like part of some future that still has yet to arrive.
Oreo
resists the unwritten conventions that still exist for novels written by black women today. There’s nothing redemptively uplifting about her work. The title doesn’t refer to the Bible or the blues. The work does not refer to slavery. The character is never violated, sexually or otherwise. The characters are not from the South. Oreo is sincerely ironic, hilarious, brainy, impenetrable at times. Oreo’s mother is mostly absent. She dumps Oreo and her sweet, eccentric brother with their grandparents so she can go on the road. She writes the children mawkish, insincere letters from different places. Oreo replies with letters written backwards. When held up to a mirror, Oreo’s words read: “Cut the crap mom.” Her mother does just that and begins to get real with her daughter. She explains in one letter why women are oppressed. After an elaborate theoretical analysis, she concludes: “I have been able to synthesize these considerations into one inescapable formulation: men can knock the shit out of women.” In the same letter, her mother tears to hell the stereotype of the black matriarch: “There’s no male chauvinist pork like a black male chauvinist pork.”
Like the best satire, nobody is safe, nobody is spared. The humor is low at times, scatological and plain silly, and the humor is high, sophisticated wordplay and clichés flipped on their heads. Ross is a hard sell for February, black history month, and a hard sell for March, women’s history month. Hers is a postmodern text; it is a queer text, it is a work of black satire; it is a work of high feminist comedy; it is a post-soul text. Her novel is multifaceted, multilingual, which still makes it an awkward presence on the landscape of American fiction, where “ethnic” literature can be put into kiosks like dishes at a food fair, and consumed just as easily.
After
Oreo
, Fran Ross never wrote another novel. She died young of cancer in 1985, anonymous from a literary standpoint, but surrounded by friends. We know only scattered details about her life, tidbits about who she was as a person. When she first came from her hometown of Philadelphia to New York City, she lived in a boarding house in midtown, the Webster Apartment for Women. A friend who met her there recalls her from the start as brilliant and warm and extremely funny. Ross was fascinated by Jewish culture and the Yiddish language; several professors encouraged her in her studies at Temple University, where she graduated magna cum laude. She loved Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, and James Baldwin. She went to hear Baldwin speak at various venues around the city. In her social world, she was often the only black girl at the white feminist dinner party.
Once, with a group of these friends, she looked up the famously reclusive Djuna Barnes in the phone book. Together they all went to the listed address, and, standing outside the apartment door, they heard classical music playing inside. When they knocked, Barnes, an old woman already, opened it and simply said to the circle, “I don’t see people anymore,” before shutting the door in their faces.
Ross’s middle name was Delores and she signed all her letters FDR, amused by the presidential echo. She was intensely close to her family, particularly her mother. She was disappointed by the way
Oreo
was ignored. She tried to find another home for her talents and went out to Los Angeles in the late 1970s, with a deal to write for Richard Pryor’s television show. Perhaps a stand-up comedian, especially somebody as out there as Pryor, would have appreciated her disregard for social propriety, her outrageousness, her loyalty to nothing but the workings of her own startlingly original mind. But when she arrived, she found herself disillusioned by the people in Pryor’s circle—and the show was canceled. She returned to New York City and her day job in publishing, still searching for a genre in which her voice could be heard—a space where she could be true to her own fierce contradictions.
—
DANNY SENNA