Let's take it back to zero.
This fixation, the Tracy thing, started with my great-grandfather. Right?
Andrew. Andrew Edward Patty, senior. First of the Patty line to be born in the united states. I saw a picture of him on a log cabin porch, from when he was about four or five, along with a half dozen other gray fuzzy faces, all repressing the urge to pick nits or give the finger because it took near a damned hour to get a picture taken. We paddies took the first fuckin' name they gave us, coming off the boat-- we coulda been McCrackens, or Williamsons, but no, no, we opted for the three-leaf clover of fuckin' names, PADDY, Patty, an absolute cowpie in the face for self-respect, roit? Fuckin' hell.
Andrew had a high mechanical aptitude, and he was co-founder of the first major garage in Anne's Town, recently re-named Anniston, on the maps. He earned enough to buy a few modest parcels of land, and we worked them as gentleman farmers, making just enough produce & fruit to be able to say we weren't speculators. We never really did much with any of it, as my grandfather's generation would be the largest our little clan ever grew, really. Andrew and Elizabeth, his wife-- about whom not much is said, for she was a very religious and generally joyless woman; she developed stomach cancer in her forties and stopped eating; as family lore phrased it, "She turned toward the wall," and starved herself to death --A.E. & Elizabeth had two children, A.E. Junior and Edwina. Edwina would never show any interest in men, beyond taking care of her father, the widow, who retired comfortably and was, as far as anyone can recollect, a very kind, gentle, god-fearing man.
Who loved Dick Tracy comix.
And, lest this whole episode get too teary-eyed, also taught me the N-word.
We'll circle back to that, don't you fret.
So A.E. Junior meets and woos and marries Mary, and they have David Edward and Mark Edwin. David Edward meets Patricia Shea Williams, marries, and they begat my ass. Mark meets Jean, they marry, ten years later Jean realizes she's a lesbian and Mark moves back in with his parents, for a minute. And that's about as big as the family ever gets, right there. By the time I've entered the scene, the numbers start whittling back down. Paw-Paw, as Andrew comes to be known, dies in 1988 or 1989. I run away in 1994. My mother leaves, later that year. Edwina dies, like her mother, of stomach cancer & self-determination. When I come back-- theoretically to see Edwina, before she passes, but she dies as I'm on the road to return, in mid-'03 --I find there's not much left of the various family legacies. Mark's new wife has picked all the things of Edwina's she wants. I'm curious about Paw-Paw's things, but I find they're not really around anymore, Edwina having purged the house of memories in the decade following my midnight disappearance.
Because I disappeared in the middle of the night. No note.
Have I ever mentioned that?
Well. There's a lot I haven't mentioned. But let's stick to the stuff that matters. Namely, what was that shit about sweet kind jesus-loving Paw-Paw teaching his stupid great-grandson america's #1 racial slur?
Andrew and Elizabeth were gentlemen farmers, you'll recall. Lace curtain Irish, basically, though we'd not have called ourselves such. But we were. We were doing our level best to pass for American. So Andrew did what americans did, to get a leg up in the community: he became a joiner. He joined local organizations. He joined the Freemasons. He also had black housekeepers.
And, when I squint at the silver nitrate memory of child Andrew on some ancestor's knee, him being barely big enough to pick out of a family portrait, I wonder how old he was when he joined the Klan.
Because that's a big fat missing piece of this whole Tracy thing I've not been talking about, in this hailstorm of amer-arcana and dropped names, and that's the racial politics of the strip.
They're not terrible. For the era. They're not wonderful, either. Dick Tracy Junior's father has a black housekeeper, who nearly gets framed up into a murder attempt; and of course she dies and there's a deathbed speech, and it's all uncomfortable as hell because the housekeeper is a Mammy caricature. She was a kind of stereotype, but she wasn't a villainous character. The Dick Tracy strip seems to avoid that, overall-- there aren't evil black people. They're just too credulous, generally. When injustice occurs, the black characters that one encounters in the 30s and 40s are its victims. Victims of the cartooning as much as anything...
And there's all kinds of racism, of course. So it's not like we should focus on strictly the aspects which haunt me. My banshee's a pipsqueak, comparatively speaking. My great-grandfather wasn't klan by the time he had kids. From what I know, his membership was never a point of pride; it was compulsory, expected, by the time & environment. I have no idea what he did when he was with them.
I will be honest and say that I do my best not to speculate.
Paw-paw tried to ensure his children were wiser, and kinder. Perhaps we were. But perhaps we were also stupid, prideful, self-deluding potato-eaters.
I say this about myself, because my grandfather taught me the N-word casually-- and curiously.
Do you know what woolly bear caterpillars are? They were a plague on our family's pecan trees. Paw-paw had trimmed the afflicted branches and we had turned them into a pyre. As the fire spit and the raspy webs became soot, Paw-paw remarked, "Watch those _______ burn." He must have been 75, or 76, by the time he said that to me. I thought he would live to be 100.
In any event. This is the subject I zeroed in on, today. I'd meant to dig into it, weeks ago, but I needed to read a little deeper into the comic strip's run before I drew any conclusions.
There's a whole raft of racial issues we can dig into as this series runs on. The stuff with the hillbilly comedy relief should definitely be a focus. Because whitefolk, man.
We're nought if not neurotic as sin.
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