Word: jiveass
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...look at the cover. There's nothing there but a white background and, in the center, a big black hand curled into the sign that says fuck you. Take a look, not only because it is the most graphic illustration of everything that The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger ends up being about, but also because, by the end of the book -by the time Cecil Brown has led you through the garish circus of lies, illusions, and rip offs that go reeling through the world of his characters - it will be good to have a "message" that...
...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...
...Copehagen, however. Jiveass (or Anthony Miller, as he is now calling himself) finds himself spending his days in the Drop Inn restaurant having long intellectual discussions with fellow expatriate blacks, and his nights in bed with a series of white women who come equipped with all sorts of far-out perversions (sexual and otherwise) that seem guaranteed to strip away all of his carefully prepared defenses. The novel gets progressively more manic as the two worlds begin to collide and intersect and Jiveass finds that even the lies no longer mask the absurdity of his situation or help to give...
Busy Bed. Since he is a black George Washington, Jiveass naturally can only tell lies. "I jive people if I don't trust them, see," he explains to a friend. And he cannot trust anyone. Distrustful and predatory, he cannot bring himself to tell even one person his right name. What he can bring himself to do is go to bed with everything female he sees. It is his chief way of relating because it is his most effective form of combat. The black lover is a true warrior, he tells himself, and "fighting every day with the foreknowledge...
...alone can bring true satiety to a woman. On the other hand, Brown addresses George in the postscript, too, saying: "You think that your acts have been lies, but you need to realize that your creator is not some white man, but a black brother, a Nigger, a jiveass very much like yourself." Whatever else it does or does not do, Brown's tall tale definitely proves that rippling waters can also run deep...