A Surprising Ending to The White Boy Shuffle

The White Boy Shuffle ends with Gunnar giving his daughter Naomi a bath and telling her the Kaufman history. I’m not sure how I expected The White Boy Shuffle to end, but this definitely wasn’t it. One of the things that surprised me is that Gunnar is telling Naomi the Kaufman history at all. He proudly tells his family history in his Santa Monica elementary school, but later seems ashamed and disdainful of his ancestors. At the beginning of chapter one, he describes himself as “Preordained by a set of weak-kneed DNA to shuffle in the footsteps of a long cowardly queue of coons, Uncle Toms, and faithful boogedy-boogedy retainers” (Beatty 5). Gunnar continues to distance himself from “Kaufmanism” as he grows up, developing his own identity in Hillside as a poet, basketball star, Gun Totin’ Hooligan, and member and eventual leader of the African American community. Until the end of the book, I thought that Gunnar’s last connection to his Kaufman history had been severed on the day of the Rodney King verdict when while looting with Scoby and Psycho Loco, he is caught by the police and beaten by his father, who tells him “You are not a Kaufman. I refuse to let you embarrass me” (137).

Even more surprising, however, was that he begins the story with his father, Rölf Kaufman. Even as a child proud of his family history, Gunnar never mentioned his father. In his own words, “The schoolyard chronicles never included my father’s misdeeds. I could distance myself from the fuckups of the previous generations, but his weakness shadowed my shame from sun to sun. His history was my history” (Beatty 21).

So what changed? I think that a large part of it is that Rölf joins the movement influenced by Gunnar and commits suicide, leaving a poem.  

I begin with the end—Rölf Kaufman, her grandfather, my dad, who died last week. The only officer in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department to commit suicide by eating his gun, choking on the firing pin and leaving the following poem in his locker.

Like the good Reverend King
I too “have a dream”
but when I wake up
I forget it and
remember I’m running late for work. (Beatty 226)

I definitely don’t think that Gunnar forgives his father, but maybe his death and poem show Gunnar a side of Rölf he didn’t know was there. As we see in the poem, Rölf too had dreams that he was never able to realize. However, unlike Gunnar who is “abandoning this sinking ship America” (Beatty 225), Rölf allowed society to turn him into just another cog in the machine.

These are also the final words in the book, giving them additional significance. I think Beatty chooses to end the novel with Rölf’s suicide because it drives home yet again how deeply engrained racism is although the novel takes place after the Civil Rights Movement. Even Rölf, the embodiment of Kaufmanism and a police officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, is driven to suicide just like the thousands who have either already mailed Gunnar their poems and committed suicide or are pouring into Hillside. 

A Different Kind of Protest Novel

One of Richard Wright’s complaints about Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was that “the sensory sweep of her novel carries no theme, no message, no thought” (Wright). Having read Their Eyes Were Watching God, I have to disagree. The novel is definitely thoughtful and deliberate, it just doesn’t convey the message that Wright wanted to hear. Unlike in Wright’s later novel, Native Son, race and racial tensions do not play a key role in Their Eyes Were Watching God, or really much of a role at all. Wright and other critics used this to claim that Hurston’s novel was not “serious fiction” and that it was “not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy” (Wright). However, though Hurston is not protesting the same things as Wright, I think it would be a mistake to say that she is just passively telling a story.  

An idea that many people had at the time that Hurston was writing was that African American literature had to protest racial inequality. As we saw in the documentary, Hurston disagreed, saying she was tired of writing about race and of having people tell her what to write about. After watching the documentary, however, I began to see that Their Eyes Were Watching God can in fact be read as protest fiction and that although Hurston does not directly make race an issue in Their Eyes Were Watching God, she is still protesting racial inequality. The difference between her protest and the protest novel people wanted her to write is that Hurston addresses racism as she encounters it in her own profession instead of the wider systematic oppression of African Americans throughout the country. Instead of asking society to grapple with the issues of systematic racism and inequality, Hurston is simply asking why she should be confined to a specific genre because of her race when she has so many additional things to say.