Claiming George Herriman

In its later years, when the strip was at its most surreal and expressive, the trees of Krazy Kat’s Coconino County grew out of pots. They had always been tall and branchless and monolithic, rising sometimes the height of your average Sunday comics page. But how their newly crowded roots managed to defy gravity and keep them upright is anyone’s guess. Still, they towered over the inhabitants, shooting out of frames into the Time between. They were most often domestic, placed next to one or another character’s homes, but occasionally they sprung up independent in the wilds of the southwestern landscape, alongside the occasional totem-like rock formation. Krazy Kat skipped in their shadows, Ignatz peered from behind their trunks with brick in hand, Offissa Pup glared from a distance—cosmic play before a backdrop famously in flux, presided over by these rootless wonders. 

Which brings us to George Herriman, a man whose own ambiguous roots made their way into his great comic strip in one way or another over its years of development from a last minute gag to one of America’s defining works of art. Thomas Aloysius Dorgan (the famous sports cartoonist, “T.A.D.”), a fellow employee in William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empire, used to call him “the Greek,” but only for a lack of any real knowledge of his close friend’s heritage. Modern commentators are equally perplexed. We know that Herriman lived in New Orleans until the age of ten, when his parents skipped town on the newly constructed Southern Pacific Railroad, riding all the way to the end of the line and settling in California, where he would live for most of the rest of his life. But the reasons for this move are subject to much debate. 

According to Bill Blackbeard, in his introduction to Krazy and Ignatz: The Complete Full Page Comic Strips 1931-32, the Herrimans were first-generation Greek immigrants that fled turn-of-the-century segregation laws, afraid that “hyper-racist” southerners might identify their dark European complexion as black. However, Patrick McDonnell, ­­­­­­­­­­editor of Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman, finds evidence that those southerners would have been right. Herriman’s birth certificate lists him as “colored,” and hints at French ancestry on both his mother and father’s sides. The Herrimans were likely Creole, with a mixture of descent that could’ve included French, Spanish, and West Indian blood, and probably a little of each. 

But the circumstantial evidence alone was enough for Ishmael Reed to dedicate a book to George Herriman the African-American, and for Ralph Ellison and Stanley Crouch to concur, as jazz lovers familiar with New Orleanean polyethnicity.  And Herriman indeed displayed some of the characteristics of "passing": his skin was dark; He was cagey about his background; He always wore a hat to cover his kinky hair, and in almost no photos does he appear without one. 

And then there are the textual clues in the strip itself. The seeming preoccupation with identity and constant subversion of the same (Cat Hearts Mouse, Dog Hearts Cat, etc.). Krazy’s blackness and indeterminate gender. Ignatz’s whiteness and the inevitability of his brick. The peculiarly creole mixture of dialects. And the ancient Egyptian love story about a royal cat who fell for a servant mouse that Herriman offered as the origin. In his famous essay on the strip, Gilbert Seldes (with prescient insight, since he could not have known of Herriman’s race) called this Krazy’s “racial memory.” 

So Herriman was a black man who passed as white, a southern transplant who made the Southwest his spiritual home. And though affected by these aspects of his identity, he tended to tower above them. To read the strip as “African-American” or “southern” is reductive, like reading Kafka as “Jewish” or “Czechoslovakian.” Krazy Kat was not about identification, but essence: the existential instability wrought by Ignatz’s stubborn materiality and his war on Krazy’s lyrical humanism; the social medicine doled out by Offissa Pup that never quite holds Ignatz’s brick at bay.

When Herriman pictured his trees as saplings, often in large pots with plenty of room for growth, there’s little indication of the giants they would become.

Comments

[Mr. McGinnis]

Hey, check out my essay on George.

http://www.postroadmag.com/11/criticism/McGinnis.phtml

[Derek]

"I ain'ta 'Kat'...and I ain't 'Krazy'...It's wot's behind me that I am...It's the idea behind me, 'Ignatz' and that's wot I am."

THE quote.... I think it's absolutely wonderful that people lined their bird cages with this seminal, beautiful, complex, and indispensable stuff. Give us our art daily. Great essay.