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.
